Suggestions

[PhilRoi]

LOL,   in fact from a realism perspective.  Data mining the data centers give you a real good "storyline" justification for creating the armored assault research vessel...  raiding enemy territory and data-mining data centers.

[darke]

trick for capturing K from data centers will be making it so that a scout can't capture knowledge and then the player assaults the data center for the reduced ai level as well.  instead of giving the ability to the Scout give it to Armored research vessel.   Then the  player has to escort the research vessel (which has the necessary computers, scanners, and equipment) into the AI planet and over to the Data center.  Then he has to guard it while the Data Center is mined by the Research vessel.   It also gives the player another reason to invest in the more expensive  research vessels.

Yeah, that's true the science labs would probably make more sense for this sort of function -- good point!  When the knowledge is "stolen" from the data center, I think that would basically destroy the data center in a way that does not increase the AI Progress.  So it would definitely be an either/or sort of situation.

Why worry about that? It's just like the decisions with Ion Cannons. You can either head in with a smallish force and take out the Ion Cannon, then have a less stressful (and less ship loss!) conquest of the system; or you can head in with a large force, take out a lot of the forces, clear out nearby ships to the ion cannon (this is really important if you're using a special forces AI), send in a colony ship, wait for a while for it to build your command center, all the while suffering from ships streaming at you and once-per-second (or whenever) losing a ship to the ion cannon, and at the end having a nice defense for your world.

Compared with taking a small force of ships in and taking out the data center, or taking a large number of ships in, including a couple of very expensive (or very fragile) science labs, defending them all the way up until they're in the radius of the data center (better hope the AI doesn't have any teleporting ships! they're quite ow in this situation), parking yourself there whilst getting hit with waves on enemies whilst your science ships spend time to suck the 500-or-whatever data out of the center (at a point per second for the slow ones), then having to march all the way back out of the sector guarding the expensive science ships as you go as well.

Or alternately, they just rush in, defeat things, guard the data center with some ships as they build their command center then get an extra chunk of research to be sucked out of that planet; but they can't destroy the datacenter for the AI bonus, since it's become "theirs" since they took it over when they took over the planet (like the advanced research center and the like).

[x4000]

I'm kind of figuring that this will be an "instant" (or nearly so) conversion of the data center.  It will probably take a bit of time, but not 16-20 minutes like it takes to gather knowledge at the entire planet.  It's more like stealing research (which is quick), rather than doing original research.

[Admiral]

LOL,   in fact from a realism perspective.  Data mining the data centers give you a real good "storyline" justification for creating the armored assault research vessel...  raiding enemy territory and data-mining data centers.

I like the idea that only the improved level 2 research vessel can do this (and the captured advanced ones, of course).

[PhilRoi]

lol making it so so only captured advanced ones can do it would be devilish.  (grins at the thought.)   after all they would have the technology to interface directly with the data center..........

but that probably makes it way more complicated then it needs to be.

[x4000]

lol making it so so only captured advanced ones can do it would be devilish.  (grins at the thought.)   after all they would have the technology to interface directly with the data center..........

but that probably makes it way more complicated then it needs to be.

That is pretty devilish!  In some respects, I really do like that, but I agree that it probably overcomplicates it in general.  We want players to actually be able to make the "knowledge instead of AI Progress reduction" choice, after all!

[PhilRoi]

yeah so speaking as a player i know that if you make the potential K gain sweet enough players will invest the effort and energy to get the rewards.  Players will be willing to spend a little time and effort to locate and capture an advanced R. Vessel to pull it off.  I personally say go for it.

But I figure that games reward people who are willing to go extra steps to obtain a goal.  The trick is to make it worth the time, effort, and resources to pursue it as a goal.

If your very worried about balance or availability of Adv. R. Vessels for this task,  don't be.  I tend to find them pretty easily.  and like i said it's all about making the reward sweet enough to justify the goal.

I say go ahead and go for it and give the ability just to adv. research vessels. If it ends up not working well you can always open it to LVL 2 R. Vessels as well.

[x4000]

Hmm, the main thing is that those advanced research stations are 1) darn slow, and 2) die fairly easily.  So I think a lot of players, me included, would get pretty exasperated with having to wait for those to move around the map.  The better the reward for doing so, the more people will complain (and rightly so -- they shouldn't have to wait so long).  If advanced research stations moved at the same speed as the other science ships, then that wouldn't be a problem.  If I make this shift, advanced research stations are going to need to get a big speed boost, too.

EDIT:  You know what, I'm going to speed them up and go ahead and do that.  That will lend a second purpose to advanced research stations, and I really like how that is likely to play out.  Thanks for the thoughts!

[PhilRoi]

donkey... stick.... string.... carrot...

heartless... yes i am

[x4000]

Ahaha...

[Admiral]

EDIT:  You know what, I'm going to speed them up and go ahead and do that.  That will lend a second purpose to advanced research stations, and I really like how that is likely to play out.  Thanks for the thoughts!

*evil cackle* I love it when my Mule abilities work on susceptible game designers *wrings hands*

[x4000]

EDIT:  You know what, I'm going to speed them up and go ahead and do that.  That will lend a second purpose to advanced research stations, and I really like how that is likely to play out.  Thanks for the thoughts!

*evil cackle* I love it when my Mule abilities work on susceptible game designers *wrings hands*

 

[Admiral]

Here are some more suggestions from last night's 6-hour play session:

• Stop. I wanted to just tell the selected units to simply "stop" where they were so many times yesterday, but I couldn't. I suggest using the following keys:
  
  • `: Stop where you are (backtick)
  • ` + V: Stop where you are and go into free-roaming mode
  • ` + ALT: Stop where you are and go into attack-move mode
• Centralize. This is similar to stop, but after stopping finds the "center of gravity" and moves all selected ships there. (In other words, figures out the point with the least amount of movement necessary to get all the ships to the same point. You can use an application of a Snell's law and weigh by movement speed, since the object is probably to get them all together in one point as fast as possible.) I suggest the key ~ (in other words, ` + SHIFT), with the two modifiers above also allowed.
• Single ship selection. I noticed the "L" key for selecting half the ships. Usually what happens is I pick my group of engineers and just want one to peel off to do something special. So, maybe ALT-L or something like that, to say "pick just one." You might even do something neat such as "hold down ALT and as many times as you hit L is how many of each ship type we'll pick out once you release ALT."
• Build blockage reason. Have starship constructors and space docks (and others?) tell us why they are not turning out a ship at 00:00: METL, CRYS, ENER, or even PAUS. It's very annoying to see it sitting there at 00:00 for ages and not know why, since it is not orthogonal to the building of other ships with command stations/mobile builders which use the materials up front instead of at the tail end.
• Release candidates. "Final" releases aren't, really. They're "Final release candidates." Probably should use the more common term for clarity and so you don't feel a bit silly when Final Release 1.009X becomes Final Release 1.009Y.
• Reveal randomized AI. I like having a randomized AI to play against. I just want to know which one was picked, instead of having it continue to show up as "Random Moderate" or whatever. Obviously, this should be an option as others probably like being kept in suspense.

Thanks!

[x4000]

• Stop. I wanted to just tell the selected units to simply "stop" where they were so many times yesterday, but I couldn't. I suggest using the following keys:
  
  • `: Stop where you are (backtick)
  • ` + V: Stop where you are and go into free-roaming mode
  • ` + ALT: Stop where you are and go into attack-move mode

If you simply right-click anywhere in their midst (or V/Alt+ right-click), that does essentially that.  They will then need to spread out again, of course, but odds are they will do that anyway, even with a stop order, because when in flight they are often overlapping themselves partly.  I don't really see why a special command is particularly needed in this case, but maybe I'm missing something.  Also, the `/~ key is already in use; it takes you to the most recent flare.

• Centralize. This is similar to stop, but after stopping finds the "center of gravity" and moves all selected ships there. (In other words, figures out the point with the least amount of movement necessary to get all the ships to the same point. You can use an application of a Snell's law and weigh by movement speed, since the object is probably to get them all together in one point as fast as possible.) I suggest the key ~ (in other words, ` + SHIFT), with the two modifiers above also allowed.

Again, just right-clicking does something quite similar to this.  I'm not sure what is really gained here, but again, maybe I am just missing something.

• Single ship selection. I noticed the "L" key for selecting half the ships. Usually what happens is I pick my group of engineers and just want one to peel off to do something special. So, maybe ALT-L or something like that, to say "pick just one." You might even do something neat such as "hold down ALT and as many times as you hit L is how many of each ship type we'll pick out once you release ALT."

The \ key does basically this.  It will select the first non-busy ship out of the current selection.  It isn't by type or anything like that, but for your engineers example it works great.  Someone else had wanted this for scouts, so that's why it was added.  Doing something more complex like multiple \ hits probably isn't going to be possible, because as soon as you press it once, you only have a single ship left in the selection.  With the L key that works only because it keeps subdividing (and in fact, you can get down to one ship of each type if you press it enough times).

• Build blockage reason. Have starship constructors and space docks (and others?) tell us why they are not turning out a ship at 00:00: METL, CRYS, ENER, or even PAUS. It's very annoying to see it sitting there at 00:00 for ages and not know why, since it is not orthogonal to the building of other ships with command stations/mobile builders which use the materials up front instead of at the tail end.

This is a really good point, I like that a lot.  Added to my list.  You can see a lot of that (not pause) on the actual build buttons below, but having it on the queue itself would be great.

• Release candidates. "Final" releases aren't, really. They're "Final release candidates." Probably should use the more common term for clarity and so you don't feel a bit silly when Final Release 1.009X becomes Final Release 1.009Y.

Yep, this is a good point.

• Reveal randomized AI. I like having a randomized AI to play against. I just want to know which one was picked, instead of having it continue to show up as "Random Moderate" or whatever. Obviously, this should be an option as others probably like being kept in suspense.

If you win or lose, it will reveal the AI types to you.  But I'll add a lobby option so that it will show you from the start.

[Admiral]

If you simply right-click anywhere in their midst (or V/Alt+ right-click), that does essentially that.  They will then need to spread out again, of course, but odds are they will do that anyway, even with a stop order, because when in flight they are often overlapping themselves partly.  I don't really see why a special command is particularly needed in this case, but maybe I'm missing something.  Also, the `/~ key is already in use; it takes you to the most recent flare.

Well, often the group is not all together; they might be spread out all over the place (e.g., due to being on LONE move mode) and I might want to have them stop just as they are with the fastest ships out front of the slow ships. Other times I will have a group which includes engineers that are toward the back of the formation and I want them all to stop to give the engineers time to fix things from the back before telling them to move again, etc.

I did use your proposed work-around, but it was not very satisfying as it cause the group to move to a specific location and spread out from there, rather than just stopping in place as I had hoped to be able to do.

Again, just right-clicking does something quite similar to this.  I'm not sure what is really gained here, but again, maybe I am just missing something.

The idea of this is to get the whole group into a big mass in the shortest time possible so you can move in a group move to wherever you want to go. Yes, you can click somewhere and get them all to move, but you might not be (and probably aren't) going to get it optimized. Then, you could shift-click other movement orders and you would know once they got to that "centralized" point, the whole group would be tightly grouped no matter how far apart they were prior to that. (It's not a hard calculation, if that is the concern; it is trivially taught in a first semester classical dynamics class in college.)

Oh yes, one more thing I was going to suggest that was annoying with the Special Forces Captain:

Don't allow shift-clicking on multiple types of actions. Quite a few times I was giving circumnavigating movement orders to flank, but would at the end accidentally click too close to an enemy and my fancy 10 waypoints would then turn into an attack headlong order. If you still have shift held down, you should only allow clicks that are of the same type as those that are already queued up.

Single ship selection.

The \ key does basically this.  It will select the first non-busy ship out of the current selection.  It isn't by type or anything like that, but for your engineers example it works great.  Someone else had wanted this for scouts, so that's why it was added.  Doing something more complex like multiple \ hits probably isn't going to be possible, because as soon as you press it once, you only have a single ship left in the selection.  With the L key that works only because it keeps subdividing (and in fact, you can get down to one ship of each type if you press it enough times).

I will have to try both of these options a bit and see what I can come up with. I, of course, will also have to figure out what "non-busy" means too.

Thanks for listening, as always!

Cheers...