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[Alex]

Thinking of that, a "impromptu mercenary mechanic" would be interesting, where you can pay nearby non-allied fleets to join a battle on your side. Or get a monetary offer to join an ongoing battle.

Or even something where you pay a mercenary fleet to follow you around for a month, joining in battles if needed. Some interesting potential here!

[kazi]

I think that this could be really fun also as a mining mechanic- you "start a battle" with a bunch of asteroids/salvageable hulks, using the mining laser makes resources/hull components pop out, you can pick them up with your ship. Random pirates and patrols enter and exit periodically and give you a hard time. Fun, right?

[CrashToDesktop]

Thinking of that, a "impromptu mercenary mechanic" would be interesting, where you can pay nearby non-allied fleets to join a battle on your side. Or get a monetary offer to join an ongoing battle.

Oh, yea.  Very interesting stuff, and Alex seems to show some interest - I think he likes it.

I always thought that it was the reactor going critical. Besides, were would the "ammo dump" be for high tech ships?

It could be the reactor or it could be the magazine - either way, the ship blows up every time, which isn't necessarily something that should happen every time.

[Tartiflette]

I think that this could be really fun also as a mining mechanic- you "start a battle" with a bunch of asteroids/salvageable hulks, using the mining laser makes resources/hull components pop out, you can pick them up with your ship. Random pirates and patrols enter and exit periodically and give you a hard time. Fun, right?

Sorry but I don't find this fun, it sound like the definition of grinding. I'd rather have something similar to Nexerelin, with a burn debuf if you have to flee in an emergency, and a CR cost for the ships doing the mining.

[Gothars]

I always just took the ship explosions as a gamey way to very clearly communicate that a foe has been vanquished. The explosions could be caused by something different each time. I'd still love it for sinking ships to make it into the game, though.



BTW, I can see campaign abilities playing into this. For example a communication disruption ability that decreases the range at which fleets can support each other.

This might be a little more complexity in interactions than you want to do, but I'd like to be able to say, "hey my Medusa could swing this battle either way, what do each of you bid for me to decide I'm on your side?"  This should generate a pretty severe reputation hit even from the guys you help, but if I'm playing as loyal to the Hegemony, I have no reason to care what Tri-Tach or the pirates think of me, and if I see a battle between a Tri-Tach fleet and a pirate fleet I'd sure try to take maximum advantage of it.

Thinking further in that direction, it might open up the gate for non-deadly piracy. Once you have fleets offering money for participation in battle, why not traders offering money for not participating in battle - with them. I never liked having to kill all those sailors for a little loot.

[Talkie Toaster]

If it's a stomp, then perhaps, but there's also not much reason to. If it's a tough fight, I'd imagine you'll have a much easier time fighting with your allies instead of waiting for them to die and fighting then. Still, it might make sense to look at what it'd take to track who made kills etc when distributing rewards; there probably are some cases where hanging back makes sense, and that'd fix that up.

I think tracking involvement by damage dealt would probably be preferable to kills as otherwise you'd get annoyed by kill-steals from NPCs. Basing it on kills would also make hanging back only to snipe nearly-dead targets at the last minute the optimal strategy, which might be interesting at low levels I guess? (E.g. a Heavy Blaster Wolf would be good training wheels in these circumstances as at least you're forced to engage a bit).

E: I guess then you have edge cases of 'it takes much less damage to kill a Hyperion than a Mule' but...
Contribution score = (Damage / HP) * FP cost of thing damaged would fix that, if necessary?

[Histidine]

The current idea behind boarding is to give you access to ships that you wouldn't have access to otherwise, but not to be a way of acquiring ships at a lower cost than buying them normally. The current implementation more or less does the job - you'll take enough damage assorted damage from failed attempts to make it cost more - but it's also frustrating. When looking for a new implementation, I think it'll make sense to look at first what role boarding needs to play, and then what mechanics makes sense given that. Starting from the premise of "every disabled ship should be boardable" seems like putting the cart before the horse there.

Part of the problem is the role of boarding isn't communicated to the player, and the way to figure out that hey, maybe I shouldn't try to board that Lasher, is to fail at it multiple times. An alternative approach might be something like super low odds to board something, with near-guaranteed success - that'd be a more intuitive "uuu, shiny drop" kind of mechanic, but wouldn't fill the same role. All of which to is to say I want to finalize more stuff before taking another look at it.

Going a bit off topic, but: If a boarded ship is broken-down enough (increased hull repair costs, D hullmods, and/or you might even have to to some work on it to use it in combat at all), the costs to reverse the damage could thin the margin between buying and boarding pretty quickly.

[Debido]

Who is awesome? You are Alex. You are.

We've been trying to mod three way battles into the game forever and day, glad to see it finally in the game. I have some cool plans for this already.

[Aeson]

We've been trying to mod three way battles into the game forever and day, glad to see it finally in the game. I have some cool plans for this already.

Technically, it's not a three-way battle. It's a two-way battle with allied units involved; if I haven't missed anything or misinterpreted something, you need to be nonhostile to one of the participants and nonfriendly to the other in order to join an ongoing battle, and the same is true for groups which might join a battle you initiate. You're not going to see fights involving three or more fleets where there are three distinct sides (i.e. if three fleets are involved, two have to be allied; you cannot have each fleet fight both of the other fleets).

To Alex: are you intending to add missions that make use of this mechanic, or revise existing missions to make use of this mechanic if such would make sense? Oh, and could we get a different color for the allied units? I think the yellow used for allied units is a bit too close to the green used for the ships the player owns; perhaps blue would work better? Or perhaps stick the friend/foe/ally colors into the options menu with a few predetermined options, so the player can configure it themselves?

[Dark.Revenant]

Yeah, this isn't three-way.  As far as the combat layer is concerned, all this does is have some ships on the player's side that the player can't control.

Alex, how do allies get implemented for the enemy side?  Is it just added into one big fleet?  Do separate commander AIs run their ships?  If not, do the CP get added together?

[CrashToDesktop]

Alex, how do allies get implemented for the enemy side?  Is it just added into one big fleet?  Do separate commander AIs run their ships?  If not, do the CP get added together?

Taking into consideration the code that is this:
FleetMemberAPI.isAlly()
I think the original fleet will have it's own commander AI, but all other helping fleets part of the AI will be run under a single commander regardless of how many other helping fleets there are.  If I've predicted that right, yay!

And I agree with Aseon, the yellow is a bit too close of a color for yellow.  Maybe make it a blue or dark green, it needs to stand out more when on the battlefield alone.  The fact that the allied ships have a circular selection area when you see them on the campaign map is nice, though.

[Dark.Revenant]

I think the yellow looks quite different.

However, people with most sorts of color-weakness or color-blindness will disagree.

[Sy]

I think the yellow looks quite different.

However, people with most sorts of color-weakness or color-blindness will disagree.

agreed, the yellow looks fine to me, but many people have problems distinguishing green from yellow at a glance, especially when both are at low saturation, like in this ui. and blue is probably a bad idea because much of the ui / background itself is a light blue.
what about a pink-ish purple? it might not be the most intuitive color for "ally", but i think neither is yellow. and it should provide good contrast to both the player's green and the hostile's rusty orange.

although ultimately all three parties can still be distinguished solely on the square, rhombus and circle shapes, even for people who wouldn't be able to see colors at all.



also, hello forum!^^

been lurking for some time, finally decided to actually post. so excited for the coming update! :]

[Linnis]

Well yellow has been the long industry standard for allies in rts games.

[Toxcity]

Alright, as per usual of me, I completely ignore the entire point of the blog post and my eyes automatically zip to the screenshots and pick them apart.  And I've found some novel-looking Enforcers and Lasher in two of them.  Looks like Hegemony-colored Enforcers and Lashers - which is nice.

This is kind of far back, but I just noticed a new looking ship in the first screenshot. Second row of the pirate fleet all the way to the right.