A quick search didn't reveal anything on this topic but it perhaps one of the things I most want to see from an 'immersion' point of view.

Anyone who played Moo2 will know that you could assign hero characters to either starships or systems. These would provide various bonuses (ship combat, production, etc.) as well as just being cool and making you really feel like you were in the middle of a grand space opera. While these heroes were never so powerful as to be game changing they did add another layer of strategy to Moo2.

Star Trek has an enormous wealth of instantly recognisable characters, who I'm sure it would be great fun to play with in game. Imagine playing the Federation and using Picarad for his diplomacy bonuses, going into a decisive Klingon battle with Martok on your flagship or sending Gul Dukat to a newly conquered system to squash a rebellion. You really would feel like you were playing out an episode from the tv series.

There are a million different ways and types of advantages such characters could provide. They could be acquired by random event (ala Moo2), a special academy type structure, increasing tech level, minor race affiliation etc. It is important to note that this is not an overly complex system at it's heart (we're not talking rpg character development here), just another resource/set of bonuses to improve your empire, just one with a huge dollop of flavour!

Welcome to the forums molari. It is good to have your input. The next update, due out some time before August, will have features kind of like what you are talking about. Great minds think alike.

Hey molari, welcome to the forums!

As Kenneth said, the next update will sort-of have something akin to what you say. It won't be in terms of ship/fleet-improving heroes/captains/admirals though. We haven't officially announced what precisely we have planned yet, so I can't go into detail yet. But there's nothing from stopping people from trying to guess...

OOOH!!! Guessing??!? I LOVE Guessing!! Lets see:

(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)
(an hour passes)

Nope. Got nothing.

oops, just seen that this has been gone over before on the forum - apologies.

Anyway, I'm just a simple guy who wants a game where I can blow up Wesley Crusher

hey, no giving out our big secret!

Don't worry about it Molari. If you look through the forums, you'll see that the same questions are asked time and again. But I still answer them. And often in depth. I guess I love typing.

Yes I do.

Yep.

Definitely.

Hehe.

Indeed?

Just joined as I've been playing Supremacy (over 350 turns on my current playthrough, and I installed less than a week ago.)

Now, as much as I do like to type, I've got just under 3 hours before the folks get back, and I've not yet gotten to doing my chores... *eek*

so, just... <insert an hours' worth of fast-typing praise>

and <insert a minute or so of veiled bad criticism>

and two questions: what's with the repeated building items? i.e. orbital batteries appears twice, once with image, once without. Some of which upgrades, the ones with the images I mean, the ones without don't.

And when will 'scrap' be implemented? I mean there's that 50x Scrappage special building...

And one feature for 'hero' ships:
right click on the ship class thing in the buld queue and the 'build hero/special' option appears, where clicking would bring up a menu to build a preset hero ship where the ships' icon is different, and maybe a stat increase... for instance, the 'USS Defiant' would feature an icon of the Defiant part-way through activating the cloaking device, and WOULD feature cloaking device.

And once built, you know, using the one-per-empire rule on the ship in question... It would build the ship with say... for the defiant: NX-74205 USS Defiant... maybe a pic of Sisko in a corner of the ship's icon too

I've got an idea for ship/task forces/fleets for when the rest of the stuff's ready, involving nesting... (Fleet>Task Force>Wing) but thats not really relevant until combat is added.

I should let Matress answer most of these questions. It would be nice to hear your ideas on combat though. We will see much of our combat as fleet action so formation and maneuvering would seam like a natural process.

Hey Alex, welcome the forums!

<responds with an hour's typing worth of feedback based on the invisible hour's worth of previously written praise>

The repeated build items are due to bugs, some temporary fixes/workarounds, and a lack of an editor to fix them. Each repeated item has its own unique reason for existing, but since you mentioned the Orbital Batteries;

Each of the Empires will have their own unique Orbital Batteries (So they can have different models in combat; yes, Orbital Batteries will both be present in tactical combat, and will also play an active part in it). This means they each get a unique orbital battery entry in the game files, totalling five Orbital batteries. On top of this, there is a sixth Orbital Battery that is used by all other races. This sixth Orbital Battery is given to ALL races by default, so that we don't have to manually enter an Orbital Battery for each individual race. This saves a MASSIVE amount of programming.

However, there is a bug in the way the game assigns buildings; the race-specific Orbital Batteries are *supposed* to obsolete the default Orbital Batteries. In reality, they don't, because the "available to all" option overrides the "obsoleted by" option. This results in both Orbital batteries being available.

...

Where images for a building are missing, that's because we didn't have one at the time the last update was released (May 2009). Since that time though, the team has worked hard to find new, updated, or replacement images; we now have literally hundreds of new images ready for the next update. We haven't patched every hole yet, but the game is going to look much, much, much, much, much more beautiful when the images are released. It's killing me that we're not releasing the images sooner, but trust me when I say it's worth the wait.

...

Scrapping won't be implemented in the game. Ever. Instead, we're goign to add mothballing. Basically, you'll be able to build a mothball yard where you can send your ships to be partially recycled, generating a small, one-time resource income to build new fleets with. But the space frames will be left intact. Then, in times of emergency, you'll be able to spend resources on bringing the ships back into use, essentially buying yourself a whole new fleet to defend your worlds with - even if it is a fleet packed with decades, or even centuries old, technology. This option will be both faster, and cheaper than building a new fleet from scratch.

Each Empire will have a unique mothball yard. One of the Zakdorn special buildings is also a mothball yard, and this one produces a greater resource return from mothballed ships than the empire-specific one.

...

Hero ships won't be in the game to my knowledge. I similarish idea in another part of the game is in though. We haven't released the details on this feature yet, so sorry but i've been gagged on releasing details.

...

2D combat may be coming in the next update, so let us know about this 'nesting' idea.

first: the hero was just basically to build pre-named ships with custom ship images (imagine, in a 3x player multiplayer game, fed, klingons and romulans, allied against dominion and seeing ships alogn the lines of:

NCC-1701-E USS Enterprise
NX-74205 USS Defiant
NCC-74656 USS Voyager
IKS Rotarran
RIS Valdore

facing a group of battleships

Anyway was just an idea.

-

Right: Fleet/Task force nesting...

Basically, one level above ships, you have wings. These are the smallest unit of fleets, and can be applied to specific roles

now for a reference to the episodes, remember the Voyager episode, 'Message in a bottle'? an Akira-class ship and 2 Defiants intercepted the captured' Prometheus and engaged the romulan warbirds etc...
well that would be a 'Tactical' Wing...

Tactical Wings: These wings are groups of no more than 7 ships, which are deployed often on their own. Interception of a small number of infiltrating enemy craft, recapture, that sort of thing. Ideal minimal loadout: Akira class leadship, 2x Defiant class ships (As given in episode example)

Offensive Wings: These wings are typically used in the 'tip of the spear' type roles during fleet engagements, directly attacking the 'enemy lines', so to speak. On their own, they would be tactical wings. Loadout is similar, but with an higher ideal lower and upper limits.

Defensive Wings: These wings would take a stand-offish stance during fleet engagements, resorting to longer range weapons such as Beam weaponry. Combined with close-in guidance from offensive wings, their torpedoes would also have a higher chance of hit from such ranges. (much like ground infrantry laser-targetting for incoming jets with laser-guided missiles for ground strikes, but a bit, more... well... star trek-y.) Primarily, though, they would be acting as escort for the Fleet Support and Command vessels, such as the far larger Galaxy classes.

If warpacts are implemented, say, Fed/Kli/Roms vs Dominion, perhaps diplomacy option of 'temporary technology sharing' could apply, allowing this:
Infiltration Wings: Wings of cloak-capable vessels, Defiant-classes in this example. For other races, the diplomacy part wouldn't actually matter. That's just for the pesky feds-dont-use-cloak rule, using the already existing example of romulans allowing one on the defiant specifically before they were even sure of the dominion being a definite threat, therefore it is logically to assume, if suggested by anyone, they would be more likely to allow it during the time of war. And we can use the 'ds9 crew was the focus of the series' rule for why such wasn't mentioned in the series I mean, canon trek doesn't say if the Ent-E was involved or not. We just assume not since we never saw a sovvy in the fleet scenes.

Anyway, so there's wings.

Next level up, is Task Forces. these are numerous wings, with ship counts in the range from 15 to 45 ships. (5 wings of 9 ships each)

There would be 3 specific required groups of ships forit, and only one actually can be just one ship (doesn't have to)

Command slot: A Ship to co-ordinate task force efforts, or a group of large ships (one of which is the taskforce' leadship)
2x Wing slots: Offensive, defensive, multiple of either, etc...
Optional would also be a Support slot: For Colony, Construction or Transport vessels. The latter being the 'invasion forces' to capture Chintoka, again Also Freighters carrying supplies for the other ships if they're stranded with no supplies of their own to repair...


Then we get to the -after-500-or-so-turns and engagements are getting bigger...
Fleets, made up of either *alot* of wings, or nested further, Task Forces. say... 9th Fleet's Offensive Task Forces Alpha and Beta drawing fire, while Defensive TF Delta escorts a Support group of Troop Transports...

Now, for issuing Orders... Orders given to individual ships Override any given to it's assigned wing, and orders to the wing override those given to the assigned task force, and so on.

So If you want this fleet of 5 Task forces (4 wings each of 7 ships) to head to Cardassia, but before you hit turn, that romulan ally player in the multiplayer game requests help in another system and relays the tactical data, you can also issue orders to one of the task forces to instead travel to thingy... and it wouldn't conflict with the fleet order (which would still apply to all the other ships in the fleet.)

in some 4x games, I've seen an order for "join fleet" at destination too, so you can order these ships to head to that other system, deal with those, then when you send 'em back, alt-click or something and it has the options for on arrival "Move" (same as just left-click) "Join Fleet" (if more than one, asks which one) and "Attack System" (if the fleet in question is already on that order, joining the fleet combines these two by default of the fleet order with no overriding order on the task force that's joining.)


I hope I was clear enough... erm.. yeah.