Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Fishman The problem with this approach is that cargo space doesn't need to be very high on ANY kind of ship before the amount of cargo space available becomes Ridiculously Huge. This was an issue in Space Empires as well: The requirements of sticking a large percentage of cargo space on a ship resulted in even small transports developing Ridiculously Huge cargo capacity far in excess of anything that anyone would sanely NEED, simply because it was required to be there. If anything, there shouldn't be any explicit limit, resupply ships should simply be limited to the size of a deep-space base instead of treated as a planetary base, or the limit should be in absolute cargo space rather than percentage, especially since the game already seems to treat resupply ships as a "giant mothership". If you consider an 800-point resupply ship with a 25% cargo space requirement, the resupply ship will have 200 points of cargo bays, or 25 cargo bays, for a capacity of 25000. This is a RIDICULOUSLY HUGE amount of cargo space that exceeds that of mining bases. This is a first step simply because Resupply ships were intended to be more like another variant of construction ships than "world ships". I think this will help. For those concerned that we're taking away the ability to build world ships, keep in mind that as your size limits go on up you can still build some really huge ships and also remember that we will be adding and expanding to the game in the future. quote:
Does this fix the annoyance where ships ordered to do something like load troops, retrofit, or move will decide to drop their orders in favor of doing something idiotic, like chasing a frigate, instead of doing what they're told to do? I believe that's fixed, from what I've seen. Once 1.0.4 goes beta, if you see anything that looks like an issue feel free to upload a save for us and we'll investigate. This also addresses the issue where fleets on manual control could lose their orders when a "suggestion" came through from the AI for them to do something else and the player rejected it. quote:
This is very vague. Does this mean more colonizable planets and more resources, or less? Somewhat less of both, as part of both rebalancing the economy and improving performance and memory usage, as we found that once the economy was working perfectly the game started to exceed our expectations in terms of how much "stuff" was being created. The base cost of resources will also be increased a bit, there are number of other methods we're using to make sure that new games in 1.0.4 are better balanced in terms of economy and performance. This will not help older saves, but should make new games quite a bit better. quote:
What is "reasonable" and "defensive weapons"? Basically, one defensive weapon per civilian ship is considered "ok" by the AI. Beyond that, they will consider it less of a civilian ship and more of a privateer of some kind. I hear you on the rest. Over time as we make further improvements to diplomacy, I think the limits here may become more flexible again. For now, we wanted to allow players to give civilian ships a limited defense without bothering the AI. quote:
Does this mean that they will disregard orders and run off and chase enemies, or merely that they will fire upon any targets of opportunity if not given a specific target and merely told to move? Will they cease firing when their fuel starts to run low so they have enough to leave the fight and make it back to base? We hope the latter, but this is not yet completed for testing. We're testing the economy right now.
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