Design Projects - suggestion for a new design mechanic

[WiZz]

So what? I will configure this politics, I will know its advantages and disadvantages. Аbout any difficulty of beating AI you say? [:D][:D][:D]
About ready designs... I will play with it a few games, learn them and what next?

[Falokis]

ORIGINAL: WiZz

So what? I will configure this politics, I will know its advantages and disadvantages. Аbout any difficulty of beating AI you say? [:D][:D][:D]
About ready designs... I will play with it a few games, learn them and what next?

So, you complain when a game has a difficulty setting and you put it on easy mode? That's basically what you are saying.

[Falokis]

ORIGINAL: ehsumrell1

Hello Texashawk;

I am one of the beta testers for Elliot and the Distant Worlds series. Before this goes any
further I just want to make one thing known. I'm not sure how often you've surfed this forum,
but if you have over time, you would know that Elliot takes ALL comments and ideas mentioned
here VERY seriously. So do us beta testers.

In most cases, the many improvements that have occurred in the latest expansions to DW have been
due to ideas from 'serious' forum members as well as players of the game. As a small example, the
creature contest (why we have the SilverMist) was open to the public. Also, fighters and carriers,
influence spheres, and other features have been implemented into the game from public ideas.

Don't forget policies like extermination or resettling. I begged for those options since the game's release and they eventually put them in.

[Tophat1815]

ORIGINAL: Falokis

ORIGINAL: WiZz

As for me, not all features, that implemented in game from forum ideas, were great ideas. Many questions about useless of sphere of influence, about radius of colonization *special facepalm from me for this feature, thank God, we can turn it off* and at last customized designs. And I don't see, that play with this feature became (will become) more challenge and interesting. AI was weak and it stays weak. So, we come to the main question: for what customized designs were implemented?
About work above. No doubt, nice work and it will become a new one more instrument/exploit, that let to beat AI with comfort and without hard work.

I disagree. If you can set a policy for each race, like the idea in this thread, the AI should be putting out much better ships. Most of the time when I whip the AI, it is due to having better designs. Just doing the optimized designs (from the other thread) for a few races made the AI much harder to beat.

This is my thinking as well.

I am guilty of making cutting edge tech designs and ina way that is taking advantage of the ai and its inability to do so. Being able to work through policy,gets the job done on a more even playing field.

Wizz.....no real clue what you expect realistically and i thought Falokis answer was direct to your question.

[Shadow Tiger]

Last one for now, I just wanted to get a mockup with the industry and research components up. Here for fun and kicks is an armed gas mining station.

One thing I'm wondering though is how to tell a station how much firepower to use? You don't always want to give it a fixed size, or be 50% max tech size or the like. So then, how does one determine how much firepower to use in this case? Easiest way would probably be a pull down on the weapons bit, but I was hoping to avoid something like that.

Ah well, not too worried over it at the moment.

And WiZz, what do you mean useless sphere of influence? I rather like being able to both see where my territory ends, and know that other empires can't build in my territory unless we make a treaty or are at war.

Colonization radius is a personal favorite of mine, it makes things challenging. Without it I could send a colony ship to the other size of the galaxy with no qualms. Instead I colonize as far as I can, take bad worlds if they'll extend my colonization range, or simply invade planets (indy or otherwise).

Design policies would put the AI ships on more equal footing with player ships, instead of always being '5 shields, 8 weapons, 4 thrusters' per ship. The tech changes but the ratio rarely does within the same role. Right now (without using optimized designs) all a player has to do is add a few more of each and it's guaranteed superiority. That's a lack of challenge to me.

Glad you like my diddling so far. It's been a fun use of a few hours here and there. [:)]

[Igard]

Some really good brainstorming going on here. I'm liking the policy mock ups Arcatus and Shadow Tiger.

I think it is rather unfortunate that this is all getting talked about when custom designs were the intended 'new direction' for making the AI stronger.

I'm thinking that custom designs should be used to create 'Flagships' and special designs.

These ideas here, should be the 'new direction' in my opinion. I just wonder if this is all a bit too late for Elliot and Erik to do something about it. Perhaps we're looking at something for Distant Worlds 2...

Anyway, good work.

[Shadow Tiger]

I think the idea behind custom designs was probably similar in intent. They require a whole lot of work to get every design created, but use code and game assets which were already there. It's my opinion that while customized designs make things better, they add far too much work for the average player.

I also believe from comments made, that the idea is to collect designs for every race and have them as part of the base game. So they would be there from the start. I can think of good and bad reasons for this way, but for working with limited resources it's a pretty good plan. Right now I think custom designs are working more like manual designs which load for everyone at game start. Bet it's a lot harder using them as a basis of tech research than first imagined.

Obviously I'm a bit biased about this new idea of course. Crossing my fingers that maybe it'll wind up in Distant Worlds some day. As for too late, who knows? That depends on their plans for the future of Distant Worlds. Another expansion? A sequel? Bugfixes and tweaks for the forseeable? Who knows. Heck, there might be another expansion in the pipe line already. [:D]

[Sithuk]

I see the new AI custom designs feature working perfectly fine alongside this Design Policy screen. The custom shipsets save me having to create my ship designs anew every game. The AIs can also have strong ship/base designs. All the custom ship design feature needs now is a randomiser so we don't know in advance exactly the ship designs we will be facing for each race.

The ship design policy screen offers a high level way to create the ship designs. It therefore offers something different than the custom shipsets that are loaded at the start, but only to the player. If I understand correctly, the custom shipsets feature recently introduced will work just fine with this Design Policy screen.

Where there could be a useful overlap is that the Design Policy screen would be a wonderfull tool to create the shipsets easily in the first place. It takes a long time to create a shipset at the moment.

Some excellent work in this thread. Thanks guys.

[Sithuk]

I see the new AI custom designs feature working perfectly fine alongside this Design Policy screen. The custom shipsets save me having to create my ship designs anew every game. The AIs can also have strong ship/base designs. All the custom ship design feature needs now is a randomiser so we don't know in advance exactly the ship designs we will be facing for each race.

The ship design policy screen offers a high level way to create the ship designs. It therefore offers something different than the custom shipsets that are loaded at the start, but only to the player. If I understand correctly, the custom shipsets feature recently introduced will work just fine with this Design Policy screen.

Where there could be a useful overlap is that the Design Policy screen would be a wonderfull tool to create the shipsets easily in the first place. It takes a long time to create a shipset at the moment.

Some excellent work in this thread. Thanks guys.

[Litjan]

ORIGINAL: Sithuk

I see the new AI custom designs feature working perfectly fine alongside this Design Policy screen. The custom shipsets save me having to create my ship designs anew every game. The AIs can also have strong ship/base designs.

Yes, great for the initial designs. The problem the AI faces, though, is that it will never upgrade it´s designs based on the custom designs. So while the first designs are really great, it will revert to it´s old "mediocre" designs for all the automatically generated ones after that...

Jan

[WiZz]

ORIGINAL: Shadow Tiger
And WiZz, what do you mean useless sphere of influence? I rather like being able to both see where my territory ends, and know that other empires can't build in my territory unless we make a treaty or are at war.

Try to play in ROTS and compare game difficulty there and in Legends. Legends is more casual with this feature.
In general, it's very sad, that DW runs from hardcore to casual [:(]

[onomastikon]

ORIGINAL: Sithuk

I see the new AI custom designs feature working perfectly fine alongside this Design Policy screen.

As a wise person above already stated, the current custom design feature would still be good for very specific subroles (such as a certain kind of capital ship). I would still much prefer to use the idea Arcatus had and the others here have elaborated upon because this would be dynamic, would take every contingency into account (which custom designs cannot), would greatly help the AI to be more varied, in addition to being elegant -- and it might STILL work fine with pre-loaded custom designs.

[Registered55]

I never understood why the system in space empires 5 couples with Balance mod wasn't used in DW from outset,

space empires 5 had a base set design (%) modifiers, but the rest was then dynamic,

the balance mod came along an created some very basic but good starting designs for the AI, then used % modifiers to dynamically build on the base design, but the Base design was not allowed to be altered, the AI could only dynamically modify the other say 60% for example.

it worked quite well, thanks to some hard work from the people behind the balancing mod, the system was pretty impressive in the end.

I'm still surprised that that system was never looked at from word go, most of the design system in Space empires 5 could be worked out by just looking at all the DATA files.

baffling.

Static designs will never work, because they will always inherit the static feeling.
Dynamic design will never work because AI will never be good at it.

SE 5 + balance mod tried to bring both together, give the AI a good start in direction, but then allow the dynamic system to be Influenced by % modifiers which the community can be the ones to balance, i also believe there was a rule set aswell with SE 5, that stopped the AI doing anything stupid in designing, again which was editable..... in fact nearly everything on Space Empires 5 was editable..... if only turn processing was so damn SLOW!!!!! i would of really got into it, if there was a game that needed Multithreading that one has to be number one for me, turn processing time could take as long as 9 minutes on my computer 3.3GHz...... shame!

anyway.... LOL

[Tophat1815]

ORIGINAL: Arcatus

In the recent patches we have seen the introduction of the optimized designs.

I don't like them.

It is too much work, too complicated and too many pitholes. The response on the forum has been very limited, and only a few shipsets has been distributed. Maybe more shipsets will come once the patch looses it's beta tag, but maybe not..

Too me it feels like the optimized designs is a step in the wrong direction, and I know that the developers here take our suggestions seriously, so that is why I have spent quite some time to think trough a new take on the designs.

I have called it "Design Projects"

Attached is a photoshopped image of the new suggested window.

I hope my illustration and the text makes sense.

My goal is to illustrate a simple scalable system where each class of ship has one project. The AI will then base designs on the project. When new tech is researched the design is regenerated based on the rules set by the project.

These rules can be explained as this:

1) Attempt to reach desired speed - but don't add engines to more than x% of total ship cap
2) Attempt to reach desired protection - but don't add shields to more than x% of total ship cap
3) Add x amount of industrial and cargo components
4) Add weapons
5) Add lifesupport and generators to support space and energy requirements

New tech will be added, generators reduced (or increased), lifesupport managed - all without the need of player interference.

This is not intended as a replacement for the existing design interface - it is an addition to it. It should still be possible to finetune more advanced designs, but the basic player (and more importantly - the AI) can use this systematic approach to generate diverse and competitive designs.

I think I'll stop there. I don't want to make this a larger wall of text than it already is.

Is there anything that is unclear? Is this just a silly idea?

never post when you are half asleep.[:'(]

[Arcatus]

ORIGINAL: Tophat1812

It would be nice to have the ability to do both policy setting for ships s White tiger has suggested and Arcatus design projects as well.

Why? The end result is exactly the same.

Customized designs and a project/policy would overlap neatly and could be used side by side.

[Tophat1815]

ORIGINAL: Arcatus

ORIGINAL: Tophat1812

It would be nice to have the ability to do both policy setting for ships s White tiger has suggested and Arcatus design projects as well.

Why? The end result is exactly the same.

Customized designs and a project/policy would overlap neatly and could be used side by side.

because i'm an idiot at times...also I like redundancy on my starships........ Was too tired and thought I read something totally different[:D]