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Unread 1 Jul 2010, 22:45   #58
AdmV0rl0n
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Re: If I could make three changes to Planetarion, they'd be .....

1. Add a new ship type, one applicable to all the races. You might also add an additional ability to the ships via race. The ship type is a stealth carrier.

Race abilities.
Cathaar - The stealth carrier has additional massive freezing ability, and can stop all/part ship production on the target for 1 tick
Zik - The zik carrier has additional ship capping ability.
Terran - big guns and bigger shields.
Xan - additional carrying capacity due to their ship designs.
Other - some mix of the above.

The abilities of stealth carriers.
They operate silently and are not detectable when flying in singlular format.
They have their own tech tree.

The tech tree offers things like fuel capacity (which increases their ability to travel further. Initially they might be range limited - say 2 clusters away max). Additional loading bays, heavier weapons, heavier shields, additional cargo space, additional drives for higher speed.

The cost of these carriers is high.
They require a special factory (or factories)
They are limited because of their technical level of speciality to 3 at any one time. This limit might be adjustable if a player commits to a special mission. (more on that momentarily.)

These 3 vessels each reside in new additional fleet slots. Each carrier rather than the fleet slot is what other ships can be loaded into.

A carrier might cater for:-

500 Fighters
400 Covettes
350 Frigs
250 Destroyers
75 Cruisers
50 Battleships
Pods and Or Structure Killers.

The above might start small and only increase care of work on the tech tree.

IF the carrier gets killed, the vessels and salvage includes the above vessels as well . I think this would be based on all ships exiting the carrier, and then firing, but being able to retreat to a now dead carrier (this combat question is tricky, and probably needs more fleshing out)

In addition, the carrier can be launched with special missions. These might include but not be limited to:-
Capturing all salvage from the combat tick.
Stealing roids.
Stealing ships.
Stealing 1 tick or part of a Ticks resources.
Stealing a piece of infrastructure (a distie, amp, factory or pot luck)
Stealing population (may well be a dumb idea, but hey we love dumb ideas)
Damaging security on a target (reducing alertness or something similar)
Stealing another Stealth Carrier factory or piece of tech.


To sum up, 1 new ship type for each race, and 3 new fleet slots. The ships and movements allow interesting missions and work outs, but are fairly limited in scope. The stealth angle means that calcing is reduced and replaced by some cheek, flair and guile. And hopefully some fun. Dev in the tech tree might allow a big heavier use later in game via the tech tree.

2. Scanners. Gal and Cluster + alliance levels
Make scanners an official game player type. Allow then to capture a low percentage of their alliances 'special resource - see below'. Allow scanners some ability to disrupt incoming attacks - in a similar way to below. Note however, Alliances would have to have a special tech tree, and each step would be expensive. And could only be paid for by alliance members. This would involve number of reactors, special disruption boosters increasing the range of the jumpgate interference. This infrastructure might be large and not easy to hide. Scanners might become targets in inter-alliance war.
Something like this might break the constant and one sided 'distie/amp war' and reduce the scanners absolute lead against normal players.

Jump gate interference.
Create a new resource. Create a limited tech tree.
Allow the resource to be used in the technology to create interference on inbound traffic. The resource would be non transferable, and only mined on the local planet. The resource is limited, and only enough can be mined to fire up the jump gate interference reactors once every X tick. Reactors would need to be built just like other infrastructure. The result would be that inbound navigation is affected and (some, or all) inbound traffic arrives either 1 tick earlier, or 1 tick later than scheduled (and its pot luck)

3. Bounties.
Make it a flat rule that joining an alliance costs X per turn. This is put in fund, and is automated (to rule out the human element)

Award a bounty for joining and landing alliance attacks (so you get a reward even if all your ships are lost, and perhaps the reward leans towards players who lose more % wise?).

Award a bounty defending.

Award a part of salvage to both defending and attacking alliances should they wish to select attack targets. That salvage goes to the fund. If they choose not to 'select' and keep unofficial, the whole alliance salvage goes to the defending alliance. This assumes the defending planet is an alliance member. If not, the defending planet gets ALL the salvage - giving lone wolf players a decent bump after alliance chewings.

'News or info leaks 10 ticks after the attack to the planet where the attack lands telling them which alliance hit them on Tick x according to the intelligence services'.
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