Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 11

Author Topic: unending galaxy  (Read 36289 times)

EsKa

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Anarkis Gaming
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #45 on: March 28, 2015, 03:39:59 pm »

(spoilerized quote of the full last post because I happen to answer on a new page of the topic)
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Good thing you didn't bought 8 of the Drath unique weapons (can't recall the name right now) if you think 8 AHPL are overpowered :p

But more seriously, one of the major problem (weapon wise) is that you can effectively equip 8 heavy plasma launchers and still fire continuously. I put energy consumption very low in the beta for testing purpose (to see what weapons need to be tuned up/down). Once I add proper stats for energy consumption/generation, your weapon combo of death will probably allow you to fire a full volley every 5 seconds or so granted your energy isn't being used to charge your shields. It will basically force battleships to equip lower class weaponry alongside their capital gun if they want to fire continuously. That will take care of a part of the problem.

Your idea about XL weapons having class specific hit chance / damage is interesting indeed, at least on paper. Damages, yeah I am likely to implement sooner or later as damage types grow more complex (an editor will likely be added for that matter too). I am a bit more on the fence regarding hit chance, seeing a bullet fly straight through a ship will raise eyebrows and I see the "bug" reports coming from a mile away :p That's likely something I am going to decide once I am done with the combat AI.

Which leads to the other part of your post

Yes, flying patterns at the moment are basic. The code to avoid bullets (or ships) is here, just unused. The issue is that collision detection (being of trajectories of actual objects, it makes no notable difference) is costly. It's not so much a problem in small encounters, but in big battles, that's another story.

That said, there's a cheap (cpu wise) way to go around that. I am going to experiment tonight with adding a bit of randomness to flying patterns so fighters will be more likely to have curved or zigzag trajectories when closing in. No idea how effective it's gonna be, but I might as well give it a shot.

(that and AI ships making predictive shots based on your current trajectory, this one, I know how to, and it's going to be fun, in the true DF sense of the term).

And while I can't enable collision avoidance on all fighters on the map, I can still try to enable it on wing leaders (fighters tend to be unleashed in wings, it's easier to notice if the Show targeting lines in sector map setting is enabled in the controls) and see what happens.

--

Oh, you found some swarm queens ! I love those critters. That's part of the "bad" events. Well, depends on the point of view, really. Yeah, they tend to have a big bounty alongside good loot. Being tougher than battleships, with their regenerative nature, and the ability to store "energy" from eaten asteroids to unleash more guardians and spores when in danger. The military and police tend to have a very hard time dealing with them as they have no way of estimating how much energy is stocked in the queen's belly, hence the growing bounty. They also act as a balancing mechanism has they have a higher chance to appear in the territory of the strongest faction (once a given threshold is crossed here again)

And yeah, the Manowar is one of the best capital to fly with, I am glad you like it :)
« Last Edit: March 28, 2015, 03:42:23 pm by EsKa »
Logged

Zazmio

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #46 on: March 28, 2015, 05:11:23 pm »

Hey, I think it's great that you're taking the time to post these long responses to our posts.  That's a good sign -- it shows you're committed to this game and are probably going to stick with it and make it into something even more cool.

Trade stations make more sense if they are selling the stuff they buy to planets for a profit -- I hadn't considered that.  Right now, colonies seem like just a background graphic to the player.  Maybe there should be some way to see more information on them.  Or maybe there is already, and I just haven't found it yet.

I played for a few more hours last night.  Clearly this game is pretty fun even in its unfinished state.  I had the chance to mess around with auto traders.  A tanker trader is very cheap and will pay for itself in only a couple of minutes.  Automated trading becomes very lucrative once you get a few traders going.  Just don't make the mistake that I did, which was to ally with a faction, which drew me into their wars and got all my traders destroyed immediately.  ;D  New players should avoid messing with diplomacy until they're big enough to defend themselves.

It would be cool if you could see how profitable an automated ship is, if it would keep track of how much revenue it's made, how much it's spent, total profit.

As for fighters:  in the wars that I accidently got myself involved in, I got into some pretty hairy battles against hordes of fighters, giving me a little more respect for them.  They still die in droves to my flak cannons, which makes sense -- they're flak cannons.  Right now, if you spend 2 million on a Titan armed with flak cannons, you can probably kill way more than 2 million in cost of fighters; just fly away from the horde and spam flak behind you.  If you add some dodging to their AI, a horde of fighters will become truly frightening, and might even become overpowered, if you're not careful.

By the way, I found a bug.  When loading games, sometimes the Titan I am flying seems to be not there.  When pressing 'w' to thrust, I hear no engine noise.  To fix it, I had to switch to a trade ship, select the Titan, and tell it to follow me using 'f', which caused it to reappear. 
Logged

etgfrog

  • Bay Watcher
  • delete & NULL;
    • View Profile
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #47 on: March 28, 2015, 06:14:43 pm »

hm...the automated builder loves to spam building wheat farms and various other food facilities, yet disfavors the ship part facilities and their supporting structures.
if you would like actual numbers:
11 Ale Breweries
15 Cattle Farms
7 Chemical plants
15 Food Factories
10 Science Labs
14 Wheat Farms

6 Chip factories
6 Computer factories
7 Crystal Mines
3 Iron Mines
2 Ship part factories(that I had to manually build)
4 Silicon Mines
9 Solar plants
8 Steel Factories
« Last Edit: March 28, 2015, 06:25:16 pm by etgfrog »
Logged
"How dare you get angry after being scammed."

Paul

  • Bay Watcher
  • Polite discourse with a dash of insanity.
    • View Profile
    • Need an affordable website? I can help.
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #48 on: March 28, 2015, 10:29:15 pm »


Oh, you found some swarm queens ! I love those critters. That's part of the "bad" events. Well, depends on the point of view, really. Yeah, they tend to have a big bounty alongside good loot. Being tougher than battleships, with their regenerative nature, and the ability to store "energy" from eaten asteroids to unleash more guardians and spores when in danger. The military and police tend to have a very hard time dealing with them as they have no way of estimating how much energy is stocked in the queen's belly, hence the growing bounty. They also act as a balancing mechanism has they have a higher chance to appear in the territory of the strongest faction (once a given threshold is crossed here again)

And yeah, the Manowar is one of the best capital to fly with, I am glad you like it :)

There are actually tons of swarm queens getting spawned in the big map (the special one in the deluxe game). I'm not sure if it's intentional or just a side effect of the map being big, but the swarm has turned into a real threat in this game. They have set up shop in a big way in the northeast by the Asterians, and I can't even keep a trade ship going up there without them being eaten by the roaming swarm. They have taken over several of the Asterian ore clusters up there. They also have a Human ore cluster down in their territory, and have been sending a few raids into SPQR lands as well. The group that landed me such a big bounty was in SPQR territory by the time I tracked it down, with a big human bounty after devastating its way through the human territory. The guardians that the queen had spawned were the ones with the actual bounty. I saw them eat an Imperator in about 5 seconds when it attacked them. The queen didn't even have a bounty because the guardians with it were getting all the kills. Every guardian was wanted for at least 5000 credits, my journal was full of reward payouts when I killed them. They would have torn my ship to shreds if I hadn't been in a Manowar and flying away from them as I started shooting.

The AI core is amping up to be a big threat too, they're breaking in from all sides here. Every faction is in active war with them and most with the swarm, they aren't even fighting each other. It's turning out to be a really nice scenario. I'm getting ready to try building my own little faction in one of the AI core territories, since they're stretched so thin fighting every faction in their other areas.
Logged
Do you like Science Fiction? I'm writing the Weaveborn Saga over on Royal Road and my website. Link

Zazmio

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #49 on: March 28, 2015, 10:45:00 pm »

In my game, the AI Core got exterminated in less than an hour, so I haven't had the pleasure of fighting them yet.

I've encountered quite a lot of the Swarm, though.  I once killed a swarm queen with a 550k bounty.
Logged

Paul

  • Bay Watcher
  • Polite discourse with a dash of insanity.
    • View Profile
    • Need an affordable website? I can help.
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #50 on: March 28, 2015, 11:07:59 pm »

In the big map the core has 8 capital sectors all over the map starting out, so they're a bigger threat. Interesting thing about the core is the carriers can build their own fighters, so a carrier can restock its fighters between battles. They also build stations for free, which means they rebuild them free. So they are much harder to cripple than the regular factions. If you sweep through their systems and take out all their stations, they'll have them rebuilt very quickly - before you even get the last ones destroyed. Taking out their ships is the only way to weaken them really. Sitting a fleet on their warp gate to take out any builder ships entering the area and killing all the builder ships you can find already there is the only way to prevent them from remaking all their stations while you're trying to kill them.
Logged
Do you like Science Fiction? I'm writing the Weaveborn Saga over on Royal Road and my website. Link

Sergius

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #51 on: March 30, 2015, 11:32:21 am »

PTW.

Big fan of 2D space sandboxes. Always liked Escape Velocity but felt a bit restrictive and railroady. Space Pirates and Zombies is nice but mostly grinding and railroading.
Logged

Paul

  • Bay Watcher
  • Polite discourse with a dash of insanity.
    • View Profile
    • Need an affordable website? I can help.
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #52 on: March 30, 2015, 02:11:46 pm »

Been messing around with the economy aspect now that I have a little faction going. I can see you haven't done a balancing pass on it yet either :) You may need to boost solar power plants, or add an alternate means of producing energy cells. Or reduce their consumption. Right now they're a major bottleneck in production.

For instance, I captured two systems. They can support up to 7 ship part production facilities. They have 17 power production slots. I did the math, and to run 7 ship part production chains, I need 31 solar power plants. And that's if I focus entirely on ship parts and have no other industry, if I start trying to produce luxuries and stuff I'm even further in the hole power wise.

Looking around, all but one of the AI factions have the same issue. Hardly anything is produced because energy cells are so scarce. I ran the math for the Asterian empire and they are even worse off. Even with their improved power plants, they would need 58 to run 7 of their ship part production facilities (mostly because they need nearly double the supporting factories for the same ship parts, mostly extra mines - and they make 40% less ship parts for their trouble).

The AICore is the only one that can produce ship parts to the maximum efficiency in the current economic setup, since their part factories are WAY more efficient (requiring only 12 mines and 3 power plants for 8 ship part factories - compared to 20 supporting factories, 12 mines, and 36 power plants of the normal empires - not to mention they produce 12.5% more per factory). Which is why raiding AI core territory is the best way to get energy cells, taking out their long standing power plants will net you tens of thousands of energy cells which they over produce like crazy. I imagine this may also be why the AI core can effectively fight nonstop on so many fronts right now, since they're making ship parts way faster than the other empires (who rely mostly on their passive colony income)


I also have a question. How do you transfer cargo from ships you own to stations you own? Or dock ships in your stations? I may be overlooking something but I haven't figured it out. Was trying to give my stations some of the energy cells I looted from the AI core. Or undock ships from other stations for that matter, at one point one of my ships somehow docked with an AI core base and I couldn't figure out how to get it to undock, eventually it undocked on its own and died.
Logged
Do you like Science Fiction? I'm writing the Weaveborn Saga over on Royal Road and my website. Link

EsKa

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Anarkis Gaming
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #53 on: March 30, 2015, 08:30:07 pm »

Hey people !

Instead of writing a giant wall of text stating every change I recently made (most of them were suggested right here, and there's still a few to be added), you can read about it in my latest devlog :)

I'll just say about it that I just invented the "drunk pilot AI" and it is pretty effective as dealing with the issues mentioned earlier in this topic about ship to ship combat.

--

Now, to the questions:

Quote from: Paul
Been messing around with the economy aspect now that I have a little faction going. I can see you haven't done a balancing pass on it yet either :) You may need to boost solar power plants, or add an alternate means of producing energy cells. Or reduce their consumption. Right now they're a major bottleneck in production [...]

Thanks for your findings, I suspected that much about the energy, given how many dock traders beeline for SPP each time they produce a batch, but having specific faction reports like this is going to save me a hell lot of time. The fact that the Asterians are slower producers and that the AI Core has a big advantage are both intended, but not to that extend. I will boost energy generation in the next release accordingly.

As a general rule of thumb, the game's data (weapons, ships, wares, factories) isn't properly balanced, it's a 1.0 goal. Well, ships were mostly balanced in a previous beta. There's still a bit of work to do, but it's mostly okay, especially as all fleets aren't meant to be equal anyway. Weapons still need tuning as discussed earlier. Factory production, well, that's the last and big one, current stats date from the time I actually put factories into the game (0.2 or so) and I haven't touched them since despite many changes to how they chain together. The good thing is that factory production balancing can mostly be automated by writing some tool that'll do the math for me :P

Quote from: Paul
How do you transfer cargo from ships you own to stations you own? Or dock ships in your stations? I may be overlooking something but I haven't figured it out. Was trying to give my stations some of the energy cells I looted from the AI core. Or undock ships from other stations for that matter, at one point one of my ships somehow docked with an AI core base and I couldn't figure out how to get it to undock, eventually it undocked on its own and died.

You can't dock a ship at a station manually atm, I'm tempted to say that's because (in theory) you don't need to, but the truth is, until recently it would have messed with some station's AI. I'll just add a dock button. Regarding 'undocking', apparently until beta 1 you could simply right click a ship from the hangar tab to do that, but for some reason I commented out the relevant code, no idea why, I will put that back in immediately. That said, you can still do that by using your 'empire manager / asset list' menu, selecting the ship and giving it an order (depending where it's docked, it may take a few seconds to acknowledge the order, ships inside hangars aren't "refreshed" as often as flying ones for performances reasons).

(how on earth did you manage to dock something at an AI core station, no less?! I might add an achievement just for that)

As for ship-to-dock cargo exchange, my bad, I should have enabled the existing menu for docks as well, but it somehow got forgotten. I am adding it right now so I don't forget again. (don't worry, next beta is due in a couple weeks, but it's unlikely savegames will be compatible)

Quote from: etgfrog
hm...the automated builder loves to spam building wheat farms and various other food facilities, yet disfavors the ship part facilities and their supporting structures.[...]

I looked at the code, you're both right and wrong :p

The priority of part production is the same as the other factories, which is indeed too low (fixed). But part factories are extremely expensive (1.000k credits) compared to most of the others (200 to 500k), as such it's very likely that your station building money account rarely had enough money to build such factories. And, without the funds, your builders decided to build what they could do, like cheap food factories.

AI factions get around that issue by moving money when needed, a thing I obviously can't do with the player's money ("where are all the credits I was saving to buy that fancy battleship?!"). It's a known issue, and I am thinking about ways to alleviate it. But right now, if you want your military production to be prioritized, you either need a hell lot of income, or you'll need to manually build the ship parts factories.

Quote from: Paul
There are actually tons of swarm queens getting spawned in the big map (the special one in the deluxe game). I'm not sure if it's intentional or just a side effect of the map being big, but the swarm has turned into a real threat in this game [...]

I didn't pick on the fact you bought the deluxe version (thanks!) early. I am glad you like this map, I spent a *lot* of time designing it (another one is likely to be added the 1.0 release). It's also fairly re-playable as there's quite a few ways the game can unfold. Swarm queens there aren't event based, they start with some territory next to the poor Asterians which aren't well equipped to deal with shield-less enemies (I am a bad person :p )


Quote from: Zazmio
Hey, I think it's great that you're taking the time to post these long responses to our posts.  That's a good sign -- it shows you're committed to this game and are probably going to stick with it and make it into something even more cool.
Thanks ! Those last few days here have been more useful than all the input I got from all sources combined in the last 6 months, so it's really my pleasure.


Quote from: Zazmio
Trade stations make more sense if they are selling the stuff they buy to planets for a profit -- I hadn't considered that.  Right now, colonies seem like just a background graphic to the player.  Maybe there should be some way to see more information on them.  Or maybe there is already, and I just haven't found it yet.

Right now colonies offer monetary income, ship parts income, manpower (military cap) to their owner, and they decide how many and what can be built in their sector. They may "look" like a background graphic but they aren't. Details about the colonies can be accessed by the F3 key / third button on the main menu, it'll open the sector info panel. Compare the numbers between an empty sector, and the capital of a claimed solar system for instance :)

Quote from: Zazmio
Just don't make the mistake that I did, which was to ally with a faction, which drew me into their wars and got all my traders destroyed immediately.  ;D  New players should avoid messing with diplomacy until they're big enough to defend themselves.

Yeah :) I thought about disabling it until you get a territory of your own, but I think I will content myself with a warning message the first time the player is about to ally / declare war without anything to back up his word.

Quote from: Zazmio
It would be cool if you could see how profitable an automated ship is, if it would keep track of how much revenue it's made, how much it's spent, total profit.

Will do.

Quote from: Zazmio
By the way, I found a bug.  When loading games, sometimes the Titan I am flying seems to be not there.  When pressing 'w' to thrust, I hear no engine noise.  To fix it, I had to switch to a trade ship, select the Titan, and tell it to follow me using 'f', which caused it to reappear. 

Interesting one, that's the kind of stuff i've hard time noticing (during debugging session i tend to disable the sound completely because, for some reasons, it takes ages for the game to load if both my debugger and the sound are enabled). I'll check it out anyway :)

Cheers,
SK.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2015, 08:36:27 pm by EsKa »
Logged

Paul

  • Bay Watcher
  • Polite discourse with a dash of insanity.
    • View Profile
    • Need an affordable website? I can help.
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #54 on: March 30, 2015, 10:06:42 pm »

Yeah, I bought the deluxe version after spending about an hour with the game haha. I can see it has potential. It's really great to see you posting here and addressing issues so quickly :)

In regard to the factory balancing, I could send you the files where I edited them a bit for my own uses if you want, at least until you get a chance to do your own balancing. Right now I just did a patch job adjusting things solely for ship parts (along with a boost to energy cells) and it seems to play well so far. I don't know if it's absolutely balanced, but it works.

I'm no stranger to spreadsheets, seeing as I run a business and have a MBA degree. As part of my looking into the ship part production I already made one that calculates the following on the stations associated with ship parts:

Total factories required to support 1 ship part production facility
Breakdown of raw materials per ship part
Profit per second for each factory
Break even time for each factory

Using that the rebalance I did was to make 4 ship part factories require 4 chip factories, 8 steel factories, 4 silicium mines, 9 iron mines, and 9 energy production facilities. And each factory has a breakeven of about 38 minutes, except for the ship part factory (9 minutes) since ship parts are so valuable. All assuming they run 24/7, which is only possible if trading is keeping them stocked well.

The way it currently is 4 ship part factories requires 2 chip factories, 8 steel factories, 0.5 silicium mine, 5.4 iron mines, and 17.667 solar power facilities - with a breakeven ranging from 8 to 95 minutes. So I mostly shifted the requirements away from solar power and toward mines, with a bit better income on the factories.

I haven't bothered looking at any of the luxury factories yet, since you haven't implemented the purpose for em yet. In case you haven't noticed yet,  I kinda enjoy mucking about with a game's economy innards, lol.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2015, 10:08:42 pm by Paul »
Logged
Do you like Science Fiction? I'm writing the Weaveborn Saga over on Royal Road and my website. Link

Paul

  • Bay Watcher
  • Polite discourse with a dash of insanity.
    • View Profile
    • Need an affordable website? I can help.
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #55 on: April 01, 2015, 12:25:08 am »

Had a chance to play a bit with my modified ruleset. It's surprising how much more dangerous the AI factions are when they have the energy to produce the ship parts and build their fleets up properly. The ISA in particular quickly built up a huge military and saved up 2000 ship parts (seemingly the max) since nobody was really threatening them. The other factions also built up much better. The Asterians managed to fight back the Swarm and eventually take the territory for themselves, the main factions held their own against the AICore and didn't lose territory like they usually did (the Drath actually started taking core systems in the lower left), and when a conflict did happen between the SPQR and the Humans both sides were able to throw a lot of ships (including capital ships and carriers) at each other for an extended period before the humans finally exhausted their ship part reserve and started losing territory. Watching the warp gate at a human capital under siege was crazy, the SPQR had a big fleet there attacking and had wiped out the human forces there, but so many reinforcements came through from the other shipyards around the galaxy they were able to take them out.

You will probably have to re-balance things in favor of the core and swarm if you want them to hold their own again on the big map once you get the economy stabilized.


I also noticed a few more minor things:

Pirate ownership of sectors seems permanent. Other AI won't conquer them, and player can't do so either - even if you wipe out all presence there and build a military base.

The pirate capitals seem bugged in that you can build unlimited shipyards there.

Jump gates can only be built by automated ships. Players can make them by setting their empire to auto and leaving a ship to do it, but there isn't an option to build them.

Logged
Do you like Science Fiction? I'm writing the Weaveborn Saga over on Royal Road and my website. Link

ollobrains

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #56 on: April 01, 2015, 04:52:09 am »

I have to say, giving the pirate factions more diversity and allowing them to grow and shrink could be an option

Perhaps silcon mines could also take construction materials and turn out solar cells that could be needed for new solar energy station facilities could be built and loaded into a building ship ( that could open up a even more diverse economy)
Logged

EsKa

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Anarkis Gaming
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #57 on: April 01, 2015, 02:53:25 pm »

Quote from: Paul
[...] eco mod [...]

Wow, thanks ! I can see how having an economic background can help a lot, that's the kind of things that would have taken me a ages to figure out without writing dedicated tools to do it for me.

Indeed, I'd be very interested in getting your modified files, it'll save me some time and more importantly, improve things for the next beta without me having to divert too much of my coding time into data modification. You can send a PM, but might as well post the link here so other people can use it right away if you want to.

Results from your experience look very good, I will probably have to readjust the costs (in parts) of ships a bit, which in turn will allow me to reduce the value of parts a bit, which will make the part factory breakeven at a speed a bit more consistent with the other factories.

By the way, that's also the first mod for my game, incidentally the first mod very likely to be officially integrated in the full game too, congratulations :)

(lesson learnt: go with tigsource with a 4x game and get input about the windowed mode not being screen centered, go to bay12 and get spreadsheets on how to improve your economic flow)

Quote from: Paul
I haven't bothered looking at any of the luxury factories yet, since you haven't implemented the purpose for em yet. In case you haven't noticed yet,  I kinda enjoy mucking about with a game's economy innards, lol.

Yeah, I noticed and that's great :)

I have thought about about the luxuries, btw. They're likely to act in a somewhat similar fashion to ship parts. When they are moved/sold to a trade station, they'll be consumed to reduce the owner's War Weariness (if any). The differences being that the higher the ww, the higher they will be willing to pay, and that it can be traded between factions. WW effects should be increased accordingly, obviously.


While we're talking about the economy. Regarding solar power plants, I am toying with an idea as it may improve cargo traffic flow a bit, especially during the first few minutes (where it's really chaotic with everyone rushing in every direction at the same time). As the SPP have no resources requirements, instead of producing in big batches, they could continuously produce small amounts of energy. It would allow dock traders that arrive at what would have been a depleted SPP (beaten to the punch by another) to wait or at least come back with some resources. May also improve performances as they won't have to query their pathfinder to find another valid buying place as often.

Quote from: Paul
You will probably have to re-balance things in favor of the core and swarm if you want them to hold their own again on the big map once you get the economy stabilized.

The core will get a make over soon, there's too many high hull / low shields combos as it is (asterian, swarm). I'll probably invert that logic with them while applying a buff.

One issue are laser weapons, due to their 100% accuracy (sort of), they're only depending on damage and range. I am likely to add a rotation/turn rate for these weapons so we can have more specialized ones (like short range and fast turn rate for fighter cleaning lasers). In turn it'll allow me to reduce the current nerf on core weaponry. Back in alpha, they used to have the longest range in the game, but it made them nearly invincible.

For the swarm, I am more likely to strengthen the gargants and hives and keep the queens intact to make sector infestations hard to clean up but manageable to prevent. We'll see.

Quote from: Paul
The pirate capitals seem bugged in that you can build unlimited shipyards there.

Thanks, did not notice that one. Also, you can't build a military base if you've already built a shipyard in your capital sector while the AI can. (I am totally not using this thread as a to-do list, why would you think that :p)

Quote from: Paul
Jump gates can only be built by automated ships. Players can make them by setting their empire to auto and leaving a ship to do it, but there isn't an option to build them.

I've added the option recently (i think it's somewhere in my last devlog), it'll be available in a week or two.

Quote from: Paul
Pirate ownership of sectors seems permanent. Other AI won't conquer them, and player can't do so either - even if you wipe out all presence there and build a military base.
Quote from: ollobrains
I have to say, giving the pirate factions more diversity and allowing them to grow and shrink could be an options

This one is a bit harder to explain. Pirate "owned" territory cannot be invaded and they cannot invade either. In fact, at their faction AI layer is simply limited to build stations. It's used to mark parts of the map I don't want anyone to claim (for performance or map design reasons), more specifically nebulae which have a strategic/military use by themselves. Factions can invade territory passing through pirate owned sectors:

Code: [Select]
[Faction A]-[Pirate]-[Faction B]
where [..] are sectors. Factions A and B can still invade each other here
(except if the sector has been tagged in a special way in the map editor, which is the case for some isolated core outposts).

That's not something I really want to change, at least not right now where there's no way for pirates to effectively defend their territory or take some (been there, done that in earlier versions, didn't work out well). Pirate AI is solely based on their stations which act independently. Ownership of their current sector is of little consequence to them. So, technically, I could rename the ownership to "lawless, unsuitable for colonization, ..." but apart from that nothing will change on that front until post 1.0.

I know that in a few maps, there are some pirate owned solar systems. But from the perspective of a player who doesn't want to grow as an empire or wants to take his time to do so, it makes sense to have a Tortuga and a Nassau that won't get erased by the might of the main factions a few hours into the game.

Incidentally, there's an exploit of sorts were you can indeed take over pirate sectors by declaring war on them, flagging the sector you want as a war target (which can be difficult, as you need claimed territory close-by) and blowing up a lot of their stuff. After a while (20 minutes or so), they'll send a peace offer that's likely to contain the targeted sector. It may be another sector though, or a lot of money, or both.

Quote from: ollobrains
Perhaps silcon mines could also take construction materials and turn out solar cells that could be needed for new solar energy station facilities could be built and loaded into a building ship ( that could open up a even more diverse economy)

I am sorry, I am not sure I follow. Are you talking about adding "station building parts" in general ? Or adding a cost (in materials) to build solar power plants (and, why not, other factories) ? Or something else ? I'll assume it's one of the first two which are roughly similar.

Yes I have thought about adding station parts. The issue is that it would make money fairly useless to factions, diplomacy aside.  Also the fact that factories solely need money to be built has gameplay reasons: do you save your money to expand your empire, do you use it to make more money by buying free traders / miners, do you use it to buy additional battleships from 3rd parties when you've reached your military cap? If you remove the station building from the equation, it makes for much fewer choices.

And about building materials (like 100 steel, 1000 ecells, 40 computers to build a SPP), apart from the fact it makes the economy much harder to balance properly, I don't like collecting stuff (hence the lack of ammo based weapons and fuel). Even so, if you do the collecting yourself, which can be fine at first, once you're grow big enough and start building multiple factories and stations at once, it will get old very fast. Of course, I'll have to add some command so the builders do the collecting for you, but then, it'll basically defeat the purpose and, from a gameplay perspective, it's no really different from selling those materials to get enough money to build the station or using building parts.


Cheers,
SK.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2015, 02:59:20 pm by EsKa »
Logged

Paul

  • Bay Watcher
  • Polite discourse with a dash of insanity.
    • View Profile
    • Need an affordable website? I can help.
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #58 on: April 01, 2015, 07:29:18 pm »

Just cutting the production rate to like 5 seconds could help with that. Smaller, faster batches. I'll try it and see how it works.

Going to go ahead and do a little more work on the mod before I release it. Might as well make it a good mod, heh. I'll go ahead and examine the factories other than the ship part chain.
Logged
Do you like Science Fiction? I'm writing the Weaveborn Saga over on Royal Road and my website. Link

etgfrog

  • Bay Watcher
  • delete & NULL;
    • View Profile
Re: unending galaxy
« Reply #59 on: April 01, 2015, 09:05:07 pm »

I would like to report a bug, you can take over sectors claimed by others by placing a military outpost. I haven't tried placing the military bases deeper into teritories, but building it over all the stars could be a valid strategy. If they go to war with you the military base will destroy all the stations there.
Logged
"How dare you get angry after being scammed."
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 11