Improved Battle Sounds thread

/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11802-sound-design



Custom Video settings thread

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?696-Suggestion-Custom-Video-Settings&highlight=custom+video+settings

yes big thanks for that

SpaceTroll wrote:
yes big thanks for that

Sticky it please?

SpaceTroll wrote:
yes big thanks for that

Thank you just willing to help

For me, it would be:



1) Additional cards and phases to go with them, to give the battles an variety of possibilities, much like Magic: The Gathering. For example, I have heard of Retreat cards, Hero Cards, Terrain Cards, Event Cards, and Formation Cards.

2) Passive defense systems, similar to MOO2. Once the infrastructure is built, an planet generated it's own fighters, mecha, minefields, and so forth automatically. Having these defenses upgrade with technology improvements would be nice, too.

3) I would like to see battles divided into three stages, one that sets the tone for the battle, the next being during the battle itself, and finally an epilogue stage where consequences that result from the battle are determined, such as loot or political fallout.

4) Technology system similar to MOO2 and Sword of the Stars, with racial picks that can guarantee or deny specific fields, including an Creativity pick that ensures access to all technology.

PASSIVE PLANETARY, ORBITAL, & SOLAR DEFENSES

+Minefield (like we have in Stars!, in that the field grows larger over time. Some also have side effects, like slowing the speed of enemy forces.)

+Satellites (These orbit the planet, and use sublight thrusters to set interception courses.)

+Starbase (General purpose, player researches technology to improve each property seperately. Eventually transforms into a dyson sphere? )

+Enforcers (Police cutters that automatically handle small-time pirates and light enemy invasion forces in the solar system. Very weak, but automatically replenishes. Sublight. Influences system morale.)



PLANETARY

+Missile Bases

+Energy Platforms

+Mass Drivers

+Militia (free infantry based on population & loyalty)

+Garrisons (Infantry)

+Fighter Bases (Fighters, for both space & air combat, can't wander far from the planet.)

+Armor Hangers (Mecha & Tanks)

+Energy Barrier

Battles divided into stages for specific phases.

STAGE I - PROLOGUE

Prelude Phase (Random effect that sets the tone of battle.)

Terrain Phase (Cards that are available because of terrain features.)

Formation Phase (Augments abilities of ship classes & attack phases.)

Scouting Phase (Opportunies and enemy composition is revealed here.)

Strategy Phase (These allow you to manipulate what phases you use.)

Objective Phase (Select a goal, that if done, would give an reward.)



STAGE II - BATTLE

Event Phase (Random effect)

Hero Phase (Cards available due to hero.)

Station Phase (How the local station contributes to the fight.)

Orbital Phase (Cards due to planet-based defenses.)

Fighter Phase (Formation & tactics specific to fighters.)

Long Phase (Long-range attack phase)

Medium Phase (Medium-range attack phase)

Short Phase (Short-range attack phase)

Assault Phase (Used for bombarding planets and ground invasions.)



STAGE III - EPILOGUE

Aftermath Phase (Semi-random effect)

Victory Phase (For the winner)

Punishment Phase (For the loser)

Retreat Phase (Adds details about your retreat.)

PRELUDE CARDS

Day of Peace - Officers of both sides agree to an ceasefire, due to an intense desire for peace. This prevents the battle from happening at all. There is an real-life example in one of the World Wars, where the troops in the trenches suspended the war for Christmas, and mingled with each other.

TERRAIN CARDS

Planetary Ring: Fighting nearby a planet with rings is an risky business, as entering the ring would result in being pelted with huge numbers of fast-moving rocks and ice. When this card is in play, an random selection of phases that both sides are participating in would be choosen. These would have ships fighting by the ring(s), and inexperienced ships could actually wander into the ring, sustaining damage as they do so. Veteran units are more likely to avoid being forced into the ring. For intents and purposes, the planetary rings cause Kinetic damage. This card opens up other phases for trickery involving planetary rings.

RETREAT CARDS

Bargaining Chip: Holding someone or something that the enemy holds dear, the fleet can be allowed to withdraw without being destroyed. Unfortunately, these circumstances are not likely to be always available, so make it count.



On this day...: May be played to stir emotion in the user's populace and the enemie's, by playing on the tragedy that resulted from the enemy's attack. When this card is played, the likelyhood of the user's ships being destroyed during retreat increases, but the emotional sway is also increased proportionately.

Stargem wrote:
For me, it would be:



1) Additional cards and phases to go with them, to give the battles an variety of possibilities, much like Magic: The Gathering. For example, I have heard of Retreat cards, Hero Cards, Terrain Cards, Event Cards, and Formation Cards.

2) Passive defense systems, similar to MOO2. Once the infrastructure is built, an planet generated it's own fighters, mecha, minefields, and so forth automatically. Having these defenses upgrade with technology improvements would be nice, too.

3) I would like to see battles divided into three stages, one that sets the tone for the battle, the next being during the battle itself, and finally an epilogue stage where consequences that result from the battle are determined, such as loot or political fallout.

4) Technology system similar to MOO2 and Sword of the Stars, with racial picks that can guarantee or deny specific fields, including an Creativity pick that ensures access to all technology.

Most or all your suggestion have already been summarised under general terms

well after playing this for a couple of days there is 1 main thing i would have liked to see.

something to give you some idea of what you are up agaisnt, because unless i am mistaken, at the moment you see an enemy fleet, and can choose to attack it, but you have no idea if that fleet is 1 scout or 12 leviathans... until you're committed to the death. not necesarily asking for exact mention of the other fleets size, merely something that gives you some small indication of it's rough size, before commiting.

gwalahad wrote:
well after playing this for a couple of days there is 1 main thing i would have liked to see.

something to give you some idea of what you are up agaisnt, because unless i am mistaken, at the moment you see an enemy fleet, and can choose to attack it, but you have no idea if that fleet is 1 scout or 12 leviathans... until you're committed to the death. not necesarily asking for exact mention of the other fleets size, merely something that gives you some small indication of it's rough size, before commiting.

When you select the fleet it does give you the size of the fleet that you up against. Concerning more intel this has been suggested under Diplomacy/Espionage.

Ingame Clock/Alarm

/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11957-an-ingame-clock

Added a suggestion for salvaging technology from space battles.



/#/endless-space/forum/29-archives/thread/13493-suggestion-ship-salvage-and-technology

More alerts needed - so colony fleets don't idle once arrived at destination, plus others

/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11801-more-alert-messages

Would benefit from discovered planets info window - should be able to click on planet in list and go right to system view

/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12568-discovered-planets-data-window

Added a Suggestion to Bigger Ship Types to "Exploration and Expansion", this includes a ultimate mobile planet at the end of the tech tree.



/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11812-add-bigger-ship-types-to-exploration-and-expansion

realism (for immersion!) - at least give me a plausible way to forget about wonky physics



1) planet types follow the single biome planet trope, especially the "jungle" type, which breaks immersion for me.



i recognize the need for a very limited set of planet types but a bit more variation wouldn't hurt. real planet types vary wildly, depending mostly on the amount of radiation they receive from their star and their mass (so an earthlike planet with more than 5 or less than 1/2 earth masses is implausible, for example). also, habitable planets seem to be extremely common, while in reality finding an even remotely habitable world (i.e. habitable under heavy and continued use of technology) would be a pretty lucky shot.



i miss really exotic planet types such as water worlds (with oceans in the hundreds of km deep), methane ocean worlds (titan for example), carbon worlds, cthonian worlds (gas giant cores close to their star, kind of like lava worlds, but they are far too easily colonized in my opinion). i also miss the wide variety of possible atmospheres (and the lack thereof), and the wide variety of different types of biology (this game seems to expect earthlike biology everywhere, while in reality even rather slight differences in the chemical composition of the surface might lead to very different kinds of biology that would be much harder to exploit).



also there might be habitable moons around gas giant (as depicted in avatar).



2) colonization and exploitation possibilities seem arbitrary



it is very unlikely that humankind will extract meaningful amounts of resources from planets before it can do the same with asteroids. since asteroids have negligible gravity it would be much easier to extract resources. planets are deep gravity wells and starts from the surface to space need much more energy. also unlike asteroids, planets usually have an internal structure that makes access to certain resources much more difficult. the same goes for the much less massive moons, which would presumably be the next target after asteroids and before planets. anyway, i can't see how i can have the technology to get billions of people to another planet before i can set up a robotic resource extraction infrastructure on an asteroid or a small moon.



i also can't seem to get how a planet can go from completely uncolonizable to being able to host billions of people in one technological step. i imagine planets to become more and more habitable as technology progresses, instead of this black-and-white-mechanic. also pop growth seems to be extremely fast. when i contemplate a sci-fi-universe i see the homeworld as the absolutely uncontested center of an expanding race for quite some time.



3) unreasonable techs



black-hole-mining anyone? totally unnecessary uber-tech. there are so many real things to exploit and so many technological hurdles to overcome in space, why resort to this kind of complete magic? especially when it's surrounded by much more modest kinds of technology. the presence of this kind of technology shows a lack of understanding what a black hole even is.



also, i can invest lots of research into weapons and superluminal propulsion, yet i can't utilize my fantastechnology to build a simple relativistic weapon: just accelerate even a few tons of mass to 0.9999c and set it on a collision course with your rival's homeworld and get the popcorn. this would presumably be in the power of just about any interstellar civilization and result in a cold war standoff in space...

We have Varied races, it seems to me there should be a more of a variation in the technologies as well.



As it stands it seems there are only maybe 4 (maybe more, doing this from memory) unique technologies for each race. I would think that there would be more. maybe triple that to 12 or more.





Also why not make the pirates a minor race. It would make sense that they would have bases, even the 18th century pirates had bases, though ones hard to find. Perhaps their bases could be in hidden places that you would need special research to discover, and the bases would keep producing ships till they were dealt with.

Nuclear Bombs

I have asked one of the moderators to sticky this, but he said they don't "believe" in sticky-ing. I think it would really help. Anybody who agrees, please PM a moderator to ask. You can find the moderators here:

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showgroups.php

Also, please note my player faq here:

/#/endless-space/forum/34-faq/thread/14116-davea-s-player-faq

Great post Jetkar! Very useful to keep track of ideas posted.



Thanks



I'll post one later, but now i really need some sleep, hahaha.

I would like to point people to my Research tree UI suggestion:



/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11405-discussion-research-tree-ui-problem-w-proposed-solution.

Diplomacy

- Vassal States would be good, similar to Shogun's setup.



Combat

- Additional Fleet Support Mods. E.G. Aegis Systems: Defensive Systems protect the entire fleet (@20% effectiveness)

- Controllable camera angles during combat.

- More dynamic ship roles. Would be good if this was expanded upon (it is currently fairly simplistic in design)





Planetary improvement

- Ability to change order of que order (drag and drop).

- More moons around planets. Many planets have numerous moons, would be cool if that was reflected here. (Obviously would have to rebalance techs related to moons.

- Display the number of turns it will take to complete on the icon itself (can get tedious sifting through all the options late game on newly colonised systems).

- Summary of the effectiveness of certain planetary improvements (tells you what benefits would be gained and the maximum potential to be gained for that system). E.G. +16 / 52 Science. Get's a little dull and time consuming when you have to sit around trying to figure stuff like that out in your head.





Balance

- UE Dreads get a little too powerful? Factoring in racial bonus +40%hp, their racial shields +500 when combined with repair systems and repair cards. Not sure if anyone else feels the same way.

- Something probably needs to be done re: heroes. E.G. Getting a plus science + production hero (or even too) puts you at a major advantage at the start, given the massive boost to production it gives (one ability gives +25% by itself). Getting stuck with nothing but combat ones forces a player to aggressive (which is detrimental to some races) or puts you at a pretty severe disadvantage. Heroes are a little too powerful.