View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0000924 | AI War 1 / Classic | Gameplay Issue | Oct 27, 2010 1:16 am | Nov 9, 2010 9:11 am | |
| Reporter | KDR_11k | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 3.908 | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 4.030 | ||||
| Summary | 0000924: Remove colony ship energy cost | ||||
| Description | Often I want to expand when I'm pretty much out of power, then it gets pretty annoying that I have to free up 4000 energy to build a colony ship, especially since the cost disappears the moment the colony ship starts building the command station. Expanding allows building more power generators so freeing up energy becomes doubly unnecessary. Is there any real reason for the colony ship to need energy? Freeing up energy got doubly annoying without low power mode, in my current game I resorted to scrapping a fortress and rebuilding it as soon as the colony ship did its job. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
| parent of | 0001207 | resolved | Chris_McElligottPark | Move colony ship into range if command station is placed out of range |
| parent of | 0001358 | resolved | Chris_McElligottPark | Cannot build Command Stations at all. |
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You could simply put the fortress in low power mode (K) while you build the colony ship. That said, I think it's not a bad suggestion. However, as far as I can remember, there is a reason Colony ships use starship amount of energy, and it's to prevent you from keeping 60 backup colony ships on a planet "just in case" the AI decides to pop the station. With their high energy cost, that kind of playing isn't very viable. |
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Could also cap them at say 3 to 4 that way you could have a couple for a tough assault or replacing on a out of supply world but couldn't have them stashed everywhere |
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Converting from an energy cost to an m+c cost really doesn't change much, since energy costs m+c to produce. It would also seem odd because it would suddenly be the only mobile ship with such a cost. I'm open to changing something, but I'm not really seeing a need. They're supposed to have a high upkeep :) |
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The 60 unit cap for colony ships is a bit ridiculous but the energy usage balances it out (240000 energy to keep them all going, that's 3 level 3 reactors in 3 different systems). Perhaps lower the energy use to 1000 & reduce the unit cap to 10? When would you realistically need more than 10 colony ships at any one time (even 10 seems a bit much for me but I probably play conservatively compared to some people). |
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From what I seen this is already fixed. Colony ship has 0 energy cost. |
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Yep I just noticed this in a new game I started after updating to v4.029. The release notes say it was changed in 4.024. Seems a bit overpowered to be able to keep 60 of these things around since they only cost 500 metal & 1500 crystal to build. Currently I don't see any penalty to building one in a remote location on every planet you have a command station on since theres no limit on the distance between the colony ship & where you can place your new command station. Maybe the ship cap needs lowered & a "build radius" implemented which limits the distance command stations can be built from it? Say level 2 force field size for build radius? |
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I agree, this is just what I was afraid of. No energy costs will make the colony ships and free failsafe against the destruction of the command station. I'm sure that was not the intention of Keith's. |
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Failsafe? The things have 40k HP, any random ship flying by can urn your standby farm into a pile of rubble. |
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It depends on whether you gave the colony ship an order to move into deep space. In which case it's either ok or is helping you by distracting an AI ship for quite a while. |
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What Keith said. Since Colony Ships needn't move to where they are building, you can simply send it off into deep space and have it travelling out there forever until you need it, and either way it's super safe, or a distraction against an incoming danger. Either way, it's bad for gameplay, in my opinion. I for one did NOT like the energy cost removal. I couldn't see how it made the game any better in any way. |
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BTW you don't even need to give it an order to move into deep space, you can just zoom out to max, scroll a few screens away & place them to build there. Unless you have FRD engineers in the system it works exactly like building them next to your command station then giving them an extremely long destination to move to only it's even safer as it'll slowly build itself out there (at which point you can give it an extremely long destination to move to). Too many advantages with no disadvantages from what I can see. |
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I disagree that the removal of energy costs was a problem. I think that it's a solid move in the right direction, as it solves a very specific problem of players being unable to expand due to lack of energy, but having no more space to build efficient energy reactors, etc. In other words, it solves a very specific (though admittedly not common) way that the player's economy could stall or nearly so. What you folks are talking about are valid concerns, though, I don't disagree at all. I just don't feel that the energy cost removal has done anything other than to throw some preexisting problems into sharper relief. My thoughts on what needs to change at least as a start: 1. Drastically reduced ship caps on colony ships, perhaps down to something like 2, maybe 3 per player. 2. Possibly increased costs for building them, though I'm not sure on that one -- that gets back into stall territory. 3. Possibly making it so that colony ships no longer can build anywhere on the planet -- that always felt odd. Instead, making it so that they "transform" into a command station wherever they are. Of course, that adds a lot of complexity to the process, which is unpleasant, but still. Possibly just making it so that the colony ship isn't immediately destroyed when the command station is starting to be built, but the command station isn't actually started on construction yet either. Then the colony ship has to make it to the command station and briefly assist it before the colony ship is consumed and the command station is actually started on construction. Of course, THAT has lots of other gameplay ramifications, too. So instead, possibly just making colony ships unable to receive orders to move outside the smaller gravity well would do it. That, plus a drastically lowered ship cap might accomplish most of the goals. |
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Chris, for the fallen-spire stuff I added a mechanic whereby a self-built ship cannot be placed outside X distance from one of a specific list of fgTypes. Could just make all command stations have that attribute with relation to colony ships. If you want to look at it yourself, lookup MustBeBuiltWithinCertainDistanceOfOneOfTheseTypes. Or I can take it later on, if you like. |
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I love it. Can you add that to the colony ships and reduce their ship cap to 2, then? |
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Can you leave it at a bit more than 2? I can think of at least few situations where you can need more of them - mostly after hard battles that mean losing quite many of your planets. Perhaps cap of 5? |
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Hmmm. If you're having to rebuild that much stuff, I think that making it a bit more of a penalty also plays well into what others had been requesting with the loss of planets not seeming to matter too much, etc. Being able to quickly rebuild a couple of lost planets is great, but being able to quickly rebuild a lost empire seems a bit... you know. How about a cap of 3 instead -- 5 still seems like it would be too easy to just station these things all over the place. |
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3 seems excesive. I also favor the 5 ships option. And if the colony ship has to move to the position of the new station, it cannot be exploited as easily. Either way, spikey is gonna be very unhappy about this :-) |
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Yep, he is, but one can't make everyone happy all of the time (as much as I'd like to). I suppose we can go for 5 at the moment, and see how that fares. |
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Poor 'lord of the colony ships'... |
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Speaking of Spikey, does anyone have a copy of the old colony ship graphic? I saw it around the forum at one point but couldn't find it the other day. |
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* The ship cap for colony ships has been dropped from 60 to 5, to prevent people from just storing up so many extra colony ships now that there is no energy cost per colony ship. * Command stations must now be built within 2000 pixels of a colony ship. |
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Of random note: how will the player be able to tell that range? will there be a fairly obvious indicator? |
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When trying to place the unit (the command station), the icon is red if it can't be placed, green otherwise. |
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It goes red when you try to build too far from it, but when you move in range it goes green. The idea is that you're basically needing to build right on top of the colony ship, but it gives you substantial wiggle room just in case (about two screen widths). It's similar to what we do for many other ships (harvesters, exo shields, etc). |
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well, ok, thats not really what i meant - people who dont read the changelogs, or noobs, or someone will say "WAHH I CANT BUILD COMMAND STATION"... I had a similar event the other night, I had moved a transport with mobile builder, apparently past the edge of the build zone, and was wondering why i couldnt build stuff. What im saying is, yes, its obvious that it cant be built - can you make it obvious WHY it cant be built? |
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In the SlimDX versions there used to be a little text popup that explained exactly why things couldn't be built. I'm not sure what happened to that. Keith, can you look at that? It would be nice to have back. |
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I can look at it later on, yes. I had been wondering where it went, but I think it was some kind of raw text draw, and we blanket-disabled most of those during the port. |
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Those were all later added back in -- it's using the DelayedGUIText stuff now. I think it might have been doing draws of TextLines outside of OnGUI and so you disabled this specifically or something. |
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Would it be possible to extend this change to the colony ship automatically moving into position when issuing a build order out of range? This would reduce microing. Additional comment: This should also be changed in the tutorials :-) At the rate you change the game and add stuff, the tutorials will always be out of date :-) |
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The amount of time to add in that sort of logic is pretty nontrivial, unfortunately, and not something we have time for at the moment. If you want to report it as a separate issue, we can look at that sometime in the future, though. And we will have to update the tutorial, yeah. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 27, 2010 1:16 am | KDR_11k | New Issue | |
| Oct 27, 2010 11:38 am | keith.lamothe | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Oct 27, 2010 11:38 am | keith.lamothe | Status | new => considering |
| Oct 30, 2010 12:01 pm | Moonshine Fox | Note Added: 0002375 | |
| Oct 30, 2010 12:31 pm | Winter Born | Note Added: 0002379 | |
| Oct 30, 2010 12:31 pm | Winter Born | Note Edited: 0002379 | |
| Oct 30, 2010 12:33 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0002380 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 11:53 am | Malibu Stacey | Note Added: 0002817 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 12:25 pm | orzelek | Note Added: 0002825 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 2:36 pm | Malibu Stacey | Note Added: 0002833 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 3:41 pm | Moonshine Fox | Note Added: 0002838 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 6:05 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0002848 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 6:06 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0002849 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 6:29 pm | Moonshine Fox | Note Added: 0002852 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 10:00 am | Malibu Stacey | Note Added: 0002926 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 12:06 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002932 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 12:14 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0002934 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 12:19 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002936 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 12:25 pm | orzelek | Note Added: 0002940 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 12:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002942 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 3:39 pm | KToff | Note Added: 0002964 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 3:43 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002965 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 3:48 pm | KToff | Note Added: 0002967 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 4:20 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0002972 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 4:54 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002979 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 4:54 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => resolved |
| Nov 8, 2010 4:54 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Fixed in Version | => 4.030 |
| Nov 8, 2010 4:54 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Nov 8, 2010 4:54 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | keith.lamothe => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:18 pm | Lancefighter | Note Added: 0002987 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:20 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0002988 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:21 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002989 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:23 pm | Lancefighter | Note Added: 0002990 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:24 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002991 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:26 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0002992 | |
| Nov 8, 2010 5:46 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002998 | |
| Nov 9, 2010 3:49 am | KToff | Note Added: 0003042 | |
| Nov 9, 2010 9:11 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0003057 | |
| Nov 9, 2010 10:07 am | KToff | Relationship added | parent of 0001207 |
| Nov 17, 2010 7:44 pm | Malibu Stacey | Relationship added | parent of 0001358 |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Gameplay - General Complaint => Gameplay Issue |
