I was just thinking about a strategy in Supremacy... (When the AI , Diplomacy is completed)

Im The United Federation of Planets... exploring space ... I come across a wormhole and notice a unknown race ship in that system. I move to contact it when I see its a Dominion ship ... they fire at you and ... and before you know it your at war with The Dominion. They want to conquer The Federation... and you dont have the resources right now to fight them. So you plan to destroy the wormhole and stop The Dominion invasion... at least for a while (They will eventually get to Federation space the old fashioned way.

What about implementing a feature where you can Shut down a wormhole. It wouldnt be that costly to do. Have a space station, colony ship, or any Federation starship with a defector or torpedo... to close the wormhole. I could see this done by sending a ship to that system that has the wormhole and in the orders area... select Destabilize Wormhole. And boom its done... And to restabilize it... pretty much the same way... send a ship or station there... click Restabilize wormhole in orders section... and BOOM.

Can this be done?... would definetely be cool

I would like the option to destroy one, but creating one? Not canon really, most artificial wormholes were created by accident in Trek.

If it was that easy to destroy wormholes, why didn't they do so in DS9 ? Creating them surely isn't an option and destroying them, well... fail to see the point, realy.

arnt you lot missing a big gameplay feature here, what about mine wormhole, were on the event that ships come through the wormhole it will play an event were x amount of ships are destroyed/damaged,

It depends on what Mike decides, Hexadex. Wormholes haven't actually been implemented yet, and we really need to have a discussion on how they will work:

How rare/frequent would they be? User defined? Random? Dependant on map type and size?
Will they shift endpoints? If so, how frequently? How far should they move?
Should both ends move? If so, how frequently? At the same time? Independently? How far should they each move?
How would you discover them? By entering the same square as the endpoint? By scanning the sector with a Science Vessel/Scout/Explorer?
Should there be Wormhole-specific random events, such as lost ships? If so, i'll start writing new random events...
Will they affect trade routes? (Shorter cargo journeys = more income?)
Could they be used by aliens/monsters? If so, it would affect the frequency you could make contact with the Borg, Species 8472, the Sphere Builders, Chodak, Gomtuu, Calamarain, Crystalline Entity, Pirates, Husnock, Cytoplasmic Being, Doomsday Machine, Space Jellyfish...
How will the AI handle them?

As you can see, there's a lot of questions that we would need to discuss.

oh I agree, there still is alot to discuss, and as long as Im included in these discussions I'm happy

Will ships be destroyed if they enter a wormhole but the empire hasn't discovered the other side yet like in BOTF? I didn't like it when that happened.

The way AI will handle it might become difficult. I think the AI in botf never used the wormhole, did they? Some suggestions though.

• I would place the wormhole in its own sector, just like a star, blackhole, etc...
• A factor will decide, if your ships will get damaged and by how much.
• The option of destroying a wormhole isn't funny. Unless you are able to create new wormholes or that at random new wormholes might get created through random events. And that prob won't work.
• Detecting a wormhole shouldn't be searching for a needle in a haystack, but shouldn't be easy either. What if a certain scan points in a sector will be enough? And then a screen gets triggered, that we found the entrance of a wormhole? With extras saying that it's a bit unstable or plain hazardous to travel through or just stable and safe.

Just my 2 cents.

Hehe...did I ever tell you about my random events Iwulff?

Wormhole Discovered (A Wormhole forms in a random sector)
A new anomaly has appeared in sector _____. A cascading inversion of Subspace led to the formation of a new Wormhole. Our military and research branches have strongly suggested we investigate it immediately.
Space is vast. Our enemies may be far away, but a chance has been given to our warriors. A new Wormhole has been encountered in sector _____. May it allow us to strike at the very hearts of our enemies!
Warp is currently our best means of travel throughout the Galaxy, but occasionally, we find there are better means of travel. A new Wormhole has appeared is Sector _____. Whilst we do not know where it leads to, or even how stable it is, it may offer us a distinct tactical advantage against our enemies. Our scientists may even be able to conduct valuable research into this anomaly...
Cardassia is strong, and we must ensure it stays that way. A new Wormhole has formed in sector _____. We must travel through in search of new territory...and slaves. This Wormhole may also have tactical uses. Despatch a survey vessel immediately.
In sector _____, a Wormhole has formed. Our strategists say it will lead to new territory to show the glory of the Gods, and have begun mustering the Jem'Hadar troops. They have strongly suggested sending an immediate invasion force through this anomaly.

Unstable Wormhole (Wormhole shifts endpoints)
The Wormhole in sector _____ has become unstable and has undergone a shift. It is unknown where the endpoint may now lie. It is recommended that the Wormhole be no longer used.
The Wormhole in sector _____ has shifted. If any Klingon warrior is trapped on the other side, may they find glorius battle quickly!
The Wormhole in sector _____ has shifted its' endpoint. We do not know where this point may be, or even if travel is possible anymore. The Tal Shiar have assured us that the tactical benefits may be huge however, and it is advisable to send a ship through at the earliest possible moment.
The Wormhole in sector _____ is not as stable as we thought. The endpoint has shifted, and we no longer know where the endpoint may be - or even if travel is still possible. However, we must exploit this and search for new territory on the other side.
The Wormhole in sector _____ has shifted it's endpoint. Although this is unfortunate, perhaps it can be used as a tactical advantage. We will spread the message of the Founders to the other end of this Wormhole.

I must say I rather like the idea of having to actual send ships out to scan sectors for wormholes (and I guess other things you might wish to include). It would certainly give the lighter ships something to do for a lot longer than in the original game where you tended to use them only until you could afford bigger and better things What might be nice is if other ships (not science ships) could report some oddity they detected whilst travelling through a sector, and recommend a science vessel be sent to investigate. Could even turn out to be nothing, but it would certainly add to the sense that you were the Federation or the Romulans... and if you were the Klingons, well, you could just ignore it Not suggesting that you shouldn't be able to just send a science ship to a sector of your choice and scan though

That's a cool idea, and I imagine it wouldn't be hard to implement, although i'm not a programmer.

...But we still need Wormholes in the first place before we can think of adding anything else to them.

I'am still pushing for the Rome / Medieval Total War approach to missions, some of which could include sending out a science vessel to scan certain anomalies or areas.

Regards Wolfe

In botf, some wormholes just didn't had an exit , others did. It had nothing do with discovering the other side.

It was always nice, to build a starbase on the other side of the wormhole and expand there

how many time the Entreprise did go into an anomaly although its probes were never returning any signals (curiosity, anyone? ). I could quite remember some tng episodes like the one with the mirror Galaxy-class ship..

As Iwulff said, BOTF had dead-end Wormholes, so I can't see why it shouldn't be in the game - unless there is a programming reason, of course. Wormholes haven't been implemented yet though, so we will have to wait for Mike to have his say on the matter.

I think the wormhole idea is a great idea..... personally i cant remember what happened when you entered a wormhole in botf1 but I and many others would love this feature to be implimented into the game..... as above you have lots of questions about how it would work, but it could be easily made quite simple for this version of the game.... and maybe if another game follows in the future like botf4, could be made more complex.

The reason the wormhole is a good thing to implement is that its a very stratgic object to be in the game. like for instance egs below.

1) if linked to another in a far system you can travel great distances to explore.

2) when at war you and your enemy may each have a wormhole in there systems which both link so fleets of ships could be deployed into your system without warning, meaning you not only watching your boarders but the wormhole as well....which do you protect the most.. where do you put the bulk of your fleets etc.

3)Sometimes random objects, ships or entitys could pass through.

As to your questions about wormholes above i will answer them to maybe give you a veiw of how they would work..

They would be completely random and the user has no power over them been created in the new game. Somtimes a few and somtimes none also random if any actually join. Map size, shape etc would not influance if they are to be in the player game created. One or two might appear whilst playing the game but would be very very rare if not a part of the new game. If started in the game they would last for the duration of the game unless there was a random event which cause them to close for good. Like for exapmle a neutron star exsploading or somthing simular in power in close proxcimity.

Endpoints will not shift or move it would be too confusing

You would find them buy either a long range vessel uncovering them in the distance or a short range ship entering on accidently.

yes random events when entering the wormhole would be great......but these events would be more likely to happen in a wormhole which you find pass through ONCE and i mean once and you end up either random placed on the map or like you said a random thing happens like ship lost or critical damage etc..

As to trade routes im not sure but i think that the trade ships would be too weak construction to pass through the worm hole and would be destroyed.

Yes they can be used by aliens,monsters and other things.... maybe this could be one way to encounter the borg....

Also i just had a brainwave... what if you made it 3 turns to pass through a worm hole like for example:

Turn 1 Your ship enters the sector which contains the wormhole.. and you select from the ship menu (enter wormhole)..

Turn 2 you enter the wormhole you ship disapears, but also as this turn is done a message pops up on the other end of the wormhole which is like 20 sectors away for example, saying "Wormhole distortion forming"

Turn 3 your ship exits the other end of the wormhole and you appear.

I think this would be good as in other games there is no warning for ships coming through a worm hole and if it was the borg for instance your system would be severly damaged.......... it would give you a chance to respond even if only a few ships, if you wasnt exspecting any visitors.

The ai im not sure to how they would handle them..... that is a good question.... ile leave that to you

Hey Starfan, welcome to the forums!

This thread is a little on the old side; I know that some decisions have been made in other threads (Most likely the Supremacy Pre-release download thread but I won't make you read all 50+ pages of it... )

In BOTF, Wormholes were completely random. Their location and destinations were always a mystery. It will be the same in Supremacy.

When you went through a Wormhole in BOTF, your ship would simply appear at the other end of the Wormhole on the next turn. However, if that ship was now outside of your fuelling range, the only thing the ship could do was re-enter the Wormhole - so it was a particularly stupid system, really. This problem won't affect Supremacy because the fuel system is much more intelligent - individual ships have their own fuel, which they only use up when they are outside of your refuel boundaries, so if your ship exits the Wormhole outside of your refuel range, they will still be able to do a little exploring before they go back through the Wormhole. Staying out of range for too long will leave them stranded in space, however. You won't be able to rescue it until you send a ship that is capable of towing other ships, or you build a fuel depot or shipyard nearby.

If your ship entered a dead-end Wormhole however, on the next turn you would receive a message saying the ship had been destroyed. These types of Wormhole will also exist in Supremacy, but they won't destroy the ship - they will instead lead so far off the edge of the map that your ships will simply never be heard from again.

Supremacy will also have the third type of Wormhole you mentioned; ones that shift end-points, as the Barzan Wormhole did. When this happens will be completely random; so will be the location of the new end point, and you'll only find out by sending a ship or probe though. (We haven't decided which yet)

Wormholes likely won't be present in a system though unless we specifically set one in the editor, like the Barzan and Bajoran Wormholes. Since they haven't been implemented yet though, they haven't been set in these systems - and it remains to be seen whether Mike will set this as a configurable option in the editor anyways.

Wormholes will always be open to anyone that knows they are there -including aliens and entities. But like I said, you have to know they are there in the first place. The Cardassians occupied Bajor or decade for instance without ever discovering the Wormhole, and Sisko only discovered its' location when he specifically went looking for it. We're hoping to have a similar system in Supremacy - you'll need to search sectors with science ships before you can find and use Wormholes. As I said before, you'll also need to either send a ship or a probe through before you know what's on the other side/where it leads.

Having trade routes going through Wormholes is something no one has really talked about. The trade route system would need to be dynamic and take changes like this into account. I've created several other random events - such as the creation or collapse or a nebula, collapse of Subspace/Hekaras corridor incident, etc that would have similar effects on the trade routes system (If it was indeed dynamic) as a shifting wormhole. If we're going for realism, it would also need to take into account whether you actually know where the new endpoints of Wormholes are after the shift. All of this would likely take a lot of processing power so it would either have to be a selectable option (Off by default to improve game processing times) or Mike would simply reject it as an idea.

As for the AI...it's not coded yet, so in all honesty it could just about react in any imagingable to Wormholes.

What might be interesting though probably inpractical is something like Rome Total War or Medieval Total War, where colonies on a coast or island had a trickle of ships going to other colonies in a sort of trade column visually.

Might be possible to have something similar, and allow enemy ships or pirates to raid the trading lanes.

Regards Wolfe

Pirate raiders are actually one of the randoms I created. I don't know if Kenneth has plans to make models for pirate ships though.

Actually, i've just thought of a random in BOTF that I forgot about; trade guild strikes. I'll add it to the list when I have time.

You can put the pirates in your model thread under minor races MOE (The Black Pearl.) As long as you are in there you could also add that Federation Fleetyard II. It is uploaded to SharePoint.

I have three ships of the Federation to finish off and upload to SharePoint. There is a PNG image of a Nova class Surveyor III but I do not yet have a real Nova model to go with it. I will again make my appeal to anyone having a model we can us to send it to me or upload to SharePoint.

Wow Kenneth, that's one hell of a model for the Fleetyard II. It looks biiig.

I've made the updates to the shiplist. I had to put the pirates under the Aliens section as if I made a new powst they would be left on their own away from the other races.

Two things:

Make them optional to the user.

Make them defensible.
One of the biggest annoyances I've had with wormholes in 4x games is that an enemy fleet can come through and leave the sector before they can be engaged. Allow stations to be built there. Allow fleets to sit there. And the moment something comes through, battle.

I abhorred the wormholes in Sins of a Solar Empire since you couldn't prevent enemy fleets from coming through and entering your space essentially unstoppable.

Ooh old thread resurrected.

Wormholes are still very much a feature that isn't set in stone. There are certain assumptions that you can make that are pretty safe though - one being that they will be a map object, which means they will be in a sector. Sectors CAN be defended with fleets and stations, therefore Wormholes can be defended too. This was the case in BOTF, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be so in Supremacy.

As for Sins of a Solar Empire, I always try to take the sectors connected to a Wormhole. I then leave my fleets in waiting for any ships that come through. Since the different ships have different travel times, you can usually pick off enemy fleets one-by-one that way, especially if they are composed of smaller ships. Capitals are obviously more of a problem though. Concentrating fire is definitely the best way to smash enemy fleets in my experience.

...Well, that and modding the game. You should see what i've done to my Capital ships.

I figured as much given how BotF2 is set up, but I wanted to be sure.



I usually played pretty huge games against a lot of CPU players, and they liked to travel with very large fleets. Needless to say, when they put essentially all of their resources into that one massive fleet, it becomes near-impossible to adequately defend multiple systems surrounding the wormhole - especially if you have your own fleets out on offenses of their own. And especially if multiple enemies feel like picking on you at the same time.

Dang it. Now I want to play that.

Giant fleets have one disadvantage though - you can't do much defending of anything else. Make sure you've got some well-trained capital ships and a balanced fleet; don't just focus on one ship type. And invest in tech upgrades when you can, they're well worth it in the long run, especially for your capitals. Techs are actually how I made my capitals uber in my modded games. I increased the number of levels for each of the shield, hull, engine, and weapon techs hehe.

Oh yeah, I know. I usually have two large fleets consisting of 5 capital ships and 20+ utility vessels, then minor/defense fleet or 4 capital ships and x-number of utilities. With focused fire my large fleets are often capable of sending any AI fleet running, and they'll usually give chase to wear down enemy capacity as much as possible to help assure they can't put up a major offensive.

So far that equation has worked, albeit I don't put the game on very high difficulty. I much prefer wholesale slaughter so go for the large galaxies with as many AI opponents as can be fit. So long as they don't gang up on me early on and I have time to build up at least one offense fleet and one defense, I'm good to go.

Hey Mattress, one thing I noticed in your race specific descriptions is that you have the Dominion use the word 'wormhole', it's a minor thing but throughout DS9 the Dominion always referred to the wormhole as "the anomoly" to provide a contrast with the Federation/ Bajoran terms.

I never noticed that SOM.

Thanks for the heads up!

Hey no worries, every little bit of authenticity helps!!! Nice work BTW