Which begs the question: why do you have the potential, if you can't (aren't supposed to) use it? I'm talking specifically about Docks. The way the game works, every system can have a shipyard. At some point, each can have say 4 docks. ...
Yes, shipyards are going to be changed apparently. Still, food for thought.
[it's not like you need the docks for refueling - there's no such thing as docking for refueling; or refitting - there's no such thing either, only scrap+rebuild; or mothballing - there's a structure for that; or simply "station-keeping"]




Sounds like a nice way to force the AI to burn its Deuterium reserves...

You don't need Credits to build stuff. BTW, what happens if you run out of Credits to pay Upkeep? Have you guys thought about that?




As long as you keep them *outside* their fuel range, collecting Deuterium, it's less of a problem

hi all

seem very nice, i have read all the thread
not yet tryed the demo but the screenshots here and there give yet a good idea

i'm just wondering how some situations will be sorted

by example imagine 50 stars attacked exactly at same turn, that could seem weird but in multiplayer, 2/3 players making a combined attack against another one.

will you sort one by one each battle? that could take hours and hours ..more probably that the rest of the game

In general the game will play out as did the original Birth of the Federation. Small ship encounters will end quickly. There will grow to be many ships over time but they tend to collect into fleets having larger but fewer encounters. Also attacking planets will involve many ships and be a much less common event than fifty per turn.

Five live players staying with the game for a week might tax the duration of combat but then they should get a life anyway. Talk to girls now and then.

Is there such a thing as girls in the life of a trekkie?

I think I remember there being a girl on the forum. Once. Her name was Jade. So apparently there are. Or at least were. Maybe Trek-girls are like Ent-wives from Lord of the Rings? Mythical, lost creatures...

i guess i'm lucky i have not this problem, my wife understand very well when i'm playing, probably the reason why we have celebrate 1 month ago our 39th year of commun life

when i play actively to a mmo i can stay logged all day especially in war time

I am sure and no insult intended yorev.

My point is merely that anyone would have to go to such extreme measures to reach the 50 large planetary assaults per turn scenario.

a mass attack instead of 1 huge attack is a war strategy which could aweakened badly the opponent

of course it's depending of the power of static defence like orbital system and shield vs 1/2 strong ships and the damages possible aginst the pop and buildings

and why all in same turn because that is forcing the opponent to sort a huge problem of defnce and split his large fleet

Read a lot on this thread, and I took an interest in the refitting/upgrading topics. I agree refitting ships should be mostly discouraged. In the TV shows/movies the refits were done in emergencies, like it being cheaper/faster to refit than build anew in the middle of a war with the klingons. (Enterprise - Enterprise A) Besides a good historic case study is the USS Missouri. That refit took nearly an entire year in the late 80's and it still had the same hull, main armament, (16" guns) and engines. Only differences were adding 32 tomahawks (nuke or not), 16 harpoons, the Phalanx system for point defense/AA to replace removed 20mm and 40mm AA guns, and a new electronic warfare package. The whole process was very labour intensive and in the end, the Missouri was a larger, clumsier, and more costly AEGIS cruiser. It was turned into a floating museum and was featured in that 'Turn Back Time' video by Cher. In a nutshell, refitting is a waste and should be discouraged.

*Maybe making ship shelds stronger, and phasor/disruptor damage stronger, cooldown times faster, and improving torpedo damages as appropriate tech levels are reached, but not being able to mix and match armaments might be the medium to be reached.

*Maybe even increasing the likelyhood of unfavourable random events occuring to older ships to encourage scrapping and modernizing of fleets. (A faulty containment field in the USS _ caused a catastrophic warp core breech, destroying the vessel along with the USS _ in the Sol system.)

Welcome to the forums Weirdness and thanks for the feedback. It sounds like the game will go with a scrap and rebuild system. It was too hard to do the extra coding for an upgrade on stations so I am guessing the same is true for ships. Mike and Matress can correct me if I am wrong.

PS You are right about the foolish concept of the upgrade. On a technical point though the Missouri did get a new engine, a turbine, in the Long Beach Ship Yards but that is beside the point.

Hey Weirdness, welcome to the forums!

The game won't have an upgrade system as such - ships will be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, albeit with some slightl recycling of raw materials. Same goes for stations. There will be a mothball system for scrapping ships though, whereby retired ships are kept in storage via a dedicated, buildable mothball facility, with only partial recycling of ships systems. The ships will then be capable of being brought back out of storage - for a price - to serve as a stop-gap defence fleet.

We actually already have a Warp Core breach random event written up. The randoms aren't yet implemented though. Here's the text we have for it so far:

Thanks for the welcome... I am extemely appreciative there's people who care about gameplay, and not about cash to the point where they volunteer large amounts of time to fan-based projects. I feel this is the only way to maintain quality gaming these days. Here's anothe Idea I got from playing too much MoO2.

*Legendary officers to be assigned to ships: Randomly determined to appear throughout the game.
-easy way: make up random names, no pics and varying abilities. weak ones appear more often while strong ones are rare.
-hard way: use canon characters with pics (Kirk, Sela, Weyun) and sort them out for random appearance by eras and assign their appropriate canon strengths. I understand this will take a lot of work and some creativity to fill in races like the cardassians and romulans who will have few legendary characters.

They can be killed in battle or assassinated by agents, and if morale gets low enough, maybe even defect with their ship!!

You'll have to wait and see whether legendary officers become a game feature. We can't comment on unannounced features, features that Mike hasn't yet told us about, or features that he hasn't definitely said yes or no to.

As for morale...we've announced that changes are planned, we just haven't yet sannounced what those changes are.

Oh I see Matress. BTW, what are the races that are missing Warp Core descriptions? I can probably fill those in shortly. I bet if I actually went into Supremacy, I would know, so I'll try that first . So, if I find out, I will start writing some possible descriptions. if I don't find out, I'll edit this post.

EDIT: I found out it was the Cardassians and the Romulans. Writing things for them is always great fun . Well, gotta get writing

Oh sorry, I assumed the colours made it obvious.

For future reference;

Blue = Federation
Red = Klingon
Green = Romulan
Yellow = Cardassian
Pink = Dominion

The missing descriptions are for the Romulans and Cardassians. And thanks for your PM, but i've got Word 2000, not 2007.

alrighty, fixed the issue with the compatibility by sending you the downgraded (compatible with 2000) version. You SHOULD theoretically be able to read it now. In the future, I guess I'll write in Notepad.

EDIT: That's alright with the colour thing. I should've guessed that green meant Romulans (they always appear in some sort of green) and in the games yellow always represents the Cardassians.

Could do both, where you have crew determined by the already defined manpower resource, you could have a list of officers generated via "Starfleet Academy" type buildings, determined via year(work out what turns = in terms of months or years, have initial officers ages varied, a couple slots for admirals to give a fleet wide bonus, then subsequent officers would be generated from a list of names with some historic characters randomly graduating around the right time under the right conditions(IE: federation owns vulcan during spocks lifespan, then spock may appear.)
they could generate as new recruits to be given to a ships command staff for bonus' depending on their skills and the position (Captain, Science officer, Chief Engineer, Helmsman, Navigator, Chief of security). You could then promote those from experienced crews to become captains of your next ships, which in turn could result in the aformentioned want of having people scrap obsolete ships in favour of new ones to
properly balance the needs of top level command staffs. Certain buildings which give experience could have those then reduced in favour of producing new and or better candidates for your fleet.
As a furtherence of this, you could then have minors have a few command staff members that when brought under your domain peacefully could enter your starfleet service.
This could be established with slight differences between the empires, making the powers even more distinct. For instance the Dominion could have vorta cloning stations to create their pool of officers, with some augmented by other races if they indeed did that(I beleive the used Cardassian officers when cardassia joined them)

Another add-on to this could be a ship that's from a conquered empire with an elite officer could contact a foreign power it feels is similar or friendly to them and ask for aid, sanctuary or to help them reclaim their homeland(With or without a price)

I believe to do these you could create some text files(Or xml sheets) with lists of names, to be pulled and combined in an array(First name, Last Name, Age, rank, exp, command, engineering, science, tactical, navigation). And each level of building would be able to train more officers
so you could have an intial pools of a couple admirals, and some officers of varied ability. Starbase would be able to train 4 every 12 turns maybe and they enter your pool, they age and they die. As the previous poster suggested they could have events in espionage and other events tied to them, assasination, or "Your Captain *officername* was killed while meeting the chalnoth leader in first contact, His death must be avenged!" etc.

Those though should be rare. However could keep the game interesting over long periods of time, The officers could age and die, your admirals could have to be replaced, since you'll want a good overall fleet bonus you'll want to promote a capable captain, thus requiring you to lose a better captain from your elite ship and requiring you to promote up the ranks. This would also require you to keep upgrading academy structures or waging battles to improve your crew's abilities and experience or to promote new capable officers.


All in favour say I! Sorry I know it's not a democracy what say you?

No you can't, because manpower is being removed from the game. In fact, the personnel structures have already been disabled. Mike didn't like the way the system worked so decided to scrap it. Dafedz likes the idea of manpower though, which is why it is still listed in his database. They've got a bit of a clash of the titans thing going on.

Unfortunately, this change immediately means that most of what you've mentioned in your post is now moot. Notice how I said "most" and not "all" though? Let's just say there will still be a certain type of personnel in the game. In fact, it will be as part of a whole new feature for the game. We haven't announced any specifics on what this feature is though, so I can't say any more on the subject. I'm not even sure when we will be releasing it as part of an update. But it is coming. So just watch this space...

*continues to watch space as MOE instructed in above post, just to see if there would be an update*

The next game update is in August as I announced Here.. I announced that a related feature will be improved as part of that update, so it's very possible that my unannounced feature will be included with it. Mike hasn't given me any specifics so I can't yet say if it is or isn't going to be in. He's been playing Star Trek online lately.

Oh, well, see what happened? I told you STO would control your minds... Ahem... I mean... of course, Mike wants to be able to beat all of the missions and such, to gain valuable experience and inspiration which will lead him into a breakthrough for Supremacy programming. That's it. Meanwhile, I will continue working on Random Event Descriptions, and get a complete list to MOE by August... or so .

Thanks Captain A. I do appreciate your hard work. Actually we hope to have the multiplayer version up and running prior to attending the Vegas Convention in the first week of August. June July is when I hope we will be getting our collective act together. We will go with whatever you have by then.

You're welcome for the work. Writing descriptions from the viewpoint of different races gives me the opportunity to not only look into those races, but also to slowly go insane... slowly..... slowly.... but enough about going slowly insane . I will do my best to get the entire description set done for Vegas. Actually, I have a batch of them ready to PM to Matress, so that Matress can put them on the SharePoint site. I should go PM them now...

PM received, randoms updated, and randoms uploaded. Nice job, Captain.

Download

Hmmm.... I was noticing the things like Ice Age and a few others that are in between are missing. I must have forgotten to send those to you Matress.... I'll get right on that.

What about having WMD? For example, the Federation can have a Genesis-derived planet killer, the Romulans can have a "Thaleron-radiation" device, Cardassians some sort of biological weapon, etc? There could be, of course, a potentially deep political price factored in for mutiple WMD usage; for example, many races snubbing (or even activating trade sanctions) against the Romulans for multiple "Thaleron" strikes against Federation or Klingon worlds. The price can go up especially if a WMD is used to start a sneak attack.

Also, would it be realistic to allow some sort of reverse-engineering of advanced ships? For example, if a fleet needs to confront a Borg cube, should there be an option to order your fleet to disable, board and ultimately take control of the cube instead of destroying it?

A lot of people would be against WMD's. Yes, the races may have had them, but they never used them, even during war. It would also unbalance the game and some people could argue it's a step too far away from BOTF.

As for reverse-engineering ships, i've got two Random Events where such actions can occur (Search the list for "Advanced Starship Discovered" and "Advanced Starship Captured").

Players will not be able to board enemy ships due to programming limitations however. This was discussed a long time ago and the decision has not changed.

Thanks for the info on "Random Events" thread.

As for WMD, I am not so sure if so many people would oppose them. Consider Trek canon during the last season of DS9, when it was discovered that Section 31 engineered a biological weapon (super virus) to exterminate the Changelings. Surely that qualifies as a WMD being used in wartime, no?

Section 31 is a rogue organisation. They may work for the Federation, but they answer to no one. So that isn't really a valid argument.

The game is moddable though, so anyone that wishes to add new game content is welcome to do so.