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31

Bug Reports & Support / AI retreats when it shouldn't

« on: February 22, 2012, 09:29:07 PM »

When playing on the 15th, I attacked the AI with my fleet which I think was the more powerful of the two. However, I only deployed my flagship into the battle. The full AI fleet, which should have tried to crush my one lonely ship, fled before me after I crippled a single fighter wing.

In short, I think the AI retreat logic needs to be looked at a bit.

32

Suggestions / more support weapons and hull mods for final version :D (pretty please)

« on: February 16, 2012, 06:45:40 PM »

Just some new (and old?) ideas:

Area Denial Weapons:

• More exotic mines: disabling engines; destroying external weapons; flux mines; homing mines (primitive seeking weapons activated once enemy gets in proximity); smart / blind versions of each mine type (smart don't attack friendlies).
• Warp jammers: used in the strategic map, prevents enemies from warping in / out when near fleet.
• Inertia bleeders: used to slow enemies in tactical map or in strategic map around enemy.
• Kamikaze asteroid drones: released drones burrow into nearby asteroids. When enemies come near, the drones engage their engines, attempting to batter the enemy ships. Cannot be detected without specialized scanning equipment.

Specialized Equipment / Weapons:

• Tractor beam: ship specific inertia bleeder beam.
• Cloaking: useful for both tactical and strategic map. Would allow for ambushes on strategic map!
• Deployable equipment: weapon platforms; ship repairs; remote shield boosters; missile jammers, simple outposts.
• Missile jammers: evade and confuse those smart missiles.
• Cloak detectors: locate and identified cloaked vessels.
• Missile chaff: give missiles decoy targets to follow.
• Afterburners: short boost to speed at the cost of flux.
• Radar decoys: fire off decoys that appear as ships to the enemy forcing them to investigate.

Hull Mods:

• Nano armor: ship armor gradually repairs itself.
• Exotic alloys: 5% reduction in armor and hull health in return for a 25% increase in mobility / speed.
• Reactive shields: for omni shields, they cannot be taken down. Instead they reactively come up when needed at all times except when venting.
• Cold engines: engines run colder making enemy weapons more likely to engage other targets. Reduces speed by 10%.

33

Suggestions / More involved, more enjoyable boarding.

« on: February 15, 2012, 03:58:09 PM »

I thought of some simple changes to implement with boarding. Right now, boarding feels rather abstract and detached from the game. I can't count the number of times that I've attacked a fleet just in hopes of boarding some nice looking ships but have instead been presented with a end-screen telling me all the ships were scrapped instead.

So why not make boarding a more skill based feature that takes place in the midst of tactical combat? Combat / boarding pods could function just like missile or even fighters. If they attach to an unarmored section of an enemy ship, the marines on board then attempt to take the ship by force. Success would depend upon the number of marines / crew already on the enemy ship. This way, players are given more direct control over which ships to board vs which ships they simply want to destroy and the outcome becomes more dependent on skill than some random probability in the results screen.

Thoughts?

34

Bug Reports & Support / Bug with enemy interception

« on: February 15, 2012, 01:23:45 PM »

I am regularly colliding with enemy fleets (pirates) but the collision of the two fleets are not registering and the pirates are getting away.

35

Bug Reports & Support / [Crash] Fleet screen

« on: February 15, 2012, 10:33:36 AM »

Selecting "resume repairs" and clicking on an empty cell on the fleet screen causes the game to crash.

36

Suggestions / A seriously important suggestion,

« on: February 14, 2012, 11:22:27 PM »

for your listening pleasure while you work:

(please excuse terrible YouTube quality)

37

Suggestions / Crippled & Destroyed

« on: September 12, 2011, 07:34:48 PM »

A suggestion that would have a pretty large impact on how the game plays (especially for the sandbox game): Currently when a ship is destroyed, it remains intact and will freely float through space. What if there were tiers to a ship's destruction?

• Tier 1: ship is in operable condition.
• Tier 2: ship is crippled and crew is dead, but ship is intact. Useful for salvaging.
• Tier 3: if a crippled ship sustains further damage, it will break apart, explode and cease to exist.

Thoughts?

38

Suggestions / EMP Weapons

« on: June 27, 2011, 02:13:48 PM »

Just an idea for a new form of weapon. Could be delivered as missiles, bombs, some sort of large wave cannon, etc:

• Knock out shields
• Temporarily disable ships
• Kill missiles in mid flight (they'll drift along last vector, but no more engines / homing)
• Reveal stealth ships?

39

General Discussion / Starfare

« on: June 25, 2011, 10:34:12 PM »

Just so you guys know, there's another game in development titled as "Starfare": www.starfare.eu

40

Suggestions / Game Speed Slider

« on: June 17, 2011, 02:21:32 PM »

I've seen people saying that the game plays too quickly while others (like myself) think that the current gameplay speed is quite good. Well a thought just occurred, why not add the option to adjust the game speed?

41

Suggestions / Career paths

« on: June 13, 2011, 09:41:28 AM »

Hey guys! In order to provide some potential feedback for the career / campaign mode of the game while it is still in the design stages, I decided to write this brief but hopefully helpful suggestion. The following are some career / campaign paths that players (and perhaps AI?) could follow to really bring the game world alive and provide a substantial amount of replay value:

• Bounty Hunter: players can accept contracts to hunt down fugitives. Simple but fun. Providing a ranking for bounty hunters could add even more depth to the career path.
• Mercenary/Soldier: players can enroll in a nation's military and get paid a regular wage in return for participating in wars / peace efforts.
• Trader: buy low, sell high! Hire more ships to trade more and make money more quickly.
• Miner: work those asteroids and sell the ore. Not particularly an amazing job, but it does pay the bills if you need some cash. Not to mention ore allows for the manufacturing of ship parts and goods.
• Entrepreneur: create your own corporation and compete with others in the game. Corporations can engage in any of the 'career paths' (provide bounty hunter service, mine, mercenaries, trade, manufacturing, research, etc). giving corporations a reputation could make add even further depth.
• Pirate: raid trade ships and out posts. Live life as a fugitive and fight off bounty hunters.
• Criminal Overlord: like the entrepreneur, only on the wrong side of the law, the Criminal Overlord can establish a criminal empire that can manufacture, raid, mine, research, sell illegal goods, partake in slavery, etc. Nothing better than sending others to do your dirty work.
• Revolutionary: want Starfarer to really push the envelope? Allow players to establish their own governments and empires. Allow them to claim space, select their own laws and policies (from a set list), build their own military, compete with other nations and everything else expected of such a position.

42

Suggestions / Odd bits and pieces

« on: May 10, 2011, 03:37:23 PM »

Oh my, more ideas? Tell me it ain't so.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

• In-game Zoom: a relatively minor but potentially great thing to implement. Rather than giving the player an arbitrary zoom distance when playing (not talking about the tactical screen), make the maximum zoom a function of the ship's size. In other words, small ships might be able to zoom out only 2x, while vast capital ships may be able to zoom out 8x.
• Ship Explosions: this might be difficult. And it would be mainly aesthetic, but it might be awesome to split up ships when they explode, causing debris, both small and large to remain from a destroyed ship (and potentially collide with surviving ships).
• Physical Collisions: this was touched upon within another thread, but asteroids should pose a larger risk to ships in order to add some depth to the battlefield. Fighters can ignore asteroids, but a capital ship plowing through an asteroid field should take significant damage. Likewise, collisions between ships should be devastating events (hundreds of thousands of tons of metal colliding is usually a bad thing).

43

Suggestions / Refined Tactical Controls

« on: May 09, 2011, 09:15:35 PM »

I've compiled a list of improvements / tweaks that would really improve the tactical experience of the game. Let me know if I've missed something and have brought up a redundant point.

• Multiple unit selection: being able to select multiple units at once and being able to add multiple units to the current selection through holding down ctrl and clicking on the desired ship would definitely make ordering ships around a much simpler process.
• Multiple ship orders: related to the first point, being able to order a group of units simultaneously would be wondering instead of having to order each ship individually.
• Clearer movement arrows: the blurry arrows currently used to represent a move order can make things rather unclear when dealing with multiple units and multiple move orders. Ideally, the arrow and line should be more defined and should more clearly indicate to which ship they are linked.
• Improved automation: being able to define ship flight, engagement and role orders would not only make larger battles more manageable, but would also make player-based combat more enjoyable by reducing the number of interruptions.
• Ship health: being able to identify how the fight is progressing and which ships currently need attention would be wonderful. Attaching a non-intrusive health bar or coloring icons would allow the player to check the status of all ships on the tactical window at a glance instead of having to mouse over each icon individually.
• Zoom: at the moment, I'm finding it rather challenging to select individual units when they are within close proximity to other units. Being able to zoom in much further would easily eliminate this problem.
• Waypoints / queued orders: icing on the cake would be being able to queue up orders and movement through the use of the shift key when issuing orders. Supreme Commander 2 did this extremely well.
• direction / vector arrows: it may be possible to remove one of the two arrows currently attached to each unit in an effort to simplify the GUI a bit. Rotating the icon to represent direction and using one arrow with different variations (a single chevron, a double chevron, a triple chevron, etc) to represent speed and heading may be a cleaner alternative to the current method used.

44

Suggestions / Shield balance

« on: May 08, 2011, 10:30:40 PM »

I've been playing around with the game and doing some casual ship modding over the past 3 or so days and have so far really enjoyed the combat. Since my time with the combat I've come away wondering about a possible alternative path for shields.

Right now (correct me if I've misinterpreted a game mechanic), shields are used exclusively to protect against explosive damage. Raising a shield to protect against energy or kinetic damage essentially overloads your flux resulting in a dead ship for a short period of time - something that is never pleasant to have, least of all during a fire fight.

And I cannot help but notice, that shields are currently only usable against the only damage that can already be defended against (discounting heavy shells). Flak cannons and vulcan turrets amongst other things, can take down torpedoes, missiles and presumably any other future high-explosive delivery system.

So why the overlap? The role shields play in combat could be expanded to make combat more varied. One possible idea would be to increase the amount of flux delivered to shielded targets by energy weapons, and making kinetic damage completely negligible against shields resulting in both damage types (and their weapons systems) having a more defined role in combat. Kinetic damage, in order to have a distinctive use, could then be given an armor piercing quality allowing it to partially (or fully?) bypass armor and directly damage the hull.

I'd love to hear what you think about these suggestions - it could very well be that you've already laid out more involved plans for the various weapons and defenses in which case most this post is probably irrelevant 

45

General Discussion / Preorders and Sales

« on: May 06, 2011, 12:11:00 AM »

I realize that this could be a sensitive topic for the devs but I'm curious about how many preorders have been made as well as how many sales you hope to make once the game is completed.

Again, if you guys are uncomfortable answering don't worry about it