Hi all,
Taking a first look of the game, it seems that it is going to be great ! I played some ~170 rounds and I now have a few simple questions and some suggestions. Knowing that the game is fan-made and still in pre-alpha, please don't take me wrong...

Here we go:
1) How much developed is the game's A.I.? In my game the Romulans accepted both my offer of alliance and (later on) my request for tribute without hesitation!

2) Clicking on a ship a yellow rectangle shows up on the map, clearly the maximum radius before the dilithium runs out and the ship is "Stranded". On most cases however, (at least in my game) this yellow rectangle is well within Federation space. Isn't this a bit strange?

3) Is it possible to create Fleets by combining say 2 or more ships?

4) When upgrading technology (say the Automated Farms from type 1 to type 2) it would be nice to have a global option as well, so as not to have to go to every system and do it manually.

5) It would be nice if next to the number of turns the game showed the Stardate as well! Or at least some approximation of it anyhow.

Thanks for bearing with me,
Savvas

Welcome to the forums, Savvas! Glad to hear you're enjoying Supremacy .

Actually, there is no AI yet. The other party will always accept any proposal you send them. This allows for some basic testing of the diplomacy system.

The fuel range (yellow line) represents the maximum distance a fleet can travel from the nearest supply station (a shipyard or space station). You can push this line out farther by building more shipyards or stations.

Use the "Redeploy Ships" button below the task force list. It works similarly to BotF--double-click a ship in the large center view to add it to the selected fleet, or double-click a ship in the bottom view to remove it from the selected fleet.

This wouldn't really work, since you'd likely have facilities of different levels in different systems. However, when the AI is in place, you will be able to delegate some of your colony management tasks to a "system viceroy" AI that can choose which items to produce. The AI will upgrade facilities more appropriately than a global upgrade option.

Once the game is close to finished, and the gameplay has been refined, I may implement something like this. However, with all the balancing that still needs to be done, it's hard to gauge the relationship between turn numbers and stardates.

Hi again,
thanks for taking the time to answer my questions . However,

Building more shipyards didn't help at all. I will try with stations.

It could be fixed that 1 turn is 1 month (or week, making it more realistic for sector to sector movement of ships).

Time for a question and another suggestion!
How does the shape of the galaxy (spiral, irregularetc) affect the game? I would expect that a spiral galaxy should have less stars between the spiral arms, while that should be almost constant for an irregular.

I was thinking that it would be great to have an option in single player that will strictly follow the Star Trek chronology and cartography (both well documented in Wikipedia or Memory Alpha Wiki), i.e. the Borg are not a random event anymore but appear at Stardate:43989.1 (Wolf 359 battle) and if the player defeats them they come back at 2373 (battle of sector 001 - First Contact) etc. Regarding the cartography, googling for "star trek maps" provides tons of maps. I know that it would take a lot of scripting, but I just thought to let you know of my idea...

Cheers,
Savvas

I think you'd have a massive headache getting a stardate system in there that matched up with what we saw in the series - the original series system and the TNG system just don't work together properly - in fact stardates just don't make any sense at all Much better would be to just show the normal calendar year, as that would give a much more meaningful indicator of the passage of time.

In fact, the stardates do have a meaning but I guess that it is very difficult to patch together the TOS with the TNG, Voyager and DS9 . However, a fiducial stardate system would be nice as it would add to the "realism" of the game and perhaps just a few selected events could be triggered, when a specific stardate is reached .

I still don't understand how the shape of the galaxy influences the game... Help, please!

We've been discussing having a canonish map for a very long time, and someone on the forums has actually said he might make one. For obvious reasons this would be very difficult to do though, which is why I say canonish instead of canon. Maybe it will be in the game one day though.

We also considered having a stardate system, but we eventually decided it would ultimately be too much hassle and superfluous to the game. We would likely also be inundated with messages from people who wanted to know how the system works, or telling us that it isn't working just because their tech level was a little bit behind/ahead of the Trek stardates.

Whilst I don't know precisely how the game works out the maps, I know that shape of the Galaxy influences the star patterns because the game randomly places the stars in a preset shape, for instance a spiral Galaxy's shape is an elongated oval. (I don't know if Mike included arms or not)

This shape is then modified because the game has preset limits within which the placement of the Empires homesystems and the minor races must avoid each other to stop them constantly knocking on each others doors. If the game generates a map that breaks these rules, the map is automatically regenerated over and over until a map is created that meets the rules. That is why the load times for each game can vary slightly. The game apparently has a particular problem when it comes to placing the Cardassians as well, which you can see if you open your Log.txt file which is in your Supremacy folder. Obviously larger maps allow for a bit more breathing room for each of the races though.

I can give it a shot . I will let you know on how that goes... At least it would be nice to have "a canonish map" as an option.

What do you mean by "too much hassle"? Simple really: the stardate could be positioned right next to the number of turns, eg Turn 251/ Stardate 48347,2 (example) .

Give them the obvious explanation:the game is in a Parallel Universe! Hence, the difference in tech level, balance of powers, even the shape of the galaxy... (hehehe... )

You can't realistically calculate stardates because the system doesn't actually make any sense, and if you take a moment to work out the passage of time they depict, you see that they have to reset the system every so often, so dates repeat - this makes it meaningless as well as nonsensical If indeed there is any real difference between the two

They have a meaning from a production point of view only, really. Have a read through this (it will hurt your eyes, and the guy who wrote it clearly had too much time, but it explains quite nicely how they don't really make any sense, despite the fact that he has done a very thorough job of making sense of them ): http://starchive.cs.umanitoba.ca/?stardates/

Stardates do have another meaning. It's the way people in the fictional Star Trek universe measure time (at least in the Federation). Since, we are talking about a Star Trek game it makes sense (at least to me ) that time in the game should me measured in stardates as well.

Actually, I know a few thing about stardates etc since I am an old fan of the series and I used to participate in Alt.StarFleet.RPG (an RPG game via emails in the Star Trek universe - http://www.alt-starfleet-rpg.org/)...

Cheers

PS I remember more than one cases where the episodes start with something like: "Stardate xxxxx, Captain's log. bla bla bla" So this I think proves a point?

By "hassle" I meant the inundation of posts about changing the system or requests for how it works, not that we couldn't figure out how to implement it.

If there's enough requests from the community for it, I imagine Mike will add it to his to do list, but it certainly won't be a priority over his current priorities - like the AI for instance.

hehehe I know how it was used in the series... my point is.. oh, read the article

You could implement a similar system, but it wouldn't match up without some serious headaches... which means ultimately, what's the point?

Martocticvs, I see what you mean. The only reason I strongly favor the addition of stardates is that they are a nice touch. They make the game more Star Trekkish, if I may call it that way.

I think that it will be way easier to implement stardates than actually make a meaningfull correspondence between [ship movements - warp drive - size of the map - time/turns passed]. Don't you think?

That wasn't what I meant It becomes clear if you read through that link I posted, but otherwise I'm just going to shut up now hehe.

Actually, if I'm correct, you can only build One shipyard per system. Its not only Just the station, its also the system you colonize as well.

If you colonize more systems in the yellow dotted line square, it will expand more because of the new system you now control. But always look for systems that have more than a 100 max population. I made a mistake by colonize a max of 10 population and I got no where on that system for technology.

So I always take risks, if I find a system out of the yellow square zone, that has a 150 - 300 or possibly 400+ max pop (I have found a system that was like 415) then I would take the risk of sending a colony ship to that system, as long as its in the fueling range, and colonize it and then walla, the yellow dotted square expands.

Another way to expand it, is making allies with minor and major races.



Actually, different shapes of galaxies displaces systems in different ways. It also depends on how many systems/planets/minor races you want in that galaxy, including the size of the galaxy. a irregulare or a circular galaxy would mean the systems be aligned to make a circle. a Spiral galaxy is the systems would be aligned in where ever they start in the quadrants, to make something like a spiral.

I remember trying a circular galaxy I think, and all the systems were in a circle alignment, and goin ginto the center of the map had no stars in them. What I mean by systems is Stars, I keep screwing them around.

So for a Irregular galaxy, the stars be scattered all over the map. How it affects the game? Well if you chose a certain galaxy, maybe a circular one, stars be closer to you than they have been before, which makes it easier for you to colonize them without having to go so far from the Yellow Dotted Square. But for some other galaxies, like the Irregular, the stars are scattered, so you don't know if you'll find a star close enough to you, or so far away that you need to build spacestations to get close to it without getting stranded.

With regards to the galaxy shapes, the spiral galaxy star positions are calculated using a Gaussian distribution, and the irregular galaxy star positions are completely random (based on the Mersenne Twister pseudo-random number generation algorithm).

Regarding Spirals, I think that their centre should be untransversable and full of black holes (and/or other anomalies), don't you think? Nobody can go there (at least as it is shown in the series) and in reality 1 (or 2) supermassive black holes dwell there.

Impementing a Gaussian distribution, doesn't allow for voids between the spiral arms, does it? Having voids would make it more realistic...

Have you considered using some kind of mask to overlay when calculating the star positions? Not sure how easy that would be to program, mind... been a long time since I did any serious programming If you can call it serious...

To what end?

To help define the shape better.. ie getting the spiral arms in.

A standard gaussian distribution laid around a circle with right sigma and ny gives you exactly that. no need to cut off certain regions like the inner disk with a mask. some star systems should still be inside that ball but sufficiently few of course which is guaranteed by Gauss .

Gotcha, cheers

would it be possible to steal technology in the game? Not just research points but ship blueprints or structures. It would be nice if ( when ) I invaded a system I could keep there superior technology, at least for a short while.

Good Evening.... i have been playing botf again and i was wondering would it be possible to build say Vulcan/any minor race ships if they held a membership treaty with you? You do control any ships they already had but can't build them. Even if they could only be built in the Vulcan/minor race system.

If this were to be possible, Mike would have to make some changes to the editor to allow me to implement it; the only way would be to allow the empires to build the ships, but that would allow them to build the ships at any time, regardless of whether they had even made first contact and membered the owning race. There is also currently no way to set it so they could only be built in eg. Vulcan-native systems.

It's a feature I would certainly like to see myself, but as I said, changes would first be needed.

Here is an unorthadox solution. Assuming any ship yard the race you are playing.

Once you get the homeworld (not a colony) of another race with a SIGNIFICANT shipyard, you can build a (one per empire) shipyard racially tagged? IE A Vulcan shipyard, so it makes Vulcan ships.

Is this kind of racial and limit tagging workable???

I think it woudl be a kick to have Breen or Tholian capability.

Or even when the Gorn go on the rampage....

If it's a possibility then someone can spend some time and make some ship packs (stats)... For variety.

But that way they are vulnerable if the planet revolts, or others take it from you, you LOSE the yard and ability to make those ships...
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I also have a question:

I can't get the Combat Simulator to work beyond the choosing stage. When this is implimented in game eventuall, can I ignroe it and just use AUTO.

OR will that cause the game to freeze? Does the battle have to play out in the sim if you dont' do it manually or can it be calculated purely mathematically.??? Might not be asking they right way so my apologies if it sounds confused.


On the other hand I can't wait until we get a basic combat and active AI in game. I have been playing original on and off more frequently since this project started.

"I can't get the Combat Simulator to work beyond the choosing stage. When this is implimented in game eventuall, can I ignroe it and just use AUTO."

Do you have Xp or Vista?

Regards Wolfe

Vista Home Premium

Doesn't run on vista yet sorry,

You can try these dlls and replace the ones in the demo/debug folder

http://cdr.wolfe.googlepages.com/BOTFIIdllsVista.rar

They will let you get in and move ships about but once they fire, uurmmphh CTD.

Regards Wolfe

Thanks! I'll try them a little later, but how will that affect the future?

Can you still play the game once the combat part is implemented if you use the "auto" function assuming they carry it over the BOTF to Supremacy?

Would that be possible?