My suggestions for the game. |
Ok, i did wade for a few hours through the TXT files to look for things to mod and figured there are a few things that would greatly improve the game if they were changed. Here a small list :
First of, i think that ship equipment and weapons should be restricted to inner or outer hull. First it makes more sense, second it makes the ai design ships that make more sense and probably do better in combat. So my idea is that all critical parts like crew quarters, life support, emergency stuff, computer stuff, self destruct mechanism be restricted to inner hull (what you want to survive the fight for as long as possible). Weapons, engines, cargo containers and sensors to the outer hull (hey, it makes sense that the be next to the armor). Normal supply and ordnance should be used on ships and base only (strangely enough, you can have both normal and small on sats), small version be availiable for all the units type save the platforms that don't need them. Storage should be one of the few things you can use to fill either inner or outer hull. Since there are so many Goodies that can be put on ships, i'm sure i left out something...
Second, make planets hold more supplies and ordnances. I can't understand why whole planet can't hold more than a mere frigate. It also would fix the problem with launching units dry. Also production and distribution or ammos and ordnance should be much higher, it make no sense that the shipyard can produce more supplies (since ships comes fully stocked) than the supply station. Increasing the cargo capacity of buildings would make sense too as ships can quickly hold enormous amount of them (this mean a real pain to fill them up when they are dry, wich happen quite often in current game)...
Troop vs fighters. Since both can take part of ground combat, i believe that the land units should be tougher than the flying one (it make sense that tanks be more sturdy than aircraft). Why use troop when you can use the more powerful and faster fighters for both space and ground battles?
Another addition. When important events happen like declaration of war, broken treaties or we run out of ressources, there should be a warning so we check all the news more carefully. Right now it's easy to miss thoses in the flow of news...
What do you guys think of this?
Cryptic?
You're a step beyond me, I'm looking forward to when I reach "enigmatic"... I'm still stuck on "Gibberish!" and I can't find a SINGLE Gibber to help me out!
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Lol
Well, you must feel as i felt when i tryied to make visual effets for "Sword of the stars". Some people could do amazing things with the tools that came with the game, but it was just behond me to understand. I gave up modding that game because the little i could do wasn't going to get any attention by the modding crowd...
At least this game is easy to mod and the possibilities are almost limitless 
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Inner/Outer placement by AI
The stock scripts already tell the AI to put weapons, engines, and a few other things on the outer hull.
Most of this suggestion is also implemented in the Balance Mod if you want to test how it works out in practice...
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That's an idea.
I have your mod, but mostly use it to see how you pulled things you did. I guess i should give it a try for the scripts. No need to reinvent them wheel if it's not needed, my own mod is quite time consuming 
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but...
Most of this suggestion is also implemented in the Balance Mod if you want to test how it works out in practice...
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I don't think you locked any components to "inner only" (or at least, I never caught you at it).
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Planets shouldnt have a supply limit at all imo.
Planets should be considered to have infinate supplies, makes perfect sence to me as its a bloody planet with millions of people living on it and should have absolutly no problems at all feeding and supplying a warship of a few hundred men. Any ship that sits for one turn at a planet you own should just be re-supplied fully no questions asked, this would solve a lot of problems and make the game more enjoyable for all.
Im not sure if this is the case or not since ive only taken planets with troops thus far but it seems to me that while fighters should participate in ground combat they should not be able to occupy and thus take the planet on there own it should require the presence of troops to take control of the planets surface. Although you could attack first with fighters, obliterate all defences and then the next turn attack again with ground troops to take the world which would make sence.
lol
Planets have lots of people on them, sure, but feeding the ship isn't what supplies do. Supplies are the power source for teh ship (hence why the ship can live without them, just go really... really... REALLY slow). I don't know how much you know about it, but antimatter is REALLY hard to make, and requires lots of equipment to store it (I think we have a couple of hundred atoms of it made ATM, though that was a few years ago).
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Antimatter
Rilburs right about the Anti-matter, and really, if supplies=anti-matter, even atoms of anti-matter, I would really be worried, cause 1 ship would store enough anti-matter to freaking blow a planet into asteroids, if it was allowed to react with regular matter in an uncontrolled manner (not while being used for engines, as that takes the energy of the matter/anti-matter exploision and puts it into powering hte engines), cause ya, an anti-matter/matter explosion, is, many times more deadly than a nuclear explosion using the same amount of atoms, which is because the full mass is converted into energy. (Could be slightly wrong, just the basics, since ya, havnt studies anti-matter in awhile)
Boom
That'd be the Kzinti lesson in action. Also John's Law: "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage." It goes on to say: "Interesting is equal to 'whatever keeps the readers from getting bored'".
True, Oh Idea
Oh, Idea just popped into my head. The ability to self-detonate the supplies onboard your ship (for your space drive) to cause damage to enemies within so many hexes of you. Kinda like Ramming, but, AoE, and using amount of supplies instead of warheads. I mean, seriously, even in space, the explosion from even a frigate, would do some decent damage to ships close to it.
Or, just makes explosions of other ships damage you if your too close when they blow up.
Rareness of antimatter isnt exactly the point.
I know what it is and how rare it is to make in this day and age, space empires 5 however isnt set in this day and age not to mention the fact that only one class of engine is an antimatter engine. Its all a mute point anyway, of course supplies isnt just food ect i kinda think of it as everything a ship needs including power but was being a bit simplistic in my descrition. Anyway if a planet can feed, power, keep warm and generally support 6 billion people it seems logical to me that it would be very little effort to make sure 200 of said people can last a while on there little spaceship.
Put it this way...
Put it this way...
In combat, a planet has infinite supply and ordinance, out of combat, they don't have any. It makes no sense, and you guys know it.
Personally I doubled the supply/ordinance storage of the planets and production of the resupply depot and have been pretty happy with the result. Before I did this I just made ships full of supply and ordinance pods and then scrap it for supplies and ordinance... but it gave me such an overwhelming advantage over the AI that I decided it was time to give them some supplies too.
greatness
ah...but this is what makes this game so great!! not enuf supplies for ya?...mod it!!
I personally like the extra challenge of the limited supplies. Takes me a few more turns to finish off the distant computer worlds. I don't use fighters or units in general against the AI, so until I start playing humans I won't run into the "dry launch" scenario. sounds frustrating.
contrary to common knowledge, in the SE universe supplies = dead virgins. there generally just aren't enough to go around.
Sigh
You're right that anti-matter's difficulty of production is a non-issue. However, how do know how much power a star ship requires? Its drives/weapons might well consume MASSIVE ammounts of power... say equivilant to the entire planets "normal" output.
And as far as infinite supplys/ordinance in combat... the supplies at least can be explained by turning the planets power grid off. Boom, no more personal computers, but lots of laser power.
Ordinance is a little off-kilter, but its for balance since platforms can't stow their own ordinance.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Very unlikley tbh...
It seems pretty far fetched to me that the power needs of a ship would come close to the power consumption of an entire, densley populated and very high tech planet. If it actually took more energy than an entire planet can produce just to fly one spaceship people probably wouldnt bother going into space in the first place.
Unlikely
Probably doesn't take the entire planets output, true, but how much of its output could the planet *spare* from its day to day activities?
That said, lets just call this a balance issue... I don't have any problems with it (though I am tweaking it in my upcoming mod), you guys do.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Fallen Haven wrote:Ok, i did
First of, i think that ship equipment and weapons should be restricted to inner or outer hull. First it makes more sense, second it makes the ai design ships that make more sense and probably do better in combat. So my idea is that all critical parts like crew quarters, life support, emergency stuff, computer stuff, self destruct mechanism be restricted to inner hull (what you want to survive the fight for as long as possible). Weapons, engines, cargo containers and sensors to the outer hull (hey, it makes sense that the be next to the armor). Normal supply and ordnance should be used on ships and base only (strangely enough, you can have both normal and small on sats), small version be availiable for all the units type save the platforms that don't need them. Storage should be one of the few things you can use to fill either inner or outer hull. Since there are so many Goodies that can be put on ships, i'm sure i left out something...
AI's design wouldn't be helped by this much, it'd be just as easy to go in and use the scripts to tell it what to put where.
On top of that, limiting where stuff goes can really irk players like myself, who (for example) might want to put stuff in nonstandard places for some odd reason. (I often move all but the first crew quarters/life supports in the outer hull, since you only need 1 of each to maintain full movement, and use the innner spaces for more shield regenerators and generators.)
edit: I left some other stuff in I didn't mean to.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.