Pre-warp Techs

[Kadste]

I am open to any and all suggestions on this.

I am in the process of creating pre-warp empires and one of things that I want to consider is the fact that these empires do not know of the existence of warp points. With them not knowing of warp points, is there a way to have them not showing (obscured/cloaked?)on the system maps for these empires given their level of technology?

I have a lot of the techs, ships, facilities, components worked out, but not this and it will have a major impact on the future direction of my mod.

I am not sure if this will ever work, but I want to work on it.

The basic reason I think I want this is to prevent humans from exploiting the fact that warp points show up on the map.

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Never Give up, Never Surrender!

[Suicide Junkie]

You could try using the map editor, and giving all warppoints in the player's start system a cloaking ability.

Human players would just spend a few turns giving orders to "warp" at every square on the edge of thier home system until they find one...

You could give all warppoints cloaking abilities, which would really slow a player's expansion down, but once they have discovered by chance where a warppoint is, the movement AI would direct all ships straight to the right place.


How about this for another alternative:
Using the map editor again, remove all warppoints from the player's start system. Add a new system right beside it, with connections to the homesystem and some other nearby systems.

Now, the player is forced to be a neutral until they develop advanced stellar manipulation tech, or, research a new tech area.
This new tech area would be "warp point detection", and would give a component which can open a warppoint to the next-door system only (range 1). The player "finds" a warppoint to the next-dor system, which allows them to expand normally.
You could say that the warp point detector is a prototype device, and only needs to be tested. Maybe the big detector component is just used to find the characteristic "frequency" common to all warppoints. Once that is done, all ships get free, fully operational detectors, and the game continues normally, with your race expanding into the unknown.

[Matryx]

Of course you could approach it in a completely different way.
Have players only have "Fighters" to start with, and they have to develop tech in order to get ships that *can* use warp points.
If I remember correctly, fighters can't warp

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[Kadste]

SJ,

If you cloak a warp point can you see it on the system map?

If the answer is yes, how you add the cloaking ability to a warp point. I have tried it and even though you can add the ability to the warp point, the warp point still shows up in the system map.

Your second suggestion also sounds good, but this means that your home system will have only one warp point link. Sounds great from a defensive standpoint, but not from attacking.

Matryx,

Yes this is the approach that I took. All of my pre-warp "ships" are fighters, not ships.


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Never Give up, Never Surrender!

[dmm]

Can you make a mod with really big "fighters" that are actually ships without warp capability? That would really change the game. You would then have regular-size ships that need carriers to go from system to system (and obviously the biggest ones would never fit in a carrier), but they would have zero maintenance. And there would be wierd effects in combat: they'd be susceptible to PD fire but not missiles.

[geoschmo]

quote:

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You could try using the map editor, and giving all warppoints in the player's start system a cloaking ability.

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Problem is that there is a hard code thingy that makes warp points visible even in a sector or system that is obscured. Not sure why, cause you can hide planets and stars this way. Game won't allow it for warp points though.

You could come up with a new bitmap for invisible warp points that is the same as the background system image. But there is no way for them to then become visible during the game. They will always be invisible.

quote:

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Of course you could approach it in a completely different way.
Have players only have "Fighters" to start with, and they have to develop tech in order to get ships that *can* use warp points.

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quote:

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Can you make a mod with really big "fighters" that are actually ships without warp capability? That would really change the game. You would then have regular-size ships that need carriers to go from system to system (and obviously the biggest ones would never fit in a carrier), but they would have zero maintenance. And there would be wierd effects in combat: they'd be susceptible to PD fire but not missiles.

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This is fairly easy to do. The problem is that there is no way to colonize planets in your own system until you "discover" the standard ships types. Because fighters cannot hold cargo. You could create a new colony mod that can be put on a fighter, but you cannot put any population on it. Your colonies will have zero pop.

Actually, you could modify the settins.txt file and give a value to the line "Automatic Colonization Population :=0". Then your fighter/colonizers can make a colony, and the population will be there. You won't be able to transfer population or cargo among planets. And you wont be able to build a ship that can launch sats or mines, but I guess since you don't know about warp points you wouldn't need to do this anyway, except where your planets are.

(An interesting thing about this if you decide to try it. When I tested it, my ships don't have a colonize button. But if you go to the planets screen and hit "send colony ship" it will make a colony that way.)


This is another reason to want Drones implemented. At least acording to the txt files, drones will be settable to warp capable or not warp capable, and have cargo ability.


Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Your second suggestion also sounds good, but this means that your home system will have only one warp point link. Sounds great from a defensive standpoint, but not from attacking.

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One would expect any empire to at least be able to hold one system outside of their homesystem.
And besides, as soon as the race discovers warppoint tech, their entire military will be moving into that next-door system.
Essentially you will have a single system with twice as many planets. (There's only one WP into the homesystem, and still only one into the combined pair)

[Baron Munchausen]

There's an unused Warp Point option in the game called "Warp Point - Ability Required". Presumably your ship would have to have the listed ability to actually pass through a warp point with this set on it. If MM would just enable this we could at least have games with "warp activator" components required to actually use them. Making them invisible is less important than this option, I think. There would at least be a way to genuinely restrict neutrals from using warp points. As it is now, they still go wandering occasionally.

[dogscoff]

Try this:

Take normal engines away from pre-warp races. Limit them to a modified emergency movement component. Call it a "system drive" or something. Make it 50kt and very expensive with (for example) movement 4.

Now use the map editor to make sure that all the planets in the start system are more than 4 squares away from the warp points. (In fact this is also possible without the map editor)

Finally make sure that the pre-warp races can't build spaceyard / repair components on ships until they develop warp technology.

The emergency movement component is limited to one per ship and is destroyed after use. This means pre-warp races will be unable to build a ship with a range of more than 4 squares. It will make travelling through their own system rather difficult, but a human player would manage by colonising a nearby planet, building a spaceyard on it and using that to "resupply" (ie repair) their system drives. However, because they can't build mobile spaceyards and all planets are 4 squares or more from the warp points, the player will be unable to leave their own system until they develop warp tech.

The only drawback is that once they have warp tech, your race will have premature access to a 4 movemnt point emergency movement component. The large size and high cost should make it less unbalancing though.

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[capnq]

You can make warp points nearly invisible by using the smallest of the green warp point images. I've had games where I wouldn't have noticed a warp point was there if it hadn't had an outgoing line on the quadrant map.

A fair fraction of the asteroid images are nearly invisible, too, as well as a couple of the shipsets.

I forget what the Show Warp Lines toggle does in Empire Options; that may help, too.
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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[This message has been edited by capnq (edited 15 August 2001).]