I'd agree with some of the bulidings being extremely overpowering lol, i thikn Dafedz was a little overzealous in some aspects of special building bonuses lol.

Regards Wolfe

No problem. I'm sure I will be able to keep myself occupied until then.

Sorry for not responding sooner, but I haven't had time to check many threads lately. Regarding your question about being on the staff, Fox, there isn't really a "staff" per se. Both BotE and Supremacy are rather open-ended community-driven projects, and we get lots of contributions--both large and small--from many different people. I'm not privvy to the structure of the BotE development team, but Supremacy is very loosely managed. Since I'm the only developer (most of the time, anyway), it's ultimately my decision as to what gets included in the game or not, but everyone is free to contribute. I try to keep a running list of everyone who contributes so that they can be included in the game credits. Naturally, you would have a place there as well. If you help out a lot, you'll probably get a more prominent mention, but that's about the only perk there is aside from the satisfaction of knowing you've made a positive contribution to a game that you will hopefully enjoy playing. The only other "staff" is the forum adminstration, which consists of those people who have been around since the beginning and the current developers. There's really no game-related discussion in the staff room--it's just site maintenance and administrative talk.

If you're still interested, I'd be glad to have you help with balancing. It will actually force me to go back and check my algorithms for computing resource/credit income and such (some of which are probably still placeholders). I've actually been thinking about scrapping the current Supremacy Editor in favor of some kind of "super mega editor" with more features and a tab-based multi-document interface. Maybe even an Office 2007 style interface . If you have any suggestions for features you think should be included in the editor, let me know.

I don't have too many suggestions at the moment other than including the features I mentioned earlier to help with game play balancing. Otherwise with the current set up each test could take several hours just to test a single ship adjustment because I would be forced to actually go through the entire tech tree just to test each change.

To help with playtesting, I could add an optional command line parameter that tells the game to synchronize the in-game database(s) when loading a saved game. That would allow you to test changes without having to start a new game each time.

Scrap the editor? Matress likes the current editor...

New options are always a good thing though.

I'm still using Office 2000 Mike, so changing it to Office 2007 will just confused the hell out of me. I've never even used a Vista computer before. I'm happy with XP thank you very much Micro$oft. Still, it's your game Mike, make any changes you want. I'll just have to mumble and complain quietly. (For once )

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I forgot to say in my last post that the broken fog-of-war has been fixed, Mike. So has the 101% sound level issue.

But the new editor would be bigger and better . Actually, it would probably use a lot of the same panels, but it would be better organized.

Office 2007 has a slick interface that I might borrow for the editor. You wouldn't need Office 2007 to run it though, and it'd be pretty intuitive to use (or at least no less intuitve than the current editor).

I know, I'm the one who fixed them .

That would help out a lot but I would still have to play until I can test each adjusted ship against each of the ships it is being balanced against. I don't mean to be a bother but testing an open ended game like Supremacy is not an easy task. One possible thing that might work if your were to release a map containing a few systems, one for each race and then a few extra empty ones for invasion and colony build tests. Each of the empire systems would have universal shipyards capable of building any ship from that races tech tree instantly and at no cost. Also, it would help that if any anomalies that are going to be in the game would be added to the map as well.

I'd suggest holding off on ship balancing for now and instead focus on resources and system infrastructure. Specifically, building and facility costs, upgrade costs, build time, resource "harvesting" rates, tech requirements, etc. Also, research costs/time. These aren't really issues of balance between empires so much as they are issues of balance between the different aspects of gameplay. The idea is that the player has several different strategic focus areas--resource gathering, colonization and expansion, military buildup, etc--and none of these should be significantly more burdensome than the others. If the player consistently finds himself unable to complete build projects on time because a certain resource is too scarce, or it takes a painfully long time to upgrade his factories, the game's fun factor deteriorates.

Balancing of ship capabilities is a bit more difficult, but I have an idea to make it easier. I could adapt the automated combat engine to run in a separate simulator outside the game, which would allow you to pit ships against eachother and automatically run the same combat simulation a thousand or so times. There are some random factors in combat that can skew the results in some cases, so you need to run a lot of simulations for these random factors cancel out. Also, running the same simulation many times will help identify inconsistencies--if the results vary a lot, then that would suggest that the combat algorithms need tweaking. Same goes if the results are identical each time. The results should have a believable standard deviation.

I know you're the one that fixed them Mike, but how many times have I noticed a bug that you'd already fixed? I'm just...confirming...the bug fixes.

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Fox, it would be great if you could balance the structure costs for me. I haven't come up with any numbers for the minor race special structures yet, so they all currently take 0 industry to build. I was going to use the numbers from BotF for the existing structures then make up numbers around those for the new structures. Races that have uber bonuses or multiple buildings will obviously have higher build/energy requirements though, so you won't have to do the balancing from scratch.

I'll send you my updates once they're complete, but I can't work on them until Mike fixes the civilization/race crash, Fox.

What about simpler tool for begining without random variables? Just to tweak overall preformance of one ship against other ( who wins in clash of Galor and Warbird)? Warbird has cloak and better torpedos but Galor is better in hull , shield recharge and beam refire? It's hard to do math all over again, increasing hull and beams, decreasing shields... to get some canon result and respecting adventages and disventages of each race.

Sounds good. One quick question I have is why the pop caps are so much lower in Supremacy than in BOTE or BOTF?

That's another thing that might need balancing. Max Population is based on the size of the planet and the environmental conditions relative to a species' planet of origin. Humans desire Terran class planets, so that's where they'll have the highest max population an best growth rates. Jungle and Oceanic would be the next best thing, so they'd be pretty good. Barren would be horrible. For a race that evolved on a Desert planet, an Oceanic planet would be very undesirable, and thus there would be a low max population and low growth rate.

As for why the numbers are low, I had intended for them to be very similar to BotF, since similar figures were used in the BotF2 database. BotE probably uses a different scale. I'm not opposed to changing the current implementation, though.

All of the galaxy generation and population/growth rate values are stored in tables that can be edited in Excel, Notepad, or any other text editor. The tables are in "Resources\Tables\UniverseTables.txt". They'll need some explanation, but I don't have time right now, as I'm at work .

Ok.

One last question for the moment. Is there any way to play as all the empires at once in single player instead of having to rely on an online game?

You can have multiple instances of Supremacy running on the same computer, all in the same multiplayer game. You'll need to create a shortcut for the game with the following arguments:


...where the "...\" represents the full path of the game's root directory. Strictly speaking, the -NoMusic argument isn't required, but I imagine the same soundtrack playing out of sync from five different instances would be rather annoying, not to mention CPU-intensive . BTW, you might get a warning message when launching the second and subsequent instances--it's just letting you know that it can't create an error log (because it's locked by the first instance). You'll still be able to play, though.


Because the random variables include stuff like "which ship gets to fire the first shot?". If the first shot is enough to obliterate the enemy, it's not a very good simultion if the same side always gets to fire first. But factors like crew experience could get cut out entirely for the simulations, and one could assume 100% weapons accuracy (best case scenario for both sides).

1. Would I be able to access the different races using that method because I don't seem to be able to play as anyone other than the Federation on a single player game?
2. Wouldn't doing that use a huge amount of system resources?

Yes, and probably. Though probably not as many resources as you think. Still, I'd start with just two and work up from there. You can select any empire for multiplayer, but they all use the Federation UI. Also, the Federation is the only one with a complete tech tree until cdrwolfe can send me his updates (hopefully any day now, *cough*) .

LOL

Sorry been a bit hectic, and not helped by me wanting to do five things at once

I'll clean some things up and send it to you tomorrow, though it is still devoid of descriptions they can be done later i suppose.

Regards Wolfe

@Mike, i was thinking more on matching two ships which fire at same time without crews and random variables for fine tuning between ships.

Would them firing at the exact same time be that realistic? Isn't there some sort of advantage currently given to what ship fires first?

No.
Yes--they get to fire first, which (if they're lucky) means there might not be anyone left to fire back .