Idea for inter-system travel - Moders, please read this |
One thing bothers me about the SE's space travel model trough warp nodes.
It creates choke points. A human player can always defend its warp points with a lot of mines, sattelites, starbases, etc and the AI doesnt stand a chance of invading a well defended system.
Also, mod wise, is's a bit weird to create a star trek mod or any other mod that doesn't rely on this kind of travel.
While a FTL drive that works without any use of the warp points would be a dream come true, i realise it's unlikely to happen in SE so here is what i propose for all the moders that want to make mods like the star trek mod:
[B]Generate maps so that there's not just ONE opened warp point to a neighboring system but at least 3! 5 would be even better![B]
This way, while players can still fortify all those warp points it would be economically unwise to do so. Rather than fortify a system with over 10 opened warp points to god knows where most player would rather build fortifications around each planet or station a fleet on system patrol to deal with intruders.
Re: Idea for inter-system travel - Moders, please read this
(a) Did you try to just increase the amount of minimum and maximum connections for a map
template? The map itsself should mostly look like a web a really obsessed spider did on LSD, but it could give the gameplay a little punch into the direction you seem to prefer...
(b) how about making opening / closing warp points an own tech that's a lot cheaper in the beginnning and where level has a big influence on the range? Players could need to build a space station which has repair and open/close warp in their systems to succeed (later cruiders or baseships could do, if you don't chose to make the components even bigger and more expensive) - i don't have any idea how to mod the AI's behaviour yet, though. The change whould be even bigger, if there was some sort of decay on all warp points, but if that's possible to be realized that easy i don't know either.
(c) Implementing a new planet type (let's call it: "crap") and a new athmosphere type (let's call it: "crappy fumes"), that fits to no race at all and setting them to 50% in the "any planet type"/"any atmosphere"-part, you could drastically lower the chance to find colonizable planets (or more than one in a single system) which should result in the players to spread wider and leave leaks in their defence you can figure out (and why should someone defend 3 warp points instead of one sole colony in the system, if the aproaching enemy could attack with fleet three times bigger because he doesnt?). Also you could almost double the size of all planets.
Re: Idea for inter-system travel - Moders, please read this
You can actually have multiple WPs between two systems (and even two WPs connected to each other in the same system!). In SE4, you could set them up in the map editor. With SE5, you can do it with the map compiler.
Re: Idea for inter-system travel - Moders, please read this
The game engine does not work that way. You can not have two wormholes in one system, going to the same destination system. To change this you would need to rewrite the engine.
Currently FTL does not exist in any SE game. I am sorry, but that is just the way it is.
Longship MOD to come out with the next patch.
"Genius is Simplicity" chris connors
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