Fuel

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Geoff the Medio
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Fuel

#1 Post by Geoff the Medio »

For various strategic enhancement reasons, it would be nice to have some concept of fuel that affects ship range, primarily on the galaxy map. Having fuel is an intuitive and easy way to limit ship range, as opposed to hard limits ala MOO, which are rather unsatisfying, IMO. It also gives a nice way to specialize some ships, by adding extra fuel tanks, to allow them to go for longer without resupply, or by later making ships that require no fuel as a high-tech perk. Fuel also provides a nice way to make big lumbering battleships more difficult to use, and thus a variety of ship sizes or possibly entirely smaller ship sizes more useful. Lack of and search for more fuel might also be an interesting scenario plot point (anybody watch BSG?), which would then integrate nicely into the game mechanics.

However the simplest implementation of fuel, where no fuel means no go, has some problems. The biggest of these is what to do when you run out; being stuck immobile is not fun. More so, having to carefully watch your fuel level to be sure you don't run out JUST too far away to make it back home would be a pain and require excessive micromangement, unless fuel was so plentiful or easy to regain that the whole system was pointless to begin with.

So, IMO fuel, if included in the game, needs to be not absolutely essential for movement. Thus I would propose a two-speed movement system: fast(er) with fuel, and very slow without fuel. Ships would use up some amount of fuel every time they moved between systems at normal speed. If ships ran out of fuel, they could still move around, but would do so much more slowly than normal speed. This way, even if you run out of fuel, you can still get where you're going or back from where you can... eventually.

Additionally, fuel should be resupplied like other consumables. If a ship has an unbroken safe route back to a supply point (eg. a planet of your empire), then it would get some amount of its fuel and other consumables replenished each turn in normal circumstances.

In order to further capitalize on the strategic value of fuel, it could have uses other than travel on the map. This is somewhat more questionable though, as fuel could serve its purpose without being necessary for anything but map travel. If it were used for other things, these could include movement in battle, energy generation (for shields or energy weapons or battle effects if present). Cloaked ships could consume more fuel, and would become decloaked after running out of fuel. (To reduce micro, it could be made manditory to have the cloak on at all times if fuel is available).

Ship engines could be rated for their fueled speed generally, but all engines could be equally fast unfuelled, perhaps leading to some interesting strategic situations or role reversals where the normally high-tech empire runs out of fuel and is then on a level playing field with the low tech empire.

Fuel would be probably be pooled amongst ships in a fleet.

As for what to use as fuel... it could be generated from PP when resupplying ships, or directly from minreals. If fuel is to be something that can be found out in space, which would be nice for scenarios or random specials like "fuel rich asteroid belt" where your ships can refuel themselves, then it would make sense for it to be drawn from minerals.

Alternatively, fuel could cost nothing to produce, but just be generated automagically for all ships you are able to refuel on a given turn in some amount dependent on where the ship is (ie. ships at supply points get instantly refuelled; ships away but in supply get less, either a fixed fraction, or an amount dependent on the length of the shortest safe path from the ship to a supply point).

Thoughts?

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#2 Post by marhawkman »

It sounds like you want to implement the fuel system that is used in Stars!. :lol:
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Re: Fuel

#3 Post by utilae »

Geoff the Medio wrote: However the simplest implementation of fuel, where no fuel means no go, has some problems. The biggest of these is what to do when you run out; being stuck immobile is not fun. More so, having to carefully watch your fuel level to be sure you don't run out JUST too far away to make it back home would be a pain and require excessive micromangement, unless fuel was so plentiful or easy to regain that the whole system was pointless to begin with.
This worked well enough in Moo2. It can be easily calculated, so that you can only travel to places if you will have enough fuel to get back to one of your worlds.
Geoff the Medio wrote: Additionally, fuel should be resupplied like other consumables. If a ship has an unbroken safe route back to a supply point (eg. a planet of your empire), then it would get some amount of its fuel and other consumables replenished each turn in normal circumstances.
This should work like in Moo2, if your ship is at a spacestation, then fuel is replenished automatically.
Geoff the Medio wrote: In order to further capitalize on the strategic value of fuel, it could have uses other than travel on the map. This is somewhat more questionable though, as fuel could serve its purpose without being necessary for anything but map travel. If it were used for other things, these could include movement in battle, energy generation (for shields or energy weapons or battle effects if present). Cloaked ships could consume more fuel, and would become decloaked after running out of fuel. (To reduce micro, it could be made manditory to have the cloak on at all times if fuel is available).
Things like cloak, shields might just need a power requirement, ie 5000KW powerplant.


We could also have different types of refueling methods, eg
-must refuel at space station
-must stop at a planet for 1 turn to 'scoop' fuel from a planets atmosphere or if you are the Wrath, to feed on some humans on the planet :).
-can only travel x parsecs per turn, as it takes 1 turn to recharge/regenerate fuel.

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Re: Fuel

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

utilae wrote:This worked well enough in Moo2. It can be easily calculated, so that you can only travel to places if you will have enough fuel to get back to one of your worlds.
That's fine if the only use for fuel is travel, and you only want to fly direct round trips...
This should work like in Moo2, if your ship is at a spacestation, then fuel is replenished automatically.
What happens at a refulling point isn't an issue... But if we have resupply lines, which I hope we do, then it would make sense that fuel is included in the resupply.
Things like cloak, shields might just need a power requirement, ie 5000KW powerplant.
That's a totally different type of requirement though... it's essentially just another space limit on the design, whereas fuel limits how long you can use something after building the ship, and relates movement on the map to things you do in battles, which would be interesting if you need to save fuel, so can't fight in the battle at full capacity, etc.
-must stop at a planet for 1 turn to 'scoop' fuel from a planets atmosphere or if you are the Wrath, to feed on some humans on the planet :).
-can only travel x parsecs per turn, as it takes 1 turn to recharge/regenerate fuel.
If you can regenerate / recharge fuel almost anywhere, then it sort of defeats the point of having fuel for range doesn't it? It just becomes a requirement that you slow down and stop occasionally, rather than a real limit on how far you can go and what you can do... Having to stop and restart also seems like a lot of pointless micromangement...
marhawkman wrote:It sounds like you want to implement the fuel system that is used in Stars!. :lol:
It's entirely possible... What were the details of the Stars! system, and were there any significant drawbacks we should consider?

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#5 Post by skdiw »

if fuel is going to be in the game, it should be very simple. some potential problems includes: mixed fuel capacity in a fleet, more tech research items, and yet another item in ship design. any of them can create a lot of problems and can be very complicated. even if ships slows down if they don't have fuel, the player still needs to keep track ship range.

to reduce micro, I think there should be one fuel capacity across the board upgradable by tech.

any way to implement you idea is maybe a seperation between impulse drive and warp dive in research (star trek.) you can always use impluse drive to move, but if you have power for warp drive, you move faster. the impulse drive can double as subspace tactical movement speed.

i think fuel should be free so player don't have to worry about mystery entity eating resources. or maybe fuel will be part of maintainece fee.

i thought of another way of limiting range. each colony have a range that they can power the ships. ships inside the range move at full speed/or some sort of bonus (helps defense part of strategic rps) and then reduced speeds or another hard limit that no ships can move beyond.

if people likes power, supply ship, and fuel... maybe we should lump all those concepts together and create a good design. otherwise i think we have enough on our plates already.

ships that moves very slow is the same as immobility. look at moo3 off-road travelling vs. starlanes.
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#6 Post by marhawkman »

The system in stars actually had a bit more complexity than what you posted.

Each fleet had a shared fuel capacity. The fuel usage was determined by the engine type, fleet mass(measured in kilo tons), and warp speed you were traveling at. Fuel was produced at space stations. Fuel was also measured in MILLIGRAMS of Antimatter. That's right.... It didn't matter how much fuel was on the ship it had no effect on the weight of the ship. Each hull design had a base storage amount, and there were a few techs that could be used to increase this, but they were items that you would add to the hull(extra fueltanks). Two main types of engines, regular, and Ramscoop. Regular engines used fuel at speeds above warp one. Ramscoop engines had a variable speed that they would not use fuel at or below(4 to 9). when it was traveling at a speed that didn't require fuel it would generate fuel instead of using it.

I might have left out a detail or two but that's about it. Main drawbacks? It uses some rather complicated formulas to calculate fuel usage. It also requires a fuel meter for each fleet.
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#7 Post by Sapphire Wyvern »

marhawkman wrote:The system in stars actually had a bit more complexity than what you posted.

Each fleet had a shared fuel capacity. The fuel usage was determined by the engine type, fleet mass(measured in kilo tons), and warp speed you were traveling at. Fuel was produced at space stations. Fuel was also measured in MILLIGRAMS of Antimatter. That's right.... It didn't matter how much fuel was on the ship it had no effect on the weight of the ship. Each hull design had a base storage amount, and there were a few techs that could be used to increase this, but they were items that you would add to the hull(extra fueltanks). Two main types of engines, regular, and Ramscoop. Regular engines used fuel at speeds above warp one. Ramscoop engines had a variable speed that they would not use fuel at or below(4 to 9). when it was traveling at a speed that didn't require fuel it would generate fuel instead of using it.

I might have left out a detail or two but that's about it. Main drawbacks? It uses some rather complicated formulas to calculate fuel usage. It also requires a fuel meter for each fleet.
There were also specialist "fleet tender" hulls that generated a certain amount of fuel each turn.

The other noteworthy element of the ramscoop/conventional engine breakdown is that once a ramscoop engine exceeded its "free travel" speed, its rate of fuel consumption climbed much faster than a conventional engine did. This meant that conventional engines could often travel further faster... but only if you didn't mind having much more fuel hassles.

Stars! used a movement measurement called "warp speed". Basically, the square of a fleet's Warp speed was the distance it moved on the map each turn. Conventional engines generally had a fuel-per-turn consumption rate roughly proportional to the warp speed rating, and therefore proportional to the square root of the fleet's distance per turn. Ramscoop engines were free up to a particular limit, and then usually extremely inefficient for any travel above their free limit.

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#8 Post by Geoff the Medio »

skdiw wrote:some potential problems includes: mixed fuel capacity in a fleet, more tech research items, and yet another item in ship design.
I don't see why more tech research items or another item in ship design are problems necessarily...

Fleet fuel capacity could be tricky though. One approach would be to have fleets have a single pool of fuel that's shared out amongst all ships (or rather, which is used up at a rate that's the sum of the rate for all ships in a fleet). This creates some problems when it comes to merging and splitting fleets though. What if you have a long range scout ship with a large fuel capacity that you want to fully fuel and send off from the rest of the fleet. If it's in the bigger fleet that has used up some of its fuel, then you split it off into its own fleet, it would presumably start with an equal share of the fleet's fuel according to the size of its tank... but you'd rather have it have a full tank, etc. This leads to situations where you have to micromange fuel supplies between fleets. And we can't just ignore this issue, and say new fleets always get an proportional share of fuel when splitting ships out of existing fleets, because you also have situations where you'd want to merge ships into fleets, which you then wouldn't be want to do in some cases because doing so would mean you'd lose any extra fuel the smaller fleet has compared to the big one, or conversely, you might then want to merge a fuel-less ship into and then take it back out of a larger fleet to "steal" some of the bigger fleet's fuel... etc.

So there needs to be a system whereby you can share fuel amongst the ships of a fleet, but which doesn't have micromanagement problems as a result in casese where you want to split ships off... Maybe the micro wouldn't be so bad in this case? If it was done without a dialogue / pop up somehow...? I'm skeptical though...
to reduce micro, I think there should be one fuel capacity across the board upgradable by tech.
How would you define "fuel capacity"? Is it some abstract unit (litres, milligrams, tons) or a distance they can travel or a number of turns they can go? How would the latter two mesh with using fuel for things other than just travel on the map? If the former (some abstract unit), do all ships use the same amount of fuel per turn or per distance travelled, or does fuel use depend on engine technology or ship size or something else?

I strongly dislike any system that "magically" upgrades the properties of ships that are away from a shipyard or other upgrade centre. It doesn't obviously reduce micro anyway, assuming we require ships to return to a starbase to upgrade other parts anyway. And even if they don't have to return to base to upgrade, there's still the fleet merging and fuel supply redistribution issues mentioned above.
any way to implement you idea is maybe a seperation between impulse drive and warp dive in research (star trek.) you can always use impluse drive to move, but if you have power for warp drive, you move faster. the impulse drive can double as subspace tactical movement speed.
Given your desire to keep ship design simple, why separate these? It's simpler for design and UI representation and player understanding to have just a signle engine component... Though if we're going to separate fuelled and unfuelled movement, it might be justified.
i thought of another way of limiting range. each colony have a range that they can power the ships. ships inside the range move at full speed/or some sort of bonus (helps defense part of strategic rps) and then reduced speeds or another hard limit that no ships can move beyond.
This is a more complicated version of the MOO system I disparaged in the first post.
ships that moves very slow is the same as immobility. look at moo3 off-road travelling vs. starlanes.
Not quite... with slow movement, you can get somewhere eventually, just not as quickly as you like. You can also run out of fuel without just losing the whole fleet, and without having to send another ship with more fuel to replenish the fleet, since you can just limp to the destination unfuelled. And with resupply, you'd never need to send a ship to refuel if a ship is close to your empire, and thus in good supply range. The case you might want to send a ship to refuel a fleet explicitly (ie. requiring micormangement to do) would be when the fleet is really far form your empire, in which case you wouldn't get much benefit since the resupply ship would have to travel so far and so long to get there that you'd probly just limp to the destination by the time the resupply arrived, and even when it did arrive, it wouldn't have much fuel left since it had to travel all that way, using up a lot of fuel in the process...

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#9 Post by marhawkman »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
skdiw wrote:some potential problems includes: mixed fuel capacity in a fleet, more tech research items, and yet another item in ship design.
I don't see why more tech research items or another item in ship design are problems necessarily...

Fleet fuel capacity could be tricky though. One approach would be to have fleets have a single pool of fuel that's shared out amongst all ships (or rather, which is used up at a rate that's the sum of the rate for all ships in a fleet). This creates some problems when it comes to merging and splitting fleets though. What if you have a long range scout ship with a large fuel capacity that you want to fully fuel and send off from the rest of the fleet. If it's in the bigger fleet that has used up some of its fuel, then you split it off into its own fleet, it would presumably start with an equal share of the fleet's fuel according to the size of its tank... but you'd rather have it have a full tank, etc. This leads to situations where you have to micromange fuel supplies between fleets. And we can't just ignore this issue, and say new fleets always get an proportional share of fuel when splitting ships out of existing fleets, because you also have situations where you'd want to merge ships into fleets, which you then wouldn't be want to do in some cases because doing so would mean you'd lose any extra fuel the smaller fleet has compared to the big one, or conversely, you might then want to merge a fuel-less ship into and then take it back out of a larger fleet to "steal" some of the bigger fleet's fuel... etc.

So there needs to be a system whereby you can share fuel amongst the ships of a fleet, but which doesn't have micromanagement problems as a result in casese where you want to split ships off... Maybe the micro wouldn't be so bad in this case? If it was done without a dialogue / pop up somehow...? I'm skeptical though...
Stars fixed this by having a dialog box for manually transferring fuel between ships. Merging ships into a fleet would give you a fleet with a max fuel capacity equal to the toatal capacity of the ships in it. And a current fuel amount equal to the total that the ships had. Splitting was, like you said, accomplished as a percentage. The game would calculate the percentage of capacity the fleet had and the smaller fleets produced by splitting would have the same percentage of their max fuel. I know it sounds kinda weird at first, but it qorked quite well. since you could manually transfer you didn't need to worry about the automatic distribution. One noteworthy thing is that this system has a fuel meter for each fleet. It doesn't have a meter for each ship. the max fuel capacity of the individual ships is only used to calculate the fuel capacity of the fleet.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
to reduce micro, I think there should be one fuel capacity across the board upgradable by tech.
How would you define "fuel capacity"? Is it some abstract unit (litres, milligrams, tons) or a distance they can travel or a number of turns they can go? How would the latter two mesh with using fuel for things other than just travel on the map? If the former (some abstract unit), do all ships use the same amount of fuel per turn or per distance travelled, or does fuel use depend on engine technology or ship size or something else?

I strongly dislike any system that "magically" upgrades the properties of ships that are away from a shipyard or other upgrade centre. It doesn't obviously reduce micro anyway, assuming we require ships to return to a starbase to upgrade other parts anyway. And even if they don't have to return to base to upgrade, there's still the fleet merging and fuel supply redistribution issues mentioned above.
Yeah I didn't really like the auto upgrade feature of BotF. I suppose we could swipe the fuel system from stars if you want. The antimatter idea makes sense. But I think the Milligram idea might have been a bit much though. Grams should do fine.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
any way to implement you idea is maybe a seperation between impulse drive and warp dive in research (star trek.) you can always use impluse drive to move, but if you have power for warp drive, you move faster. the impulse drive can double as subspace tactical movement speed.
Given your desire to keep ship design simple, why separate these? It's simpler for design and UI representation and player understanding to have just a signle engine component... Though if we're going to separate fuelled and unfuelled movement, it might be justified.
I'd keep the single engine approach. since we currently aren't actually using WARP travel we can't use warp drives. Thus leaving us with only "impulse" drives. I'd make it so that the drives could still move without fuel just at a snail's pace.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
i thought of another way of limiting range. each colony have a range that they can power the ships. ships inside the range move at full speed/or some sort of bonus (helps defense part of strategic rps) and then reduced speeds or another hard limit that no ships can move beyond.
This is a more complicated version of the MOO system I disparaged in the first post.
Indeed. If you're actually using Fuel then the range bit is counterproductive.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
ships that moves very slow is the same as immobility. look at moo3 off-road travelling vs. starlanes.
Not quite... with slow movement, you can get somewhere eventually, just not as quickly as you like. You can also run out of fuel without just losing the whole fleet, and without having to send another ship with more fuel to replenish the fleet, since you can just limp to the destination unfuelled. And with resupply, you'd never need to send a ship to refuel if a ship is close to your empire, and thus in good supply range. The case you might want to send a ship to refuel a fleet explicitly (ie. requiring micormangement to do) would be when the fleet is really far form your empire, in which case you wouldn't get much benefit since the resupply ship would have to travel so far and so long to get there that you'd probly just limp to the destination by the time the resupply arrived, and even when it did arrive, it wouldn't have much fuel left since it had to travel all that way, using up a lot of fuel in the process...
Well stars handled that with special ship designs that could carry 30 times as much fuel as a normal ship. That and there were the various fueltank technologies. If you wanted a ship that could go a very long ways you could build it with the fueltanks instead of something else in the hull.
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Rise of Nations

#10 Post by guiguibaah »

I liked the Rise of Nations approach to Fuel. Supply Wagons.

For those who have not played Rise of Nations, here si a quick description.

A friendly army within a friendly territory can move around as much as it wants. It also slowly gets healed over time if it stays within that territory.

A friendly army within neutral territory can also move around as much as it wants, however it does not slowly get healed over time unless it has a supply wagon with it.

A friendly army within enemy territory will slowly take damage when it enters enemy territory if it does not have a supply wagon with it. This can force the withdrawal of a hostile army out of one's territory. It mimics such things as lack of supplies, guerilla attacks, medical / food transport, etc.

thoughout the game players can develop upgrades to their territory that "drains more health" from enemy armies as they enter borders without a supply wagon.


For a defending player who does not have a lot of cash to afford the huge army needed to destroy a huge army attacking their lands, a common strategy is to build some fast-hitting units that attack from the rear and to pick off the supply wagon(s). If the attacking player looses their supply wagons, they need to make a quick battlefield decision, which is...

a) Continue the fight, and hope they can destroy as much infrastructure before their army succumbs to attrition...

b) Retreat to neutral territory, and build a supply wagon to meet the damaged army to heal it...

c) Retreat to friendly territory, to heal their army.


- In the beginning of the game, damage taken by attrition is rather small, almost unnoticeable, to allow for quick skirmishes. As the game progresses into the middle stage, use of supply wagons is essential. When the late game enters, you have units that are immune to attrition and have no need of supply wagons (such as high speed bombers, ICBM missiles, etc...)


* * *

I think this could work for Freeorion. Granted, it would have to be modified as Rise of Nations is an RTS game, and Free Orion is more of a TBS game.
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#11 Post by Geoff the Medio »

marhawkman wrote:Merging ships into a fleet would give you a fleet with a max fuel capacity equal to the toatal capacity of the ships in it. And a current fuel amount equal to the total that the ships had. Splitting was, like you said, accomplished as a percentage. The game would calculate the percentage of capacity the fleet had and the smaller fleets produced by splitting would have the same percentage of their max fuel. I know it sounds kinda weird at first, but it qorked quite well. since you could manually transfer you didn't need to worry about the automatic distribution. One noteworthy thing is that this system has a fuel meter for each fleet. It doesn't have a meter for each ship. the max fuel capacity of the individual ships is only used to calculate the fuel capacity of the fleet.
That's pretty much what I'd like to have in terms of functionality, as long as the UI is workable in practice. If it worked well for Stars! then that's encouraging... though you may be less concerned about micromanagement than some others, so don't see it as an issue when they might.
I'd keep the single engine approach. since we currently aren't actually using WARP travel we can't use warp drives. Thus leaving us with only "impulse" drives.
Don't worry about the fluff terminology (ie. what stuff is called in game). The important thing is the game mechanics...

Do we want there to be separate variable speed ratings for different ships in situations like combat with fuel, combat without fuel, long range map with fuel, long range map without fuel, etc?

For on the map without fuel, assuming you can still move, do you do this at a fixed speed for all ships, or a speed proportional to your fuelled speed, or do you have a separate engine choice / part that determines your speed without fuel, or does a ship have a single engine that has two speed numbers (one with, one without fuel)?
This is a more complicated version of the MOO system I disparaged in the first post.
Indeed. If you're actually using Fuel then the range bit is counterproductive.
I think the idea was to do range instead of fuel...
Well stars handled that with special ship designs that could carry 30 times as much fuel as a normal ship. That and there were the various fueltank technologies. If you wanted a ship that could go a very long ways you could build it with the fueltanks instead of something else in the hull.
Being able to design long-range ships with more fuel supplies, or tankers that can travel with a fleet to give it more fuel supplies, but which also make a nice juicy target for raiders would be good things. We want to avoid situations where the player needs to use a tanker to shuttle fuel to a remotely located fleet though... which is part of the benefit of using an automatic supply regeneration system. So we just need to make doing fuel runs with separate fleets just to transport fuel to an already existing fleet not worth the cost, and then there's no problem of the extra micro required to do so.
guiguibaah wrote:A friendly army within neutral territory can also move around as much as it wants, however it does not slowly get healed over time unless it has a supply wagon with it.

A friendly army within enemy territory will slowly take damage when it enters enemy territory if it does not have a supply wagon with it.
This doesn't really accomplish the goal of having a limited range for ships. Really it's an attrition system, not a range / fuel system.

Which is fine... and we could have an attrition system, or perhaps specialized buildings or research paths or strategies that make attrition-type effect fields, and/or ships that protect from such fields, but it's sort of another topic from this, I think...

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#12 Post by marhawkman »

Geoff the Medio wrote:That's pretty much what I'd like to have in terms of functionality, as long as the UI is workable in practice. If it worked well for Stars! then that's encouraging... though you may be less concerned about micromanagement than some others, so don't see it as an issue when they might.
Well unless you have an automatic systeem for splitting fleets then it's really not an issue. You just split and then click the button to do the fuel transfer(if you want to).
Geoff the Medio wrote:
I'd keep the single engine approach. since we currently aren't actually using WARP travel we can't use warp drives. Thus leaving us with only "impulse" drives.
Don't worry about the fluff terminology (ie. what stuff is called in game). The important thing is the game mechanics...
Well I mentioned it since he was proposing having both types in the game....
Geoff the Medio wrote:Do we want there to be separate variable speed ratings for different ships in situations like combat with fuel, combat without fuel, long range map with fuel, long range map without fuel, etc?

For on the map without fuel, assuming you can still move, do you do this at a fixed speed for all ships, or a speed proportional to your fuelled speed, or do you have a separate engine choice / part that determines your speed without fuel, or does a ship have a single engine that has two speed numbers (one with, one without fuel)?
Stars! handled this by having each engine type have a minimum warp speed they could go without fuel(combat speed was unaffected). Space Empires 3 handled this by halving the ship speed when it was out of fuel(in and out of combat). Also in SE3 a ship with no fuel couldn't repair anything or cloak(Stars! did cloaking as a passive ship system that didn't require fuel).
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Well stars handled that with special ship designs that could carry 30 times as much fuel as a normal ship. That and there were the various fueltank technologies. If you wanted a ship that could go a very long ways you could build it with the fueltanks instead of something else in the hull.
Being able to design long-range ships with more fuel supplies, or tankers that can travel with a fleet to give it more fuel supplies, but which also make a nice juicy target for raiders would be good things. We want to avoid situations where the player needs to use a tanker to shuttle fuel to a remotely located fleet though... which is part of the benefit of using an automatic supply regeneration system. So we just need to make doing fuel runs with separate fleets just to transport fuel to an already existing fleet not worth the cost, and then there's no problem of the extra micro required to do so.
Hehe... that's why I like the ramscoops in Stars! You could simply tell the ship to mave around slowly for several turns to refuel. But this system also encourages the use of remote fuel depots(which also might as well have bull's eyes painted on them). And that, that is cool. Oh yeah... I usually sent the Tanker ships with several armed vessels just to make sure they stayed in one peice. Heck I usually just stuck them in the fleet before it left just to keep it from running out of fuel in the first place.

One side note I just thought of is that it doesn't look like we'll be implementing warp speeds. Which means the only real way to do ramscoops would be to have them generate a certain amount of fuel per turn. Dosn't really sound like a bad idea atm...
Geoff the Medio wrote:
guiguibaah wrote:A friendly army within neutral territory can also move around as much as it wants, however it does not slowly get healed over time unless it has a supply wagon with it.
This doesn't really accomplish the goal of having a limited range for ships. Really it's an attrition system, not a range / fuel system.
I think his point was to make it so your allies could refuel or repair your ships etc.... which is good. He just didn't explain it well.
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ewh02b
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To throw yet another Sci-fi universe into the fray...

#13 Post by ewh02b »

Why not have a system like Battletech/Mechwarrior? I think that with a few modifications, it could closely resemble the current system.

For those not familiar:
Jumpships can leap up to 30 parsecs (or is it light years? I forget) at a time, and then have to wait a week (we could make it a turn) to recharge their capacitors. Ships generally recharge using huge solar sails, which take time to deploy/collect, but collect energy in a safe manner. Jumpships are generally unarmed, but can carry Dropships. Moo2 equivalent is probably Freighters.

Warships have jump capability, but their use is not cargo transfer, but war. They can have fleets of fighters, lasers, etc, etc.

Dropships can land on planets, but must travel from star to star attached to a Jumpship. The Moo2 equivalent are Transports, and possibly Colony Ships.

If someone wants to jump further in a turn, they can try "hot-loading" the drive, at the risk of blowing it up. If that happens, they cannot jump, they are stuck in that system (able to maneuver) until replacement parts show up. If they succeed, they get to go twice as far.

Possible tech upgrade: capacitor batteries, take up lots of space, but allow for a 'safe' double-jump.

Any thoughts? Or too dissimilar to work in?

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: To throw yet another Sci-fi universe into the fray...

#14 Post by Geoff the Medio »

ewh02b wrote:Jumpships can leap up to 30 parsecs (or is it light years? I forget) at a time, and then have to wait a week
This would mean that ships have to stop for a turn every other turn, which would be a bit annoying, and wouldn't really accomplish any of the goals of a fuel system.

Which is not to say we can't have an alternative engine technology that functions like this, but for the main / default / most used system, I don't think it's really appropriate...

ewh02b
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#15 Post by ewh02b »

no, it wouldn't be that bad--since the jump is instantaneous, the 'turn' is the recharge. It wouldn't take 2 turns to move 30 parsecs, it would take 2 turns to move 60 parsecs.

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