salvaging and looting

posted on August 18th, 2011, 3:05 pm

I just had a big fight againgst some rom and dom AI and had a stream of ships flying through my base. My khalless could handle the fleets usually but it cost me a lot of turrets sometimes and i destroyed big fleets. So what would be great for borg or klin players: Shipwrecks do not dissappear, but stay floating around and can be harvested by mining frighters or another ships, giving the player 30% of dil, trit and supply costs of the ship they found. Or maybe its a passive near outpost? What do you think about the idea?

posted on August 18th, 2011, 3:15 pm

i think its been suggested before. its interesting.

reminds me of total annihilation. in that game it was often extremely important to control the battlefield after the battle, even more so for naval battles. that way you could reclaim the resources and out resource the enemy.

if it was implemented in fleetops i'd like it to be done much slower than in ta, with special mining ships needed, that are just as weak as normal miners, and cant mine normal moons, only wrecks. also have the mining rate be slow, so that it is slightly slower than mining moons, but requires no processing station, only mobile miners, that can leave when you cant protect the area, you cant keep mining stations, u have to decom.

even then this gives an advantage to those who can quickly secure the aftermath of a big battle, maybe those with an easy turret or yard to place and mine those wrecks. maybe the wrecks could be rarer, with only very few ships leaving them.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 6:15 pm

Salvage vessels, i like it.

However i do wonder how much strain massive amounts of debris would place on the engine.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 8:55 pm

with the new render system in the works it might be possible, performance wise that is.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 9:41 pm

If the engine could do I would like to see both Craft , recovery /salvage and wreck mining.If possible  you have a Savlage yard where the  space frames are  towed to be slowly  to be repaired. For balance  the rate  should beat least twice the ships normal  build rate  . For  wreck mining  it is done by ships wich give 40% Tri, 45%Dia, and 20% supply back.  Reprossing  for the ship debris will be a rate 30% of the  players races normal Resourse miner.  If a  players Miner miner takes 10 seconds  from  start to finishto mine a dia or a tri moon, it takes a additional 3-4 seconds  to mine a wreck. due to having to switch  holding bays.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 1:14 am

An old A2 bug was sections of the maps disappearing if a large cloaked fleet was nearby. As i recall that was due to the rendering and it is also why i worry that the debris would cause problems.

There's also an option for the debris to be heavily damaged vessels which can be towed to a shipyard. Most dead sequences let a ship explode so this would mean changing the code for each vessel.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 1:30 am

I'd like to see this for the Borg, but I'd rather see it happen for the Borg. This could be some kind of mixed tech module for an adaptor that would allow you to use that loot. Specifically it's weapons of it is salvageable. Would be cool to see an Adaptor fire some different types of adapted weapons from other species. It could also add resistance to that kind of weapon.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 1:55 am

I like the idea, a while back I suggested making Borg vessels slowly rebuild, somebody mentioned GLA holes.  Like Myles said the point is to give strategic value to holding the site of a battle.

Rather than make it occur for only a few kinds of ship, it would probably be better to make it happen randomly, with the chances based on the type of weapon firing on the ship and how much it was overkilled.  There's just one problem I can see with it...

Fleet ops uses zero-gravity mechanics, so wouldn't the wreck continue to move in the direction the ship was going?  If so, they could end up anywhere!  I recall Ray doing a replay with the persistent wreckage mod, and one piece of borg ended up flying up into his camera.  After all, the game does still contain a 3D universe, it's just limited.  If the wreckage just sat in one place it would look ridiculous.

I guess this could work if the wreckage were to start out moving but then slow to a stop, call it the effect of random gasses or something.  They would also need to be coded to snap to a flat trajectory so they can't travel off of the grid in cases where a ship dies while flying vertically around something.

So once again, it's a doable idea but I can't tell if it would add enough value to the game to be worth all the time to code and balance it.  Still, if nothing else I'd like to see something for borg cubes.  Their size (and the lore of actually being able to regenerate) make them a prime candidate.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 2:39 am

Anoter idea sort of along the same lines would be to have a npc station that, once captured, would provide a trickle of supply, dilithium, and tritanium. The mechanics are already in game, and it would make for some nasty battles trying to control the station/s.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 10:28 am

Fleet ops uses zero-gravity mechanics, so wouldn't the wreck continue to move in the direction the ship was going? 

yup they would, gameplay would have to trump realism. cant have a wreck float into a player's base. that would be too nice lol.

I guess this could work if the wreckage were to start out moving but then slow to a stop, call it the effect of random gasses or something.  They would also need to be coded to snap to a flat trajectory so they can't travel off of the grid in cases where a ship dies while flying vertically around something.

stellar gasses arent dense enough to make much of a difference. the wrecks would realistically drift for years, especially considering fights happen at impulse, which is fast (compared to the short term of rockets at least)

Anoter idea sort of along the same lines would be to have a npc station that, once captured, would provide a trickle of supply, dilithium, and tritanium. The mechanics are already in game, and it would make for some nasty battles trying to control the station/s.

king of the hill but with more resources on the hill. not only would king of the hill be perfect for feds (and to a lesser degree dom) due to their quick ability to secure a location, extra resources for holding the hill would make it so much easier.

capturing an npc station is a lot easier than buying mining (unless the station has guns or something). so the station trickle would need to be lower income than traditional mining. if it gives a lot of income, then its gonna encourage fed/dom to take it and hold it for ages. however if it gives less than mining, but is also easier to get than mining, it could be ok. as putting resources into holding that one station would leave players unable to stop other players expanding to moons.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 3:02 pm

@Tryptic, what I do when I animate is I add some resistance and weight to the object so that it it eventually slows down to a stop. I also make it spin quite a bit because it just looks cool.  Even when it stops its still spinning.

posted on August 22nd, 2011, 10:05 am

Its a good idea but I don't think you should be able to repair alien ships special weapons (and maybe not all weapon systems) as your race wouldn't have the nessacery tech to fix it properly. Would be more realistic if you took an enemy vessel and bolted your own weapons to it (i.e. the roswell ship from Independence day).

posted on August 25th, 2011, 3:49 am

Note: I've seen the mining of derelict vessels made doable before, and it was quite neat. Would be cool to add, but prehaps change the ships a tad so the chance of a vessel that gets shot up going derelect, not repairable w/o cost or salvagable for supplies.

posted on August 30th, 2011, 6:01 am

several Old armada  Mods I have  seen  did  have mineable wrecks. If I remember correctly, been a while  . It was at AFC web site. Sorry don't remember whom it was.

posted on September 5th, 2011, 10:20 pm

In general it would be cool if less ships explode, when they loose a fight, but stay in space without control by its recent owner. Its the same way in TV series quite often... Borg could salvage on the fly, while other species would have to use a special ship or an construction ship, which brings the debries into a nearby yard.