Topic: Some changes

[[UFP]Exeter]

I have made some changes for expedience to get the game deployed faster.

Design:  The original intent was to have a character with stats as a captain and customize the ships.  To me this lacked a real game strategy for single player and questionable multiplayer.  So the change is to have th overall strategy galactic conquest that is a cross between Birth of the Federation and Armada.  There will be control of resources to build and expand.  Also, try and build some intelligence into the AI.  Campaigns, with goals and objectives are highly customizeable.  The combat will allow simple (automated) or manual.  Manual is tactical combat controlled by the player, with full 3D player controlled combat,  Order can be given to the rest of the fleet.

Characters and customizaion will be added in later.

The strategic part of the game will be in C# as performance is not an issue.  The actual 3D (tactical) combat depends on what is adequate performance, but will be multithread/core and utilize GPU on comptible systems.. 
Customization will support LUA and C# both

And there is a skirmish mode to allow jumping to 3D combat with up to 5 ships per side.  Single player or multiplayer.

There will also be both single player and multiplayer save.  This will allows different players to savee the game and come back later.  An examole, if a game is saved with 4 players and later on 3 can make it, the AI will play the missing player and later the missing player may take over.  What will not be saved is 3D combat.  Not yet.h

Network details are still not decided.  I see 3 choices.  Use Steam.   Use Dyna, just have to create a new universe and change the code.  Third option is to do over our own universe but use dyna servers.

[Javora]

You may want to consider a name change as this doesn't sound anything like SFC.  The main focus of past SFC games was piloting a ship against another ship(s) to conquest areas of the map.  The micromanaging of the ship itself was always the main focus.  What you are describing is something entirely different.
 

[[UFP]Exeter]

You have a point.  A reason I post my thoughts here to get feed back.

As it is just me coding I was looking for a way to accelerate deployment as I do not want this to take another year or more.

I may have no described it well enough.  The strategic would be similar to sfc2, like dyna.  But adding research etc to get better ships and technology.  This is from Birth of the Federation and Armada.  Movement closer to dyna.

Combat would be a automatic combat like Birth of the Federation or manual.  Manual would be ship to ship pilot o a ship just like in SFC2, with some changes.  For large fleets u would be commanding the flagship but the other ships would follow some preset strategies.

What is lacking is the ability to finely customize the ships and captain/character traits.  This will be added, but I would like to get the game out for it to be played and get improvement ideas.    Then the expansion if you ant to call it that.  All this together may take another 2 years, working alone.  But release 1 early next year.  And another 18 months for improvements and add the additional capability.

[Corbomite]

Personally I think you should scrap the whole ship customization idea (and player weapons creation if you're considering it) if you want to make it anything like SFC/SFB in flavor and feel. Your ship is not your own personal "hot rod" to soup up and you are not Han Solo who "made a few improvements" of your own. You are a part of a fleet and a military organization, the very antithesis of personal expression. The point of SFB/SFC was to shine and win with what you are given, not have the best of the best all the time. If you allow ship customization, very soon everyone will be running around in the same cookie cutter ships and it will become a big bore-fest. People min/max by nature and will always do it if you give them the opportunity. I know customization is popular, and it works well in games where it only affects the performance of your character against the AI, but against people it just forces everyone to play in the fashion of the person who figures out how to work the system and not based on personal skill or tactics.

Now, people will still gravitate towards the ships that are the best to get the performance they want and thereby everyone is running around in the same ships and the bore-fest is back. You can control this through Order of Battle, i.e. control ship production in a sane and orderly way to prevent too many of any ship being constructed and tie that into how many are still in service. Once the limit is reached, no more will be built until one or more are lost in battle. One of the main things we always had problems and debates about was the Econ vs Fighting Ability equation and we had to impose several rules to get things to work well and not have people exploit (either knowingly or otherwise) the limits of the game engine. It would be nice if the Econ and OOB were tied together better with the computer acting as a responsible govenment with a goal in mind regarding ship construction and deployment.


EDIT: I had some ideas about how to tie ship deployment into player combat record if you are interested.

[knightstorm]

Your ship is not your own personal "hot rod" to soup up and you are not Han Solo who "made a few improvements" of your own. You are a part of a fleet and a military organization, the very antithesis of personal expression.

The ships in a fleet are not uniform, especially during wartime when refits, and parts are in demand.  Its very feasible for a captain to pull whatever influence his reputation has earned him to get the weapons he finds most necessary installed on his ship.

[Corbomite]

Refits are one thing, completely designing your own ship is another. Besides, with a proper refit schedule the captain in question can get his improvements simply by changing to the next incarnation of his/her ship or to another design they prefer. If you offer enough variants there is no need to customize more than certain loadouts.

[[UFP]Exeter]

Carbonite I am interested in your ideas.

I feel with a good game "development" system to cause technological breakthroughs that can improve capabilities we can get some control on the cycle of more is best. 

My idea is if we rate technology from a starting level of 1, but the game has built in up to level 10, but can handle up to 50, then we can ue customization and future version to expand.  So we do not need to rewrite the game to add capability.

I also think a real time, run based system for the strategic map.  Where you select your fleets and where to go, and the velocity.  then when all as done, the host will more all simultaneously.  And if combat cam occurs it is done.  The only issue I see is if there are multiple individuals in different fleets, two could be in combat and other have to wait.   A puzzle for real multiplayer.  My thought was to consider time for combat and time for warp and allow the other player and fleets to move.  But the exact algorithm will take some thought.

[Nemesis]

Your ship is not your own personal "hot rod" to soup up and you are not Han Solo who "made a few improvements" of your own. You are a part of a fleet and a military organization, the very antithesis of personal expression.

The ships in a fleet are not uniform, especially during wartime when refits, and parts are in demand.  Its very feasible for a captain to pull whatever influence his reputation has earned him to get the weapons he finds most necessary installed on his ship.

TNG episode where Geordi meets the warp engine designer and she comments on his changes to the design.  In Trek there is customization.  Not too surprising I suppose when you may be away from a base for a long time and encountering alien tech and problems that may allow (or require) you to modify the ship for enhanced performance.

[Corbomite]

Your ship is not your own personal "hot rod" to soup up and you are not Han Solo who "made a few improvements" of your own. You are a part of a fleet and a military organization, the very antithesis of personal expression.

The ships in a fleet are not uniform, especially during wartime when refits, and parts are in demand.  Its very feasible for a captain to pull whatever influence his reputation has earned him to get the weapons he finds most necessary installed on his ship.

TNG episode where Geordi meets the warp engine designer and she comments on his changes to the design.  In Trek there is customization.  Not too surprising I suppose when you may be away from a base for a long time and encountering alien tech and problems that may allow (or require) you to modify the ship for enhanced performance.

I'm not sure I'd equate making a necessary modification to save the ship from a death trap to allowing the crew to radically alter the ship's design to fit their own personal desires. A better example would be when Captain Jellico assumed command and began reworking the shift schedules and re-routing certain systems towards defense so he could have better back-ups in a jam. Of course the Federation was not in a war time stance at that point and his modifications were deemed necessary by his judgement of the situation, which could have quickly lead to war. During the Klingon and Dominion conflicts the Defiant was modified to just get it to work right, but it would be assumed that all combat worthy ships would have received a refit to better prepare them for war. I assume that in the game a war time stance is already in place so the ships would be more combat oriented already.

I am not against letting the players cutomize their ships, just only up to a point and not in a way that will allow them an unfair advantage due to the limits of the game engine, otherwise Exeter will spend all his time listening to people complain about a certain configuration and others defend it as "good gameplay and get with the program". If you offer variations on a theme you have to make sure each variation has strengths and weaknesses and that none sound good on paper, but due to the limits of the game actually don't do much. I have seen this in other games and it always turns out the same.

[Javora]

Refits are one thing, completely designing your own ship is another. Besides, with a proper refit schedule the captain in question can get his improvements simply by changing to the next incarnation of his/her ship or to another design they prefer. If you offer enough variants there is no need to customize more than certain loadouts.

IMHO that is why SFC III didn't do as well.

As for movement and combat, I think Taldren used the hex map so that they didn't have to figure out all the issues that you are facing now.  The only other way I could think of doing such a multi-player match up is by using the agro bubble, where as if any two (or more) ships enters each others radius a battle mission is triggered.  This same but larger radius could be applied to planets and star bases so any attacked bases can send out it's distress signal to friendly ships to trigger a base defense mission.

This "agro bubble" that I am describing works well in Guild Wars and other multi-player games.

[Nemesis]

I wouldn't support the idea of radical alteration either as that would take a FRD at least.  But changes that are non structural like a D7 using Fed targeting devices to upgrade some or all of their PhII to PhI or using alien tech to upgrade the glass rear shields are more in line with what I was thinking. 

[Corbomite]

I wouldn't support the idea of radical alteration either as that would take a FRD at least.  But changes that are non structural like a D7 using Fed targeting devices to upgrade some or all of their PhII to PhI or using alien tech to upgrade the glass rear shields are more in line with what I was thinking.

Yeah, that'd be great, but why would it be limited to your own ship alone? You'd share this tech with your empire to let them develop and deploy it wouldn't you?

[Lieutenant_Q]

One thing that will help considerably, is to put a Credit Cost on everything.  BPV is designed to balance ships in the skirmish arena, money balances the fleets in a campaign.  For example, its not cost effective to refit every single cruiser in the Federation Fleet to a CC.  Even if the CC is a much better ship than the CA, so Starfleet Command comes out with the CAR refit, to improve the CA without spending the money to upgrade them all to the CC.  And if the feds start losing Cruisers too quickly, they'll be forced to stop building CAs, and start building War Cruisers to fill the gap, because they can build two NCLs for the price of one CC.  Just like the Klingons decided sometime after Praxis that they could build 10 B'rels for the cost of one K't'inga.

[Nemesis]

I wouldn't support the idea of radical alteration either as that would take a FRD at least.  But changes that are non structural like a D7 using Fed targeting devices to upgrade some or all of their PhII to PhI or using alien tech to upgrade the glass rear shields are more in line with what I was thinking.

Yeah, that'd be great, but why would it be limited to your own ship alone? You'd share this tech with your empire to let them develop and deploy it wouldn't you?

You might not be able to.  You might be unable to reproduce the tech (or do so at an extortionate cost).  As I recall the Klingon use of PhII instead of PhI was the result of a shortage of a critical raw material so they could make PhI but only in very low volumes, as they acquired the materials (or an affordable substitute) they put out more PhI.  Upgrading your own ship with captured components in that case might be all you could do, excess might be distributed among your own subfleet. 

The tech could just be too alien.  Hydrans might easily make some things in their environment that a Klingon could not duplicate in a cost effective manner due to the environment.  The same in reverse for the Hydrans and their neighbors.  It could even be due to a biological process not duplicated off one home world. 

[Corbomite]

That's getting awfully complicated. It's just  game after all and each race/empire should start out relatively equal. The discrepancies in SFU empires was always tempered by other factors that  were never incorporated into SFC and would be a pain to replicate and balance in a video game in any case.

[Panzergranate]

You're assuming that alien tech would be better.... it's like fitting Soviet innaccurate tank gunsights to an M-60 A2 during the Cold War because it's "Enemy (Alien) Tech".

[Corbomite]

You're assuming that alien tech would be better.... it's like fitting Soviet innaccurate tank gunsights to an M-60 A2 during the Cold War because it's "Enemy (Alien) Tech".

They did it to us. When I was working as an aircraft instrument tech in the '90's, just after the U.S.S.R. disintegrated and Russia began selling off old MIGs, some Russian altimeters and airspeed indicators came into our shop. We were all excited to see how the "enemy" had done things and the whole shop watched as I opened up the case of the first instrument. We were very disappointed to find that the altimeters and airspeed indicators were very much like our own. In fact, they were our own. They were the same instruments that our F-16's used.

[Nemesis]

You're assuming that alien tech would be better.... it's like fitting Soviet innaccurate tank gunsights to an M-60 A2 during the Cold War because it's "Enemy (Alien) Tech".

Actually I'm not.  In some cases it will be in others it may just be superior to the piece of junk that is left of your own system after the battle.  In others it combined with yours may be superior to either (Nomad and V'ger for Trek examples).

In a series of SFB battles my friends and I once staged I captured a Gorn CA and if the series had been completed it would have been overhauled to Klingon tech for that last battle.  In that case the G-CA would have had its Pl-G replaced with disruptors (they were destroyed) and its forward four Ph-I would have become Ph-II (they too had been destroyed).  The resulting customized captured ship would have been less powerful than the original before I crippled and captured it.  (It was a lesson to my brother-in-law to use the sensors to gather information on your enemy ship   he didn't learn it )

I used the Klingons both because of my own personal afection for the TOS Klingons and because the Feds do use more advanced tech in their ships and a Klingon Captain or Engineer who captured some of that tech would naturally want to use it as they could. 

[knightstorm]

I wouldn't support the idea of radical alteration either as that would take a FRD at least.  But changes that are non structural like a D7 using Fed targeting devices to upgrade some or all of their PhII to PhI or using alien tech to upgrade the glass rear shields are more in line with what I was thinking.

Yeah, that'd be great, but why would it be limited to your own ship alone? You'd share this tech with your empire to let them develop and deploy it wouldn't you?

But if the empire could only acquire/produce/install a limited amount of these devices per year, not every ship would get them.

[Corbomite]

I wouldn't support the idea of radical alteration either as that would take a FRD at least.  But changes that are non structural like a D7 using Fed targeting devices to upgrade some or all of their PhII to PhI or using alien tech to upgrade the glass rear shields are more in line with what I was thinking.

Yeah, that'd be great, but why would it be limited to your own ship alone? You'd share this tech with your empire to let them develop and deploy it wouldn't you?

But if the empire could only acquire/produce/install a limited amount of these devices per year, not every ship would get them.

Hence the need for a performance based system to reward ships to the most deserving and giving the rest something to strive for.