Please post here all ideas for ships, battles and/or weapons.

You should be able to select 'phasers only' if facing a weak opponent and don't want to waste torpedoes.

Hospital ships
After your Hospital ship has cured your people of the phage, it can be used to help improve relations with minor races, send it into orbit and it stays there a set number of turns, thus the minors attitude towards you goes up a few points.

I guess this goes here:
what happens when you have a non-hostile agreement with another race and your ships are in their space?
is it just left up to you to remove them (or do they automatically move back to a member system in one turn like in botf1- which i think is a bad idea)
i think that there could be an order -move out of opponents(or some other better word depending on the situation like friend/enemy etc) space. This would choose the shortest route to get out of the opponents space and the ships would not engage things on the way. This could be used to move out the space and the alien race wouldn't complain cause they know you are getting out of their way.

I agree on that SonOfMogh, i think because you could be stranded in enemy space, you could chose to use phasers only, because you want your torpedoes for more deadlier enemies.

That bizarre anomoly shouldn't crop up here. If you sign a treaty, the enemy should ignore ships in their space for the next 5 turns, giving you time to remove them. After that you risk war by entering.

SHIP EDITOR

This game will be ultra moddable as we all know, I believe gavin said the ship editor will be as easy to open as the option screen.

I will list all the things I personally want to be able to edit on ships, please tell me if I'm asking too much....

NOTE- The one thing I don't want in the Editor is NUMBER OF PHASERS/TORPEDOES, hopefully in the game the amonut of weapons will aid the coverage of the ship, but won't have a bearing on how many weapons are fired per turn. An exaple is a massive ship with 20 phaser banks Vs a small ship with 5. In theory neither ship should fire more shots than the other as each have full coverage of weapons. I guess what I'm saying is 1 shot at a time. The actual numbers and locations of weapon hardpoints will be editable in g-max.

Ok, here's the list.....

WEAPONS

Beams- Power/Accuracy/Rate of Fire
Pulse Weapons (if any)- Power/Accuracy/Rate
Torpedoes- Power/Accuracy/Spread
Torpedo Compliment

PROTECTION

Shield Strength
Shield Recharge
Hull Strength

ENGINES

Cruising Speed
Max Warp (in hexes etc)
Impulse Speed
Agility Index
Fuel Reserve

MISC

Type Of Weapon (Type 6 photon etc)
Names List
Type Of Ship (command, science etc)
Scientific Capability
Scan Range
Officers Required
Dilithium Required
Ore Required

Are we having maintenence????

I think this is it guys, I'll give it some thought.

turns needed to repair ships

Let's say because a Miranda is quickly repaired, it will have a repair rate of 10% = 1 turn, but whith a Sovereign 3% = 1 turn. What do you say? Perhaps there are a lot people against this?

I like the idea! Obviously it will depend on experience as well. A heavily damaged iranda would have certain modules removed and replaced. A Sovereign would need a full service in a shipyard.

it will also depend on what kind of lv. of shipyard you have.

Definitely. It should be quite a process to repair a heavily damaged ship. Like the sovereign in nemesis.

about maintance... i don't think it should be in, because at the time in botf, they didn't had Deuterium and raw materials. When your ship is damaged, then it can be repaired, because it already has the stuff onboard, but it can be repaired in a fast way, by getting materials from the empire resources. With fuel when a ship has none, then it will replenish it when a supply vessel is in the same hex, or shipyard, or something else. it will take the Deuterium from the empire resources into the ship.

Agreed, maintenence was an artificial repesentation of repair cost etc. In Botf2, those costs will be real and physical.

DOWN WITH MAINTENENCE! BLOODY CSA!

so u mean u can see the torp and phaser burns and missing hull sections like during the war and with the forard section of the enteroprise being gone?

no he didn't ment that, he ment that a miranda, needs in Startrek shorter repairs.

u mean u wont see the physical effects from a fight?

venting plasma?
missing chunks?
missing nacelles?
burn marks?

i don't know how that will work, though i''m sure we get to see damaged vessels. But i don't know that if a ship get's hit at a certain position that you can see that. Perhaps we can devide a ship into 6 sections. Below, Above, Left, Right, Frond, Behind. When it get's hit below, it will show the damage there.

I dunno what the graphics department is planning, so Jigalypuff will probally respond to this.

i agree with that sections of a ship idea

in Silent Hunter III, it will be possible for a ship to sink by the bow, or by the stern

maybe a system like this?


hit the starboard nacalle really bad, PPOF no more nacelle

and maybe ONCE IN A WILE, the plasma would ingnite and incinerate the ship


i think the ships shouldnt ALL be destroyed outright

i think they should be "knocked of their feet"

IE

as they were in the battles, theyd take a hit and go flying in the other direction, and only maybe 30% of the time they explode completely

to have certain sections blowing off of a ship would require more than 1 model per ship, damage will appear, thats just a seperate tga file which is superinposed over the undamaeged one.

so to get this straight -

there would be the same models, just more files to be superimposed wen a ship is damagefd

say -

vent plasma.tga
nacelle missing.tga
chunk missing.tga


etc?

no only battle damage would appear, like scorch marks. thats it. for bits to come flying off and the ship not exploding you`d need another model.

ohh


so theyll explode outright?

wouldve been interesting to see a graveyard like from WOLF 359 or chintaka




BTW--

THIS IS MY 500TH POST !

would it be possible to have a section as 100% transparent in the tga file so it would be just as if that part was missing?

i know that this might create a hole in the ship which would allow youto see right through it or something, but it would be good if it could be fixed.

alternately, each ship could be made from several models, so that destroying one part of the ship just means that you don't display that model.

This will take a lot of time for Jigalypuff and others that are working on those models. I dunno, we first have to got those ships ready for all races, were are planning for. I think something like this will take to much time to do, at the moment. But this is a desicion that has to be made by Jigalypuff and ??Davedz??, and perhaps some others.

The damage effects you describe would be cool for such as bridge commander, where 5 or 6 ships are fighting at once.

There won't be several models of each ship, so maybe we should concentrate on how the damage texture should look. In botf it was grey, and looked like pot marks. I'd like to see a darker grey, with some red and orange so it looks like the ds9 battle damage.


On another subject, most ships should have at least 1 aft torpedo launcher this time round. I'm sure that's already planned though.

i`m fairly certain i wrote that to have bits fly off and dissapear would mean more than one model the transparent tga is something i`ll look into though

Repairing will be covered already, no need for diffrent % for diffrent ships. a miranda will have a certain hit points, say 100, but a soverign will have a lot more 1000, so the soverign can take much more damage. so say a basic shipyard can repair 10 hit points a go, then the miranda would take 9 turns to be reiapred when at 10 hit points, but the soverign would take a lot more 990 hit points to repair at 10 per turn makes it 99 turn, long time.

That does make sense, and probably saves a lot of work.

Regarding the appearance of ships. One annoying thing in botf was the troop transport having galaxy nacelles, before you're at that tech level.

Ideally, we'd have 3 types of all support ships, but that would be loads of ships, over all the empires.

An alternative could be having a model with an excelsior type hull appearance, but with 2 types of nacelles- refit type could have 2nd set. Maybe an nx type on the 1st ship and a constitution refit type on the 2nd. These would look plausable on a backup ship right to the end.

No doubt people will create state of the art support ships to be modded in later.

Umm, I've heard about a 2D combat system, what do you mean by that? Like it is in botf or something from some old Atari/ Master of Orion type of thing?