Small mod idea- trash.

Hello all.



I was playing a quick game the other day, and I got to thinking about the surveyor module. Yeah sure, it's great that you get a free ship in the beginning to get the lay of the galaxy each game. To see where to colonize, where to mine, and picking up anomalies. But after awhile, it's useless. And unless you're playing a game with a HUGE amount of anomalies just lying around, it's useless to add a surveyor module to another ship. At least, that's what I thought until I started thinking about GalCiv2 and I realized what this game is missing- debris.

Think about it. You get into a border skirmish with someone, you destroy their ships, they destroy yours. So where's the debris?

What you could do is have an anomaly spawn whenever a ship is destroyed, but only one from a select list. Most would essentially be small amounts of credits (As in, you find trash worth a certain amount.), but some of them would offer a small research boost like other anomalies. (As in, you reverse engineer someone else's tech.) And maybe one or two would offer an instant tech gain. Something limited, like instant access to Laser I for example.

Maybe even have functioning mining starbases spawn garbage anomalies worth a few creds. Same thing around major trade routes.

Players/AI could become the "garbage men" of your particular universe. You could outfit your battleships with surveyor modules so that after that failed attempted invasion, you could at least try to recoup some of your lost profits. Of course, you better be quick or else you would be creating literal gold mine for your opponents. Turn those Space Pirates into scavengers that roam the spaceways looking for junk.

Just something to add to an already great game. If someone does do this, however, just make it cross compatible with Dark Avatar and Dread Lords, please?



Leslie
3,152 views 7 replies
Reply #1 Top
I love the idea!!

But your initial survey ship isn't "useless". You upgrade it to a medium hull, and if you've hit enough of the right anomalies, you'll find that its hitpoints are far beyond your standard medium ships.
Reply #2 Top
What you could do is have an anomaly spawn whenever a ship is destroyed


Unfortunately this sort of thing can't be modded in.
Reply #3 Top
An excellent idea, that would make the anomaly-respawning crowd happy I'm sure. And a logic one, which is a bonus!    It shouldn't be a certain thing though, maybe there there should be a chance for it to happen, and the bigger the battle the higher that chance. Maybe the Luck ability could have a part in it too.
Post it to one of the wish list threads. It should be more than a mod.
Reply #4 Top
1: i sooooooo submit to the idea of anomalies beeing spawn after the map has been amptied.

2: about the slow start mod: you are absolutely correct. he initail colony rush is a game killer for me. personally i found that there's no fun in playing the game after you've colonized the initial systems.

and dont get me started on a colony beeing able to grow to the size of twice the homeworld in just 20 game turns; that's just plain wrong!

so id like to suggest you something a lot more radical:

a) make a huge maintenance cost per colony; something that would really make you think twice about : "Do i want a 4th colony or i should wait until the ones i have start producing some income ?"

b) colony modules should't cary more than 50 (not 500) colonists. this should force you into transporting population into more than one colony ship to a new colony to help it out.

c) lower the population growth significantly. as i said, a colony to be able to outgrow the homeworld in just a few turns is just wrong.

d) lower the ammount of troops that can be carried in a troop module as well; this could be an easy exploit by the player.


Now all of the above soung nice, but my only concern is that the Ai wont be able to keep up with all this.

it would be very cool if it was pozzzible to limit the number of colonies a player has at one time by some tech (let's say government system) but i dont believe that this is moddable.

any thoughts ?
Reply #5 Top
oops; im sorry i posted in the werong thread
my appologies
Reply #6 Top
and dont get me started on a colony beeing able to grow to the size of twice the homeworld in just 20 game turns; that's just plain wrong!


Correct scaling is not one of the best features of this game, unfortunately.

I do think that the initial conditions for the game are very lame. You start your journey to the stars with your homeworld almost empty in terms of infrastructures, and yet you have 3 jump capable starships in orbit (one of which you don't have most of the techs required to build it...). Also being able to build cargo hulls and not large hulls is somewhat weird.
The point of this being, yes, the start is somewhat hasty.

a) make a huge maintenance cost per colony;


Initial Colonies do have a high maintenance, and some projects got theirs increased - some to absurd values? - still there are some projects/ships/bases that do not have maintenance, which is weird.

b) colony modules should't cary more than 50 (not 500) colonists.


Considering that it's 500 *million* colonists, not 500 - and that's another QA issue in both the Selected Object Context Area and the Ship Loading Window, and for both Colony ships and Transports - and that now you can actually fit those size *20* modules in small and even tiny hulls... I wonder how 500 million people plus starting materials for a colony can fit in, or even be towed by if you want to look at it that way (but then you wouldn't really have a size limit on ships, would you?) in such small hulls, but again, scaling is just plain awful. I don't think they consider these things too much. Better QA would certainly go a long way.

it would be very cool if it was pozzzible to limit the number of colonies a player has at one time by some tech (let's say government system)


Some form of logistics for planets. Why not?
Reply #7 Top
Lets get back on subject, please   

I like the garbage/debris idea. Starbases dropping anomalies nearby every six months or so, most being worthless (or near so), but the ocassional gem should show up. Doing it for battles makes sense, but like Iceman said, it should be more random. Size/Number of ships destroyed should determine the frequency and quality of spawned anomalies. Again, most would be a small amount of money, a minor hull/weapon/sensor/range uprade or the like. Perhaps you'll happen apon a ship that was merely disable, and the crew died because of life support failure You could commandeer the ship. Ofcourse to be realistic the ship would be severely damaged, barely flyable, and definetly not battle worthy.

Haveing trade routes spawn garbage doesn't sound like a good idea though, it would get cluttered fast in bigger galaxies with several AI's with maxed trade routes.

Ooooooooooo!!! I had an idea, when a civilization is destroyed and its ships and starbases are removed from the map their should be a random chance of a civilization graveyard left behind by one of the ships/bases. Ofcourse their would only be one graveyard per beaten civ. I like that one.

I like this idea. Good show!