Energy redisrtbution

posted on July 14th, 2013, 10:30 pm

Hi, I've been thinking about this for quite some time and perhaps the idea already came up once or twice here in the forum(but I haven't been able to find it so far).

What if let's say it were possible to extend the AI settings of a ship with four additional settings concerning the power /energy resources of the ship.

They could look like this:

Balanced:
- Weapons 100/100 %
- Shields 100/100 %
- Impulse drive 100/100 %

Offensive:
- Weapons 200/100 %
- Shields 50/100 %
- Impulse drive 50/100 %

Defensive:
- Weapons 50/100 %
- Shields 200/100 %
- Impulse drive 50/100 %

Agility (adding more speed to the ships):
- Weapons 50/100 %
- Shields 50/100 %
- Impulse drive 200/100 %

For instance while some of your ships are under attack you could switch them to defensive mode so that they can take more punches while sending in a relief fleet with agility setting in order to reach them faster and then switch the whole group to offensive in order to crush the enemy ships.

My guess is that this would be similar to the special powers which last until deactivated.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 1:44 am

welcome to the forum.

something similar to this exists in the games bridge commander and legacy, where you can choose where power goes.

it works well there as you control just one ship. i don't think it would work well in an rts for several reasons.

1) changing each ships settings would require lots of new buttons and hotkeys, making the interface cluttered and annoying to use.

2) one must be able to tell at a glance what state a ship is in, otherwise you end up having to use a menu on every single ship. such an indicator would add more clutter to gameplay.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 4:05 am

It's also worth noting that replace weapons would have to be used, so with that many modes there would be at least triple the number of odfs if it was applied to every faction.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 5:00 am

On the other hand, we still have 'fleet formation' buttons in the menu - I definitely would love it if those buttons were replaced with an 'energy redistribution' menu with a system like this.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 10:18 am

I tried doing something like this to mirror the "Power Allocations" in Klingon Academy. The problem I had is that three or four allocations (Offense, Defense, Speed, Repair) would take up most of the slots for special weapons, and their implementation would be clunky at best.

Also, both my own mod and FleetOps as a whole are about, well, fleet combat. Clues in the name Best to leave nitty gritty like power allocations to "individual captains" (i.e let the game engine handle it) rather than over complicate the game.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 11:59 am

It's also worth noting that replace weapons would have to be used, so with that many modes there would be at least triple the number of odfs if it was applied to every faction.

i doubt number of odfs is a problem for the devs, they already have over 9000 of them (not even joking). they generate them with their voodoo software. for a mod, yeah, that would be tricky.

the real problem would be that replaceweapon is still buggy, ships often forget orders when replaced, and they lose other buffs, they also cause the ai to pick targets again, it also disrupts attacks like combat tractor.

i didn't bother mentioning it because if implemented hopefully it'll be done without replaceweapons.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 5:43 pm

Replaceweapon is the cause of a lot of in-play headaches, plus there's no small amount of micro cheese that's enabled by it. I know there are some things that require it but the less it's used, the better.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 6:51 pm

i doubt number of odfs is a problem for the devs, they already have over 9000 of them (not even joking). they generate them with their voodoo software. for a mod, yeah, that would be tricky.

True, but load times would increase, odf.fpq would get close to 100mb, it would be a massive pain for modders to add fully integrated ships, etc.

Mostly, I wonder if it's worth it. I'd probably either keep all my ships at balanced or do something like set my offensive ships to offensive, defensive ships to defensive, etc. It seems more practical to just have ships with different roles and use them according to their roles rather than coding tens of thousands of odfs for a single feature.

posted on July 15th, 2013, 7:48 pm

It seems more practical to just have ships with different roles and use them according to their roles rather than coding tens of thousands of odfs for a single feature.

agreed

posted on July 16th, 2013, 4:10 pm

The biggest issue with this isn't the massive amount of .odf it would add, or the fact it would require the use of replace weapon that has other currently unfixable issues associated with it (mainly order forgetting, target switching and buff loss) or even the cluttered menu with deep micro.

The biggest issue is that each unit is designed in the game with a role in mind such as offensive, defensive or science and if you look at the news posts this will be even more so in 4.0 so by having these roles changed you could potentially spam one ship and switch their power to change their role totally ruining the idea of building mixed ships with set roles and just making everything much more complicated... we do not need beefier monsoons for instance, they would be even more annoying for someone fighting an early monsoon/intrepid start

posted on July 16th, 2013, 8:42 pm

The biggest issue is that each unit is designed in the game with a role in mind such as offensive, defensive or science and if you look at the news posts this will be even more so in 4.0 so by having these roles changed you could potentially spam one ship and switch their power to change their role totally ruining the idea of building mixed ships with set roles ...

True haven't seen it that way. My problem was probably that I haven't thought in a large scale ... actually I'm used to change the power settings in the games mentioned in the posts here but I've come to realize that this would work merely for a single ship ... maybe I'll experiment with this after all in combination with the cinematic mode (like steering a hero ship )