End Game

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Intaweb
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End Game

Postby Intaweb » Mon Sep 27, 2004 7:09 am

Im thinking of modding this game, in a similar way to NOVA, as i have my own particular visison of what would make the game better, and minimise some of the flaws in the game. Will post details later, but i i came up with the name "end game".

Intaweb
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Re: End Game

Postby Intaweb » Mon Sep 27, 2004 12:16 pm

Intro:
I’ve never modded anything in my life so I don’t know what is possible, but as far as I understand from what i have read here most of this should be easy to do.

Economy:
The Fading Suns universe is meant to be, well a universe that is fading. Houses should be grabbing hold of diminishing resources, not slowly building up massive industrial juggernauts. Also the micromanagement of the economy especially how you place your cities adds a huge amount to the learning curve and puts off new players (like myself). To achieve this there will be industrial planets with large amounts of cities, farm planets etc. Engineers will no longer be buildable, although you might start with some or find some they will be very rare. Thus certain cities will be rare and highly valued. I don’t think people were really flocking to the urban centres during the Emperor wars anyway, so this ties in nicely with the feel of the game. The amount of micromanagement will have a much lower potential. Also I’m thinking of removing or greatly reducing the amount of raw materials that are needed to make electronics and chemical etc, as they will be rare enough. Capturing forts and factories will also become essential as their number will be limited.

Research:
As Labs will be un-buildable, it will be most likely that only the most powerful units will require any research. Most rare units will require rare resources so even when researched their number will be limited, and because all lab spots are pre determined player will no longer be able to surround them with units to fool the Church.
As research will be


Combat:
The same as NOVA except I think agility and armour would work better backwards. If agility represented the thickness and quality of the armour then accuracy would represent the penetration ability of the weapons. Tanks would have high agility and low armour, and thus only high accuracy weapons would be effective against tanks. Infantry would have relatively low “agility” but high “armour” so while antitank weapons would always “hit” them they would do minimal damage, thus anti infantry weapons would be low “accuracy” and high strength. When legions (10,000 troops) are fighting I don’t think they would be able to “dodge” enemy attacks so agility never made sense to me anyway.

Other then the ever present city micromanagement, the only problem I had with NOVA was some of the units having 4 different attacks. Jack of all trades and master of none didn’t really apply to DNA assault legions. Units should have a balance factor, no air attack, no close attack, low defensive values, being unbuildable. While DNA assault legions were quite expensive (a reasonable balance) they are certainly worth the cost, and make the majority of units redundant. In the EFS universe units like these should be extremely had to get a hold of, or extremely expensive not the mainstay of the houses armed forces. Units should only have attacks in 2 fields (say close and direct or direct and air) 3rd or 4th attacks types should be very weak.

Space bombardment:
When you have a giant fuck off space cruiser shooting at (up to) 20 units of 10,000 men it should be able to hit something. I think infantry should be able to be hit by space bombardment. Also I think space fighters should have a high accuracy ranged space attack, this way they would “intercept” enemy fighters and bombers and I think space to space fighter weapons would be pretty effective against ground tanks so they would be a counter to tanks (as the bigger ships would be more effective against infantry). Because of the limited number of star ports and resources so that space wouldn’t rule all. Also making the shield bigger could be a good idea to make sure planets have a nucleus of cities that will never be destroyed. Maybe missile PTS would be anti fighter (high acc) and laser + meson would be anti capital ship.


Any suggestions or tips would be most appreciated.

Grimly
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Re: End Game

Postby Grimly » Mon Sep 27, 2004 8:41 pm

I think your basic idea is a solid one: the Houses should not start out with nothing and end in control of a dozen planets. If they did, why not call the game Golden Age of the Star Lords? And why would anyone need to be Emperor if the Emperor only has a few heavy units on B2 and the forces of each House dwarfed those of the combined Ministries? May as well keep on fighting until all Known Space is under your control.

Of your other ideas, I like the reversal of agility and armor the best. Agility could be called Armor and Armor could be called Men or Mass or Size, suggesting that a large number of men are harder to hit directly at once than a single tank, as in fact they are. You can change these names so no one gets confused.

But you do need something to represent agility, because infantry are capable of hiding, and this is where it gets sticky. First of all, I'd rethink your assumption that all units are the same large size, let alone 10,000 men---it contradicts the fading universe idea, for one thing. The reason space bombardment was assumed to not affect stacks of infantry is that infantry are very little affected by artillery when they are in good cover---artillery mainly has the effect of suppressing, slowing, or breaking, not killing. Armor isn't affected at all except by direct hits, though---and I think that's your point---so it's a bit odd that EFS makes them so vulnerable. It might be better to have bombardment hit anything but set its accuracy very low. Small units should be able to escape bombardment completely (high "agility" though unarmored), and in your scenario large units would have enough "armor" (i.e., hit points) to survive and get more experience.

Note that the Church already knows where your labs are.
Grimly

Grimly
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Re: End Game

Postby Grimly » Mon Sep 27, 2004 11:34 pm

Intaweb, your comments gave me a related idea for the cloning people. When I first started playing EFS, I was always confused that there was no time limit. All this talk about fading suns and the stars dying---which surely would mean less food, for one thing---and yet not a single one dies during the game. Nothing happens at all, no doom, no disaster. There is no urgency to the attempt to unite humanity---the one thing, in the context of over-muscled Houses struggling to occupy a moribund throne, that gives that struggle a purpose.

What if the stars actually waned? Not much, of course, but enough to affect food production. And here I hate to have to plug another of my own ideas again, but as Intaweb remarks the people should not be flocking to the cities---rather the reverse. If workers, farmers, and soldiers were resources to be harvested and if they dwindled in supply (birth rates dropping, but perhaps not as fast as food production drops) over time, players would need to focus more and more on producing and maintaining small, mobile, deadly elite units. This would also bring some sense to the notion of the Houses as city-builders---all they're trying to do is keep people around and breeding to keep their subject populations stable. The falling birth and production curves would at some point (and there would need to be some random factor) cross the Houses' expansion curves and players would be struggling upstream to keep their empires viable.

Instead, in original EFS, once you reach a certain critical point you have more food than you can eat, and by then metal has become useless except for tediously building more cities. I wish I could figure out how to simulate the fading suns in current EFS . . . but I don't think it's possible.
Grimly

Intaweb
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Re: End Game

Postby Intaweb » Tue Sep 28, 2004 12:24 am

I think it would be in the region of 10,000 men or about 1,000 tanks per unit. Although infantry can hide, dig bunkers etc i think that would only reduce losses, the only way in a war this scale that a unit could avoid damage is if the unit can't be hurt by enemy fire.

On your point about artillery, yes in our modern warfare artillery is mainly useful for keeping their heads down, or breaking up formations. But when in caught in the open infantry get creamed by artillery, because EFS doesn't have a surpression system it hard to find the middle ground. I guess better trained troops or troops that are naturaly stealthy (trackers, rnagers etc) would have higher "agility" levels to represent the fact they are better at taking cover. Units like special forces would end up somewhere between tanks and infantry, as they would have more numbers and less "agility" then tanks and higher agility (damage resistance?)and lower numbers then infantry. Or maybe stealth units will be immune to indirect (if possiable).

Its not like they ground forces have much warning when a cruiser is about to strike, if they stayed near cover (that can resist orbital bombardment) all the time they would barely move at all. Anyway the way i see it, on the scale i think the battles are happening units that are broken up or disrupted or routed don't really factor into the battle anymore, its pretty hard to kill all 10,000 troops in a legion even if they are only lowly milita but if only 100 survive then they might as well not be there. My assumption is that their crap health represents the fact they leg it when the going gets tough, not the actual damage it takes to kill every last guy. "Routed" units in EFS is units buggering off on a scale that actualy matters. And besides when units get damaged its not like they all take proportional damage, the replacements have to come from somewhere.

My comment about the labs was refering to the fact you wont be able to surround them with cities anymore.

As for putting the FADING back into Emperor the fading suns, i think its pretty much immpossiable in this game. The closest i think you can get is removing the ability to build cities, so any destroyed by orbital bombardment would never be replaced. So if you bombed all the farms on one planet it would pretty much die off.

Another idea i had was for house units, maybe make give each house its own resource, that is needed to produce its units. Although it would be at expense at basicly the entire economy of the game, and it would have to be very well protected, maybe ill save that for a wargame version of EFS.

Grimly
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Re: End Game

Postby Grimly » Tue Sep 28, 2004 5:50 am

Yeah, you'd have to work up a whole system of how to quantify each aspect of a unit. And you'd have to think it through to make sure you weren't losing anything. For instance, EFS was probably supposed to have agility interact with terrain (thus the useless Agility file), but doesn't. So theoretically you would lose that by turning agility into armor, but practically you don't, because it was never there.

I'm curious what other advantages you see. I've been working in the same direction but not so boldly, and in fact my solution went the other way: I doubled foot agility and all close-attack accuracy, and allowed direct attacks on foot units. Your system is elegant but is it better? Does it let you modify unit numbers to show differences without driving yourself crazy?

Might be easier if you strip away the assumptions of the designers---just changing the words makes it easier to work through. Basically you have a number that represents "meat," and a second number that represents resistance to attacks on the meat. A third number overcomes the resistance, and a fourth number attacks the meat (whether killing or breaking, as you say) once resistance is overcome. I've used the standard terms and concepts with modifications, but your system would need to call them Mass or Formation, Resistance or Defense, Penetration, and Firepower, in that order.

"Defense" then becomes anything that keeps the bullet or beam away from the meat: personal force shield, smallness of target, camouflage (camouflage itself is a misnomer---more like "ability to use cover in ambush"), parrying ability, armor, discipline. Mass would = the number of people in the unit AND maybe their basic toughness (trained/untrained, Noble leadership), so that a company of tanks might have 60 men, while a battalion of armored infantry might have 500 (divide by 10 to get 6 and 50?) and a levy 10,000 (999). Penetration is exactly that: high = AT, low = HE. Really, this is much easier to work out in your head than the original system! Keep in mind that the game adds bonuses to certain numbers, but I can't think of any problems.

I'm very interested in your system because I've been struggling to find a way to represent the wide range of unit sizes in EFS. I've worked out a large-size bonus to armor coupled with an agility bonus for small size, but it's awkward. Combined with an expanded firepower range up to 999, you would see clear benefits to using large units/small units, low/massive firepower, or high/low penetration because everything would be directly tied to what it represents. WYSWYG.


I forgot PsyDef, but that's just another form of meat. Mind meat. Actually my analysis may be flawed. What is the damage actually taken from? Is it all just based on 100%? In which case armor really isn't like hitpoints (although it seems like it is) but more like: armor.

<small>[ 29.09.2004, 02:05: Message edited by: Grimly Fiendish ]</small>
Grimly

Maur13
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Re: End Game

Postby Maur13 » Tue Sep 28, 2004 5:37 pm

Those ideas are very interesting and would make for good game, although i want to add one thing:


That suns are fading is a legend and not established fact.

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Macroz
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Re: End Game

Postby Macroz » Tue Sep 28, 2004 9:12 pm

Umm, no, the suns are actually fading. For example, Delphi and many more.

Intaweb
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Re: End Game

Postby Intaweb » Wed Sep 29, 2004 2:57 am

Yeah and there have been some hints that its the Vau's fault.

Grimly
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Re: End Game

Postby Grimly » Wed Sep 29, 2004 3:20 am

The only ways I can see to model the universal collapse in existing EFS are to

1) build in late-game stresses on the economy:

a) Massively increase research costs to force all Houses to build more Labs. Unfortunately this gets tedious (slow research) and the AI offers you more money for your tech, so you end up richer. It does force you to choose techs carefully though.

b) Raise lab maintenance costs. 500FB/turn is about right, and with #1 your tech maint costs can get high near the end. Of course you can strike techs to avoid this, something that is otherwise rarely necessary. Theoretically this would force players to sell their assets, thus causing a shortage of resources.

c) Drastically increase maintenance and cash costs of advanced units. Mercenaries should make you a pauper.

d) Drastically increase resource build costs for advanced units. Repeatedly disbanding and reconstituting units to store their parts when not needed would be inefficient, leading to diminishing returns.

e) Add oil (energy) into the cost of units with engines. That way, when they are recovering from combat they absorb more of your resources, especially oil.

f) Invent insanely effective and insanely expensive units such as Knights.

2) change the focus from expansion to management of decline:

a) Start houses with basic industries intact or nearly so and with more rebel-held harvest cities at home. Possibly each homeworld could also have advanced cities under rebel control. A chemplant would be a minimum. I think the original idea may have been that initially available commodities such as electronics become scarce, leading to the need to build your own, not necessarily expansion. So possibly players should start with cash but not electronics cities; alternatively, they could start with little cash but an electronics city.

b) Allow the League to become hostile earlier and make it strong and aggressive. That way, expansion is not just attacking rebels and establishing colonies, but fighting the League over existing cities. Too bad there is no other point in fighting them---you can't force them to surrender and start trading with you again, and if they are strong you will never get the riches of Leaguehome.

c) Place harvesting and other cities around the Known Worlds---not too many, but cover all the obvious harvesting spots. Each House should have access to advanced cities it can capture.

c) Make it very hard to build Engineers. One big problem with original EFS is that it's easier to build engineers than combat units, because any city can make them, so you build instead of fight. Only Palaces should build engineers, for example. Make Engineers out of materials other than metal and food. Make them cheap enough so you can maintain a few, though, if they take a long time to build.

d) Make it hard to transport Engineers. Make an engineer unit for each planet type, for example (terrain combat tech), that can't be transported and so must be built onplanet. You should still be able to scout out and harvest resources and build expensive Labs, and build Palaces to build your engineers.

e) Encourage the bombardment of cities. Weaken PTS weapons or make them rare. Increase the number of units with ranged space weapons and make them more attractive to use. Allow any unit to be targeted. Make those units hard to hit. Decrease the accuracy of ranged space weapons. Too bad you can't separate razing from building.

f) Turn on Plague and set the check at 50% or more. Make Hospitals effective against it, because you won't be building many. (The planet of the Amaltheans would be a hospital-filled refuge.)


The good thing is that these are all ideas discussed over years here in this Forum. The bad thing is that these are all ideas discussed over years in the Forum!

If anyone has any other ideas, plase post them.
Grimly


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