i think if u had an actual option of blockade then u would have the effects happening on a planet aswell (which is asmost the point of a blockade)

Then, just put your ship in that planet's orbit

Might need some special command to tell the ship to bockade instead of attack.

Oh Wait. No ships in orbit? So what happens when that planet builds a ship. If the ship it built was stronger than the blockading ship, what happens then?

Oh Wait. No ships in orbit? So what happens when that planet builds a ship. If the ship it built was stronger than the blockading ship, what happens then?

If the blockading ships occupy the same space as the ship being huilt then once built the ship would immediately enter combat I think. If it wins then the blockade is ofc broken. If it loses then naturally the blockade continues.

I think from a gameplay perspective it might be better if the blockade remains in 'high orbit' so ships can be built up by a planet and attempt to sally out once the owner thinks they stand a hope of succeeding. Otherwise a planet building fighters will just pump them out to be slaughtered which just seems a bit daft.

An important point to consider is the shipyards themselves? Are they ground-based or space-based? If the latter, even destruction of the shipyards seems logical. If the former, it seems that production should continue regardless of orbital status.

Well colonies cant uild ships until they build a starport. That suggests that ships are built on the planets surface and launched, but ofc the starport may just be a link to an orbital facility. Personally though I envision a space blockade to be long distance, patrolling the surrounding space rather than hovering over the planet.

What is missing in this discussion?

I). What is the purpose of a space blockade? Is it economic? Is it prevention of access to resources? Is it the elmination of the use of space platforms, such as space located ship yards? other??? I really think this needs to be well difined before we can imagine ideas as to how to make it work in a game.
A). What is needed to accomplish that purpose? Is it solely preventing ships from entering or leaving the planet? Is it preventing communications (electronic (both normal space and subspace), gravimetric (which could be considered electronic), courior, other.)? Is it destroying space platforms where ships could be built? Other?
1). What equipment and what technologies are needed to produce the equipment to accomplish these blockade engines?
a). What equipment and what technologies are needed to carry these blockade engines to their intended place of use (note: this question may seem to have an obvious answer --- until you get a chance to really look at what the blockade engines are. For instance, to cripple shipping might require what might be called a "hyperspace interdiction device". Such a device might be huge, and might take huge amounts of power to operate. It might be installable on a ship, or it might be too big, hence may require being towed to its point of use, and may require some technology to permit towing such a device through hyperspace.).

They had to envision what it would take to blockade a castle in terms of men and equipment then. But this is now (or perhaps one of many possible futures). The technology used for blockading castles and cities were very effective, in their time, and in the scale that applied, because the techniques and engines used were devised to fit the requirements and scale of the task. The blockade of planets is on a much larger scale, with a different set of parameters that must be met, to create a successful blockade. This requires considerable upgrades in the definitions of requirements and designs.

Well I have to agree that ‘blockade’ is a great idea. There are many ways to implement it, but all of them would take quite a bit of programming I think. So I doubt it will make the game, unless everyone pipes in about it. (And just to make a point that I think everyone who wants this should. I would be willing to wait a month or 2 to get this feature in, and yeah I think it would take that long. And I think it is way more important than good looking graphics.)

The thing to remember is that there isn't 1 solution to how to best implement it. How effective a blockade is or what a blockade does is completely open. And all factors will have an impact on game play, so it would require even more fine tuning, just what the Devs want to hear.

And that is what LJ's point is. What do we want a blockade to do? For now I say keep it simple, though I don't think I can. In terms of building a system that would work you would have to build in control mechanisms to allow for tuning.

The ability to blockade should come after the majority of colonization is done. Yet that varies by many factors, but I hope gives a good idea tech wise and timeline wise when I think it would be safe for players to start gaining the ability. Where you place the ability is 1 control.

What kind of ships can be used in blockade is another type. I would suggest that only large type hulls be allowed initially for blockade, with later techs allowing it to be on smaller type hulls in progression. That is a 2nd control.

Next I would suggest that there be a blockade rating. For me that means it is some form of a module that has to take up space on the hull. Again size and cost are a control factor to keep it safe for early game. Now to elaborate on what I mean by rating. A module would have X points in blockading. That X could be a percent, telling us how effective it would be in a blockade. Or it could just be a number that is used as a ratio against a plants class. What I mean by that is, a class 2 planet should be much easier to blockade (whatever the blockade does) than a class 20 planet where they have the many more means to counter a blockade. Either way you again have a control value for fine tuning. btw I like the class idea

Next the hard part, what does a blockade do? I would suggest keeping it simple and trying to build on it as needed.

First range. Do to the mechanics of the game, this may not be something that can effectively be modified. I don’t know how they store range data in the program, I don’t think it will be an issue, but it may.

Now, 1st off you generally want players to have the ability to reach a planet under blockade, and again the games hidden mechanics makes it difficult to know how I could modify range. I would be ok with a complete removal of that planets bonus to range, especially since there is a way already to increase a ships range. A percentage might seem more fair, but I want to keep it simple and as easy to program as possible. If there is more time then a good discussion on balancing a % idea would be good. But I wouldn’t want to focus ideas here yet.

Next I would suggest that the amount of production but limited. Now there are a few ways to do this. But again due to lack of how they programmed the game I don’t know which is easiest to implement. And yes I am generally more interested in easy of implementation than overall realism due to developmental time constraints.

1 idea is that a planet’s income is all that is allowed to fund its projects. Problem with this idea is the planet under blockaded would want to fine tune that planets production independently of the general economy. They really shouldn’t do research there, and they most likely would not benefit from any construction other than ship building. So for simplicity I would say take that planet out of the general economy and force it to just make ships. Now I know many would want to personally control the planet, but again for simplicity no. Given more time to develop then we could expand on this. But the real problem is I don’t know if you can take it out of the general economy and set something like this up easily.
If not, alternatives would include seeing if you could kill any excess income from the planet while it is under blockade. Stopping of production of everything but ships should still be fairly easy (yeah like I would really know). But just to make some heads spin, I haven’t even brought up how effective the blockade is. How would this effect everything? Going with either the % idea or my ratio idea things get complex very fast. And yeah, I do think that this would be a good place to implement that. However, the more I look at it the more I’m willing to drop effectiveness of a blockade idea. I’m thinking it would just take too much time sadly.

My 2nd idea, which I’ve already kind of shot down, is using the class vs. ability of blockade idea. I really like the idea of the more ships you have the better the blockade becomes. It leaves room for the Falcon to run the blockade and has a bit more realism. It may be easier or harder to implement, I just have no way of knowing. Another way of it working is for every point a blockade has it suppress the class of planet by 1 while in place. Not very useful against a starbase, but it may work and may be easier to program. Don’t know, just throwing out ideas. But this type of modifying would require a lot more fine tuning. So that is another thing to consider.

Influence is another thing that should be affected but a blockade. And again I just don’t know how much data is kept to make this effect or cumbersome to do. Starting with the obvious I would like to see that having a blockade increases the chances of a planet flipping to you increase, this should be easy as I’ve seen in the Journals that it already exists in some form. I would like planets that have been taken over to be more effected by a blockade from there original home worlds, but that may be reaching a bit.

And all this and I haven’t even talked about interaction of effects. So you can all see I hope, how this is just not as easy as it sounds. And I’m getting tired of writing about it. So I will leave it to the rest of you who want it to debate if this is really worth waiting for. I say yes.

"1 idea is that a planet’s income is all that is allowed to fund its projects. Problem with this idea is the planet under blockaded would want to fine tune that planets production independently of the general economy. "

And big economic-powerful planets could be blocaded to reduce enemy income. Also blocade should cut all trade routes

i think there should be a standard of what a blockade does (keep it simple) so its not goin to be diffrent with ship numbers and class.

Sorry, Tim, I like the idea of blockades, but your way of doing it wouldn't interest me in the least bit. I don't care how much you justify it, if a blockade can't be broken at all from the inside, no matter how weak the blockading ship, you're just begging for blockades to be abused. Set a minimum combat strength that needs to be stationed there (based on the technological and industrial base of the planet you're blockading), and you've got a workable way of dealing with it that's harder to abuse.

Second, you do realize that of the US economy, the virtual money outnumbers the actual printed currency, don't you? More money exists as bits indicating a bank account balance than is printed and in circulation. Printed money is nothing more than legally backed faith in the government that issued it, unless that currency is backed by something hard, which the US hasn't had since we went off the gold standard.

i think more or less everything tim said was right on about more or less everything he said, one way of gettin past this virtual money is by if the ship in orbit jammed the planets communication, this would mean that the planet is no longer able to send information to main government (this would also mean that ship could no longer be built because the government agin isnt able to pay for it). i think the only specific ships that can blockade are the decent size ships (this would just really exclude small and unarmed ship like say fighters and scouts, which means ships could perhaps jump to hyper space before fightter can destroy ships)

If we have blockade (nice idea btw), let's have blockade runners, and maybe smugglers events too. Interdictors à la Starwars could be a way to make blockades more effective than with a standard picket of ships patrolling the star system or planet's ways out, such ships could be module-based, expensive, thus making them very precious and allowing for standard blockade for minor planets.

was havin a go of the MOO3 60 mins trial and had a look at some of the stuff u could do with the senate, best thing i thought first of all was you were able to propose bills (which i thought was great) but to keep to the topic, u could impose trade sanctions which is a close replacement for a blockade

[i agree with u there Ugleb except, if u are on ur last planet, it is mostly overall game over. also some ppl might rase and build a couple of ships at start of game and quickly blockade someone which would almost end them
Update
just had a quick go of MoO2 and the way they have done i relise is really good, if u blockade a system it also cuts of freighters which means if u block a planet with little or no food then the planets population will starve (also with GC2 if u have 1 planet which is ur food planet u could starve out a civ) also it does stop all production of a plent, which u find is useful
/quote]

No, Just because you are down to one planet does NOT mean that a skilled player cannot turn the tables, Nothing is impossible! and also this is not the Masters of Orion admiration forum, And on the topic of your latest post (From the point of this post) It is possible in GC1 to flick a button and cut off all trade to said unlucky empire.

Also about that post about "Jamming the packets so communications cant get in" (Heavily corrected) that is complete and utter nonsense, There is no way short of wiping out everything on the offending planet to truely jam communications, They may be intercepted but never truely blocked..

If you were to have a communications blockade I would imagine that having to wait for your orders to get through would be quite reasonable.

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I like the idea of blockades, But they do seem a little bit overpowered.

(also with GC2 if u have 1 planet which is ur food planet u could starve out a civ)

Nope. In GC2 all planets provide their own food (food capacity determines the max pop the planet can hold without morale penalties).