Home » Stars! Clones, Extensions, Modding » FreeStars » make PP what they are suppose to be
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Sun, 07 August 2005 12:42   |
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LEit: Have you considered making a rules editor tool for advanced players for freestars?
Being able to actually change game variables on the fly should make the rebalancing process go much more quickly....
g.e.
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"When the newspapers have been read, the TV sets shut off, the cars parked
in their various garages. Then, faintly, I hear voices from another star.
(I clocked it once, and the reception is best between 3:00 A.M. and 4:45
A.M.). Of course, I don't usually tell people this when they ask, "Say,
where do you get your ideas?" I just say I don't know. It's safer."
-P. K. DickReport message to a moderator
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Mon, 08 August 2005 09:09 |
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There is certainly a case for balancing the PP, CA and JOAT races a little more effectively. All of us that have played Stars! for many years know this (and this is why games are created with restrictions like CA with no TT and JOAT but no NAS).
In the Freestars code, I would like to see the hull mounted mass driver added since there will have to be additions for it made in the server side. This way, if it is decided to implement, the code will be mostly done and only has to be modified. The cost and research levels of such a part will have to be determined since I would not want to see it available until other races already had MD 7 capabilities - the advantage of a PP using a ship to packet planets too early on are obvious. This part will need to be limited as well to a MD7 so that ships will not have the capability of flinging packets at greater than warp 10.
The race wizard costs can be modified to help balance these 3 PRT's more effectively in version 1.0 - Even though Freestars will be a clone of Stars!, there is no reason to leave this issue undone. Version 1.0 should address some of the very easy items that need change.
Ptolemy
Though we often ask how and why, we must also do to get the answers to the questions.Report message to a moderator
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Mon, 08 August 2005 10:58 |
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Conceptually, the idea of ships with mass driver capability is nice and it jives with a lot of scifi scenarios.
However, in game terms it would be devastating...
How could a player possibly make any preps to counter a mass driver ship in orbit? ... short of destroying the ship???
The planet would absolutely no warning concerning the lauch of the packet except when it hits... and even so, this would be true of all planetary orbits which are within the distance of (md^2)/2 ly's.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Mon, 08 August 2005 14:23 |
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 dethdukk |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 200
Registered: June 2005 | |
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Everyone Knows that to launch a packet from a ship, you need minerals on that ship, so instead of being able to make a "Packet Scout" You could make it so the PP would need to build a special ship, only one mass driver allowed, with a limited amount of cargo capacity, and you need to launch it all at once. This forces them to have to run back and forth from target to mineral loading zones, Or to have a large fleet of transports with them, to beam minerals to the packet ship. Also, no cloaking ability, even with an overcloakership in the fleet. All they have is engines, some thousand kt of space, and a driver. Easy to see, easy to kill, just target the unarmed ships. What do you think? Oh, and it takes up a design slot.
If you cannot love, you will always hate, and in hate there is only death.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Mon, 08 August 2005 20:05 |
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| Orca |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 1 |
Messages: 148
Registered: June 2003
Location: Orbiting tower at the L5 ... | |
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| dethdukk wrote on Mon, 08 August 2005 11:23 |
Everyone Knows that to launch a packet from a ship, you need minerals on that ship, so instead of being able to make a "Packet Scout" You could make it so the PP would need to build a special ship, only one mass driver allowed, with a limited amount of cargo capacity, and you need to launch it all at once.
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Everything except the "all at once" part would be easy to make using the mod file. That would require code changes. (Firing packets from a fleet may require code changes as well, I'm not sure, and I'm not fully up to date with what's been implemented thus far).
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This forces them to have to run back and forth from target to mineral loading zones, Or to have a large fleet of transports with them, to beam minerals to the packet ship.
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Cargo capacity is summed up per fleet, so you'd just merge a bunch of freighters.
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Also, no cloaking ability, even with an overcloakership in the fleet. All they have is engines, some thousand kt of space, and a driver. Easy to see, easy to kill, just target the unarmed ships. What do you think? Oh, and it takes up a design slot.
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Completely disallowing cloaking for a fleet based on one ship would require code changes.
[Updated on: Mon, 08 August 2005 20:08]
Jesus saves.
Allah forgives.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Mon, 08 August 2005 21:27 |
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| crr65536 |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 180
Registered: June 2005 | |
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| Orca wrote on Mon, 08 August 2005 20:05 |
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Also, no cloaking ability, even with an overcloakership in the fleet. All they have is engines, some thousand kt of space, and a driver. Easy to see, easy to kill, just target the unarmed ships. What do you think? Oh, and it takes up a design slot.
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Completely disallowing cloaking for a fleet based on one ship would require code changes.
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I think dethdukk meant not that the cloaking would be disallowed, but rather that the "mass driver" would be heavy enough to make overcloaking unusable. Better find yourself an SS ally! 
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Mon, 08 August 2005 21:59 |
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| dethdukk |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 200
Registered: June 2005 | |
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| Quote: |
I think dethdukk meant not that the cloaking would be disallowed, but rather that the "mass driver" would be heavy enough to make overcloaking unusable. Better find yourself an SS ally!
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yes, thank you. Or rather the ship, as the PP would be able to put the normal Mass Drivers on. I am suggesting you only add a ship, not a new type of mass driver...
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Cargo capacity is summed up per fleet, so you'd just merge a bunch of freighters.
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And having done that you would launch the entire fleets mineral supply, if you put in that you have to launch all the minerals. Though I guess that would require a new type of mass driver, since the driver determines how much you launch and not the ship. Otherwise you would be draining entire worlds of their minerals. Or can you make the ship determine it?
[mod edit: fixed quotes]
[Updated on: Tue, 09 August 2005 02:10] by Moderator
If you cannot love, you will always hate, and in hate there is only death.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 00:01 |
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| dethdukk |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 200
Registered: June 2005 | |
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<quote>other person's text</quote> (replace less-than signs and greater-than signs with square brackets).
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Thanks. I didnt know how to do quotes, so I just did [quote] in front of it.
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How many resources would it cost?
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Alot. About as much as the highest Mass Driver. Perhaps 600? This would make it much more expensive than any other ship, and make them much harder to build. even if they are that expensive, it would be well worth it. I mean, pounding a planet from orbit with a warp 16 packet is well worth 1200 resources, is it not?
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Or are the stats given just for the hull? If so, it would break the pattern of hulls requiring only construction research.
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I had in mind the fact that if the PP is building them, they should have higher anyway. And also, the ship would require a LARGE energy source to run a mass driver, but that can be taken out, just boost the Con. to 15. Also, they would be able to mount ANY Mass Driver on them.
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Also, I think a mass higher than 300kT would be needed to prevent overcloaking - I was expecting more along the lines of 1000kT - 2000kT.
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I have not done cloaking testing yet, so perhaps you could offer a weight? Remember that it will have other transports and warships with it.
If you cannot love, you will always hate, and in hate there is only death.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 01:11 |
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| crr65536 |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 180
Registered: June 2005 | |
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With that high a mass (which is what I had in mind) I think that 0% cloaking would be all right.
BTW, not only would it be good to not have any electrical slots, but other types of slots would be good to avoid too IMO - for example wouldn't want someone putting MT langston shells on shield slots and getting cloaking.
Also, it seems like this sort of ship would make a very good bait: send it into space, accompanied by a cloaked fleet of warships, and the enemy thinks he's attacking an undefended but dangerous ship when in fact there's a cloaked fleet ready to destroy what he sends.  Of course, anybody can use this tactic - it would just be more impressive with this, I think.
Anyways, at this point I'm wondering what the use is now  . You can't really use it as a weapon, because now an enemy can see it coming and temporarily de-pop the target just like before a normal packet attack, and also because to get it close to a target you will probably need enough warships protecting it that you would probably be able to attack the planet anyways. It's mineral transportation abilities are limited - now you can get 21 more ly per year - whoop de doo! Is it for sending away the minerals of a planet whose orbit you have captured but can't keep? Or am I missing something (relatively) obvious? 
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 01:18 |
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| dethdukk |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 200
Registered: June 2005 | |
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I like the designs, but I think we should make one design, set for mid-game. Also, we need to balance the Mass/Cloaking/Fuel ratio. Too heavy, and it cant get anywhere. Too light and it's cloakable. you are right about resources, I forgot that ships can't use them. Perhaps we could set a limit as to how much it can launch at once? Make it so that it has to have a strong MD or it won't have enough of an effect?
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Would it be possible to set an innate cloaking level on a ship hull? For example set this ship with negative cloaking level? Or cap the cloaking in a similar way to starbases jamming?
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Perhaps when they figure out how the SS has 75% innate cloaking, they can make this ship the same way. -75% starting cloak? Though I believe the game bottoms everything out at zero...
[Updated on: Tue, 09 August 2005 01:20]
If you cannot love, you will always hate, and in hate there is only death.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 01:36 |
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| dethdukk |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 200
Registered: June 2005 | |
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| Quote: |
Anyways, at this point I'm wondering what the use is now . You can't really use it as a weapon, because now an enemy can see it coming and temporarily de-pop the target just like before a normal packet attack, and also because to get it close to a target you will probably need enough warships protecting it that you would probably be able to attack the planet anyways. It's mineral transportation abilities are limited - now you can get 21 more ly per year - whoop de doo! Is it for sending away the minerals of a planet whose orbit you have captured but can't keep? Or am I missing something (relatively) obvious?
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You can use it to throw minerals off your remote mining planets,
you can plant one in the middle of an opponents space with some Fighters and Remote Miners and then procede to deal out packets every turn without having to run back to your own planets. When you kill their HW you can use their minerals without colonising it (RM then MD the minerals). you can sit it on your worlds so you dont have to use resourses to transport your minerals(ships dont use resourses). You can restock on the fly by having on of your MD ships MD the minerals to the planet you're going to. I'm not sure how the turns go, but perhaps you could MD the packet from orbit, and then invade in the same turn. No losses, the planets terraformed, and there is minerals to boot. Did I miss any?
If you cannot love, you will always hate, and in hate there is only death.
[img]http://dragcave.net/image/XIJh.gif[/img] <--- is teh dragon!Report message to a moderator
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 01:45 |
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| crr65536 |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 180
Registered: June 2005 | |
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SS built-in 75% cloaking is easy: just add 300 cloaking units / kT to all SS ships. I don't think making it's cloaking negative would be fair, but making the effect 0% unless it has 75% worth of cloaking would be good - i.e. something like:
PP mineral launcher ships's cloaking units / kT = max (0, cloaking units / kT - 300)
which would subtract 75% worth of cloaking from such a ship but keep the cloaking greater than or equal to 0.
More details about cloaking units are discussed in the "Guts of Cloaking" page in the help file. In general, the more cloaking a ship has, the harder it is to give it even more, so that minimal cloaking is easy but 98% cloaking is (relatively) hard.
In general, I must say that the relatively high stats of these proposed ships suggest to me that there's something inherently unbalanced about them - more fuel than a Nubian, more mass than a remote miner, more armor than a battleship, more cargo capacity than a large freighter - you get the idea. When the figures get this high, I think something may not be quite right with the world.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 01:49 |
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| crr65536 |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 180
Registered: June 2005 | |
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| dethdukk wrote on Tue, 09 August 2005 01:36 |
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Anyways, at this point I'm wondering what the use is now . You can't really use it as a weapon, because now an enemy can see it coming and temporarily de-pop the target just like before a normal packet attack, and also because to get it close to a target you will probably need enough warships protecting it that you would probably be able to attack the planet anyways. It's mineral transportation abilities are limited - now you can get 21 more ly per year - whoop de doo! Is it for sending away the minerals of a planet whose orbit you have captured but can't keep? Or am I missing something (relatively) obvious?
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You can use it to throw minerals off your remote mining planets,
you can plant one in the middle of an opponents space with some Fighters and Remote Miners and then procede to deal out packets every turn without having to run back to your own planets. When you kill their HW you can use their minerals without colonising it (RM then MD the minerals). you can sit it on your worlds so you dont have to use resourses to transport your minerals(ships dont use resourses). You can restock on the fly by having on of your MD ships MD the minerals to the planet you're going to. I'm not sure how the turns go, but perhaps you could MD the packet from orbit, and then invade in the same turn. No losses, the planets terraformed, and there is minerals to boot. Did I miss any?
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With it's cost, though, how is it better than just building LFs for these purposes? The only one of those LFs can't do, that I can see, is packeting right before an invasion, but in the current Stars you can still do that, you just need timing.
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| Re: make PP what they are suppose to be |
Tue, 09 August 2005 04:08 |
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I'd be happy to drop the mineral transportation and the high fuel. No real need for those in the design itself as long as you bring supporting ships.
The armour costs I suggested are the same as BB for the first, and the same as DN for the second. Don't forget they won't be armed and they won't have armour or shield slots (MPS / Langston...) unless it can be marked for 0% cloaking.
Regarding the 'they wouldn't be much use' argument - I'd also add that you can sit them near opponent's worlds and then NOT packet them... If your opponent lifts the pop they just missed out on production for nothing... Of course you might choose to fire and then they'd wish they had lifted...
Also in terms of the comparative cost of defending one of these ships vs attacking a star - The fleet doesn't have to be as big - you don't have to worry about a starbase or additional defenders gating in; You don't have to reduce the minefields; You have a chance to reclaim the scrap from open space if you are defeated but freighters survive.
I suspect the armour of the ship may need to be increased further to prevent it being too easy to snipe - (we'd want to ensure it is less attractive than freighter chaff or else it will be a joke ship...)
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