About the UTILITIES section of the Botf2 Database, i think that it is necessary to consider, for example, that the minor races destitute of water (as Kazon) or having been attacked and bombarded can need enormous amounts of water (water structures), but also medicines (health structures) and to send these requests for an empire to the diplomatic interface. I think that the water and the medicines would be a good argument of negotiation in addition to credits, deuterium and raw materials. Often, in the episodes, I observed some minor races asked the Federation to furnish them with water and medicines. We could also consider that these health structures are capable of produce medicines. It belongs to you to judge, naturally.

I noticed this: One of Federation's primary duties is to offer humanitarian aid whenever possible.

The water structures will NOT be in the game. Mike is against the idea and unless he make programming changes, I won't be able to implement them. Dafedz added them to his database because *he* wants them in his own idealised version of the game.

We plan to allow your ships be able to undertake medical missions to cure plagues. Doing so for an enemy planet will result in a big boost to relations. Conversely, ignoring pleas for help will result in major damage to your relations.

Have you decided to replace them by something or simply change the description of their fonction? In Supremacy, i saw that you had choosen the word "Growth Rate" (for the population, i presume).

Some of the water structures have multiple bonuses. Those that do will simply produce the other bonuses but not the water bonus.

Those structures that ONLY produce water won't be in the game. For a structure to produce a bonus, that bonus has to be programmed in. But since Mike doesn't want water in the game, he hasn't programmed the bonus. So it's impossible to give water as a bonus to a structure.

"Growth Rate" is the rate at which a system grows per turn, given as a percentage of the current population. So if a system has a total growth rate of 5% and has a total of 100 population, on the next turn it will have 105 population. Most of the planet types already have a special structure that boosts Growth Rate so this bonus is definitely in. As I said earlier, some of the structures also have other bonuses, such as Deuterium, Raw Materials, or Food, and these bonuses - and therefore these structures, will also be in the game.

Seeing as Water wont be in as Mike has said, then perhaps it might be possible to change 'water' as a produced game resource for say the Irrigation Network to a slight +Growth rate instead - to reflect the expansion and development of a population?

That way the structures (and their additonal Raw Mats/Deuterium bonuses) can be retained.

Thoughts?

I'm agreed with the name: Growth rate about the population.

Err...already done. In fact I set it this way months ago, and I could've sworn I told you about it, Dafedz. For reference, i've compiled a list of ALL of the structures that have an implemented growth rate bonus of any kind., that is all of the structures that have a growth rate bonus already ingame. Note that the bonuses written here are as they currently stand in the game files, and may not be the same as those in the database; the database has been updated since the May game update but the lack of an editor means I can't update the game. Please ignore any potential differences.

Advanced Irrigation Network (Barren Planet)
+35 Food, +2% Growth Rate

Antedean Hydro-Reclamation Plant
+100% Food, +5% Research Empire-Wide, +10% Growth Rate

Atmospheric Condensers (Desert Planet)
+5% Growth Rate

Ba'ku Metaphasic Spa
+50% Growth Rate, +1 Morale Empire-Wide

Cardassian Basic Replicator
+25 Food, +2% Growth Rate

Desalination Plants (Oceanic Planets)
+10% Growth Rate, +5% Raw Materials

Ice Breaking Stations (Arctic Planets)
+7% Growth Rate

Purification Works (Jungle and Terran Planets)
+7% Growth Rate

Steam Vent Collectors (Volcanic Planet)
+3% Growth Rate

Xyrillian Organics Nursery
+100% Food, +20% Growth Rate

Ah superb, thanks. I'll make the adjustments to the database.

Sorry yes, I'm sure you did tell me about this, but what with one thing and another (many others) some matters slip though the net. I have no recollection of it.

Wouldn't it make more sense for these structures to improve population health rather than growth rate? At the rate we're going (no pun intended), we're going to have a lot of growth rate bonuses.

Actually, they shouldn't affect the final population health level, but rather the target value that population health slowly "drifts" towards each turn. Think of it as having a "Baseline Population Health" value and a "Current Population Health" value. Each turn the current value moves a little closer to the baseline value.

Mike, Dafedz & Matress, i think it missing a structure improving the planets conditions from HOSTILE to IDEAL. What do you think about it?

Eventually I plan to add terraforming projects. These won't be structures per se, but they will be go through the "production" queue..

Ah so ships won't be terraforming then? Or perhaps will terraforming via ships only be for the least hospitable planet types?

If it's going to be a structure, I vote calling them Climate Control Systems or Weather Control Systems. They've been mentioned in Trek a few times, and in fact I recently saw an ep of DS9 when someone sabotaged the Weather Control Systems on Risa, which almost instantly caused the weather to change from cloudless skies to hurricane.

Incidentally, a Climate/Weather Control System would be an ideal target for enemy saboteurs. I've also got a breakdown of the system as one of my random events.

I found this example in Space Empires 5 game

Climate Control Facility
Desc=Moderates the atmospheric conditions of a planet to improve its conditions.

Function= Climate Control Facilities improve the conditions of the planet by [%Amount1%]% each year.

with a new bonus: + % Atmospheric Conditions (or if you have something better)

They won't be structures, they'll fall under an as-of-yet unintroduced category called "projects". Projects effectively block planetary production until completed. Things like Martial Law from BotF fall under the same category.

I'm curious though, if you haven't yet terraformed a system to colonize it how can there be a build queue at all? Plus, this changes quite a few things with the colony ship values and descriptions, if they are no longer to be involved with some kind of terraforming.

As for a name, my vote is for 'Terraforming Station'. That's what they are bascially, and that's exactly what O'Brien called one such facility on Venus, in "Past Tense", as I recall.

Me, for example, I consider that "WATER" word mean a lot of things under severals points of view. Sometimes even food may be as solid as it can be liquid. For example the water can be treat by industrial structures with a % INDUSTRY and become an ingredient for the trade routes (several poor minor races need water), also for the liquid and solides rations food with a % FOOD and a substance used for manufacture medical supplies with a % POPULATION HEALTH. The idea of Dafedz had been refused in a sense but can open a lot of ideas in other fields. We should not blame him for that.

Your opinions?

You can colonize a system without terraforming it, but the lower the hability rating, the lower your maximum population and growth rate. Terraforming projects can be taken on at higher tech levels to enable you to slowly transform a planet towards the preferred planet environment for your race, improving the living conditions and appeal of that planet for your people, thus boosting your max population and growth rate.

Terraforming isn't required, and will work quite differently from BotF. It will work pretty much like in MoO2.

Water has a big rule in our life. Aside from water source of liquid that we drink, sometimes the patient if they can't be able to eat they use dextrose as serve the liquid as their food. They can use as medical support for the patient.

Good point yeshadette21. Thanks for posting. I am not sure how much of a role water will be taken into account in the actual game code. We may see more on that in the next release.

Hey yeshadette21, welcome to the forums!

Water is not being taken into account as either a resource, nor a population limiter anymore; water was always something that Dafedz wanted to see in the game, but after very long discussions we have decided not to include it for reasons of playability. Water just doesn't add much to the game whilst also making system management more difficult. In this respect, it is therefore actually a feature that restricts, rather than improves the game.

All game features are being assessed by Mike, the programmer. All features start with a negative score and have to gain a positive score purely on their own merits, be it by improving functionality, gameplay, or some other part of the game. By looking at features in this way, you can prioritise features into stuff that must be in the game, stuff that would be nice, stuff that will need for wait for Supremacy 2, and stuff that will never make it into the game. Water became a feature that falls into the final category based on Mike's ranking system.

Please don't take this as meaning it will never be in though. The forums are a place for discussion, so if you have an idea that you think may not have be thought of, please discuss it. But water had a particularly low score so it will take a very good idea to push it up into a positive.

Yeah, water and utilities have been discussed to death already. They won't make it into the game, period. Micromangement issues aside, such a feature would require too many changes and additions to parts of the game that were written long ago and are relatively stable. There's simply no way to justify that. It would only serve to delay work on far more critical outstanding features.

Like?

Take your pick from any of the missing features (in no particular order): planetary assaults and invasions, the new personnel and intelligence system, victory conditions, tactical space combat, an improved tech/research system, etc. At least a couple of those are critical to having a game that's genuinely playable (i.e. winnable). And then, of course, there's the AI, which is a whole set of "sub-projects" in and of itself: colony management AI, fleet management AI, diplomacy AI, etc. So much to do, so little time...

Diplomacy AI alone _can_ be like half a game. And with the strong emphasys on relations with minors in this particular game...
Hehe. Joking aside, it will be a massive undertaking.

No kidding. The Diplomacy AI will likely be the single most complex and far-reaching component of the game. Beyond merely dealing with diplomatic exchanges (which is complex enough on its own), it will need to observe and react to events which should affect interracial relations. There's plenty of difficult problems to solve, like how to determine whether another empire's ships are routinely travelling too close to your own borders. The answers to those kinds of questions can seem simple, but the actual implementations often require a lot of creative and careful coding. For example, what constitutes your borders, and how close is "too close"? One idea I had was to represent an empire's territory as a set of disjoint "clusters", find the convex hull of each cluster, compute the geometric union of those hulls, and use the result to represent the "within my territory or too damn close" zone. But simply computing all that geometry on each turn can be deceptively expensive. The time required grows exponentially (and independently) for factors like the size and shape of the map and the "disjointedness" of the empire's territory. Any algorithm that grows exponentially is a serious problem, because under the right set of conditions, processing time could jump from fractions of a second to several minutes or more. Thus, you can see how problems which seem conceptually simple to solve can be technically challenging to implement.

So .Iceman isn't far off. The Diplomacy AI can easily be an entire game's worth of code in itself.

If it will take up so much computing power could the system be made simpler? It would mean a compromise but only for the AI as a human player will give into paranoid thinking right off. Could you look for the range from nearest ship you can see to world, starbase or outpost you hold? Sure there are cases of that dog leg shaped empire that would not work so well but as Iceman always says, "It is just a game."

OK, now you can tell me all the reasons that will not work.

There are certainly simpler solutions. This particular example isn't terribly difficult to solve, and your suggestion is actually on the right track. But I only brought it up to illustrate how seemingly simple problems are usually not so simple, and that accuracy must often be sacrificed for the sake of performance. As an engineer, I instinctively want to search for an accurate and well-defined solution, but such solutions are often not practical. Instead, one must rely on comparatively crude approximations which have no guarantee of accuracy, but which are "accurate enough" most of the time. Coming up with approximations which are easy to compute and consistent in their level of accuracy can be very challenging. There are almost always edge cases in which approximations will cease to produce reasonable results, so the goal is often to minimize those edge cases, or at least isolate them so that they can be solved using more accurate means. Sometimes it's the other way around, and an accurate solution can be obtained most of the time, with approximations used only in certain edge cases. Figuring out the best approach can be fun and challenging, but it definitely makes the development process longer.

You see why I "warn" about complexity in other areas of the game like range+fuel, and minor race expansion and interaction? Put all these together, plus a few more things, and you can end up with a huge TPT hog.
One thing to avoid should be the AI playing by different rules. Also, a sub-par AI will be the death of a game which most likely will see a lot of SP action. It's better to have simpler but effective gameplay, than the opposite.

Mike and others, i think in this context, water is used for "industrial" purposes. Dafedz did well to create the "planetary science" in the tech tree. Who say "industry", say "population grow".

Not going to happen, sorry. This discussion has been over for some time now, and it needs to stay that way so we can move forward .