Game play ideas = resource fields, mobile yards

posted on July 11th, 2012, 3:57 am

After reading your comments and ideas I still believe the best possible approach would be cheaper outposts not real star bases as we have em right now.

I also believe we all agree that those outposts needs to be weaker in both armor and firepower in order to avoid any nonsense SB rushes. The question is how:


So far we have only 1 idea regarding that:

- limited outpost zones on all maps.

I think the idea is not bad and could get improved with some additional rules or features. I can see great potential for it.

However at the same time it seems also to predictable. It wont take long for players to learn the different outpost spots on the limited amount of maps people usually play. It wouldn't play it's full strategic value because the places would be limited. Then again it could make people fight for those places to get an extra safe zone what also could become interesting.

1.) How about if people can place em everywhere. Where ever they want but therefore those outposts would be limited for each race by lets say maximum 3 stations. That would not just force the player to place his outposts carefully but also to plan ahead to decide where his next outpost would serve him best be it for his economy or offensive, defensive operations.

@Myles:
Don't worry. Due to the fact that these are outposts and not real star bases rushing them should become rather suicidal for the player & the station as it wont take to many ships to destroy them. Remember we wont wish for a new type of ultra strong star base. Besides the outpost feature would only become really interesting in team games.

2.) We could even go one step further if we want to. keeping it limited to 3 outposts like said before or let it be build able in unlimited numbers but therefore need to sacrifice one constructor per outpost while building it. Imagine the construction process to be like with a Dode turret with the exception that the constructor just vanishes after the outpost has been completed. So the player gonna have to pay for the constructor & the outpost. Sounds rather expensive as he could have build like 2,3 additional ships with that amount in the meanwhile.

So the player will have to think twice before he builds a rather easy to kill outpost in mid game. Of course after that he can build new miners and constructors out of that outpost. Build turret walls if he wants to before or after the initial construction of the post. But it certainly drains his ship production in the meanwhile.

That should make games a lot more interesting not just because we go away of the concept of having 1 single main base but also and that's the main key because it gives each player a ability to stay in the game even after the main base plus base mining has been destroyed who knows your allies might still be very much alive after all. (See base trading example of Besereme.)

At the moment player objectives are as follow:

A. Kill miners.
B. After successfully killing miners try to hunt down probably most likely outnumbered enemy fleet. GG
C. If first two objectives fail try to take out the enemy Star Base while keeping your own alive. Hunt down the rest. GG

With that Outpost in here base trading will become harder assuming of course the player didn't place all his outposts in his own base. At least it will delay the process allowing the other player to respond to such treats and that works both ways of course.

So what do you think people where do you see options to improve certain things. I've posted about 2 different possible things which could work.
and we also still got the limited outpost build spot idea from hellodean which also offers interesting aspects.

Perhaps we should unify for 1 specialized idea we like most and then try to enhance it by reason and balance as good as we can. Of course if you got more ideas then share em first with the rest of us.

posted on July 11th, 2012, 9:27 am

the limited build spot idea splits the map into territories that can be fought over, but the problem with that is it leaves no sneaky building it out of the way since the other player knows, "well its got to be in one of these few limited places"

making the starbase have an enormous "build footprint" (that is only relevant to star bases, other building can still be placed right next to it) lets the player still build one where ever they want on the map, and as many as they like, just not several all in one place

tbh i dont have a problem with how it is at the moment but if it did change i think this would be a good option

posted on July 13th, 2012, 11:00 pm

replies in green and red as its easier

I agree there's little precedent in the show for the suggestion, but that's also true of several fleetops things such as:

• Magnan super giant phaser cannon i dont know, kinda reminds me of the enterprise D refit
• Specially designed troopships actually the klingons had one, it was also coloured yellow and used as a cardassian ship iirc)
• Carriers - fighters had warp drives i dont think its that much of a stretch, most ships have an arangement of different shuttlecraft. even the defiant had a small craft and the defiant is little
• Repair ships well they have dedicated science ships and medical ships. stands to reason they would have repair ships (even tho most of the time they just tractor beamed them back)
• Pings - cloak detect was done using nets or plot devices (hard to implement gameplay wise) in the Alpha Q, DQ had pings in one episode, but voyager never made it home in fleetops
• Almost all Romulan ship designs

at the end of the day i dont think its that far of a stretch
on the up side, ds9 could move slowly with some technobabbling.
they used the manovering thrusters that kept it in place of orbit and just overpowered it iirc
the decades of time between canon and fleetops can hand wave some crazy stuff into the game.
indeed
add a couple phase plate rhienns if you can afford to, phase plates is great, cloak early to avoid hull damage to your rhienns. then you can recharge them with your singularity gen. and they will have phase plates ready very often with the energy.

yeah that was pretty good, did loose a few because the fed A.I out numbered me but i only lost 5 ships in the whole game, went for griffins rather than rhienns to mess them up abit with the jammer(damn thats a good ability )only built about 17 combat ships in the whole game

[Myles]

posted on July 13th, 2012, 11:22 pm

Last edited by Myles on July 14th, 2012, 12:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

man your post looks like a xmas tree with all that green and red.

point by point:

1) that enterprise d refit was in a non existant future of Q's making. the giant phaser was on a decades old ent D with 3 nacelles and a cloaking device. it's the sort of crappy ship you get in fanfiction.

2) Troopships: I've never seen a troopship in canon, only troop transports, which is just a normal transport, but with troops inside rather than other redshirts. troopships are specially designed for boarding in combat, troop transports aren't. troopships have never appeared, boarding has been done by regular ships.

3) shuttlecraft are nothing in comparison to fighters. fighters are more like runabouts, and the behemoth galaxy class enterprise D only ever carried 1 runabout and that was a temporary thing unless they purposely used inferior shuttles for other missions when they could have used a runabout. the only fighters we ever saw had warp drives and never launched from ships, they were just seen flying with the fleet (granted the fleet was already about to start fighting). the point is that there is no precedent for fighters, even if the technology for berthing fighters isn't that exotic, nobody has ever been shown to do it except for the ridiculous reman ship in nemesis, you know, the one built in secret by oppressed slaves that happened to be the most OP ship in the quadrant, the one with the giant death ray that could exterminate entire planetary populations, you know the one i'm talking about.

4) repair ships, that logic is terrible. they have a) and they have b) therefore they have c). that doesn't hold in general. what logic is there in assuming because they have ships dedicated to science and medicine that they must have a ship dedicated to repairing? how would the armada 2 style repair beam work anyway? armada 2 is sketchy on the details because it's a game. in canon there'd need to be a bit stronger technobabbling. if bits of a ship's hull are blown off, a beam would need to be replicating and positioning new hull metal to repair the damage. which is pretty neat tech to have. the only thing that has come close in canon has been a repair station. i think more likely (considering abilities and skills seen in the show) is that the tugs seen in the show carry some engineering teams to board damaged ships and help that way, while the ship is towed to a station for more serious repairs.

5) at the end of the day i dont think its that far of a stretch:

neither do i, seeing as we can use the decades gap to justify pretty much anything the devs add to make a fun game. if we can justify the list of things i said then we can justify whatever we want, as to make a good game you have to have things that are unprecedented in the show.

they used the manovering thrusters that kept it in place of orbit and just overpowered it iirc

words words words words words = technobabble.

kira shouted at o'brien, o'brien technobabbled the station, it moved

therefore stations being able to move is partially precedented.

EDIT: lol tired, forgot quotes

posted on July 13th, 2012, 11:57 pm

man your post looks like a xmas tree with all that green and red.

i know right! i actually decied to try something out in the editor and
you know what,there are way more colours than the 4 they have about the smilies

more valid things

yeah i have to agree with you on your points, the repair ship could always do the same thing as construction ships but that would probably look odd the way they would nip around back and forth



[quote=jamesdean]they used the manovering thrusters that kept it in place of orbit and just overpowered it iirc[/quote]
words words words words words = technobabble.

kira shouted at o'brien, o'brien technobabbled the station, it moved

therefore stations being able to move is partially precedented.

gotta love the technobabble

posted on July 14th, 2012, 12:02 am

Aren't fighters having warp drives fannon? We never saw fighters go to warp in Star Trek, they always flew at impulse, even in the episodes based around them.

posted on July 14th, 2012, 12:09 am

with even the smallest shuttles having warp drive it would be strange for them not to have any but im not that knowledgeable about the subject tbh.
tho for comfort ideally i think they wouldnt have crew isolated for so long on small ships. bad for moral and stop them going crazy. only going to combat when needed.

posted on July 14th, 2012, 12:16 am

That's not true though - many shuttles in TNG had no warp drive at all, despite outward appearance. They were explicitly said to have to travel at impulse speed http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_shuttlecraft

posted on July 14th, 2012, 12:21 am

i know right! i actually decied to try something out in the editor and
you know what,there are way more colours than the 4 they have about the smilies

yeah, you can use any of the named colours that you can use in normal html i believe.

the forum even accepts the hex codes (prefix them with #)

Aren't fighters having warp drives fannon? We never saw fighters go to warp in Star Trek, they always flew at impulse, even in the episodes based around them.

even though they didn't enter/exit warp on screen, we see they have the ability to launch attacks over multiple star systems (eg the cardassian weapons depot on byrma and gul evek's ship in preemptive strike), so we can presume they used warp to make the journey within their lifetime. we never saw an an akira class enter/exit warp afaik, but we can presume it can

the fighters were comparable to runabouts, able to operate on their own, as the maquis used them.

also if we accept that these are peregrines, then odo and kira chased a peregrine at warp in heart of stone.

posted on July 21st, 2012, 4:58 am

I think fighter craft might have limited range warp drives. However still the limiting factors would be your consumeables : Fuel Deterium / antimatter/ torpedo casings loads. As well as life of warp drive components . Plus Pilot comfort. A Earth example would be a roadtrip at70mph. Would you want to spend a month in a cockpit cabin the size of a "smart car" driving from the Pacfic Coast to the Alantic coast with out stopping? Or how about driving 200 miles per hour in a little smart car non stop on the same trip from coast to coast? The car just would not hold up to operational stresses placed upon it's components. So I feel a fighter would have the same limitations.

posted on July 21st, 2012, 11:22 am

I think fighter craft might have limited range warp drives. However still the limiting factors would be your consumeables : Fuel Deterium / antimatter/ torpedo casings loads. As well as life of warp drive components . Plus Pilot comfort. A Earth example would be a roadtrip at70mph. Would you want to spend a month in a cockpit cabin the size of a "smart car" driving from the Pacfic Coast to the Alantic coast with out stopping? Or how about driving 200 miles per hour in a little smart car non stop on the same trip from coast to coast? The car just would not hold up to operational stresses placed upon it's components. So I feel a fighter would have the same limitations.

that's why they're used in war, they're probably not at all comfortable, but they aren't supposed to be. the fighters presumably have to do a day or 2 max at warp, as that's the rough time it takes a fleet to get from fed space to cardassian space, eg ds9 to cardassia prime for example.

also a smart car may not be comfortable, but driving at 70mph shouldn't destroy it. a smart car can't go 200mph, it's like a fed fighter travelling at warp 15.

also if you're talking about the pacific coast and atlantic coast of panama, i'd bet it could be done on a unicycle, 30 miles isn't that far.