my custom ships wipe the AI's plate clean - everytime

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: JosEPh_II

taltamir wrote:That sounds a lot like the epic fail MOO3 had. Where you had to redesign all your ships every single turn!!!

No you didn't! [:-]

Only when major tech advance was achieved. And generally when you had several advances to combine for an new line. And you used the older designs for Piracy control, Antaran X Expeditions, and added system defenses. You could scrap them but they definitely had better uses. Go to the Atari MoO3 forum and read the Gen. Disc. sub forum thread Evon1.2.5.

JosEPh   [;)]

You "had to" in terms of "there was new micro advances in tech every turn that you could apply to your ship designs to make them better, but if you didn't redesign you would not benefit from the new tech"...
You could make do with outdated ship designs, but my point was that the system of a million tiny updates was made out of epic fail.

[BigWolfChris]

No idea if it's been thought of
But personally I would like to see a mixture of Gal Civ 1 and Space Empires IV with components

Basically put, there would be major advancements and minor advancements

Major advancements would be new components (or even major improvements to current components)
These would require redesigns and retrofits, and would happen now and again

Then you would have Minor advancements, which would be geared to improving efficiency of current existing components
These would not require redesigns or retrofits, since the improvement would be automatically added

For example:
For Lasers -
Titan Beam Lvl 1, Titan Beam Lvl 2, Titan Beam Lvl3
Lvl 1 would be the major as the discovery of the component, while Lvls 2 & 3 would be minor as improvements to the component

You could even expand this
Titan Beam, Titan Beam Improved Range, Titan Beam Improved Damage, Titan Beam Faster Fire, etc


You could even get general techs that increase efficiency of all related techs, like reactor output, or hyper drive energy use

End of the day, it's all math, and providing it's designed correctly, would be straight forward to do and would allow for the tech tree to be extended without much hassle in the area of ship or base design
Infact, you could keep the current components, but just insert minor techs into the tree, zero extra components, zero extra graphics, and with the advantage of allowing races to give minor improvements to ships without the overhead of redesigning or retrofitting

[taltamir]

@BigWolf: those are some very nice ideas. and I think they would work out nicely.
Just as long as the minor advancements are such that you don't benefit from a redesign (since the AI Would redesign, and you would feel like you are forced to constantly redesign).

This means increasing range and damage and maybe rate of fire.
but leaving size and energy unmodified.

[BigWolfChris]

Tbh, the thought is, size would remain unaffected, but energy would still get lowered, but at such a minor amount that would take multiple minor advancements to actually benefit from a redesign
At the same time, you could need 2 minors for the weapons energy efficiency, as well as a minor in reactor efficiency for a retrofit to be worth the effort

End of the day, games are about numbers, it's just a case of getting the right numbers into play to make it all work and stay fun

[taltamir]

the problem with lowering energy:
1. It requires a redesign
2. With a directed energy weapon lower energy is the same as higher damage. What do I mean? you are actually improving efficiency, efficiency determines what percentage of energy goes to damage and what is wasted. If you improve efficiency you can either keep the same specs and do more damage... or you can reduce size and power consumption and do the same amount of damage.

This isn't just realistic, its also a better game design mechanic.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: taltamir

the problem with lowering energy:
1. It requires a redesign
2. With a directed energy weapon lower energy is the same as higher damage. What do I mean? you are actually improving efficiency, efficiency determines what percentage of energy goes to damage and what is wasted. If you improve efficiency you can either keep the same specs and do more damage... or you can reduce size and power consumption and do the same amount of damage.

This isn't just realistic, its also a better game design mechanic.

Plus with energy reduction you eventually hit a brick wall...that being zero...so that no improvement can be made. Granted Zero should not be possible, but...you'd eventually have to have a stopping point.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

ORIGINAL: taltamir

the problem with lowering energy:
1. It requires a redesign
2. With a directed energy weapon lower energy is the same as higher damage. What do I mean? you are actually improving efficiency, efficiency determines what percentage of energy goes to damage and what is wasted. If you improve efficiency you can either keep the same specs and do more damage... or you can reduce size and power consumption and do the same amount of damage.

This isn't just realistic, its also a better game design mechanic.

Plus with energy reduction you eventually hit a brick wall...that being zero...so that no improvement can be made. Granted Zero should not be possible, but...you'd eventually have to have a stopping point.

The 100% efficiency... where 5000 watts of power yields 5000 watts of energy delivered to the opponent.
100% efficiency is theoretically impossible to achieve though.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: taltamir

ORIGINAL: Shark7

ORIGINAL: taltamir

the problem with lowering energy:
1. It requires a redesign
2. With a directed energy weapon lower energy is the same as higher damage. What do I mean? you are actually improving efficiency, efficiency determines what percentage of energy goes to damage and what is wasted. If you improve efficiency you can either keep the same specs and do more damage... or you can reduce size and power consumption and do the same amount of damage.

This isn't just realistic, its also a better game design mechanic.

Plus with energy reduction you eventually hit a brick wall...that being zero...so that no improvement can be made. Granted Zero should not be possible, but...you'd eventually have to have a stopping point.

The 100% efficiency... where 5000 watts of power yields 5000 watts of energy delivered to the opponent.
100% efficiency is theoretically impossible to achieve though.

Good thing I don't believe in theories, eh? [:D] I tend to look at things with the 'Impossible just means no one has done it yet' mentality. You never know till you try.

Still in game, getting to 100% efficiency in any aspect should be the end game and very, very hard to attain.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

ORIGINAL: taltamir

ORIGINAL: Shark7



Plus with energy reduction you eventually hit a brick wall...that being zero...so that no improvement can be made. Granted Zero should not be possible, but...you'd eventually have to have a stopping point.

The 100% efficiency... where 5000 watts of power yields 5000 watts of energy delivered to the opponent.
100% efficiency is theoretically impossible to achieve though.

Good thing I don't believe in theories, eh? [:D] I tend to look at things with the 'Impossible just means no one has done it yet' mentality. You never know till you try.

Still in game, getting to 100% efficiency in any aspect should be the end game and very, very hard to attain.

Impossible as in "time travel is impossible" and "magic is impossible" type of impossible.

[BigWolfChris]

I see what you mean Tal
But I was thinking with efficiency it would happen rarely and still be fairly small, in order to need a couple of minor techs to make a difference
But range + damage modifiers would be a must
Hell, you could even call that efficiency modifiers, but wording it as the same amount of energy give higher range and damage

It's basically the same thing (equal energy = more range/damage) either way, but to think about it, keeping the energy number per component would, as you say, would probably be better

I'm wondering if it would be worth allowing modifiers to make components cheaper as well?
But I've not played since 1.03, so I don't know how the new economy handles, I remember it being stupidly easy then, so if it still is, a price modifier would serve little purpose

[Anonymous]

[Deleted by Admins]

[adecoy95]

if you dont think that the ai can handle custom ship designs, try not designing them, use the regular ships. if you still want to design your own ships, but dont want to steamroll the ai (as bad), try building ships that do not go over the size of the base non custom ships of the same class

[diablo1]

ORIGINAL: lordxorn

GalCiv 2 AI designed the latest ships.

It also designs ships based on what it has discovered the player is using so if you build heavy torpedo ships it will counters with heavy ECM equipment. GC2 is the best 4x game out there as far as AI goes. It's one of the few games that "learns" as the player custom builds more radical ship types.

[Aures]

Well I wouldn't go too overboard about GC2's AI system. Sure it can be challenge, but only if you let the AI cheat to a ridiculous extent (before I stopped playing I was using furthest difficulty setting to the right but one). With ships the main way the AI cheats is by being able to build much bigger ships than you can. I will admit the AI did seem fairly good at designing many different ships to make the most of the available space (though it often built ships that were way over-engineered for what was needed, actually counting against the AI economic advantage). DW could probably learn something about AI designed ships from the GC2 system.

If you set the difficulty to whatever puts you on par with the AI in GC2 you can whoop it easier than you can DW's AI. In DW the only way you can get the AI to cheat is by giving it a better starting position relative to you and raising your own corruption.

Having code that causes the AI to alter their designs in response to your weapon loadout is cool, but it is just a special piece of code related to the rock-paper-scissors weapons system. Afaik the AI in GC2 doesn't have any generalised learning capability. The ability to play rock-paper-scissors hardly qualifies it as the best 4x AI.