Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

1

Suggestions / Limitation on Repair on the Run

« on: January 27, 2013, 10:32:44 AM »

Everything, aside from fighters/bombers, should have a cap on how much hullpoints could be repaired "on the run".  Lore wise it's more plausible that extensive repairs and refits require proper facility of some sort.  Gameplay wise, such restriction should add proper tension to extensive voyages in hostile/unexplored space where such facilities would be much harder to come by.  It would also add more of tie-in with combat to campaign mode, as mistakes made in combat would now have another layer of challenge to players in the campaign mode (as in, they need to find a facility to repair their ship to full strength.

I think the restriction should be about half of maximum HP of the ship.  You can repair up to half of HP of the ship on the run, but the other half representing more core structural aspect of the ship, would require proper shipyard of sort.

Mobile shipyard that can handle full repair for frigates/destroyers would be cool too.

Maybe this should be restricted to "Ironman" mode but I think it would be proper mechanic for both modes.

Update: Thank you all for variety of feedbacks.  To update my view on this suggestion, I'm still for the idea but I do see few problems with it and my thoughts on them.

1. Campaign is no where near done and there are too many unknown factors about it.  True, but ship repair is pretty much functional now and I haven't seen any blog about upcoming major overhaul to it.

2. Balance between old/new tech ships.  Never occurred in my mind before Wyvern mentioning it.  Could be a huge issue.  I certainly think it's a very valid point but it doesn't concern me too much because overall, ship balances can be made in many different venues like FP cost, ship cost, supply consumption, simple stat changes, etc.

3. What to do with armor (kind of related to 2)?

Current repair system is just too... good.  IMO non-catastrophic combat damages should have far deeper impact than what they do now.  It's true that in a more fleshed out campaign supplies could be so hard to come by that players will have to seriously think over that "suspend all repair" button.  If so, that may just do it but I can't shake the feeling on how odd it is to repair a vehicle--that's built on technology that nobody in the known civilized society don't fully understand--to 100% functionality on the fly.

2

Bug Reports & Support / Retreat + Autoresolve Bug

« on: January 07, 2013, 01:31:47 PM »

If a ship retreats in middle of combat and you auto resolve the battle afterward, the auto resolve will still take that retreated ship into account as if it was in the field.

For example, I just faced a fleet with Paragon + bunch of frigates.  I wiped out the frigates minus a lone omen, Paragon retreats, so I auto resolve since the omen begins to run and waste my time.... and I lost the auto resolve even though I had a Conquest, Medusa and Omen and the after action report doesn't show the Paragon in retreat status.

3

Suggestions / Changes to Tactical Control

« on: August 19, 2012, 05:40:54 PM »

First, let me just say that this is not another "Let's have RTS control" thread...

Now, the change I thought of is... removing command point cost from all the missions and drastically reducing amount of command points the player gets (ranging from 2 to 5 at most).

What this means is that every ships and objectives can have mission assigned without costing you anything.  What command points are still used for is way points.  This way basic tasks like escort/capture/assault are free and will be used actively by the players, while command points will be reserved for more intricate tactical maneuvers, like making path for flanking by bombers (which you can still do but as of now is WAY too CP expensive since you need CP for all the basic stuff), rally point for supporting ships, etc.

The main idea is to free up CP for creative tactics through way points, while keeping the whole 'hands off' fleet control that Alex wants.

What do you guys think?  Way too drastic of a change without any benefit?  Too encouraging for "micro" control?  Command points becoming useless?  Or is this idea working?

4

Suggestions / Armor Module

« on: August 09, 2012, 03:43:38 PM »

Pretty straight forward suggestion... I think it would be fun and cool if we could equip armor pieces on hardpoints instead of weapons.  Would be a small cost and benefit, like small slot armor giving 500 armor for 1 op, medium slot armor giving 1000 armor for 2 op, large slot giving 1500 armor for 3 op, without turning into a sprite piece that takes hull integrity damage (so that battleship with light armor won't go down because it's been shot at the light armor repeatedly).  When the armor runs out projectiles should just travel through it.  I thought about the armor giving hull integrity but figured it would be cooler if it literally worked like additional armor on top of the ship, meaning that it's very location specific (would be meaningless to have armor on hardpoint that's in center of the ship's sprite).  This means that some ships would work a lot better with this suggestion, like enforcer/medusa/auora because they all have lot of hardpoints in forward direction.

Main reason for thinking of this is because I'm a bit obsessed about filling out every slot or keeping ship loadout symmetrical, and often I found efficient loadouts force me to run lot of empty hardpoints which irritates me a lot every time I look at it.  Then I thought about just having armor placed in hardpoints for looks.  Then I thought it would be neat if they also offered bit of extra health and armor for the ships since hardpoints do look rather... fragile most of the time so having something sturdy covering it up would be good for the ship.

5

Suggestions / Suggestion on fighter patrols

« on: May 02, 2012, 10:09:49 PM »

Since fighter patrols and such will probably be built into the game sometime later based on what Alex said,

That's intended. Still want to allow in-system fighter patrols and such - they just won't have much range, as they don't have anywhere to carry supplies, and will be subject to accidents once a couple of days pass (accidents due to no supplies, NOT due being over hangar space).

here is one idea of implementing fighter patrol.



Sorry for the really cheap diagram, but it should convey the idea well enough.  The red ring represents ships, such as frigates+ (what we have now), and blue ring represents your fighter patrol for your fleet.

Once you have at least two squadron of fighters/bombers (FB from here one), you can assign up to half of your FB on patrol (this limitation represents the patrol's requirement for R&R, half of FB acting as the reserve), which will create the secondary engagement ring (size depends on the number of FB on patrol duty [with some hardcap to prevent ludicrous patrol are of coruse]) consisting purely of the FB that's assigned on patrol.  The patrol units can always refuse to engage to represent their speed.  The patrol units cannot join the main fleet in combat, so if you refuse to engage a fleet with your patrol, you probably want to recall the patrol back if you plan on using all of your available FB for direct combat.

My only concern over this suggestion is that combats involving the patrol would be too automatic, but then again, any combat that's heavy on FB would be pretty automatic because you can't control them.

6

Suggestions / AI Tweak: Increased Aggression from the Rear?

« on: March 27, 2012, 04:06:20 PM »

AI in 0.51a build is a bit cautious, which is good majority of the time.  However, once enemies start to retreat, this behavior turns really odd as your owns ships refuse to pursue your enemies aggressively and ends up taking few potshots from the rear only to take a step back for no reason what so ever.

Since making the AI to tell whether a ship is retreating or not could be hard (although maybe AIs can cheat and get a 'notice' if the other AI decides to retreat, but this may open doors to abuse by players who may retreat a single ship to bait), can the AIs just get increased aggression if it's at the rear of a ship it's targeting?  Most ships in this game have poor rear armaments anyway, so it shouldn't turn AIs into suicidal maniacs.  I just wish AIs didn't back off when they have plenty of flux and have clear shot after taking the shield off retreating enemies.  I'm assuming that AI have some ways of telling the direction of the ship they are facing because I see fighters constantly trying to avoid being in front of the ship.

7

Bug Reports & Support / High AI Priority Target Without Ship

« on: March 11, 2012, 07:04:59 PM »

This only happened to me once and I have no idea how to reproduce this.  What this bug is that there is a target that AI will use every ship nearby to kill, except the target is... just empty space.

8

General Discussion / Do Stations Restock Ships If...

« on: March 11, 2012, 04:43:01 PM »

Ok, so stations restock ships, but do they still do that if you sell ships to them?  Every game I sold some ships to stations, they just stopped restocking on ships.  Is this the case or am I just incredibly unlucky?

9

Bug Reports & Support / 0.51a Medium Pulse Laser Graphic Glitch

« on: March 10, 2012, 01:49:47 PM »

The medium pulse laser's projectile spawns on top of the gun, so instead of the pulse looking like it is coming out of the barrel of the weapon, it comes out on top of the gun itself.

10

Suggestions / AI Tweak Against MG

« on: March 10, 2012, 11:53:09 AM »

ATM the AI can't handle fighting against machine guns.  It uses shield to take machine gun shots, which in turn overloads the ship's flux pretty much instantly, then they can't fire, so they just eat more machine gun while they can't shoot back.

My proposition is a very small one.  If the AI is getting hit by nothing but machine gun fire and it is not taking hull damage (armor is still up), it shouldn't use its shield so that it can at least keep firing its weapons.

11

Bug Reports & Support / 0.51a Auto Resolve from Mid Battle Counts Ships without Crews

« on: March 09, 2012, 01:26:49 AM »

I just faced a pirate fleet with about 5 frigates, and it didn't have enough crew to man all the ship so it sent a hound and a lasher at my 2 medusas.  Lasher goes down fast, and hound is on the run so I figured why not auto resolve it now and just exited the battle, and behold, my full hp medusas lost and retreated with 50+ crews dead.

12

Bug Reports & Support / 0.51a Crew Casualty Sometimes Unreported

« on: March 07, 2012, 05:07:06 PM »

Sometimes crew casualties won't be reported after battle.  Instead, the end battle report uses the new reduced crew count as base and reports that nobody died.  For example, if I had 100 green crews, and lost 10, the end battle report will sometimes say I lost 0 out of 90 crews.

13

Bug Reports & Support / Onslaught Class Cannot use Omni Shield

« on: February 23, 2012, 10:47:26 PM »

I tried to use Omni Shield for Onslaught class battleship by getting the upgrade for it.  However, in the battle its shield still functioned as 'Front' type, and I couldn't change the shield's direction.  The shield coverage looks the same, so I think it didn't do anything other than using up some points.

14

Suggestions / Faction-less Fleets

« on: February 22, 2012, 04:35:42 PM »

I understand that the campaign mode is pretty bare bone and more things are to come, so if this suggestion is already on you "to do" list, then well sorry for bugging but anyways...

Can we have fleets that are not aligned to any factions?  If you think about it, having all pirates working in cohesion as a one big "army" is really really strange.  Fleets like the pirates and independent traders should really be... independent and have no ties to any standing factions.  And I doubt pirates will fly around with huge radar signature that lights up on other ships as "HI I'M A PIRATE".  So perhaps just whole bunch of independent fleets with different set of aggressive value?