don't forget, apparently when stars go nova, you get advance warning, so you can evacuate population and resources from the planet before it goes. It's not that big a risk compared to them being in BOTF 1, if you think about it.

Although i don't remember the last time i saw a star explode in BOTf 1 games and i play over 1000 turn games regularly.

in all my botf matches so far, at least 0.5 novas or novae in good old latin appeared per game, so it happened pretty often. I find this number too high compared to the relatively small galaxy size and time frame that botf is taking place in (some 20000 lightyears). Actually one nova every 10 games would be quite enough for me.

according to Voyager, the Milky Way has one nova every 30 years, so since BOTF Supremacy is going to be almost the size and scale of the real galaxy, i would suggest that the supernova event reflect that. Of course, there would probably always be the option to turn Supernovae off if you're lucky. But i've always enjoyed the idea of a galactic minefield, even if it doesnt go off.

hehe, nope. botf the size of a real galaxy, I'd wish too. It would be 100 times as much. Remember the Borg are in the same galaxy and they don't appear ingame with their homeworlds and those homeworlds are ten times as large as all known humanoid races thrown together.

Look it up in startrek encyclopedia, I already calculated it. Botf and all its successors will only have a small window (practically the intersection of alpha, beta, gamma and delta quadrant, so somewhat like the centre of the galaxy though sol does not lie there but on the border..). Star trek isn't very consistent but that was not the topic. If novae appear all 30 years in the milky way and a botf round lasts 2 years at the beginning and 2 weeks after round 400 then you can calculate how often that mine field is gonna blow off.

i suppose so... but still, something to muse over.

In Supremacy, I think all four quadrants will be represented in some game modes.

Also, the supernova event IS in, but we could make special considerations for the Kaelon. There could be an increased risk. And it would be a known risk. Besides perhaps the major home systems, any other random system could go nova, but the risk of any specific system going nova is low because there are so many other systems that share the same chance of going nova. For example, if the Supernova event has a 1% chance of occuring on any given turn and there 100 systems (a low number for Supremacy in larger game modes as far as I know), then there is a 0.01% (a 1 out of 10000) chance any specific system could go nova on any given turn. The more systems that exist, the less likely any specific system will get destroyed since the random generator could easily pick a different system.

But with the Kaelon, the risk wouldn't be NEARLY that low. It'd be really high like say... a 50% chance of going nova at some point during the game. In fact, the game could determine IF the system will go nova when the game is started. Then, it's just a matter of determining what turn to go nova on. That's far and away much worse than the "normal" supernova random event.

In exchange for the inherent risk in investing into the system, there needs to be a good reason for the player to not ignore it.

of course, statistics say there is a slight chance even at winning the lottery so a nova event will most probably occur in a usual game but I'd like it to be very special cause I don't want 2 or more occuring, it disrupts gameplay too much IMHO.

A turn is supposed to equate roughly one month - so 30 years would be 360 turns. 1 Nova every 360 turns would be extremely annoying. I would imagine 1 Nova every 1000-10000 turns would be better from a playability point of view. Afterall, we're trying to make a game here. Yes, we want realism, but there are times when that has to be thrown aside for playabilities' sake. As Malvoisin said, Novas are extremely disrupting, and if you find one of your best systems is blowing up every x turns, you're not gonna want to play anymore.

Using a random number generator would certainly be the easiest way of implementation for Novas. I'm personally against having special cases in the game unless people feel there is a really strong need for this, though. If there are going to be special cases, as Azhdeen said, there needs really really really really really really really really good reason to invest into the system.

Dilithium, high population max, big energy bonus, high raw material levels, lots of Gas Giants, that sort of thing. Make people fight over them because the risk is worth it. If the gamble fails, it is an even bigger loss, but before hand the system was a real boon to your Empire.

It makes things more fun, adds an element of risk, and keeps you on your toes.

one month? I guess this topic never ends with the numbers

one month, ok, let's get serious with it, then the development from Kirk-age ships to Defiant takes less than three decades in botf..respect!

The calculation with 2 years gradually descending is correct, believe me matress even if it's not 2 years now in botf2 but let's say 1 year, you still have to adapt to different development stages and resulting time frames. It's like the development of CPU's for example, moore's law or something like that.

The one month "rule" is not something that has been specifically calculated and stuck to - but if you want, you can test it.

The Defiant era is roughly 70-80 years after the Kirk era. There are 12 months in a year, so 12*70 is 840 turns. If you go with 80 years that figure is 960 turns.

I know this is a relatively short game (By my standards anyways! ) but I know that there are many people on the forums who play games of about 200 turns at most.

These figures then give a mid-length game. By doing it this way, you keep more people happier - and the more happy people there are, the more people that are gonna play. It's all about balance.

If you don't like the game, just mod it by increasing research/build costs, or by lowering the return from your science and industrial buildings. There's nothing that's gonna stop you and you'll be able to upload your mods to the forums so other people can try them!

For obvious reasons, the "timings" won't be the same on different size maps either. Big maps = more systems = more research = shorter games. That's partly the reason why we've increased the tech levels from 10 to 12 - but again, this can be modded to however many you want. Aaages ago I made a list of different techs that I thought could be in the game, and I came up with 30 different weapons levels alone!

The game is going to be moddable, so any arguments that the game isn't "right" don't matter. We should be focussing on ideas rather than on the nitty-gritty which the programmers have no doubt already taken into consideration.

a single variable would be needed to solve that problem, let people utilize a "modifier" in the game options, a factor of 1 is normal game length, a factor of 2 would make things go twice as fast, etc...

But we're wondering off the Random Events subject

would be a possible solution. I made a mistake above, it's three decades not a year (a year would have been if he said day instead of month). well, my idea and I hope it's gonna be implemented in bote is the introduction of the good old stardate which is calculated by current mean tech levels and turnwise advancements of all major players. With that you have a floating but exact timeline.
Only problem occuring is when research sabotage hits all majors extremely bad and simultaneously you might actually go back in time but since this is a mankind's dream, no problem.
btw. matress, a 960 turns botf game I only play in MP, in SP matches I have the Defiant at round 500 at last and now you get into swimming with your months calculation

btw, it's totally moot to think about since nobody cares anyway when playing..

one last thing, if a turn really is constant in time, then the ship movement from one sector to another screws up cause at warp 1 in the beginning you need some 2-3 years to get to the next sector "nearby"(which actually means 20 light years away) and that would take us some 24-36 turns for starters, a bit long don't you think?

That's actually a really good point - a loooong time ago, we discussed having a Stardate counter in the game, and we agreed we would do that...however, Gavin's original BOTF2 project has since been cancelled, so it's definitely worth considering again. It's got my vote, at least.

We didn't discuss having it attached to anything though - it would be a case of turn 1 = Stardate xxxx.x, turn 2 = Stardate xxxx.y, and so on. Your system would actually be rather cool, Malvoisin.

I don't know how you've got the patience to play multiplayer for that many turns though, Malvoisin. I've only ever played BOTF multiplayer once - and that was only a couple of weeks ago. I gave up because I just couldn't cope with how slow it ran. I'm used to single player games of several thousand turns or more, so speed is key for me.



Why do you think I said in my last post that "the one month "rule" is not something that has been specifically calculated and stuck to?" We could say each turn is a millennium for all I care.

yeah I was referring to my good old botf days (nights..) 5 years back then with my cousin and some of our friends. We played even if round calc took half an hour to complete, it was kult like we germans say

the stardate thing has an enormous potential in it. We are currently digging into the idea, i.e. just think about linking ship speed dynamically to the variable time difference bridged by a turn shift. As a result you get dynamic (rounded up and down accordingly) ship movement and a great lot of importance on ship warp engine tech and resulting ship max speed stat. It'll get 10 times as important in game balance as in botf for example. There the engine tech was more or less a necessary evil..

I agree it's rather cool (I mean it's from me ok enough of it )

Well you couldalways wait for Mike to read this thread, or you could send him a PM with a link to this thread or even pitch your idea to him. He's always open to ideas...

I'm sure mike'll read this thread when his exams are passed so a pm won't be necessary. Anyway he'll get a pm from me or pustekuchen in close future with another issue that's gonna be interesting ..

Thankfully, I'm done with exams, and back to work on Supremacy. The stardate idea is interesting, though it raises a lot of potential issues, and it makes the game slightly less tractable. Then again, they did something similar with Civ4. Maybe I should wait and see if the BotE team finds a way to make it work first .

how do stardates work when they didnt have em in the 22nd century, the 23rd century was 4 digits and 24th century jumped to 5 digits and barely moved over 10 years? I say skip the stardates and just do "calander" dates.

Agreed simplicity first

Hope your exams went well Mstrobel

sure, calendar dates are my personal favorite too but there's nothing against a little creativity to make up for design flaws in it to give the game a bit more star trek feeling.

the 22nd century lack of stardates is actually helping cause at the beginning, research is quite unstable in most botf games so there might be problems calculating that date without too many unsmooth edges..

I though of "introducing" the stardate set on year 2200 in that specific turn when everyone got tech level 3 in all fields.

If you get down to it thoroughly then the game doesn't even start at 2161 but more like in the short after-Cochrane-era cause otherwise the vulcans must already be part of the federation or at least known so one has a certain large enough time buffer here to compensate the phase/time window in the beginning.

one might even think about switching between calendar and stardate mode since I really prefer the first anyway it's first hand gonna be just an additional information provided for the player to give him more startrek feeling while playing and maybe a "captain's log" which we plan which contains important game data, personal remarks & notes and battlelogs of big fleet battles.

so now I'm good to go preparing for x-mas. Have a nice one everyone too. We'll see us probably after new year again so happy new year too from me.

Hehe "Captain's Log"...we could simply rename the info button to say that. It would certainly give more of a trek feel and wouldn't really require any additional programming.

The stardate thing would be really cool, but if it requires too much work, I would then be against it. If it is possible though, I definitely think it could be worth having a look at. And as Malvoisin said, we could even have a double system where the player selects either the Stardate (xxxx.x, xxxx.y...) format or the month (January, February...) format of time.

I'm certainly not a programming buff, but I doubt this would tak emuch programming.

The only problem with the Stardate idea is that since, as proposed, it depends on the game's overall research level, the actual date will be different between each game. The cool thing about simple counters, like turns, is that they are consistent. Turn 178 is turn 178 regardless of what game you are playing. So, if you aim to be at certain goals within X turns, you can track that because 1 turn is the same length of time for each and every game.

However, the research levels of the entire game can be very different from game to game. This makes the Stardate idea relative to the players in the game and where they are deciding to focus their resources. Thus Stardate XXXXX.X won't neccessarily be the same "length of time" as it was last game or will be in your next game. While it adds flavor, the Stardate idea cannot be used for anything important, it'd simply be in to look cool. Because, if based off of research and if everyone simply stops researching for whatever reason, time (stardate-wise) would stand still. That... doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in addition to research sabotage that was mentioned above.

Simply replacing turns with a stardate counter would be the only solution I could see. Thus, each click of the turn button would incriment the stardate instead of a turn counter. There would need to be an easy way to determine what turn you are on, though. Given that, I would probably argue that using a simple turns counter and forgoing the stardate idea would be better off; it's a simplistic way to determine how far the game is along which will be easier for more casual players.

Under no circumstances will I even consider implementing a stardate system in which the date depends on non-constant factors (i.e. research level). Not only is it an inconsistent solution, but there is no elegant way to reconcile the different tech levels of all the empires.

k to make it short, it does not work without upper and lower boundaries in which stardate-turnwise-advancement takes place, i.e. you need a minimum (and maximum) time advancement of course. Take a "wide-meshed mathematical discretisation", namely put a fixed stardate increasement values to the current overall mean tech level. The latter is a fixed number changing(increasing) most of the time and can very well be used to define a monotonically decreasing step-function with domain in the tech level intervall (= calculated current mean techlevel) - let's say [0..9] float numbers - and range between [14...731] days. Rewrite it in stardates, done.

This function then represents a non-volatile/non-problematic time advancement that changes every turn but does not stop or reacts too strongly on userbased research decisions. If you wish use a maximum boundary as well to be more on the safe side.
You can even dismiss the tech advancement(!) factors in your calculation totally. They aren't needed, they just would make the stardate appear even more unpredictable/fluctuating within the borders set, of course.

Hope that clears it up a little. Happy holidays.
Malvoisin

While I think I understand what you are trying to propose, I think I am missing some of the details due to the language barrier. However, there is no such barrier when it comes to mathmatics so if you have a purely mathmatical solution, definitely share it

However, I still think that a mathmatical equation in order to determine "time" within the game contradicts the concept of time entirely. Time is linear, a straight line even; it goes forwards at the same speed regardless of circumstance (disregarding time-travel discussions). An equation with multiple variables will change time from a straight line into... well... something different.

I definitely agree that determining some sort of stardate that is appropriate to the progress of each empire would add some canon flavor. But in the end, the point of the game is to contain canon elements, but allow players to play outside of canon. Afterall, every empire's goal is to take over the universe. Typically, that's not something the Federation is trying to do. A player can play a peaceful Klingon empire or a warlike-Federation (and deal with the consequences of those non-typical actions).

I think there's two options: keep a simple turn counter (I'd prefer this one) or replace the turn counter with a "stardate" that incirments consistently each turn. The reason I prefer the counter over the stardate is that a player would have to "convert" the stardate to figure out how many turns have passed, plus the idea of the stardate may be completely lost by not-so-Trekkie players. I'll reserve my final thoughts on seeing the mathmatical solution, but this is where my thinking is going at this point in time.

you don't tell me to write a LaTeX-made pdf for ya containing some integrals and sublinear Hahn-Banach-functionals don't ya?! ;)
joke's aside, that solution above is consistent in every axiomatic way except maybe non-standard analysis theory but I doubt that plays any role here ;)

what you will have in the end is a turnwise counter and optionally a stardate resp. days counter displayed directly below the turn number.

as I said the function f:[0,9]->[14,731]€{whole numbers}, f(x):=min(731,max(14,trunc(743-x^3))) will most probably do the trick.

set class.time.stardate.day(......)=f(current.meantech);

upgraded way with tech advancements:

set y:=current.meantech.diff=current.meantech - lastturn.meantech;
f:(N,R)->Z, f(x):=trunc((1-y)*min(731,max(14,743-x^3)))

set class.time.stardate.day(......)=f(current.meantech,current.meantech.diff);

this last function is very raw but effective in generating a bit more fluctuations. the other function above is polynomial, which is okay for the time decrease and of course I don't win the fields medal for this..
Btw. Azhdeen, time is of course running constant but a turnwise game and every turnwise game takes snapshots from the timeline and the time intervall between those snapshots can of course differ from each other, but shouldn't too much, that's for sure.

I think that the TURN counter is far better. However, if people want to see a stardate on the screen then why can't you simply do something like:

TURN
128
STARDATE
50421.3

?

that's the way it's gonna be. only the stardate has to be calculated first, otherwise it's not funny or seems a bit lame just to have an additional number with no real change except turnwise fixed additions and no meaning after all.

hm, I got a bit into the stardate calculation stuff and I must say, I'll go with the easy version 1 century = 100.000 points and all that in the Julian Calendar System (like our standard gregorian but with the leap year gap at 400). Therefore an hour is roughly 0.1 in stardates. The beginning stardate would be 01/01/2121 (or 2161 if you like it canon) and that would make for stardate 121000.0. the leading 1 here could be dismissed to make it more tng like cause a typical tng episode stardate was something 5-digit-like 47309.5 which is about 04/10/2447 at five o'clock in the morning, so the century could be shown in the normal year display.

it would look like this:

Turn: 383
Stardate: 47309.5 (or 447309.5 with the century mark)
Year: 2447

I think one can live with that

I have some late thoughts and it s not kinde of earthquake or anomaly and things like that...

In Master of Orion II ( I do not recogenize MoO3 as sequel of MoO2, MoO3 is more garbage then a game) was random event "splinter colony".
You were just wondering trough galaxy and uncharted systems with chance to run on your race ascendents who left your homeworld for decades ago...

of course they join you immediately, it would be fan having such random in game ...

P.S. I m waiting for Malvoisin, there is no post enough lucky to evade his
detection!!

Sorry Malv just kiddin lol

well actually that one is not(!) on my list (yes I made a 30 allbrandnew random events list (in german of course ) on our forum and that one is shockingly not amongst them, so I have to add it quickly and I think I extend the idea to one with multiple outcomes (war, immediate joining, simple don't care-attitude).

and yes zeleni, you may be lurkin..

..but I am answering (stuff) lol