Random Stellar Events

posted on April 14th, 2006, 8:35 am

There is a consistant focus on canon ships, weapons, and stations. Its a good thing, I like details. But one thing our little FO universe lacks is a few random stellar events. I know this is rarely done anymore with RTS games to my knowledge. But I remember with C&C RA1 how an overused Chronosphere could trigger a destructive vortex. A lot of Star Trek episodes revolve around some random stellar issue. So I was thinking of small things, like a mini-Space monster, or your ship entering an unstable wormhole and warping across the map... not much or too often, just now and again.

posted on April 14th, 2006, 12:59 pm

Thats a good idea and I think they already have something simmilar planned, but I aint sure

posted on April 14th, 2006, 2:26 pm

yep very nice idea. although im not sure how it would be implemented, in fo (balance wise). Cos if one race can have something go wrong with one of their things then there should be something wrong with the other races' ones too (not neccesarily the same thing).

posted on April 14th, 2006, 2:30 pm

RANDOM is RANDOM-thats how

posted on April 15th, 2006, 9:12 am

the scale of the random events could be dependant on the overall resources of all the players in the map. If there are low levels of resources that have been mined by all players, than the event would be small... like a wormhole, or..... say an old Miranda class comes out of a rift and destroys your ship, 3 times, and then your ship is back on its way, its just been delayed by an in-game cinematic so to speak. If the resources are at a high level you could roll in a space crystal, depending on how heavy you want to make it.

In my view I can see simple things in the beginning like my scout ship being transported to the other side of the map, or an odd little space alien starting to mine one of my dilithium moons. When fleets are big enough to go head to head I could see a gas cloud turning into a star, or a body of asteroids breaking up, or a monster so large that the players realize they would be served by killing the monster now and continuing the war later.. but again, thats making random events a larger part than many may be comfortable with.

Even if a space crystal were to pass by ships/stations it would start to eat people, leaving the ships/stations empty. Its a big can of worms that may be better in a mod of this mod.

posted on April 15th, 2006, 9:55 am

instead of a monster how bout a raideoative nebular that flots around the map and into you stuff. or that cloud thing that had the voyager space probe inside in one of the tmp's

posted on April 15th, 2006, 10:40 am

There are many events that they could do, it would really add to the diversity of the game

posted on April 15th, 2006, 3:29 pm

it would also add an element of surprise and luck, let's face it, if a randomly moving nebula doen't hit your base but diverts at the last second, thats luck.

posted on April 15th, 2006, 4:49 pm

this one gets the from me, although i have to say that a randon nebula floating into your base (particully the yellow or red one(the blue one will really ruin your day too)) will be quite annoying after a while. but still worth a try i say.

posted on April 16th, 2006, 3:12 am

not sure how i feel about it, the idea itself sounds really cool, but i don't like the sound of a radioactive nebula floating into my base. and canon wise, do nebulas even move all that much anyway?

posted on April 16th, 2006, 4:56 am

nebula don't naturally move that much unless they're being pulled by an object, I don't think that idea will work out. I think that say if a blue nebula turned to red, that would be interesting as no one's base is going to get sucked up... but non-cloaking ships would lose their hiding spot.
But again, it may be more interesting if they turned into stars, or just went away. I don't think the game should mess to much with the more static stellar objects as it takes thousands, or millions of years for such shifts to take place in reality. I think we should stick with smaller things,

like space monsters
oh..
space monsters
and asteroid movements
and stars shifting phase
and unstable wormholes
and space-time loops
really there's plenty else to play with.

posted on April 16th, 2006, 11:39 am

a1 had moving asteroids didn't it? that wouold be cool to see in fleet ops, the follow a plotted course so it would be different for every map which would be cool.

posted on April 16th, 2006, 11:59 am

Impossible with A2. I asked that for month -.-

posted on April 16th, 2006, 2:17 pm

i think the hole envioroment was better origanly for a1 different size and shaped moons, move astorids...

posted on April 16th, 2006, 3:22 pm

A1 in total was a far better game than A2. Hopefully that new ST RTS will be better :S