a few ideas on eras, scale and research

[EvilleJedi]

As for a decision on the era of play, personally I would shoot for post ROTJ. This has the most balanced navies on each side and a larger variety of ships and also makes a lot of sense in universe. Certainly playing during the rebellion could be an option, but honestly it's been done too many times. The clone wars also works as an era of play, but has a limited focus. This would probably be a game option or could just be based on the player race. (we will need to see what restrictions we can put in)

 

After some experimentation with importing ships and scales I'm wondering what might be the best decision on scaling between vessels and map objects.

 

the ratios I want at minimum to maintain are the following (acceleration will be modified to meet these)

 

1) all ships are scaled correctly relative to one another, no questions, the engine supports it, the overlay is there, everything will be to scale as much as possible, but the base unit of scale will be determined based on how the engine responds to a larger scaling of vessels and other objects.

 

2) planets to look sufficiently massive need to be at least 10x the size of the largest ship (excluding deathstars) so probably around 200 km would be a good size, but this will have to be experimented with because of how the camera will react to them.

 

3) ships weapon ranges will be roughly 10x the length of the largest ship (so if the executor is roughly 20km then the range of heavy turbolasers will be around 200 km in game) I'm willing to play with this, but ranges will be no shorter than 40km for heavy weaponry. (which is what I have in HW2 right now) the ranges could be a lot longer, but I don't know how well a player would be able to manage this or how it would look. ships would need to move closer in to engage all of their weapon systems, so firing from extreme range would only be for picking smaller targets off or harassing economies. ECM would also be a significant factor in shortening weapon ranges.

 

4)gravity wells can be either equal to or larger than the maximum weapon range. Defensive stations will have similar ranges to ships and planets will have shields vs bombardment so the threat of planetary bombardment/invasion is only an issue with significant force or minimal defenses.

 

5)inter planetary distances just need to give an impression of space so they can be arbitrarily determined as a multiplier of the gravity well final size

 

I am not opposed to using the phase lanes in the game simply for gameplay reasons, having open connection maps would be more in universe (maintaining gravity wells would be necessary though)

 

As for research and tech trees... Knowing this goes against decades of 4x gameplay I would opt for a very limited tech tree. Each player would start out with the capability of building most frigate sized vessels or less and most of the weaponry would be available (turbolasers, ion cannons, torpedos). Instead of a very broad tech tree with lots of options I am thinking of a limited tech tree that gives a very focused unlocks for specific ships or abilities (superlasers, interdictors, baradium charges, or specific vessels). Upgrades like armor upgrades would be considered to be fleet wide investments in the armada rather than 'finding a new type of armor' These upgrades would be a lot more expensive and time consuming, it all depends on where you focus your cash.

 

As for empire building techs, these could be considered more of an investment in infrastructure rather than a 'new technology' for example focusing on droid production will give you an incremental boost in build speed and could be thought of as simply buying more droids or upgraded droids for all your factories, rather than 'discovering' a new type of droid, gameplay wise it actually doesn't change much, it is just how it is worded in the description. The classes of ships would be controlled by signing contracts with ship builders to build ships for you (for example, placing an order for star destroyers requires a contract with the KDY corporation, more like a liscencing fee instead of research, this doesn't make a lot of sense in the trilogy era, but afterwards makes a heck of lot of sense) Other Empire building could be useful like implementing the tarkin doctrine as a 'culture' tech. so again not changing the effect of the tech research or upgrade just how it is described.

 

I'm going to need help implementing this changed tech tree, and coming up with ideas for individual upgrades. so again please go to the warlords forums if you want to help.

 

questions, comments?

[RogueJedi]

1) all ships are scaled correctly relative to one another, no questions, the engine supports it, the overlay is there, everything will be to scale as much as possible, but the base unit of scale will be determined based on how the engine responds to a larger scaling of vessels and other objects.

Proper scaling would be awesome

 

I am not opposed to using the phase lanes in the game simply for gameplay reasons, having open connection maps would be more in universe (maintaining gravity wells would be necessary though)

I assume you mean where the Vasari can just jump directly to any planet (with the structure)? I'd actually think not using that would be more accurate. Due to the nature of how hyperdrives work, you can't just make a straight line to any destination, you have to worry about objects in the path, hence why most travel is done through the so-called 'lanes' jumping from planet to planet. I think the only happy medium here would be to have more connected planets unlike the current games where a straight line could be made between two planets, but you can't jump directly there.

 

As for research and tech trees... Knowing this goes against decades of 4x gameplay I would opt for a very limited tech tree. Each player would start out with the capability of building most frigate sized vessels or less and most of the weaponry would be available (turbolasers, ion cannons, torpedos). Instead of a very broad tech tree with lots of options I am thinking of a limited tech tree that gives a very focused unlocks for specific ships or abilities (superlasers, interdictors, baradium charges, or specific vessels). Upgrades like armor upgrades would be considered to be fleet wide investments in the armada rather than 'finding a new type of armor' These upgrades would be a lot more expensive and time consuming, it all depends on where you focus your cash.

There's two routes you could go. You could start from pre-clone wars and have research be what brings you through the clone wars tech, trilogy tech, etc. Or this route could be taken. Personally I'm for the former (or a choice, if possible).  This route would work well though I think, massive upgrades (fleet-wide armor, shield, etc) that actually make a difference would be a refreshing change than those that don't seem to help at all (where greater numbers always defeats higher upgrades.) Though one example of where this route becomes a problem is things like fighters. I could be wrong, but after playing around a bit, there seems to be a hard limit of two types of fighters allowed.. anything more than that and it's like it the data parser can't handle it, complaining of missing attributes that are right below it. Hence there would need to be an upgrade path of TIE Fighters -> Interceptors and I haven't even figured out if that kind of squad upgrade is possible.

 

As for empire building techs, these could be considered more of an investment in infrastructure rather than a 'new technology' for example focusing on droid production will give you an incremental boost in build speed and could be thought of as simply buying more droids or upgraded droids for all your factories, rather than 'discovering' a new type of droid, gameplay wise it actually doesn't change much, it is just how it is worded in the description. The classes of ships would be controlled by signing contracts with ship builders to build ships for you (for example, placing an order for star destroyers requires a contract with the KDY corporation, more like a liscencing fee instead of research, this doesn't make a lot of sense in the trilogy era, but afterwards makes a heck of lot of sense) Other Empire building could be useful like implementing the tarkin doctrine as a 'culture' tech. so again not changing the effect of the tech research or upgrade just how it is described.

This sounds very cool. When I've often though of re-imagining Rebellion, the thought of companies producing the ships via contracts and the like always comes up. Even to the point of letting players BE one of the companies, expanding and defending their holdings, etc. Though playing as KDY or the like is likely out of the scope of this mod.

[Segur]

Sounds great! And I agree that would be the most balanced time period.

[Faerdan]

Hey all, first post.

 

I've been reading up on Sw tech and found this:

 

"In order for hyperdrives to function, a starship must be free of a planet's gravity well. Safety cut-offs restrict the hyperdrive from activating, and the gravitic presence also interferes with a nav computer's ability to calculate accurate coordinates."

 

Obviously that fits perfectly with Sins' gravity wells.

 

"The Empire took advantage of this weakness of the hyperdrive and developed artificial gravity well generators. These devices send out powerful waves that disrupt the mass lines in space, thereby simulating the presence of a large stellar body such as an asteroid or a planet. The presence of such simulated mass prevents ships in the area from engaging their hyperdrives, and also drops ships already in hyperspace back to realspace."

 

You could just rename the phase lines to mass lines.

 

Seriously though I'm in support of keeping the phase lines, they help to keep a large game sane (you basically have "front lines" so that you only have to defend certain areas).

 

Hyperspace beacons  could also be an option (replicating the ability of the Vasari phase stabiliser). The beacon contains navigational data for each planet that contains one, allowing safe hyperspace travel between them.

 

Another idea would be to give some ships (perhaps capitol vessels) the ability to drop a Hyperspace beacon, which operates until it is destroyed. It could add some very interesting gameplay.

 

 

I like the idea of getting rid of "Research" and instead having Military and Economic "Development".

 

Players could purchase (well lease would be a more appropriate term) a KDY factory. An idea would be to have the factory drain all resources from a planet while manufacturing. The more a planet produces the faster the ship(s) would be constructed. This I believe would also fit with the universe as you would need to have a whole planet dedicated to manufacturing to produce such vessels quickly. There could also be a base resource draw, an operation cost. It would make an interesting game mechanic, you'd have to dedicate entire worlds to military manufacturing instead of economics. An upfront charge would also have to be paid for each ship (this would in essense be a payment to the KDY corporation for the actual manufacturing, the resource draw is the raw materials needed).

 

Before manufacturing you would have to invest in the blueprints for the vessel.

 

Of course you could invest in Development to make ship manufacturing faster. These could be Military Development in the form of more advanced manufacturing droids which are more efficent (therefor the make better use of the resources they get) and/or Economic Development to increase the production of the planet (and thereby increase speed).

 

 

I'm up for a good discussion on this.

[adm_silence]

Gravity Well..... makes me think of Interdictors. The ability of one of Advent's tactical structure (Phase ???, I forgot the name) except with a permanent effect until unit destroyed.

 

And the need for more squadrons... is required..

[DontGetCrabs]

As for a decision on the era of play, personally I would shoot for post ROTJ. This has the most balanced navies on each side and a larger variety of ships and also makes a lot of sense in universe. Certainly playing during the rebellion could be an option, but honestly it's been done too many times. The clone wars also works as an era of play, but has a limited focus. This would probably be a game option or could just be based on the player race. (we will need to see what restrictions we can put in)

 

After some experimentation with importing ships and scales I'm wondering what might be the best decision on scaling between vessels and map objects.

 

the ratios I want at minimum to maintain are the following (acceleration will be modified to meet these)

 

1) all ships are scaled correctly relative to one another, no questions, the engine supports it, the overlay is there, everything will be to scale as much as possible, but the base unit of scale will be determined based on how the engine responds to a larger scaling of vessels and other objects.

 

2) planets to look sufficiently massive need to be at least 10x the size of the largest ship (excluding deathstars) so probably around 200 km would be a good size, but this will have to be experimented with because of how the camera will react to them.

 

3) ships weapon ranges will be roughly 10x the length of the largest ship (so if the executor is roughly 20km then the range of heavy turbolasers will be around 200 km in game) I'm willing to play with this, but ranges will be no shorter than 40km for heavy weaponry. (which is what I have in HW2 right now) the ranges could be a lot longer, but I don't know how well a player would be able to manage this or how it would look. ships would need to move closer in to engage all of their weapon systems, so firing from extreme range would only be for picking smaller targets off or harassing economies. ECM would also be a significant factor in shortening weapon ranges.

 

4)gravity wells can be either equal to or larger than the maximum weapon range. Defensive stations will have similar ranges to ships and planets will have shields vs bombardment so the threat of planetary bombardment/invasion is only an issue with significant force or minimal defenses.

 

5)inter planetary distances just need to give an impression of space so they can be arbitrarily determined as a multiplier of the gravity well final size

 

I am not opposed to using the phase lanes in the game simply for gameplay reasons, having open connection maps would be more in universe (maintaining gravity wells would be necessary though)

 

As for research and tech trees... Knowing this goes against decades of 4x gameplay I would opt for a very limited tech tree. Each player would start out with the capability of building most frigate sized vessels or less and most of the weaponry would be available (turbolasers, ion cannons, torpedos). Instead of a very broad tech tree with lots of options I am thinking of a limited tech tree that gives a very focused unlocks for specific ships or abilities (superlasers, interdictors, baradium charges, or specific vessels). Upgrades like armor upgrades would be considered to be fleet wide investments in the armada rather than 'finding a new type of armor' These upgrades would be a lot more expensive and time consuming, it all depends on where you focus your cash.

 

As for empire building techs, these could be considered more of an investment in infrastructure rather than a 'new technology' for example focusing on droid production will give you an incremental boost in build speed and could be thought of as simply buying more droids or upgraded droids for all your factories, rather than 'discovering' a new type of droid, gameplay wise it actually doesn't change much, it is just how it is worded in the description. The classes of ships would be controlled by signing contracts with ship builders to build ships for you (for example, placing an order for star destroyers requires a contract with the KDY corporation, more like a liscencing fee instead of research, this doesn't make a lot of sense in the trilogy era, but afterwards makes a heck of lot of sense) Other Empire building could be useful like implementing the tarkin doctrine as a 'culture' tech. so again not changing the effect of the tech research or upgrade just how it is described.

 

I'm going to need help implementing this changed tech tree, and coming up with ideas for individual upgrades. so again please go to the warlords forums if you want to help.

 

questions, comments?

 

Okay this is all very basic and would need to be expanding.  This would let you use all eras naturally with the economy and techtree.

 

Example Tech Tree:

 

                          Old republic era

Ship<            Venator-class Star Destroyer  ------------------ Star Destroyer

                          1000g  500m 250c                          5000g  2500m 1000c

                       

Weapon<      Heavy Turbo Laser -------------------------- Heavy Turbo Laser 2

                        500g  0m  500c                          2500g  250m  2500c

 

 

Income<      Double income rate ------------------------- 2.5x income or 3

                15000g  10000m  5000c                    some huge ass amount of stuff here

 

 

 

okay now that I have that the price to build the ships needs to be leaps and bounds diffrent too, if like a vent is 2000c 1000m 250c  the SD would need to be like 3 or 4 times that much to build.  Now the SD would have HTL's and HTL2's.  The HTL2's would do like 2 or 3 times to whatever ships you want to be Old Republic era.  And the Vent only has HTL's.  This would be more natural turn of events causing the older ships to linger about but fade away.  Then just repeat in some way.

 

 

I have a few other ideas to make it more natural.  Use the alliance system already in place.  Then use the star/planet system to make the rebel alliance have a corellan star, whatever star for mon cal, and a star for the emp,  the corellan star would be smaller, as would the mon cal, and the emp star would be pretty big.  That way the corellan player would need to hook up with the mon cal player.  Have a star chock full of resource rich planets but full of pirates making it the nal hutta system or kessle system.  Once again needs to be expanded upon.

 

That would open up all sorts of fun gameplay mechanics.  You could make many races where correllans can only make smaller frigets and such.  Bothans could use scouts, mon cal could bulid heavy ships.  Making each race depend on each other to take the self sustained empire.

 

Also the phase lanes are no problem in fact that keeps it more real imo.  Just make a lane from each star to every planet in the star system, boom problem solved.

Edited February 23, 2008 by DontGetCrabs

[GabRaz]

A question about the GUI Evile, I noticed when building frigates/cruisers/cap ships that there's a limit of 9 choices for each class of anything (buildings as well). considering the Warlord's extensive build list, is it still possible to have that massive choice or do you need to cull the herd?

[EvilleJedi]

I posed that question to the Devs on how we extend the UI to more slots, still waiting on a response

[GabRaz]

If 9's the limit, what would your choices be for a post-ROTJ setup?

[EvilleJedi]

the capital limit of 5 and the limit of 2 fighter types per ship is the harder limit, they pretty much have to fix those to get this mod to work well.

 

basically the ship list for smaller vessels (gunship through heavy frigate) will be divided up with the duplicate ships going to one faction or another. Right now there will be very few ships that are missing from the warlords list in that size.

[GabRaz]

the capital limit of 5 and the limit of 2 fighter types per ship is the harder limit

 

Ouch, didn't realize the selection box was so strict.

[Doc]

Alright so heres my idea for part of the Civic side of the Imperial research:

 

 

 

Staff Training Splits into two segments

 

 

First segment.

1)Naval Academy Institutionalized

a) Naval Academy required to become Naval officer- Damage increase for ships in a fleet by 20%

 

2)Enlistment Propaganda

a)A Large amount of credits are put into recruitment of navy personnel. All strike craft build time and cost reduced due to larger amount of personel pool.

 

3) Training facilities Expanded

a)With the creation of newer training facilities, more soldiers are trained increasing the ability to man ships decreasing build time by 10%

 

4) Recruitment of Subhuman Races

a)With the need of personnel arising, the Empire now allows the recruitment of all subhuman races. The increase in population pool results in an additional 20% reduction in ship build time.

 

Segment two

1) Sector patrols Increased

a)With an increase of patrols, and an overall decrease in crime -Allegiance production increases

splits into two more segments

 

subsegment one

1a)Moff Council size increased

a)In attempt to gain control of more sectors, more higher Echelon Moffs are created, each sector becomes more reliant on itself, generating an increase of 2.0 Allegiance of all planets

 

2a)Moff Staff Selection Process

a)All imperial staff  go under extensive reviews, and are forced to attend a school to ensure required skills to assist Moffs in duties are met. Efficiency of Moff Orders are increased, resulting in superior production. +10% Credit increase

 

3a)Imperial Interim Ruling Council

a)Creating the New Council, brings all the leaders of the Empire together.  Resulting in the empire being focused toward common goals. Allegiance production increased dramatically by 25%

 

subsegment two

1b)Goods Seizure

a)Moffs now sell all seized goods of Smugglers and pirates, placing a small portion of the income into Imperial coffers. +10% credit income

 

2b)Internal Investigations

a)With regular audits of Moffs, illegal activities slightly diminish and all productivity is increased by 5%

 

3b)COMPNOR

a)With the resurrection of the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order. COMPNOR is able to maintain morale and loyalty within the Empire at a level never before seen. Production, Allegiance and Credit increased by 20%