The new Alpha5 Version of BotE is coming soon!!!

There we reworked a lot of balancing things. The late game part is much easier, now. There would be a lot of new and amazing graphicscreens. A new main feature would be, that you can create a majorrace from every minorrace. So it is possible to play with 10 or more majors! I advise to take a closer look to our new version when it is released. I think you will have a lot of fun with this version ;-)

Music: The current Federation music track you are using is an older version. Look for the Serenity version I made. Or if you'd like, and this is because I've played this game again, I can compose 2-3 slower tracks that can loop instead of just the one.

Font: The font is awful. It hurts my eyes. Its too narrow. Maybe a more standard variant like Arial or Helvetica for the scroll text would be preferred.

I like the current federation track a little bit more than the new version. But we would need a new track for the Cartar Invaders ;-). This race is similar to the Cardassians in the Star Trek universe.

With our new version you can modify almost all parts of the game. So you also can change the font, the font size and the font color. So everybody can use Arial for every race if he wants.

I just played a few hundred turns of the new Alpha6.
I like it very much so far the only thing a little disturbing is the rotharian backround music. I dont know if its just my taste but it is a little to present when playing long time. How about the others any opinions on that.
The others I like very much kind of think I know the music of the hanuhr.

You can change volume in BotE settings.

With me, the settings won't change during a game. I.e. turning off the music during the game will not work. It will just restart the track.

Quick question. In the original BOTF you could assign ships to 'intercept' and they'd try to hunt down incoming hostile vessels automatically if they were fast enough. Is that planned for BOTE? If so could you also assign 'intercept THIS ship' making it targeted? Both could be useful in different situations but I do find it annoying trying to guess where a ship is going to be to attack it, especially when I have 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1 speed advantage!

it is planned. problem with assigning intercept command to a ship is that the ship may be kicked out of a fleet by the enemy and retreated while the big fleet still moves towards your systems. same with fleets. they can be split or joined thus the original command would not hold anymore. here there are many cheat possibilities so to speak.

if you happen to have an idea other than the one to have a "turn in between turns" where you see who is intruding space and which fleet you wanna follow with which ships you have set on intercept..hm, maybe "intercept largest fleet in range" or "largest beatable fleet in range (pre-estimated odds>50%) or being able to select "largest transporter/colonyship fleet"..

i guess we will implement it that way that we look at the odds and always intercept fleets that are the largest beatable ones with all ships on intercept in range. So each territorial sector will be scanned for enemy fleets and it will be calculated how many intercepting own fleets can get there and their winning odds. Those >50% nearest to 50% will get to combat.

A 'category intercept' does sound a good compromise, probably need at least a couple of categories. Hit 'largest' or 'smallest' group, and as you say what type of ship to try to intercept. I'd say use the standard designations 'destroyer', 'cruiser' etc. Not sure if you should add in 'nearest', and 'furthest' as well as a third option... don't know if that would help or not. Trying to think of any time when you'd want to hit the furthest ship away on an intercept. There are two other categories that could be used as well I guess. Race (including 'unknown' for question mark ships) and speed. Again, not sure if speed would be really useful. If you have the ship type designation that might cover it well enough.

As for the problem with a specific ship being targeted being kicked out of a fleet... yeah I can see it. But I assumed that there'd be 'cheats' like that. You'd never know which ship in your fleet an enemy had targeted for intercept so splitting your entire task group into separate groups (or even individual ships) and spreading your move over several squares would be a valid tactical decision. I don't really see it as a cheat, more a tactic. Not sure if the AI would be good at doing that or not. I don't think further clarification on whether to continue following a given ship would be needed if the fleet splits. It'd be too much micro management I think. As you say adding in an in between turn to confirm who you were going after would be a bit much.

hi, i also think that a way to intercept (or target) a specific Class of ship, or ships belonging to a race, is useful.

"Major race" and basic "ship class" should be ok, but usually we will know who we are trying to intercept... eg:

If a "fleet group" has an "id", and if the game keeps a historic "id" of which fleet a ship came from, then i think it could be used for targeting.

This way, you can target a fleet that you think you can defeat, and even if part of the fleet leaves and retreats away from your range, you can at least still intercept the remaining ships of that fleet, (if the game keeps the last known parent Group id).

edit: on the topic of ships, i posted this basic code in case it helps:
viewtopic.php?p=74004#p74004

maybe a fleet id can use a similar set of logic, based on class.

(optional priority 1: target ships of Major Race X / Y)
(optional priority 2: target smallest / largest Combat ship class) (excludes colony and transport ships, even though some are armed, and stations)
(optional priority 3: target smallest / largest Non-Combat class) (transports and colony ships)
(optional priority 4: target smallest / largest fleet) (based on #ships, OR estimated FirePower, OR estimated total Hull/Shield strength)
this way, players cant fool the game by making large small fighter fleets

(and for lots of extra features, you could use the same rules for "avoiding" the target of certain ships, but that might add too much complexity)

(either way though, i think there should still be a bit of "random factor" so that sometimes a ship captain or fleet commander can make a mistake and target the wrong one) - especially if there are some spacial anomalies in a nearby sector

After playing 400+ turns with the Fe... , errrm, Coalition, I have a few ideas to improve the game.

As mentioned by other people, I also miss the ability to upgrade old outposts/starbases.

Also, the ability to upgrade/refit ships to latest specifications would be nice, with money and experience penalty (old crew needs first to get familiar with the new equipment; maybe 10-20% of experience loss).

And then... I hate when 10-20 small ships play inside my borders. My suggestion would be to add a building at a later stage (tech 7+) and let's call this building something like Tactical Command. It would allow to interrupt a turn (concept from some isometric turn based games) and choose whether to intercept, if the enemy ship is coming into range of ships which are on standby. You wouldn't be able to target single ship, only single sector (if enemy is converging more fleets into single sector, then you can't attack a single ship without the others coming to assist). So the problem of separating a ship from the fleet wouldn't exist. Something like the original BotF, but with the option of not intercepting.

And, one which is probably the easiest to implement (unfortunately, I'm not a coder)... To increase the step for resource transfer and/or to implement that holding a button will transfer resources as long as the button is pressed. It takes 125 clicks to transfer 125k of resources to interstellar storage.

And a question regarding the resource trading... It takes several hundred of resources sold to drop the price to really small values. Does the game actually determine the price based on the demand? If so, then it should be able to have a real monopol For example, to wipe all enemy systems which have iridium and thus force them to buy it from you

And... Some more tactical options in battle would be nice. I don't like the feeling that wining or losing a battle depends on dice. For example, a battle chances are 55% in my favor, but sometimes I win with almost no loses, and sometimes the enemy wins with very few loses.

All this is hard to code and it takes time, I know. Maybe we could organize some group donation gathering for the developers.

Hi generic2 welcome to BotE.

By now we have already implemented the upgrading of old outposts/starbases,
but it will presumably take much time until the next release is ready.

We don't have a refit option for ships yet, but we've discussed it in the German forum too.

I like this kind of intercepting too (e.g. in Battle for Wesnoth) and BotE needs definitely an intercept option.
The problem is the realization of the many good ideas with just one (active) programmer.

Currently the multiplier at the bottom of the interstellar storage display is adjustable from 1 to 10k,
so for 125k you need thirteen clicks with 10k. Thirteen is still too much, so maybe we should add a 100k multiplier.

I'm unfortunately not an expert in resource trading, someone else have to answer this question.

The battle chances are just rough estimates and leave many factors out of the calculation.
We've already discussed to change it from percentage (back) to thumb up/down/neutral,
so that nobody believes that the value is highly accurate.


Thanks for your feedback.

Kind regards,
Vuto

Hi generic2, welcome too

for monopols http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/index.php/Monopole I think your suggestion would be to hard (as I understood it so far). Atm it's a credits/resources advantage. Doing a total monopol would mean that other's would not be able to build anything without the resource. That's to hard I think.

Monopol: You mentioned the multiplier there? (1,10,100)

Interstellar storage: put the multiplier to 10k. Mention the limits: at one turn a maximum of 20k can be taken out of the storage (@Vuto: we should think about max 30k or better a limit depending to NumberOfSystemIngame). So multiplier 10k is enough here I think.

Battle chances: Have to be improved...or not: Real battle results depending on some further facts which own tactical experts at fleet may misjudge:
- how's enemies crew experiance (Kirk did again and again )
- which kind of torpedos does enemy have (scan may no deliver any info about kind, only deliver that torpedo tubes are installed)
- further surprises
so BotE may need an info like: Our experts expected this odds:


Coder: Well...as a hobby fan project things are going slowly but on the other side we're doing step by step, so BotE is still in progress . Due to some reasons (e.g. copyrights for graphics) BotE remains an non commercial open source fan game so we won't use something like kick starter or similar. Using kick starter would put it out of our fan based level.
Donations we discussed some years ago. Due to we're located in Germany there might be a tax problem with donations. (Give us donations by joining BotE, helping with checking translations (also wiki, manual), graphics, ideas, or other contributions, best way by programming C++ .

Now I have to stop and I hope I gave answers to some questions (I have to check rest of questions next days)

You might have a look to last developement via viewtopic.php?p=71595#p71595

Thanks guys.

Actually, I'm an idiot, didn't notice the 10k multiplier so I was using 1k with dual-clicking on the mouse and touch pad

Anyway, what Reg mentioned is also a very good idea, the amount which you can take from storage is proportional to the number of systems you have.

For the battles, I'm just saying that with almost equal fleets (size, experience, etc), there shouldn't be any extreme outcomes (one side is completely wiped out, while the other loses 10% of ships). Maybe to take average result of 10 battle simulations.

Monopol as a military tactic would be possible if there was an interstellar market where each race would offer quantity and price. Minor space faring races would also be trading some resources. Now I sell 10k of some resource and drop the price to 0

I will browse the forum so I don't ask questions that are already asked/answered.

I will also try to re-learn some German (it's on my to-do list for a while ) so I can discuss it on german forum.

multiplier: so asking and getting the answer is the best way

interstellar storage: up to 20000 it's depending on number of own systems (for more see here: http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... lare_Lager)

for battles you might think about equipollent opponents used in movies to increase eagerness. Please think more about (technical) superiority for these 99% winning odds.
Battle itself: each single beam and each single torpedo is calculated, and for each shoot the effect of accuracy (hit or not), shields and than hull, even when 500 ships inside the combat ! ....and crew experiance has an not to small effect.
In my mind (and in SirP also) there shouldn't be no a exact forecast before combat runs . After done some combats with Omega (or others) you gavered experience about some odds .

here a simple illustration (not part of BotE.exe)



"You drop the price to 0" ....you flood the commodity market.....ingame selling resources should not be a neverending option to get credits
...Monopol as an military tactic...might be nice, but not implented yet...we have thousand of wishes, too ...... atm and for you: use sabotage as an non-military option which can outplay other empires...with good intelligence majors (Rotharian, Cartare, Omega) http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... nenverbund quiet easier than with other empires, but they can do also by using (much) more intel buildings


"re-learning German"...maybe by reading BotE-Wiki ......tell me about sites you'll need bi-lingual, so I might do a translation (my to-do list since years but demanding much time...nowadays I put new content into Wiki in (my bad) English because re-translation into German is easier for me )

hi generic, welcome to the boards.

reg's english isnt that bad... (it's much better than my german)

some good and new ideas here, i'll add them to an ideas database so as not to loose them, am glad the starbase upgrade idea has made it into the internal test version...it just goes to show that with a bit of patience, the team can achieve anything...well maybe not to beat the game on the hardest level