Those were simple Raptors, with 1 beam and 1 torp. Low level at that. That was one of the few ships I managed to design (along with a mining ship and an assault ship, plus redesigning the colony ship). It was the only warship I could build Building ships is rather easy, I just queued them and forgot about it. I had the industry, and there's no resource costs or upkeeps, so churning them out is no problem. I was going to use them to attack (speed=1.4), but then I got busy the whole weekend...

Having pre-made designs would be a good idea. Especially for fast games. Shouldn't be too hard to have basic designs for each hull; for example, a Raptor would only have level 2 components, etc. The player could then edit those designs and upgrade components. But this is probably in the to do list.

One day we'll have to compare designs. I had FFR's (Fast Frigate, Recon) that sound kind of like what you had. they were my recon ships sporting a single torp and warp 1.6 engines.

Factories could decrease growth rate, while farms would increase it; probably by the same amount, so that each farm would cancel out the effect of one factory. Something like a 5% penalty to the GR per. So if you have 10 factories and only 4 farms, you get a 30% decrease in your GR (sy from 3% to 2,1%). Power Plants too, with a smaller penalty?




You could introduce Credits, which you would get from pop. Ships would cost upkeep in credits, so that the larger your pop, the larger the flet you can have. Or simply cap the number (affected by size) of ships you can have according the your pop count. Encourages you to expand and grow your pop.

I've been away for a bit, due to busy period at work. So have not had much time working on the game since the last tests.

warning: HUGE WALL OF TEXT BELOW


I'm aware of this and will look into a way to make that information more user friendly, and making it easier to see what will happen if you build building 'X' in terms of how it influences system output (industry, research, food, power)

yeah, 350 is way low. Maybe I'll change this to something like 2000. and MAYBE giving starting players 2 colonyships instead of one?

It does not make much sense, but I can't really add 14 structures either, that would fill up the system. So if there IS to be bonus structures from additional col modules, then it has to be lower than the "initial" count. Also as said in an Enterprise episode, new colonies will use ALL of the colony ship, so it's conceivable the base ship will provide with much materials of the initial structures =) maybe I'll change it so that each additional col module (up to 3) gives you an additional factory (helps get systems up and running a bit faster)


It was done so players could easily build colony ships without waiting 20 turns at first.. But you're right, colonymodules are way to cheap now.

Ok

Already got a task for this.


Already implemented this (but it was not in the latest build), think the numbers are 10%, 15% and 25%


How about on the system button/box that is your faction color and holds the system star icon and name?


Currently the deuterium plant is what allows ships to transfer deuterium to the system, but then again if that is it's ONLY purpose and it's built in every system then it's not really needed and could be removed from the game.. I'll have to see think about it, see if it might have other purposes, etc..


Hadn't thought about it yet, for the time being everyone gets an identical system with a "main" terran planet.

Yeah, I do need to implement some kind of upkeep. Maybe add a industry upkeep cost. For example your raptor/oberth class could be a 15 industry upkeep per turn. If this is distributed trough all your systems (if you have 3 systems, and 45 upkeep, 15 industry is deducted from each) it will hurt your small new colonies instead of your large industrial centers. So far I'm thinking each system will deduct it's maintenance cost from the system that built it. If that system is destroyed the ships would then automatically start deducting it's maintenance from the system with the most industry surplus.


I do have plans to add this but it's not been scheduled until version 0.4.9, which is 5 releases from now. There will be a handful of ship designs, that will show up in your template list when you've researched the hull + all components in that design.

Especially it will be useful for learning how stuff works (you get a tanker spec ship when you get the bussard collectors, miner when you have mining lasers + cargo components, troop transport when troop module is discovered, a slow defensive ship, a quicker attack ship, a better explorer that has multiple sensors).




The population definitely needs to do something useful. I was thinking of making output of research and industry dependent on population in some way.
For example I could cut factory output in half, and the other half would require 800 million population to work fully. Let's say 1 Factory gives 100 industry.
So a system with a population of 5 billion with 5 factories you would get 500 industry from the factories by default, and another 500 from the factories because they are fully staffed (5 factories taking 800m people each would require a population of 4 billion to work at 100%). so in total 1000 industry
The same system with 5 factories but 1 billion people would give 500 industry by default (from structures) and an additional 100 (1 structure is fully staffed by 800m people). So in total: 600 industry.
The numbers above are just for illustration, research could work in much the same way. Making population do something useful is scheduled for version 0.4.7

I would not really wan't to add credits to the game at this point, maybe in the future. But population could be used to determine the number of ships you can have. If you've clicked the ships info window, there is a table and each ship does have a "crew" count. I was thinking something along the lines of systems producing "crew" and when you construct a ship it would require a full crew before getting launched.

Not implemented yet, but during combat you can loose crew members (especially if your shields and/or armor goes down). loosing crew will make ships less efficient. Ships will get new crew when visiting friendly systems (maybe only systems with a shipyard, or maybe an academy structure(will make ships built in that system have more experience, which gives a bonus) or something like that). There will also be a sickbay module which will reduce casualties in the fleet while doing combat.

Thank's for all the feedback, I really appreciate it. I've made some planning changes to the releases ahead.

The current release I'm working on is 0.4.55 (bugfixes from alpha testing, misc. improvements, colonization fixes as described above, implementing ship upkeep (no more zerging ships).

That means what was going to be the next release (0.4.6) that holds the online part that allows you to register 1 trekwar account that can be used with ALL servers/games will be delayed by around 25 work hours.

0.4.55 will probably not be released, but the next test will be of version 0.4.6 (59 work hours from now). After 0.4.6 is out, much of the manual jobs of setting up test servers will disappear, and Testing can become more regular (at least every release, and each release is around 25-28 (maximum 30) work hours).

As always you can see what is in store for the next releases here: https://www.toodledo.com/tasks/public.p ... 2f960d2cd4

That'd be a good idea.
A single colony ship is not a terrible option either, since you'd have to choose between developing your homesystem or spending the next x turns building another colony ship, in case you find 2 juicy systems nearby. That would only be interesting if developing a system as early as possible would be a good option though (which it is if you have another empire close by).



That's why I think 7 structures is way too much for a single module I guess it's true one could see the power plant as coming from the ship, and even the "farm"; so 1 factory per module would be good, in that for (quite) an extra cost you get the system to develop way faster.



That's a good idea.

How about when you hover the mouse over one structure in the build list, the production bars change to those that would be displayed if you built that structure? Or keep the current bars as they are and show the modified bars in a mouse-over/right-click pop-up window or something.




I'd say you should start with 2 scouts and 1 colony ship, but since system composition is disclosed without visiting them, it's not very relevant.




That's kind of dangerous. If you get hit in a couple of your shipyard systems, it might shut down your other shipyard systems, thus reducing your ability to defend yourself.




Or you could play with upgrades, when a system got to 800m pop you'd get the option to upgrade a Factory to lvl 2 _or_ a Lab to lvl 2 (which would staff that structure). After queuing the upgrade, it'd become unavailable in the build list, until the system got to 1600m pop, and you could upgrade another, etc. That way you would use/keep upgrades to production facilities, and use pop for system development.
The same could obviously apply to Farms and Power planets, lowering the threshold from 800m to 400m or something.

The galaxy is a dangerous place
The third option I considered was that each system has a slider that sets a kind of "tax", for this then goes to a empire wide maintenance pool. For example if you set it to 5% then that system will give 5% of it's industry to the pool. If that pool hit 1 ships would need to degrade in function some way as a penalty. Or maybe starship production could stop if that pool went to low.
But with this approach you will gain a large amount from passive systems that are not building anything at the moment (by setting their "tax" very high).

So far I think taking upkeep from the system that built the ship is the best solution, and it's very easy to implement in the game. I guess ships could NOT change home systems if their home systems are deployed, but then you can end up with a fair deal of "free" ships that require no maintenance. If your core industrial systems get's taken out, I guess it should sting a bit


Not sure if it would be fun/meaningful to manually update stuff from just level 1 to level 2. Already removed the levels from the base structures so users won't have to do that kind of micro management.
But I will update the system view, so it's clear where stuff is coming from (example: how much industry comes from buildings, population and morale bonus). And I'll definitely try to display the bars above with the change in them when you hover over a structure. And generally re-do the bars so they are easier to use, since now it's kinda hard to tell if you have a surplus of 5 or 50 by looking at the bars.

How do people feel about Starbases having an ability (you build a special module in the starbase) that allows it to fire automatically at ships in adjacent squares? (light/medium damage) This would make their role as defensive points more prominent, as intercepting incoming enemies by trying to end up in the same tile as them at times can be a bit tiresome I do remember yelling "KEEP STILL!" at the AI in BOTF at times

Or they could create a ZoC around them, where ships would have their speed reduced (warp inhibition field?). It would help you prepare your defenses.

What happens when industry goes negative from building too much stuff with industry upkeep (structures, ships)? What gets affected first, structures or ships? If ships get their stats reduced, which stats? Don't ships recover their stats automatically when orbiting a friendly system, thus negating this?
Will this not make building even more factories a necessity? While ship upkeep will reduce production rate in shipyard systems, I'm not sure this is a totally good thing. Once a shipyard system gets choked by ship upkeep, you'll must build other shipyards until all your systems are shipyard systems.

Ships requiring crew to be built, or a command point system (like in MoO2) based on number of shipyards and starbases (giving them another purpose) could be alternatives.
BTW, will starbases also cost industry upkeep? If ships do, it'd probably make sense they would too.

Or you could just increase the cost of ships, particularly larger ones, and restrict the use of at least torpedoes to larger vessels - unfortunately I didn't get to test the possibility of a swarm of torp equipped (lvl 2) Raptors bombarding systems.




I guess it's as much fun as building any structure in the system, for 20~30 times. By making it "colorful", say with a Basic Industry -> Advanced Industry -> Industrial Center / Basic Lab -> Advanced Lab -> Research Center progression, you get to make system development a bit more interesting. It would even make it easier to implement some form of "pollution" that would affect GR if that was found to be something interesting - with "heavy industry" causing more pollution than "light industry".

With the approach you mentioned, how do you decide if it's a factory OR a lab that gets the output boost each time the system gets to each pop threshold? Also, will a specific factory or lab get the boost? Meaning, if a factory is destroyed or scrapped by the player, can you lose the bonus in case that was the structure where the "full staff" was allocated to?

Or, better IMO, reduce the output of factories and scale the costs of structures down - a factory costing 1450 and a scout 485...
Maybe setting all production outputs to 40 - farms and power planets already are - would work as a good starting point; labs 55 -> 40 would slow down research a bit which would be good, and factories 78 -> 40 would work if structures would have their cost cut in half (and industry upkeeps too).
A system with fully staffed factories (relatively developed) as mentioned above would then have about the same industry output as currently.

In the research window, when you click on a tech you haven't researched yet, I think you only get to see the icons of items that will be unlocked if that's their last pre-requisite; you don't get to see icons in all the pre-reqs for items. Is that correct? And if so, is that intended?
(if an item requires Bio 3 and Com 3, you only get to see its icon when you have one of the pre-reqs already researched and click on the other)

Techs already researched don't show any icons of items unlocked by them. I'm guessing that's intended.

There is already plans to make subspace disruption field at some point, it will probably be a space structure like a starbase or mine field.


Haven't thought much about this yet, have not started the upkeep task yet. I guess if a system went to negative industry it would be unable to build more ships, which then would prevent a zerg of medium ships to occur. The ships stats reduced I was thinking about was maybe to prevent that ship from getting any repairs, and maybe do worse in combat.
Forcing you to make "all" your systems into shipyard systems would not be ideal.. Another way could be to limit the number of ships, for example allow you to have: 10 ships + (6 ships per system owned), but not a big fan of that idea.

Increasing the relative cost of ships would be a good way to avoid too many ships in play, but it would still allow people to just build a lot of cheap ships early in the game and zerg another player.



The way I was thinking of doing this would be quite simple, the population would just give the additional bonus each round. So both factories and research would get bonus for the same population. Those 800 million people would not be bound to a particular factory building, their presence would just allow that factory building to get a bonus output, and the same 800 people could also give the research lab it's bonus. Just a simple way to make population actually matter, and give a general boost to all system structures.


Yes, selecting a tech only shows you what new components/structures you get for researching that particular tech (last prerequisite). This is also why clicking already researched techs show no items.
I guess adding "grayed out items" that were required by that particular tech in addition to the "color ones" could be somewhat helpful?

If some of the sentences I've written seem weird and makes no sense, it's just because it's 04:00, and my brain feels funny

As long as rush building with ore is restricted to the industry output of the system
Speaking of ore, the Ore Refinery is not required for ore "from the planet" but is required for ore from asteroids... a bit weird.

It'd be nice to make use of the surplus industry in systems that are not building anything. Those are probably systems without a shipyard though, and to be consistent, only shipyards should be able to service ships. I guess one could imagine them building spare parts for ships when industry is idle, so a mixed solution could be used - you'd have a "support" value equal to half (or some other portion) your surplus industry in non-shipyard systems, and your shipyard systems would have to pay the rest of the upkeep (in industry upkeep). That way you make use of wasted industry and don't choke shipyards.




You already get stat reduction when fuel is low, don't you?




Or instead of systems owned, population count - kind of like the population support in BotF.

This might also be an issue with ship design. The fact that a torp launcher takes up one slot just like a beam weapon; or a colonization module.




This favors a more or less "balanced" approach to system development, at least when pop is not topped out - 2 factories and 2 labs get more output increase than 3 factories and 1 lab, when you hit 1.6m pop.




I was wondering if you shouldn't get the icons for all the pre-reqs. So that you know what to research to get a particular item. Without taking notes one game so you can use them the next

Since it's a subspace disruption field, will it also affect subspace scanners, and scanning in general?
I'm guessing it affects everyone.

Hi Erlend,

How's the development coming along?

Still on the subject of pop.

Population could generate officers/crew, like we had once in Supremacy - a % of total pop, different for each race. Since ships have a Crew stat (planned), and there aren't any resource limitations to building ships, this could be one such limitation. The Naval Academy building could increase the number of crew generated per turn on that system.
Not sure how crew is going to work, but I guess it can die in battle (my guess would be when the *hull* is hit, after shields and armor have been overcome), and the ship's efficiency will decrease accordingly. Crew would have to be replenished in one of your systems, and the ship's experience level could be affected in case losses were too high.

Population and troops.

Not sure why the troop cap depends on the number of planets and not on pop count, but I think it'd make more sense if the cap would be something like 1 troop per 1 billion pop; structures could expand that cap.
Also, the recruitment rate could also be something like, one troop is automatically created whenever pop reaches a new billion; that is, at 5 billion pop you get the 5th troop in the system, at 6 billion you get a 6th, etc. That means defenses grow (by default) at the same rate that the system does (its pop, more precisely); recent colonies are more vulnerable.
Structures like the Military Outpost can increase the troop generation rate (like they already do) BUT at the expense of population growth - something like that _planet_ not getting any new pop, or getting its growth halved or something (depending on number of troops created? -X pop per troop?) when troops are being created.
Each colonization module would carry one troop, taken from the system where it was built; that means you can only build colony ships in systems that have troops available (and pop, if it's implemented that the colonization module also costs pop to build). Recent colonies would be more penalized for constructing colony ships.

"Troops", while a representative name, seems kind of odd; 1 troop, 2 troops, ...

I would differ on the subject of troops. I can see support costs as a better way of limiting the number of troops. After all, there are many small countries (North Korea, Israel, heck South Korea has slightly more manpower than the US does with only 1/6th the population) that maintain large armies.

Currently, in the game, troops depend on the size of the system. What's the size of Israel relative to the US?
Notice that each race could have a troop modifier, making warlike races be able to hold more troops in their systems. My point was that population level is probably more indicative of army size than number of planets. You could have a system with 9 Arctic planets after all, which would have the same troop amount as 9 Terrans, while having way less pop.

I'd rather see support costs. Population makes as little sense as number of planets.

Support costs for troops? Hmm. Not really a good option IMO. If troops would have to be actively recruited (built) by the player, sure; as it is, being automatic, not really.
Population does make more sense; after all, it's where you get the essencial for recruiting troops - people. Also, you need more troops to protect more population; protecting lots of space if it is mostly empty is moot.
Anyways, it was just a suggestion.

Russia (Siberia), North Korea (everything outside of Pyongyang), USA (Alaska), Canada (Northwest Territory, Yukon, Suskatuawan, Alberta, Manatoba) why would anyone want to protect empty territory.

Upkeep cost is a far better and more realistic course to go.

I agree with you, like I said, IF recruitment was optional. Besides, cost you what? There are no credits in the game. Industry upkeep?

Empty territory is not exactly brimming with troops, is it? The territory itself, not the nation as a whole. (*a* star system vs the entire empire)