to be honest, I dont really 'get' how a colony ship could populate a system with 20 or so billion people.

So "Colony Fleet"...? And they take the 'passengers' directly from a systems' population.

This is done in a lot of other games, Galciv as I recall just being one of them.

That is a good way of thinking of it. Our colonyship is just representational. When I think in a concrete way I like to think the colonyship is bringing the factories and farm equipment and golden arches to support the people. The people get there in so many smaller ships that we do not bother to represent.

Plus we want this game to be a sequel of BOTF and not space empires, galactic civilization.........

I do believe that we need to stay true to BOTF wherever we can.

yes, but even staying true to 'star trek' would mean 'building 1x colony fleet'.

One of the many star trek novel series' was "New Earth" (I think)

anyway, the story was 6 novels, and starts off with a fleet of transport vessels moving the people and the stuff to a new system to colonise, and the escort fleet was simply the Enterprise[refit, dunno if it was pre-wrathofkhan, or -A, post the-movie-that-shall-not-be-named] and two or so 'pickets' or something.

The ship on the cover of the... 5th or 6th, was a weird variation of the TMP Enterprise-refit style design.

Constitution refit saucer and engineering hull and nacelles, but a weird torpedo "Rack" with V-shaped double-neck between the engineering and saucer hulls.
Also, the nacelles were located on roughly on the same horizontal plane as the engineering hull, and double-struts there too.

Various fan websites had different names for the class. A long time ago I called it the Twilight class, anyway.

I still think it's unnecessary, we want to be a BOTF sequel. Plus only movies and series are canon and in the Enterprise episode Terra Nova there was only one Conestoga class colony ship colonizing the planet.

For an intended population of...?
Edit:

Allow me to hang a lantern on that particular example.

The Conestoga was the first, and carried 200 people.

Two. Hundred.

Not two hundred thousand....

or two million.

but two. Zero. Zero.

Subsequent colony ships were not dispatched due to many reasons. Distance/speeds, loss of contact, and that the colonists were opposed to the other ships' being sent there anyway.

Therefore Terra Nova can't exactly be held as a shining example of 1 ship to populate a system with millions.

Without looking it up again I do recall that BOTF had one still image of many ships heading for a planet when a new world was colonized. It would not be a problem to put a number of copies of the colony ship into the combat engine. It would through the dynamics of combat off with more targets. We have not yet accounted for how to deal with the loss of some but not all of the colony ships. This all could be done with no changes in the galactic map view but we would get a lot of comments. Mike might be able to make changes without a lot of fussing but I am skeptical of that. Now, unfortunately, is not the time to ask Mike to make any changes like this as we are on the cusp of releasing our first multiplayer version of the game. There are bigger issues to deal with right now.

For now I would say we have to accept that the colony ship is just representational. I do not mean to just dismissing the idea. It has merit but it may have to wait for BOTF III.

Yes, BOTF had a colonisation image with ships from multiple races all approaching a planet. BOTF actually had the opposite image as well, with the ships leaving the planet. The image is only included in the program files though and was never used; it was probably for a feature that was never implemented as the rushed the game to market.


Like I say, i've got backups of everything on my computer. It was easy enough for me to grab these as soon as you mentioned it, Kenneth.

I agree that we shouldn't change the system. The game is meant to be representational. We can't expect the game to display hundreds of colony ships at a time. Same goes with the structures, as .Iceman has frequently argued with me. One structure represents the construction of multiple structures or an entire network of them. The game is representational. It doesn't have to be perfect. People didn't have (much of) a problem with that in BOTF, so let's stop getting caught up on this one small issue and start focussing on others.

so its a "this is just the first, once colonisation begins the rest follows" type of deal. okay.

Yeah, think of it that way. Your systems grow turn-by-turn afterall. You don't think all of the colonists are baby-making machines, do you?

...They're colonists, not drones.

Think of the system growth rate as meaning how effective the system is at advertising itself to new colonists, who travel to the system by their own, unseen, devices.

Yeah I always assumed your fleet of controllable ships was supported by hundreds of civilian/ semi military ships for things like colonisation, supply lines, crew transfer, etc.

Love that alternative BoTF pic Matress.

Will there be race specific scenes for Supremacy? Things like that colonisation pic but with all Federation type ships etc?

Once we have a chance to see the updated game in action we can dreaming up some new still images or even short animations. I could see using blenders animation and putting in some of our models. They could be dropping out of warp and into obit around a strange new world. It would be cool to have them pop up in the UI in a new view window. That is if Mike has a way to do anything without rewriting the code from day one.

Would be awesome to have either a brief animation or even a still of a ship of each class departing from space dock, which starts automatically when you build the first ship of a new class.

Makes a note
Great idea
I think we should update are shipyards first but I would like to
do that when you build a new ship.

Always wanted that feature, glad you like it.

Could even go so far as to have it accompanied by a few seconds of relevant music... For example Constitution Class slowly pulls out of the shipyard to the classic starfleet tune, wheras the first Intrepid would have a few seconds of the Voyager theme tune. You already have the religious holiday event accompanied by a choir!!

Given all the possible ships and multiply it by the number of ship yards and fleet yards I do not think we would get all of them as prerecorded animation.

Once we have a combat engine though it is a whole new game. Then you could just write code to have it put in the models as needed. The combat engine plays a little clip of code to run a ship model out of a yard model.

Yeah nice idea. I guess worst case scenario just take the main pic for that ship and photoshop a docking station in the background. Gets the general point across without being a massive job.

http://www.trekmania.net/art/3d_animations.htm

There are some interesting animations here.

Looks like Dafedz got to the idea before you, SOM.

Yes, this would be mind-blowing eye candy for the game to have a ship launch animation, but there are potential problems with it, other than the problems Kenneth mentioned; what happens if multiple ship designs become available during the same turn? Do all the video play one after the other? It would be clunky and would quickly get tiresome.

Same goes for a colonisation animation where you colonise multiple systems in the same turn.

And what happens in multiplayer games? Do all players have to wait for each others' animations? This would get boring, and seeing an enemy colonisation movie would give players an unfair advantage. The only way around this is to turn the animations off by default.

But it would seriously be awesome eye candy.

I was thinking it would play only on the PC of the user that owned the ships. Also it would work only as fill when that user was otherwise waiting for a turn to cycle. We would interrupt it to continue the game.

A colony ship is *a* colony ship. When you build a Cruiser, you're not building a fleet of Cruisers.
Also, if the colony ship is not taking the colonists itself, then it shouldn't be taking the facilities either - where's the room for all that? Where's the cost for all that? It costs as much as any warship.
As for the growth rate being due to some sort of advertisement, hmm, that's an odd concept. The colonists have to come from somewhere. All the other systems have their own growth rates, so...
Colonists are created out of thin air. So they reproduce like rabbits too.

I said it before and I'll say it again, this is a game and not real life, the game has it's own set of rules sometimes different from real life in favor of gameplay. Next thing someone is going to suggest is that we should remove warp drive from the game because nothing can travel faster than EM waves (light included).

Must be true then. Ok.
Let's all just agree that the only thing the colony ship takes to the new planet is the empire's flag, and the rest gets there by invisible ships that cannot be intercepted. The "private sector" has cloaking tech I guess, and thousands of ships with it.

Hehehehehehehe, naturally, I am the Emissary!


I'm a supporter of the current system because the old BOTF had it and this is BOTF 2, plus we are a fan project and we can't afford constant changes, things like the AI, combat engine, ship models.... are the priority.

Of course you are... heheh.

As for this being BotF2, I think it is called Supremacy or something... can't recall right now.
And yes, ship models and art in general keep changing... Damn, I hate that. Let's stop with the art changes already!!!! It's making me crazy!!

Art is the most flexible part of the game, and the easiest to change or improve, plus if we have higher quality image that could replace lower quality one, the logical thing is to use it.

Look at it this way. You, the player are in charge of Starfleet. Starfleet builds a variety of ships, cruisers, destroyers, hospital ships etc. It also builds colony ships so that new colonies can be formed and be given the most effective technology to get established and ultimately defend theirselves. Starfleet don't handle transport for anyone deciding they want to move from Earth to Betazed, unless you're in Starfleet you'd probably catch a Federation transport ship for that. Likewise, Starfleet aren't going to be involved in the affairs of all the families who want to move to a new colony. It's likely that on the announcement of a new planned colony, a great many people will book tickets for hundreds of transport ships going to this location around the same time as a colony ship- but they won't actually be on the colony ship.

Othrwise you'll have to control every freighter going back and forth to Quo'Nos, and Romulus, and the 35 affiliated minor races you have.

The other thing to bear in mind is that a turn represents an unknown period of time, maybe it's a week, maybe 2 months. It's not like all the colonists necessarily need to arrive all at once or on the same ship.

I found the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to be odd. All the colonists just walked out into the countryside with the clothing they had on and not much else. Did they plan on eating grass and live in the trees? Even if you are going to be a subsistence farmer you need tools, seeds and even a tent would be nice.

I like to think of the colony ship as delivering the basic infrastructure that would allow people to live off the natural resources of the new planet. It would be future tech items but Star Fleet would be the only organization with the means to deliver it in substantial amount. The colony ship plants the flag, sets up the shop and opens the door for business. I do not worry about counting the people or the ships they use.

It is just a game so please think of it as you chose.

Nope. You're in charge of the Federation. Or the Empire. Or the Star Empire. Or the Union. Or the Dominion.
You tell your colonists what to do, and they're (supposedly) not Starfleet - or whateverfleet. They're citizens.
You handle diplomacy, espionage, trade and whatnot.
You run an empire. All of it. That's the premise of any 4X space strategy game. You may delegate some tasks to governors/advisors/whatever, but you're the guy calling all shots.

I like the current colonisation process, which is much simpler and saves time. Unlike the original BOTF, where you had to terraform every single planet in a new system, it is nice that the new function automatically terraforms every planet in a system.

That being said, what about an option allowing a colony ship the option of joining a system and adding to its population? Pardon me if this sounds too much like the Civilisation-series, but I think it would be nice to quickly augment a system's population, especially if it is one that borders a rival power.

On a side note to those complaining about the "lack of realism" about only one colony ship having everything, I think it is fair to claim the colony ships have replicators that can fabricate tools. This would be consistent with TNG canon at least.