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I was thinking of having something that I read in a book that used a similar means of interstellar travel (The 'Warp Points' in the book 'Exodus') and it mentioned that some of their 'warp points' can't be used by some ships becuase the ships are way to massive.

Would it be possible to implement something like this into allegiance? It wouldn't have to be something generated with a map - it would be a map-editor only feature, like the 'Stationary alephs' that aren't randomized.

Well, wouldn't that limit access to the enemy a bit. Such as, if team A is surrounded and team B only has a shipyard, and team A's sector is mass capped then the only way in is with bombers or smaller ships. then isn't it impossible for team A to win? Assuming there is no money left.

I thought you meant that the aleph itself is limited in carrying mass, which actually reminded me how funny it was for me to watch the gigantic Capships enter the aleph.

And if it was about the Aleph itself then its gonna be a change in a code just limiting the aleph from accepting certain ships passing through.

Then i would think of it in two ways either :

1- The aleph's ability of carrying mas sis limited to xx amount of mass per xx amount of time (like 10 Mins) which means that the capship has to wait for the next 10 mins to pass through, while all others should not pass through to avoid reaching the aleph limit.

2- Alephs are are all different in mass limit from another, and from sector to another, which means the capship can only go through those alephs that can accept its mass, which in other words means that the capship have to go through a certain route in order to reach the target sector.

Depends on the max mass of the aleph. Some alephs could allow some caps through but not others, while some may only allow small craft through.

Also, there is always money, as He3 does regen, and there are always floating cash and paydays. If Team A is turtling in a sector that doesn't have caps and Team B only has SY as game-ending tech (You would assume that they used another techpath before they got up to the SY), Team B still has the whole map to scrape the He3 from, and they have paydays coming in every minute. They can also counter-camp and keep Team A from coming out of their single sector. They would have plenty enough time to get bombers, stealth bombers, HTTs, or whatever. Also, if you have cap ships and they are being useless, then you simply dock them, get the money back, and you'll have quite a bit of money to research with.

Edit: Damnit amsun! You and your ninja-posting

The original idea was more like your option 2, with having a set max mass, where however many ships can go through in whatever timeframe, so long as they're under the max mass limit. It is like trying to fit a piano through a door - Some doors, even most doors, may be able to fit the piano through, but there are those that the piano will not fit no matter how hard you try.

*Necro Post* All your brains are belong to us! *Necro post*

Just wondering if anyone has any further opinions/input for this

The reason I brought this up again, coz I was thinking of it , and next thing I saw your post, I got all excited about it, yet this post died quickly, with no one sharing ideas, or telling us about the possibility of doing it,...etc.
I dont know how much code it will require, but eventually I would like it to be as an option when setting up the game, like we could choose to have our Aleph's mass to a limit of :

1-Allow All ships.
2-Allow Small, and mid ships.
3-Dont allow anything to pass. (Like a dead end), this would be crazy awesome, but yet again we might not need to apply this at all.

Yaay for necro-posts! Hmmm, I wish there was more fun stuff to do with alephs, but I personally don't like the "capships can't use certain alephs" idea *too* much... placing arbitrary limitations on where cap-ships can go doesn't seem particularly fun. >_> Cap ships are already rarely used, and often to end a long-running game against a heavily turtled team. Making certain alephs impassable to cap ships does not seem very conductive to fun, in my opinion. 6_6 They're already slow as it is, and really, I don't think dragging a game out even longer just for the sake of making it longer is a great idea. Sure, if you give the turtling side enough time they might stage a comeback, but really, whether they have enough time should depend on the competence of both teams, not on arbitrary aleph limitations.

The other version that's been mentioned, alephs that don't let more than a certain amount of mass through in a certain time period, sounds much more fun, but also very complex and potentially confusing. It would add to strategy -- it'd be like having to make a "budget" for the mass of ships you're sending through the aleph, making sure you only send in the most useful ones, and the enemy might deliberately send a lot of mass through to keep an aleph from being used by their foe. But then, even beyond the programming question of whether this is possible to do, you'd also need something to *tell* you how close to reaching "critical mass" an aleph is, like something like a "health bar" for it.

I much more like the idea of spontaneously de-stabilizing alephs, alephs that destabilize on one side but not the other, or (probably less plausibly) alephs that simply disappear once in a while at unexpected moments (especially this last one, since it could provide an in-universe explanation for why the different maps don't seem to actually be connected to the rest of the galaxy. ).

I also liked the idea of amount of mass per time, but then it would be better if each side had its own mass amount.
Like imagine we have exceeded our limit from our side , now we cant go through to kick the other team's Ass, but as for them they can still come through from their side and drive us nuts ( it would evolve into a camping strategy).

And as for the way of telling the Remaining amount of Mass, i think it would be simply by clicking on the Aleph, along with the distance, which shows, shows a number like 100/2500 which tells us only 100 is left from 2500 which might just let a scout pass through.

It would show up like the KB, or even like the shield/hull bar of the enemy ship when you lock on it.

EDIT: But hey what if it was 0/2500 Mass remaining, will it allow pods to come through ??

Making the mass over time in the code would probably be incredibly difficult to do, although it sounds incredibly fun.

And making it so that it has a toggle would require probably a bit more work or the same amount of work as making it have a check for straight mass amounts.

And for the 'artificial' restrictions of cap ships: It wouldn't be applied to every aleph, it would only be applied to certain alephs on custom maps, like ZG maps. And ZGs are supposed to be more than your regular PUG anyway

I've not looked at the code and do not know the map file format. Sorry, I just have not had time to look. I think the code change would be pretty easy if you wanted to check the mass of a ship against a mass limit assigned to an aleph. The tricky part is getting a mass limit assigned to an aleph. This could either be easy or difficult depending on how extensible the map file format is. If it is a 'fixed' format then adding a new parameter to aleph's would 'break' all previous map files. Either that or we'd have to write a 'smart' map file reader, one that looked for the old and new format and if it was the old it would read it but fill in a large default value (using maybe -1 to represent infinity). Definitely doable but is it worth the effort?