Elegant solution to the speed problem.

Anton Zed

Join Date 09/2006

Elegant solution to the speed problem.

Here the basic plan

1) Limit the maximum speed of ships to 8 units/turn.
2) Make your planets with instant transport (I mean stargates did not just disappear with hyperdrive). Basically you can send your ships from one colony to another instantly.
3) Make sure ppl can put a max of 2 engines on their ship.
4) Make life support essential (like 1 basic support for 2 squares !!!). Currently it is useless.

I mean the average distanse between stars is no more then one sector, thus i dont really see a justification for ships to been able to cross the half the map.

This system will make the game movements like in Civ 4. (Which i should say is very well balanced from movement perspective). Also in this case the AI will see that you prepare attacking him and would be able to mount an effecient defense.

Other things which can be used:
- Transport must way a full turn on orbit around the planet.
- Once a ship moves from one planet to another via stargate, it looses all its movement points (this could also be used to limit the nb of ships which are able to transport to a single planet.)
- Use the stargate ability to been able to transport pop from one planet to another. (to fill up transports, or to fix your economic strategy).
- Make the user pay for each square a ship moves.

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MMM Stars game sounds sweet. Very sweet. I can pass hours simply to CALCULATE the thing. (Muhahahah). Ok. The thing is that its purpose is kind of different from GCII. I mean if you look the evolution of strat games, they become simple and simple, with lesser units but better balance. (Civ is a good example). Putting too much details would complicate the game too much, making it too micromanagable. Considering the fact that most ppl play on hude and gigantic, this is unadvisable.

That would be a nice twist, the allocating power. I'm against reducing speed to 10, speed 20 quite satisfactory but at 10 your ships move a snail pace at the risk of being outdated if the planets are quite seperated in gigantic galaxies.

This is why there is FREE stargates at each of your planet. You dont need to move your ships from your home planet to a planet 10 sectors away. You TELEPORT your ship from your planet to the closest planet and then move 1 sector max. I mean moving 1 sector with speed 8 take 2 turns !!!!. I really dont see how your ships can be outdated.

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I agree a limit of perhaps 20, I could see that but 10 would seem to slow things to a crawl.

Some form of stargate for instant system to system movement would seem to be necessary with a limit of 10 to movement speed. Maybe a stargate could function like the warp gate from Star Trek Armada game, a special project allowing instant 2-way travel anywhere on the map but such a gate could only be open maybe once every 12 turns (2 game months) and the portal is only open for 2 turns (2 game weeks). That could perhaps balance its use. Since the story line talks about how much power the stargates needed, it could be seen as a recharging period.

An alternative could be to limit the speed to 10, then put some incentive into the hyperion shipyard project and have it give a boost of +10 to all an empire's ships and fleets. That would make this special project a lot more meaningful. As is, its barely worth researching.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

I wish I didn't oversympathize with anyone who has their paycheck directly connected to tehir keyboard time. I'd love to see some lengthy Stardock responses to this wave of stargate talk--particularly a rank-ordered list of how much work some of the different suggestions might require.

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The Wikipedia also has a Stars! writeup, much more info than underdog thing.

True. However, you can't download the game from Wikipedia. Underdogs is an historical archive.

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Ooooh, come on now...programming isn't hard...

(hides, puts on flame suit, and builds a bunker 300ft underground)

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Here i made an illustration of the idea. Stargates are located on planets ONLY. Your ship should move on the planet orbit to teleport to ANY other of your planets. (In the illustration i put a close one since i wanted to save space).Once the ship has been transported (i wrote teleported damn

), it has 0 movement points.

PS. I am not a graphic artist.

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Looks cool except that enemies can't use them if they're on the planet. You also have the issue of fleets and the limited number of ships in orbit.

Attaching to starbases makes more sense.

How do fleets invade under this idea?

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Looks cool except that enemies can't use them if they're on the planet

You can only teleport ships ON YOUR planets. i dont get what you mean by that.

You also have the issue of fleets and the limited number of ships in orbit.

As far as i remember you can always lanch a ship from orbit (even if it has 0 movements points). If not you can leave a ship with 1 movement points.

Attaching to starbases makes more sense.

No the simple reason is that you can put a starbase in the middle of the ennemy territory, then teleport your gigantic army and trash the ennemy from inside. The whole point of stargates around your planets is that you will need to stack ships close to the ennemy territory for some time. The AI will detect it and consider you want to go to war. Thus it will prepare and bring his ships close too.You can not just avoid all his ships and grab his planets. In fact you will probably need to kill like 50% of their military force before you could even grab 1 planet.

How do fleets invade under this idea?

The point of this system is faster movement, not invasion tactic. It is good for defense, since AI will been able to bring his troops to defend an attacked planet immediatly, while you will have to check how your invadin ships will move.

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Why not just leave the speed as is. Its not broken, so why fix it.

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