Random Ideas

posted on February 28th, 2012, 9:32 pm

Nebula research station with yard extension:

Advanced research that leads to specific ship classes immune, resistant, or adapted to particular nebula effects. For example, some nebulas lower your shields. The research station develops a new ship from scratch that either is able to find its way to use shields in the nebula, or find some alternative method to bolster defences. A particular energy field, armour, shield generator, etc, that whether it restores shields or not, gives it better resistance while in the nebula. Or Nebulas that affect sensor range or speed.

It would be cool if the research station could be built inside the actual nebula, though this is probably not possible. But basically, have a station built inside that purple nebula. It can just go all out in testing and observations as it is located within the nebula itself. Eventually they figure a way to beat it. Although, do to damaging nebulas, this is probably also unwarranted, you'd lose the constructor and never even finish building the station.

But yep, nothing to fancy for a ship, just a way to counter specific nebula. Perhaps each faction gets a specific nebula it is able to counter. There are five nebulas, and five factions. Well... currently at least.

Mining Sabotage

A weapon that can be shot into subspace? When shot near a di or tri moon, it destabilizes the ore. Nearby miners will receive damage (causes leaks or explosions, I dunno). The ore they have mined so far is not useable, causing them to empty their cargo bays, and start back at zero. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$. Don't need the miners to return back to the station to do anything, if it has mined 75 di, just goes back to zero.

Or, it creates some sort of jamming that doesn't allow mining to occur. Before a tractor beam can be locked back on to the moon, the area damage weapon thing has to dissipate. Lasts 10 seconds.

System value Idea for the new faction

The one species that is the living organism. Maybe I'm just remembering this and it was already suggested dunno. The ship is alive, so there is no rank system. Instead, the ship grows its offensive and defensive stats etc. All ships or whatever they are called start with lower stats but very high system value. Initially, the offensive and defensive stats rise steadily, while the system stats drop dramatically. So it starts out as 1, 1, 50, and based on whatever it is (like offensive profile, defensive, mid early gam etc) the stats mellow out at some set levels. At this point, they just grow, and the growth is maybe related to what they do. Attacking increases rate of offensive growth. Staying near a star base or equivalent, increases rate of defence growth, being close to yards or whatever spawns them increases system growth. etc. or some variant.

Special Weapon Growth

A similar idea, but for a special weapon. Instead of special weapon, though, it is a special that is more of synergistic attack pattern. The special attack pattern is researched or activated I dunno, then as the special attack pattern is used more and more often by your fleets over the timeframe of the match, the attack pattern becomes more and more effective and more deadly. So, for instance, attack pattern 32 gamma involves 5 ships attacking a ships aft engine. In the beginning, this sap (Special attack pattern) as the potential to do a fair bit of damage, and probably knock out impulse for 2 seconds. After your fleet becomes accustomed to this tactic, it becomes more and more widely used across the board, and more dangerous. Eventually, the special could hit a peak where it has two main results: one the ships engines are so badly destroyed the impulse engines are unrepairable and the ship is stranded. or an engine overload occurs and it blows up. The damage from the attack might be realistically only enough to do 75% drop in shields, but as it was targeting the engines, and ships are becoming better at getting direct hits, the ship will just go poof, and your officers will remark to each other "look at the pretty colours we made". So the damage of the special has growth over time.

Random Ideas. No consideration to who gets it (Faction), what ship, what stage of game early or late, etc.

Just ideas.

posted on February 29th, 2012, 2:24 am

Dude.

A while back we were talking about destructible rocks in space or around moons.  This could be semi-accomplished in an awesome way with such a thing.  I don't know about an entire station and fancy setup, but if there was a specific type of damage nebula that mapmakers could use, and each race could research a tech that causes it to not deal damage that would totally work.  You could have certain areas of the map inaccessible until it's researched, then new avenues open up in the late-game!

Now the pathing would be rather hard; either the tech would have ships ignore it or the nebula would have to be placed without any pathing blockers in the first place, which makes it very dangerous before the tech is up.

Thumbs Up 

[godsvoice]

posted on February 29th, 2012, 10:41 pm

Last edited by godsvoice on February 29th, 2012, 10:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, I wasn't sure about the direction of the idea. Ie. Purpose of having a station or additional yard vs just a research.

Also, what the ship that was built could actually do. I've always wanted to send ships through red nebulas like in pathtonowhere. But then, is it just some heavily shielded destroyer that doesn't come with any perks, or is there something else to it? Perhaps it just serves as a raider or something else. Or a ship to move quickly and with good line of sight in purple nebula.

For green nebula, as this one really only helps you anyways, I was thinking something else could be thought up, 2 options (that I've considered, feel free to add):

1. The research allows hull repair, instead of just shield repair. This is done by rerouting energy through the rarely mentioned subsidiary deflector dish. so often overlooked...   :blink:

2. The research allow the ship prototype to emit an adverse energy field that diminishes the effects of the nebula, causing nearby enemy units to have almost negligible shield repair for a few moments.

Edit: Oh! lol, I thought I mentioned in the original post. Beyond just 1 for each (as there are more planned factions) cloaking factions could research cloak ability to work in the non damaging nebulas. So, green, good blue, and purple.

posted on February 29th, 2012, 11:47 pm

The damage effects themselves aren't that bad, it's the pathing that really messes you up and that part is much harder to change in the code.  If there was simply one movement setting that avoided nebulas and another that ignored them then a lot of ships would be able to slip through damage nebulas without being in too bad shape.  The problem is when they start turning around or not all of them come in or you have to wait for some ships to enter the nebula before you order others to leave.

I remember getting it to work with waypoints a few months ago, but I haven't tried it recently.