Trifaction Core (3FC)

Development areas for Allegiance core (IGC) design.
Jersy
Posts: 250
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Post by Jersy »

Well, I wouldn't exactly say so.

Like I've said before, I wan't to have all the factions and all techpaths equaly economically capable, which is not possible, if the techpaths have different GAs (I would go as far as saying that the fact that EXP has He3 yield and speed has probably quite an impact on it's popularity).

(NOTE: Economical equality affects a lot of things - all the faction multipliers are the same, so miners have the same capacity and mining speed, He3 yield is the same, prices on tech and stations are the same, research time is the same... Also IC has classic miner+refinery combination and their miners can't rip...)

So I need all of them to have access to the same GAs and one way to do it is moving those under Garr. Although now that I think about it, I might decide to make a basic techbase (any of them) an additional prereq for the basic GAs and advanced techbase for the advanced GAs.

It will be up to the commander if he spents his money on advancing his techbase and upgrading tech, or researching GAs.

Other than that, Garr is supposed to be "support" techpath, with the true strenghts lying in the real techpaths. Although it will have some potentially game-ending tech, it will probably be significantly harder to win with basic bombers/transports, than with their tech-specific advanced variations. Also, the garrtech will be one of the few things entirely common for all three factions, meaning that if both sides would decide to - for example - rush basic bombers and early bomb, then neither of them would have an advantage.

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Regarding my previous post, I am now seriously considering blinding all fighter-class ships, not just interceptors, as somehow it seems to me that "sight battles" would be a great game feature, that should not be exclusive to EXP only... It would also save me the trouble with counter-balancing exp ;-)
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Alien51
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Post by Alien51 »

Maybe IC miners could be enabled to 'Tele Offload' at all IC bases? Man that should be a researchable ability.
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LANS
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Post by LANS »

Sight battles sound cool at first, but all ships should have a tiny bit of scanrange at least. Exp may work without scanrange because of it's short range weapons. Fighters with reduced scan range would put a heavy emphasis on carrier based attacks. Stealths would have a scout spotter and a scout to get pods.


Without scan range you have a problem. It's fairly easy for an int to chase down and kill a scout, and scouts die real easy to prox camps. You now have what was a formidable offensive rush neutralized due to lack of scouts.

You're certainly glorifying the role of scouts.
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Jersy
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Post by Jersy »

Alien51 wrote:QUOTE (Alien51 @ Mar 8 2011, 05:53 PM) Maybe IC miners could be enabled to 'Tele Offload' at all IC bases? Man that should be a researchable ability.
If I did that only for IC miners, it would beat the whole idea of economical equality*. Also, tele-offloading is a thing of bases, so it would require a devel that would upgrade all the bases to tele-offloading points. This thing is further complicated by the possibility of having only one succesor for each ship/base.

However, I was thinking about spicing up mining... Teleporting miners, Miners that are tele-recievers, miners that are both, the combinations of outpost, refinery and teleport reciever (possible tiers of refinery being "docking offload", "tele offload" "tele offload + tele reciever").

Maybe I will implement something like this, but it will be equally accessible to all three factions.

*
The idea of economical equality being making it easier to balance the factions (How much do I need to increase faction X's firepower, if I increase faction Y's He3 yield by Z%???).
LANS wrote:QUOTE (LANS @ Mar 8 2011, 06:34 PM) Sight battles sound cool at first, but all ships should have a tiny bit of scanrange at least.
Okay, I admit they could... Complete blindness is a bit extreme. But I kind of like it. It's radical. It's different. All would tremble in fear if they were to lose the object that sees the enemy for them.

QUOTE Exp may work without scanrange because of it's short range weapons. Fighters with reduced scan range would put a heavy emphasis on carrier based attacks. Stealths would have a scout spotter and a scout to get pods.[/quote]

Yes, that is kind of the idea... Although on this spot I should probably tell you about carriers - see, the classical ones are gone. Instead of them, SUP teams will have "Dropships" - medium-class teleport-recieving player-controlled ships, that are supposed to take the place of carriers. But as you said, their role as "sight provider" would be still the same.

QUOTE Without scan range you have a problem. It's fairly easy for an int to chase down and kill a scout, and scouts die real easy to prox camps. You now have what was a formidable offensive rush neutralized due to lack of scouts.[/quote]

For those situations, the emergency probes I mentioned would come into play. Kind of like pulse-probes if ints have them. With them, dogfight ships could be able to clear the camp and allow the scouts to come through and hide.

QUOTE You're certainly glorifying the role of scouts.[/quote]

Yes, like this, scouts (and medium-class ships, which would still keep their scan-ranges) would become a super-important part of each dogfight. Also, their pilots would need to focus on staying alive, staying out of the way, hiding and silently eying stuff from safe distance.

The way I imagine it, every dogfight would become a game of trying to either simply win by force by killing all enemy offensive ships, or to hunting down the enemy eyes.

There might be some downfalls to it, but I'd like to at least try it ;-)
Last edited by Jersy on Tue Mar 08, 2011 6:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Sonic
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Post by Sonic »

This sounds like a great idea Jersy, nice work. If I can be of any help at all please let me know. :)
Last edited by Sonic on Tue Mar 08, 2011 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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LANS
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Post by LANS »

Jersy, you misunderstand me. I love the idea of requiring scouts for everything.
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Jersy
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Post by Jersy »

About the only help I would need would be artwork-related, as there is one more balance issue I thought of eliminating, and this would also be one of the more radical ideas.

Lutra already volunteered, but with extra people, the results might be sooner.

It's about the shapes of the ships.

Just so I could dismiss different ship shapes of different factions as an balance issue (wtf dude, IC int is so much harder to hit than the Belt one...), I thought of making all of the factions use the same models, only with different easily recognisable textures, so each faction would have it's colour theme (Like IC = Red, Belts = Green, Rix = Blue, or something like that).

I wouldn't bother if there was nobody with artwork skills willing to help me, but if someone provides with the models, then I am going for it ;-)

(Oh god, I am almost willing to bet that the core will be finished on a stormy night and I will be like "It is alive!!! They thought I'm crazy, but I did it! MuhaHAhAHAHhAhAAHAHAA!!!" and then lightning would strike and thunder wil roar and it will be awesome :-D)

@LANS: Really? Cool! :-)
Last edited by Jersy on Tue Mar 08, 2011 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Jersy
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Post by Jersy »

Today, I've created the majority of custom 3FC minimap icons. I admit though, that I didn't start from scratch and used icons already present on the autoupdate as the basis for many of them... So here I give you a little preview.

= Scout
= Fighter
= Interceptor
= Stealth Fighter

= Basic Bomber
= Exp Bomber
= Sup Bomber
= Tac Bomber

= Basic Transport
= Exp Transport
= Sup Transport
= Tac Transport

= Basic Support
= Exp Support
= Sup Support
= Tac Support

There are advanced and luxury variations to those icons.

"Advanced" has a mark in the upper right corner
"Luxury" has a mark in the upper left corner
"Advanced Luxury" has marks in both upper corners

(note: all medium-class ships do not have advanced versions, and on top of that, basic medium-class ships have no luxury version)

The implication of the above is also the following:

Ships (scouts, figs, ints, sfs) will have two tiers only. Basic version available under basic techbase, advanced version available after research under advanced techbase.

The prerequisite for tech-specific medium class ship will be advanced techbase and researched basic version of the ship (+ also maybe advanced dogfighting ship).

Basic version and tech-specific version will be both available at the same time.

Basic version will be cheaper, but will logically lack the extra features of the tech-specific version.
Last edited by Jersy on Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Link: Allegiance Stuff on "Jersy's Ultimate Blog of Concentrated Nerdiness"
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Jersy
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Post by Jersy »

Progress update:

- All GAs have been moved under the "Shipyard" tab (only for organizational purposes).
- Each faction has it's dogfighting ships / medium class ships comfortably seated in the tech tree.

Next on my "to-do" list would be:

- some custom GA icons for easier orientation (moving from symbols to larger text)
- some faction/tech specific bases (fighter drone control station, scanner station, ...)
- sorting the equipment and other individual pieces of tech
- implementing "reverse engineering" as a part of "tech stealing" (when you steal the tech, you still need to research it, but cheaper and faster)
(the mechanism to be used has been already succesfuly tested and is confirmed to be working)

Devel notes:

Due to the procces in which they were created (duplication), all player-controlled medium-class ships currently use the faction specific model of a bomber... However, since the amount of medium-class ships has increased, I simply do not have enough models for all of them, so I guess it's better to have all of them the same model, rather than only some of them. And also, I don't really care, as I think it won't affect the gameplay much, since they are all visually differentiated by my super-awesome radar icons ;-) :-D
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Link: Allegiance Stuff on "Jersy's Ultimate Blog of Concentrated Nerdiness"
Current stuff-count: 97
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Bunnywabbit
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Post by Bunnywabbit »

Question: Do you have an average-game-duration in mind for this core?

I ask because being somewhat pressed for time, I would personally like to see a core where i can expect a game to last between 15-30 mins. You might be shooting for something completely different, though, which would be fine too.

Anyway, I like where you're taking this, it promises to be a fun project. Keep it up!
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