Playing with stars in "tight clusters" can simulate choke points. You get large areas of blank space, so you have a better chance of knowing from where an invasion may come.

Thats my really short answer.

  antracer makes a good point - a little more detail would be helpful.

~ Cypher ~

As a form of nonviolent protest, you could always use unarmed tiny hulls to surround their transports, rendering them unable to move. It seemed to work for Dr. King

There were a lot of very serious flaws in the game that made it less than fully enjoyable, but I like a concept from Star Trek:  Birth of the Federation (a MOO-ish TBS from the '90s):  the notion of parking a fleet of starships on automatic intercept, so anytime an enemy ship crosses into their range, they will intercept it automatically.  No more "Awww, crap, I didn't see that ship slip in."  That makes a lot of sense to me.  I would love to see something similar in GC3 -- assign starships to a planet or a base, and they'll automatically attack anything threatening that planet/base instead of waiting for you to manually attack or use the "auto attack" which disables itself if there aren't any enemies you can see (and can lead a fleet far astray from where you want it to protect).

You make a good point. Although even at warp speed (or even warp 9 in Star Trek), it would still take quite a bit of time to cross vast interstellar distances, since i think warp 9 is considered 81c (81 times speed of light). But in order to alleviate surprise attacks, somewhere in the tech tree along the defensive path, they could have an Anti-Warp Bubble (or Dampening Field), that could be setup in a Solar System boundary (not the sphere of influence, that is too big), which would make ships slow down to 1 base speed.

I agree, and AI often does not go for Sensor techs very quickly, so the never get this themselves. I think Stardock should keep Eyes of Universe, but massively scale it down and make it a 5-7 Pc Bonus (and you don't get to see every ship on the map).


As far as I mentioned bringing in some aspects similar to Civ III, I in no way meant that if you cross someones terriroty and the other civ complains, it throws out all your units to the border, that was about as lame as anything could be. But since space is so vast, sensors should work based on a range scale, so huge hulled ships with 3 warp drives loads of quantum torpedoes will pop up at a ship's max sensor range, but say a tiny-hulled scout with no weapons and low signature would only be seen at half the sensor range, giving them a greater use to attempt to monitor enemy activites, and sneak through boundaries (looking for clear space for a larger fleet).

Also to liven up the nothingness of space, and create a way to make chokepoints, and defensible positions, they should think about actually adding some of the other stuff into the game that actually exists in the universe. Since an immense galaxy probably actually would be a whole galaxy, no reason some planetary nebula's or a black hole cant be floating around. Sensors dont work in nebula and speed is halved, or whatever, the things that could be done are almost limitless.

Tom

Cloak?

Well, actually the concept CAN be exploited in GC2... indirectly, and that involves fiddling with two specific kind of values; Range & Sensors capacities. As both are being "perceived" by you_us (as in Humans looking at whatever happens to be on a map - hint/FogofWar & minimaps rendering of elements!) during gameplay.

For example, my X-Worlds Minors are simply colored pure Black(0,0,0) for the SectorColor tag field. What this does is up until the entire map is revealed (ungreyed and unfogged, so to speak) all of their ships *and* planets just show up as "holes" in real space. Pouf, all invisible on the mini-map for much of late game turns.

Now, comes in the sensors gimmicky trick. *Zero* values to all but a single ship of your own puts everything else in a REAL cloak outside a specific range of 'travel' distance. If you were to remain on a single Homeworld, that situation is even more obvious.

Besides, everybody knows that there ARE some Invisible ships already into this game... once you realize, how it happens & why.

The problem in GC2 is how do you detect those holes of yours??? Did you make appropriate sensor or energy field detection parts and techs to combat your new units or is more or less a cool exploit/all for show thing at this point?It sounds to me like it's more in the realm of visual hiding on screen for the player's benefit as opposed to an actuall technology in use during the game... Still, Black holes marching through space...

I mentioned cloaking and stealth above as real threats to any percieved border system impemented ingame. Equally important are counter measures to them. I feel the advantage for the first 75% of the game would go to the cloaked ship, but eventually sensors and tracking would be so fine tuned it wouldn't matter, making the cloak apparatus expendable in favor of shields or weapons on a hull. Stealth, on the other hand would never go out of sytle...

Or, you could simply make the outer hull of your ship like an F-117, only mirrored to reflect the space around it. You'd never see it until you got close enough to be able to see a reflection...

T

At the galaxy set up you can choose between tight, loose, scattered or random star clusters. By setting it to tight, your galaxy will have about the same number of stars but in ... tight clusters. So you will tend to have a bunch of open / empty space. The chances of anything coming out of the space is slight since the AI will make a straight line for you. It will depend of course on your placement in that galaxy in relation to the AIs. And you will still find some resources in that space.

So in that way you can have a sort of choke point, or aty least a point where you will expect the AI to come through. It will be easier to place military starbases too.

It turns out it's not even close to the same number of stars. Using tight clusters cuts the star count a good 20-30%, or it did the last time I tested it.

Some of me likes my thinking too, but other parts of me hide in my left lobe waiting for the chance to strike... I can't commit to full time modding, but I'd be happy to help in what little way I can. I can find my way around an XML file without causing my system to crash, for instance...

@galacticdoom: The remark about the black holes was in reference to Zyxpsilon's 'black' ships, ie invisable, ie black 'holes' where the ship graphics would go... The thought of little 'black holes' going through space... As for REAL black holes, it wouldn't be so bad. It would be a star system sized thing that you just really want to avoid. If you're silly enough to fly your ships too close to it, you deserve to have them sucked away. It's not like it would move or anything... Hmmm... Real black holes marching through space... Ok, maybe not as awesome.

Quite right, as usual Mr. Willy. It's the property of tight clusters that allows me to play gigantic maps vs. large on spread out. Keeps my computer from graphically hemorraging.

@ tetleytea:   The question is, did it cause all the matter to be inside out...

T

It was a sort of 'joke' about the buggy situations most if not all of us experienced when some ships would simply vanish from the map and STILL be selectable as if they **were** cloaked!

Code-wise, i could see an optional --no material_texture-- shown on any specific ships equipped with a new but magical component (for a cost, btw)... but, as of now, the engine doesn't provide it. Thus, why i colored the Minors mapping stuff with an indirect (still a "cloak" feeling) pure black.

I reckon in the next GC2 update they should experiment with Cloaks. That black hole idea would be good... but what happens once it consumes ALL the stuff on the map? that might be a problem. but whilst we are on the subject, why not add comets? or meteorite showers? Add nebular to increase research of a planet just like the asteroids increase production.

Planets look a bit static, they don't rotate around the sun. Imagine the new level of tactical ability this would bring if all the planets were to orbit around the sun!

I'm getting over excited, too many ideas at once!

See, absolute great ideas.. they could make actual maps based on actual types of galaxies, globular clusters (similar to loose/tight clusters of stars), spiral galaxies (like ours), irregular galaxies... and have them all slowly rotate around the galactic center (where the supermassive black hole resides). Of course since every object is set on a gridpoint system in GC2, it may be confusing having everything constantly rotating everywhere, they would need a whole new system to accomodate something of that magnitude.

As for cloaking, initial early cloaking systems could simply make ships harder to spot on the map when within sensor range, similar to what ID software did with the Spectre monster in Doom (the harder to see demon). Based on difficulty the AI would have a 'percentage chance' of spotting the unit each turn it is within their sensor range, and this chance would increase while it continues to be within sensor range. Higher difficulty would give higher chance to spot.

Better and better cloak systems would be more and more invisible, until being completely invisible, in which the appropriate technology would give certain sensors, which would also have a pretty good chance at spotting these ships. Of course to make sure something like this is not incredibly abused, many steps would have to be taken to ensure not every ship in the fleet has cloaking technology, so it would need to be a very expensive part and take up alot of ship space or something.

In order to fire, the ships would have to de-cloak, and would be then seen by opponents until it gets out of their sensor range. Running into a cloaked ship (even by accident) would also cause the cloak ship to be spotted.

If they added this feature in, and left in the Eyes of Universe 'see every ship on the mini-map', wouldn't that suck! lol