I don't think torpedoes should cost anything. They are readily available at starbase, a ship just has to go and pick them up.

Regarding repairs, I'm not sure about cost here either, I think as long as the ship being repaired can't be used for x amount of turns that's plenty.

ships's fuel is going to cost deuterium, why not put it in the game, that repairing ships costs resources, the same with torpedoes.

If it doesn't take too much pragramming I'm all for it.

As it stands I'm just praying we'll get a limited stock of torps for each ship, anything on top of that is a bonus.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love this, as well as anything else that makes the game more difficult and adds to the realism.

Since there are all these additional things to worry about with ships, will the maintenence costs be lower than in botf1?
After all, what are the maintenence costs for if not for restocking fuel weapons and repairing?

I had another thought, in battles, are ships going to have the oppurtunity to recloak? like the scmitar in nemisis?

if they are then it would mean that one turn would be spent cloaking and that would mean dropping shields for a short time so any ship that does it would have to have strong ablative armour. but in the next turn you would be unattackable and you could retreat if necessary. maybe so ships won't be able to follow you if they are in pursuit and are faster.

This is what we talked about SOM. Because of the costs of repair, refuel and rearm, there isn't any need for a maintance cost.



Well it could be implemented, but it shouldn't give a to big advantage, i mean your idea that the ship will get hit on there hull that turn, is a very nice idea. Good work

Maintenence is obsolete as we have 'real' maintenence now that fuel and armament etc can be expended.


The cloak during battle idea has potential, although it has to be looked at carefully. Personally, I think the initial advantage should be lessened slightly. A good way around this could be that the ship being fired on returns fire in the first turn, thus halving the advantage.
If a ship recloaks whilst being fired on it could risk taking 2 or 3 phaser strikes, meaning the ship could be destroyed or at least damaged. However the ship would have the same half -turn advantage again when decloaking. This would be great for flanking ships or any ship out of the firing arcs of the enemy. It could also be a cool tactic to cloak and decloak certain ships in a large battle, confusing the enemy as to your exact numbers.

On a side note, any cloaking ship would either be klingon or romulan, therefore they wouldn't have ablative armour as that's a federation technology!!

For the torpedos how about having ships capeable of restocking fleets but they have to fly back and forth between the starbase and the fleet to restock them. this would introduce a whole new aspect to the game of attacking supply lines. You think this might work ?

Also is there any plan to include the armour in the last voyager episode that coats janeways run about and is used to protect voyager from borg torpedos (i cant rember the name of the armour).

p.s. Ive checked this thread over and over and have come to the conclusion that torpedos are going to cost raw material and some other ressources but I'm not clear on where they are built exactly or what build que they fit into or exactly how they get from where they are built to the ship/starbase. Could some one elaborate or point me towards the relevant thread?

with cloaked ships i think (and it might have already been discussed) that we shouuldn't be able to see them at all (unless we have the necessary scanners). not like in botf where you could see them, but not fire on them.

Horadrim- There's been a lot of discussion on torps, the concensus at present is that there will be an empire-wide stock of torpedoes. Ships can rearm from this stock at a starbase or outpost, or from a supply ship. The supply ship will basically have access to this empire wide resource, but will only be able to restock 1 ship per turn or so. As a result, more than 1 ship would be necessary to restock a fleet quickly. So yes, attacking supply lines would be in, however only on the way to restock the fleet.


The technology from 'Endgame' was the Ablative Armour Generator, an advancement of the Ablative Armour that the Defiant and Prometheus classes are currently equipped with. Rather than panels of armour attached to the ship, the generator replicates the armour and is therefore more resilient.

I really hope this isn't in the game, it's a far future technology and would give the federation a completely unfair advantage, as well as totally change the relationship between shields and hull that other empires would have.



Sensou- That's the intention! A cloaked ship can only be seen with a very advanced anti-cloak scanner, and then only at close range. In battle the enemy numbers and locations will be revealed only if/when they decide to decloak.

i agree with that

i mean, if a ship is cloaked then standard sensors shouldnt be able to pick them up atr all

only anti proton beams and tachyon scnners can

and the scimitar even wen cloaked couldnt be detected by any known means

Is there anyone else who has anything to add to cloaking during battle and it's advantages?

[quote="SonOfMogh"]
The technology from 'Endgame' was the Ablative Armour Generator, an advancement of the Ablative Armour that the Defiant and Prometheus classes are currently equipped with. Rather than panels of armour attached to the ship, the generator replicates the armour and is therefore more resilient.

I really hope this isn't in the game, it's a far future technology and would give the federation a completely unfair advantage, as well as totally change the relationship between shields and hull that other empires would have.
[quote]

I hope it is in the game as a very high up future tech but only if the other sides have things to balance it out.

Also the missile system sounds great.

ive had several thoughts=

1. the jem bugs should get a good bonus wen ramming as they were designed for this and they were very good at it

2. there should maybe be a new tactical combat order - SURRENDER
i know it will probably be VERY RARELY used but its just a thoguht

3. there also should be orders to -
A. Attack center of enemy lines
B. attack right flank
C. attack left flank


3. wen the breen join u, u should be able to build their ships, as they were an integral part of the war in the final months of it, and therre were quite a few breen warships



any thoughts?

i agree on all of them, except perhaps the surrender option, we should discuss it here. What will surrender do? Would you need to pay a requested sum of money/resources/ or even systems or technology? So that you will be released with your fleet? Or will your ships be destroyed and the crew be safely returned home into the officers pool? What do you all think about this, and how it should be implemented?

We also have attack patterns in the final game, also very cool. Like your thougth that you can attack certain flanks.

EDIT:

You won't be able to build the vessels from empires that join you. You still have the ships they had, but they are technology always less advanced. So you won't be able to build them after they have joined you.

1/ There's no evidence to say jem hadar ships were designed for ramming, they did occasionally do so as they have no fear of death and it was a good move tactically or they had a point to prove.

2/ Surrender? Why?

3/ You will be able to select the ships you want to attack, you will also be able to choose which way to go, ie. strafe left, strafe over, etc.

3 (again?)/ If the breen became a fully fledged member of the dominion then the only ships built from the breen system should have been jem hadar ships, aside from the breen weapon (which can be fitted to jem hadar ships), the dominion vessels were far superior. If the 2 were merely close allies, they would obviously continue to build there own ships.

Don't assume that every ship seen during the war was currently being constructed. For all we know the breen hadn't build a single ship for 50 years prior to the war, all those ships you see weren't built yesterday. You did this before with starfleet ships, assumed the federation were desperately building Mirandas in time of war when far more effective designs were available. Believe it or not, in the late 25th century starfleet will probably have hundreds of obsolete sovereign class ships, trhey'll support newer designs but won't be in production!!!

well i think that small ships would easier hit a targetted ship because they are faster and more manouverble in battle. But ofcourse if i could choose between a sovereign at full impulse or a dominion bug then the choice would be obvious.

I see your point about surrended.

But i do think that this would be cool, to attack a certain side. I know that this could be done in a certain way. But this would be something extra for the strategic things in battle.

I already told you in 2 posts before what i thougth about minorships being able to build. (not)

Well if ships gain experience they would be far more valuable to the player. As such they could also have statistics like "moral" this would make it more realistic if say you happen into a trap and are out numbered 20 to 1. If it's a green crew then they have X+50% to surrender or if it's an elite crew you would have X%. Also said bonus could be added to ship's effectiveness IE: more damage done and more evasive abilities.

Battle: Is this going to be a recreation of the battle system used in BoTF? from this thread I get the impression that it is. For one the BoTF never had enough volume of vessels to justify large fleet type battles, that and the AI was really bad at it. A vessel by vessel command system should be available, with the ability to make fleets and select formations and rules of engagement.

Well we thougth about surrending, and it is actually ridiculous. If you would surrender, then this would mean in Startrek and in real life, the loss of all your ships. So i don't think that a surrender option should be in.

I don't know what is planned currently for the battle engine, but that is something that still needs to be discussed. The final version of it, will be a 3d battlefield, but what strategic options will be available are still unknown to me, because development hasn't started with this part of the game yet. We will have in the early beta version a civilization like 2d battle field. Again, this will not be for the final game.

Experienced ships wouldn't inflict more damage, the weapons are the same regardless of the crew. Accuracy and evasive maneuvers would be affected though.

We discussed the battle system in depth and everyone seems to want more tctics and greater strategy, whilst still actually looking like a ds9 style battle (especially on the replays). As a result the battle engine will probably end up similar to botf, but with a far bigger combat environment and the ships starting off further away from each other- allowing you to create effective formations. There will also be orbital batteries contributing to system defence, fighting alongside ships, as well as planets and moons in the background.

I've got a few ideas for the batles

1. for cloaked ships. heres a problem i had while playing aainst the roms. they would come into a system of mine with ships/outpost in it, and use their first 'cloaked' move to hail me. you could tr to hail them on your first turn, but since there is no way to respond with a hail on their free turn, they would always open fire on the second turn(or just run). This is something to be fixed, if they hail on their first turn, they should atleast wai and see what you are going to hail them back on your turn.

2. ships need to actually fire on the target you select. it seems to me that if you select a group of your ships, and give them a target, they'll sometimes just fire at whatever the want to, only if you manually select eack ship and tell that ship where to fire would they actually listen. another thing tht should atleast be looked into.

I think a couple of abilities that a topline experienced ship should get is the ability to make the occassional critical hit and the ability to escape an otherwise death dealing battle.

The reasons behind the first two are that legendary crews (Archer, Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway,) always either pull out the lucky shot at just the right moment to turn a battle, and the second is that they always some how servive. So when a ship reaches second from maximum experience, they should be able to do those two things, in addition to a final power of actualy adding a one xp boost to accuracy.


I almost forgot, I have an idea for how the battles should look. Instead of having planets that aren't much bigger than ships, have it that planets dominate the background like a huge, glowing, arcing, atmospheric, wall. Take it a step further and you can have perimeter based battles. The Solar system in ST has the Mars defence perimeter. So, options for planetary defence should extend to the a system wide level. Say you have the fifth planet colonised, one of the defence options should be orbital defence sphere, which will act as a barrier that has to be faught through to get to the inner planets. Once you defeat each perimeter, where the planet is no bigger than the head of a nail, you have the option of fighting the planet the perimeter was based on. You shift to a near orbit scene where the planet looks like a wall. Or you skip the planet and go to the next perimeter or planet.

Everything you said about planets is so so right. Look at games like armada, the 'planets' look absolutely ridiculous. If the planets aren't massive, (filling up one side of the screen), I think I'd rather they weren't in.

Should this come in the TWAAO thread?

Sounds like thats right on the money, iwulff. If no on else has any complaints, i said add her in the thread.

it sounds good to me.

added it into the TWAAO thread!

Reading this thread, one thing that hasn't been mentioned, is about capturing enemy ships.

If you had the option to surround a ship (Say, if you have a 3-to-1 numbers advantage, or higher) then you could then have the option to capture a ship (This would also allow you to steal technology/take prisoners/take slaves, depending on the race you play as)

If you take prisoners, then you could enter diplomatic talks, with the race of the prisoners. If you were to give the prisoners back for nothing, then the relationship could improve with that race. However, you could also ask for something ridiculous, like half of their empire or something. If they refuse, you kill their people, and have a 'legitimate' reason to go to war, if you were say the Romulans, coz they attacked you, and would'nt 'pay the price'.

An effective counter against this, is to have a self-destruct option for your ships. If an enemy attempts to capture your ships, then you could set your ship to self-destruct, killing the enemies on board. (Like Kirk did to the Klingons) Of course, it means you lose the ship(s) and crew, but if you had sent a prototype ship into battle, you wouldn't want to hand the ship to your enemies on a silver platter, would you?

While it wasnt discussed in this thread, in some other thread the ship capture idea was discussed, and I'm pretty sure it was decided that it wouldnt be in.

I remember they were still talking about capturing bases, and I'm not sure if a concensus was ever reached on that.