The tier system that was trown out definately seems a bit limited in scope, but with some new numbers I think it would work. Also, we are only talking about a soft cap on total weapon/defense numbers, not some arbitrary limit.

That's the problem, the slot system is a hard cap on ship design. You get one or two weapons, period. It is intentionally designed to remove most of the flexibility from the ship design aspect of the game, forcing the fleet to be the basic unit of combat as individual ships are so gimped they can't do anything. And as I pointed out earlier, it will simply throw focus into building higher damage weapon modules, since you can't get the same result by putting more than one of the less advanced systems in the same space.

To put numbers on it, as people clearly can't see why I'm bitching so much about this: A tiny hull, what we presume to be his "tier 1" can now have 3 or 4 modules on it, more if you pick small stuff. Compare that to the two Alfonse would allow - and those with limitations on what they can be.

Huge hulls can have 15+ modules, all the way up to 80 or so if you want all HP modules. The slot system would limit this to 5, again with limits on what they can be.

Even if you increase Alfonse's numbers to something more reasonable, you still lose the flexibility of the current system. Need a high attack ship? Nope, can't do it because you ran out of weapons slots. Need a high defense ship to counter that high attack ship? Nope, you don't need it, but if you did you can't build it - you ran out of defense slots. Want to build an insanely fast transport interceptor? Engines weren't addressed, but presumably you ran out of engine slots, so all ships are about the same speed.

Plus, an extra set of primary shapes models (with pre-colored materials such as Hull/Trim..engines) that can be re-textured by coordinates on totally flexible meshes -- as in, assembling & painting on extremely variable hull configurations.

The ShipYard (by means of a complete overhaul of features, btw) would no longer *only* depend on fixed components or pre-designed elements while giving huge control over the ships framework.

Triangles, Squares, cubes, cones, polygons, smooth curves, beziers, etc.

Secondly, i designed a whole set of new Thumbnails that puts abbreviations for the items such as "hW III", sensors, supports, defenses & weapons - short of having a clear tag line to identify these when we select any while upgrading - it was the only solution. Even the second Troops module now has an "Adv" to tell it apart from the other.

Thirdly, instead of Pitch, Yaw, Tilt "balls", i'd prefer working on the zyx & primes perspective representation as do all 3D modeling softwares uses; RBG, up/down, left/right, depth, etc. Precision is also a concern when you try to find a simple 5° angle cusp on the actual "spheric stuff"; i agree that in that case numericals would certainly help even for the sizing bar. An extra button for "Switch" or "Replace with" an old engine (etc) with a newest is another must have.

Fourthly, Hardpoints, HP, HP, HP, HP, HP(familiar enough?) & possibly even more colors which could also be tied with the theoretical "Slots system" (without the 2-dimensional combat as currently proposed, btw) of Alfonse to hint on the location of, example, engines and other stuff specially for AI templates cuz *we* know where to instinctively or visually place any of these exactly.

Fifthly, proper handling of true thematic Fleets creation in the external Yard option but also backported for DA.

....thly.

One thing we need is a shipyard with a que.  The planet has it why not the shipyard.

True, but if we were to *select* these same slots as an undefined group of W/D/E/... as estimated by the T2S3M5L7H10 (very basic) equation... the H10 could be W5D4E1 or E1W9, R(ange)3S(upport)2D3W1(that one being as Spore module), etc. Huge amount of variations, based on values that CAN grow from the current modifier sizes (of individual components) & miniaturization tags.

That's the correction to be made, assuming they're also tied with HardPoints.

Yeah, that'd be nice.

By that definition, anything (including the system now) would be a hard cap. Also, the system would still allow flexibility: each tier would have multiple hulls in it: one with attack slots, one with defenses, one with engines, and so on. True, you would lose some flexibility, but if you did it right, you would not have the "huge hull kills all" problem we have in GC2.

Sorry, but i really don't understand this.

Why would you need another queue when the shipyard keeps making same ships unless you change it?

Besides creating it for such a sequence as *Make 3 Constructors, Two Colony, One Fighter, Six Defenders and 20 Battleships" -- you'd want to exit that process often enough when gameplay situations enforces you into rushing an armada out of many planets instead of Colonies.

You're probably thinking about Starports, Daniellost.

if you have 29 battleships qued up you probable don't need to rush any armada's other than buying them.

That confirms what i just inserted in the previous reply then, all and every Starport only queues the same ship unless you change it as of now; BUT, there are plenty of Governors already available that handle 'queuing' indirectly. Not as a list or a sequence such as you suggested, though. I'd possibly give this a try only to watch a few "unwanted" ships in orbit of one my 250+ planets simply cuz i kept them all on individual but different queues.

I think the point is, what would you que(sp?) in the shipyard? I could see it for starports, but for nthe sip designer, there's really no point.

1. For the new spy sytem from DA to GO AWAY! I very much enjoyed the old system, You kept putting money into it (like you should) for updated information, it was compaired to how much your oponent spent against you, and no micro managing something you shouldnt have to manage.

2. Unlimited research. If your finnished with the tech tree, simply add infinite loop techs to upgrade weapons, planet upgrades ect.

Thats it, that is all I ask and I am satisfied.

Once #1 is fixed maybe I'll get back to playing again. But really 3 will simply have better graphics, more options, smarter A.I. and probably actually impliment a carrier system. That just about sums up the best TBS I could really imagin.

It won't be rolled back, but SDC still has 1.80g as far as I am aware, which is the version of DA prior to 2.0, so you're welcome to do it that way if you'd like.

I have conflicting opinions on an infinite tech tree, but I'd like it to be larger.

I REALLY want the old tree from GC1 back!!! Not only was it not linear, but it was larger and tech victory was harder to attain: the thing I liked about it was the "arc": you started out with a few techs to choose from, and they opened up into more and more options until about halfway through, when (thanks to the multiple prerequisists that I STILL want back!) your choices narrowed back down until you got to tech victory at the very end.

As for the infinite loop thing, I would see this as a tech at the end of each section called "weapons development" or something like that. As long as you kept poring money into it, it would keep giving you a bonus in that category. Of course, this would seem to exacerbate the rich-get-richer problem, but maybe if you made it like esbionage where each iteration costs MORE than the one before it, you miiiiight be able to make it work.

Amen.

Another thing that I would want to see from a modding perspective is a universal set of "special" tags. You know, like [shortcivname], ['yourleadername], those sorts of things. The way they are now, you have different tags for the same information in different files, and they don't work at ALL in other contexts, like the tech tree. What I want is for a standard series of these tags used by ALL the parsers, so that you can say, for example "throuought the history of [yourshortcivname], artificial gravity has been the holy grail of the scientific community" in my tech tree. Granted, some tags wouldn't work in all situations, but I think we can reasonably assume that if someone has enough sense to mod the thing in the first place, they won't talk about someone having invaded an improvement. I would also like to see a series of "random" tags that pull a random value for the appropriate field, so that you could say someone defdected from or to a random civ, for example.

To extend this to its next logical step: Let me use starbase module abilities in planet improvements and ship components, and vice versa (x2).  (Okay, maybe not all of them, but it annoys me that an ability will work in one place but won't work in another.)

Indeed. Basically, I think all of the modders would agree that more standardization in the XMLs would be a big help. To extend it even further, maybe have a universal "requires" field that would accept the internal name of any tech, imp, or starbase module. This would go a looong way to freeing up more "adaptive" requirement systems, which were one of the things I loved the most about Civ 4. It would also be great if govs, tile resorces, and extreme planets were included in the XML list: again, more moddability and interesting requirement systems: i.e. to reserch the advanced toxic planet coloniser, you would have to have colonised at least one toxic planet, to reserch biology techs you would need to build a bio lab, and so on.

That also means a complete overhaul of AIs 'tactics' on priority selection of pathways.

Non-Linear has its appeal in terms of freedom of choice or highly variable strategy, granted - gameplay dynamics are even at stake.

It certainly opens up the GC3 is not GC2 anymore pandora box, innovative nevertheless. Ingenious idea.

I'd go knee deep for that much of a new challenge if i was an SD dev.

But, if you'd want a clear demonstration of the Infinite techs principle & prerequisites chaos for valid  gameplay reasons -- i'd highly recommend this; http://c-evo.org/

And, get the Re-Search tool for it (not far from the GTeChnos utility for GC2 i transfered to a Delphi coding project from a VB5X template, a month ago) on my Home-page.

Trees, you say? Pfffffttt, now that's a techno race.

Cohesive approach can only help.

This thread should have a Poll feature. 35 Pages later, there's bound to be a few 'good' suggestions lost -- in fact, this whole thing has reached a "Pre-Beta-Testers" phase of serious discussions.

Strike one against Ultimate Espionage above, btw.

You know Scoutdog is working on modifying their research paths to begin with (at least to the extent that this is possible in GC2); why should this surprise you?

And it's honestly not like they research terribly intelligently in the first place.  Read: Focus on power plants, et al, which were only ever good in DA ~1.7.

Speaking of which, I could use a few more replies from a few more people in my survey thread...

https://forums.galciv2.com/343677

For an answer, click above!

The smaller ships you have to design/build three different types.  Those are what I would que.  Also would que escorts for the larger ships.

But really as with most scifi games there is no real reason to build anything but the largest ships you can.