Various Galaxy toughts... From: d8ilvja@dtek.chalmers.se (Jakob Ilves) Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1992 13:38:55 +0000 Hello! I love all these Galaxy articles! Keep up the good work writing them!!! Ok, I have a few ideas about how to mess up this nice, uncomplicated game. 1) Allow ships to have "enhanced" systems. For example, a normal drone with only a one ton drive costs one ton in materials and 10 production units. Imagine that one wants to have a faster drone, without increasing tech. That is, by using some more materials, and a LOT more production time (measured in total no of hours used by the labors to manufacture the drive engine) one gets an engine which still weights one ton, but has better capabilities. The D command would be like this (M abbrevates mass, E enhancement): D <shipname> <drive M> <drive E> <noofguns> <gun M> <gun E>...etc The capabilities of a system is its mass times its enhancement. Minimum enhancement will be 1.00. Also, the cost of a system is, in production units, say, the mass times the square of the enhancement. The cost in materials could be mass times enhancements. This would make the game intresting, as a three ton incoming group moving at high speed still could pose to be a threat... it could be a hyper enhanced murderfighter... Also, more guesswork could be left to the players if the enhancement factors are NOT revealed to other races when the races encounters each other. You may see how heavy their drives and guns are, but you cannot guess how well manifactured the specific technology is. 2) To make the tech increase more realistic, let the increase in tech each turn in a specific area be based on the LOG of the production units spent in research. Of course, one would need to have threshold value for when to use the LOG function. Small investments would still be linear. The advantages with this is that you cannot plan like this: "I wait with weapon and shield tech, expands my cap and THEN boosts those tech to five times as much in one turn... hehehe..." Instead, you better would try to spend your investments more evenly among the turns. For those of you playing empire, this aing new. This is how tech works there. How big the threshold should be and what base to use, I dunno. Guess that a threshold of 100 and a log base of, say, 1.5 could be good. 3) Allow races to have different "race profiles" which are used to tell which planets will fit them best and which races will be the most similar to each other. (THIS would REALLY mess up the game... :) Have the profile described as a no of variables. For example, five alphabetic letters followed by five booleans and then two floats. All planets also has three letters describing their environment. Of course, this profile is selected randomly. How to use this profile? Well, if your race tries to colonise a planet which environment letters closely corresponds to those of your race, the planet is a good place for the creatures you command. Colonisation will be cheaper. Industry will be more effective. If these letters is very different, the planet is very unpleasant... If you wins a battle above an enemy planet, and the profile of the enemies race is close to that of yours, the two races are quite similar. You may use some of the industry, and also some of the population will be yours (or maybe the planet will turn into a conquered enemy planet, producing whatever you want, at less efficiency). If you attack a planet which race is very unlike your race, the captured cap will be useless (it is impossible to figure out how it works, why it works and it wont fit members of your race anyhow...) Your races members cannot communicate with the enemies, so the only thing to do is to bomb away the whole bunch. Also, this compatability issue would determine the results of a boarding of an anemy ship. Similar races could use ships captured from each other... 4) Allow ferries. A ferry is a group which is devoted to transport a specific cargo from one planet to another. Maybe it takes another one in return, but that is optional. When the ferry is established, every turn, a specific amount of cargo is automagically moved between planets. The ships are treated as being at both planets, and between, all at the same time. If a battle occurs, the ferry is cancelled for that turn, and those ships in the groups which it is reasonable to assume will get out of hyperspace at the battle planet will participate in the battle. Also, if the distance is short, and the group is fast, the ships will travel between the planets multiple times, thus increasing the cargo throughput. In the turn report, the ferry could look like: homeworld CAP colony _ 34 transport 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 the first word is a planet, followed with the cargo transported from that planet, then the destination planet followed with the cargo taken in return. After that, there is info about the no of ships, their type and their techs.. this was my 0.02$ worth. comments are welcome HaJK (Jakob Ilves) <d8ilvja@dtek.chalmers.se> Referenced By Up