FreeOrion

Longer starlanes take longer to travel.

I thought that was something that was going to be changed... that distances would essentially be measured in starlane lengths (and that Engine tech would basically be how many turns it takes to cross a starlane)

This is true only for certain things such as fuel use, (fuel is essentially only used to initiate the "jump" into a starlane) and for calculating supply ranges.

It doesn't effect travel time of your actual ships.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

OK, just thought that simple node and connection system was going to go into more of the game (as travel time can be important, and the exact effect of an engine tech is harder to describe on a screen)

We've been working on v0.4 since i became involved with FO, so i don't quite know how we finish this off.

Assuming we come to the point where no-one has anything to add to v.0.4 design pad, what happens next from a design standpoint? (obviously there will be coding to do, but that's not my concern here)

By what process does the v.04 design pad become the official v.0.4, and work officially begins on v.0.5?
Will Tyreth and/or Aquitaine be involved? Voting? Consulting of oracles and/or magic 8 balls?

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

As of now, the v0.4 design pad becomes the v0.4 requirements when I say so. At the moment, I suspect that will be when the planetary resource distribution stuff is resolved, although another issue might come up. I suspect we'll need a revision, perhaps v0.4.5 or v0.4.1 (numbering is vague at best with this project...) once we get an actual combat engine and see how things work in practice, as well as what additional questions we've not yet thought to ask, let alone answer, in the v0.4 document.

There should probably also be a section added that discussed changes to stuff from v0.3 and earlier that have been made. For example: Planets now start with maxed out meters, since the 75% ones (as in v0.3) grew to maxed in a few turns anyway and it was (IMO) rather stilly to have them start that way.

As well, a lot of the specific numbers in tables in v0.3 and earlier don't really belong in the design document, since they get tweaked quite a bit over time, and are really content, not higher-level design stuff. IMO the design document should consist mainly of (1) features that need to be in the code and (2) general principles about content that we intend to add to the game. This does not include specific numbers in universe generation tables, or exactly how universe generation should be caluclated, or what techs or ship hulls we'll have.

There used to be a more formal process for this stage of the design process... "Formal" in the sense that a discussion was had on the "Game features" forum instead of the "Game Design" forum and was called a "Public Review". This thread (currently in Game Design) is pretty much what used to be a public review for the v0.4 design document as it is now, though. These also used to be held for major features, but I haven't seen a need to do so after the initial design discussion.

v0.5 work already has begun, in the preliminary thread.

Tyreth is not particularly interested in issues and decisions such as this, although he is there as, effectively, a supreme court of the FreeOrion project in case someone thinks I or tzlaine or pd are idiots or have disappeared and need to be replaced.

Aq has posted twice in the last year, give or take a few days, and not once since June; he's effectively gone (although his last visit seems to have been yesterday; nice to know he's / you're still checking in from time to time). His opinions carry weight, but unless Tyreth says otherwise, he has no official decision-making roles at present.

Well, the only thing I can think of is this:

You have mentioned removing micromanagement. How is this done? Can you create squadrons and platoons before the battle? Or is there some unseen rule?

_________________
MoO: Darloks Rule!
MoO2: Custom Darloks Rule!
MoO3: Dunno cuz I'm a cheapskate

I thought removing micromanagement reffered to empire building, not battles. Its not quite "crewman 32 fire laser #3 at that ship's engines" micromangement but unless I missed something major (actually quite possible ) ordering individual ships should be fine.

The micromangement issue has been mainly focused on the strategic game, as opposed to the battle.

For battles, there are similar concerns about level of detail in simulation and control... If players are controlling fleets, they can't be controlling individual ships to the level of detail of individual subsystems. This is taken into consideration when deciding what to simulate and what to abstract, and will influence what specific parts and abilities ships can have.

IMO bigger is probably better in a case like this; I like it when things are Epic. I'm not to worried about loosing detailed damage to individual subsystems but what exactly would we have to sacrifice in terms of ship abilities?

Weapons that directly target subsystems might have to go, debuff weapons that slow ships or weaken weapons could probobly stay.
Player controlled special abilities would have to go (Good riddance )
Anything else? If its not much more than that its probably worth going for big fleets.

I know the ground combat is for 0.6, but what about "boarding" feature of the space combat? Any discussion on that?

Boarding will probably be treated as a weapon of sorts. IE boarding strength is compared to enemy crew strength, then result is resolved. Not a particularly complex concept is it?

_________________
Computer programming is fun.

Going back to the original topic: What's missing.

On the latest page of debating the scale of combat it turns out there isn't anything on the design pad on weather a battle can last for multiple galaxy turns or not. We probably should decide this one way or another.

I've also added a few annotations (all in underlined text, with "--Zach" at the end) indicating contradictions, points that need clarifying, etc., to the 0.4 Design Pad. We should address those here too I guess.

The major game-design thing that the v.0.4 is missing is visibility/fog of war on the galaxy map.

I've discussed this lack with Geoff, and it will probably be the next official design topic.
I'm working on gathering any relavant topics, but there doesn't seem to be much.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—