Ship balance changes and jump beacons

General discussion for the game Anacreon
george moromisato
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WorldsStrongestNerd wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2017 1:41 am
George, there is something that I ask you to consider.
I get your point, but I would like to see how the current arrangement works before changing it. In practice, I think it will be hard to set up such discontiguous outposts because you'll have to use slow ships to do it. And once you've decided to send a fleet of slow ships to the other side of the galaxy, there's no impediment to creating sector capitals on the way. So even if we required a contiguous region, it wouldn't take much longer to do it.

Another reason for deferring is that restricting to contiguous regions is much harder to implement. In particular, we'd have to do all the same pathfinding that we do for nebulae. But unlike nebulae, which have a pre-computed mesh of points, we would have to dynamically adjust the pathfinding mesh every time a beacon is created or destroyed.

Plus we'd have to handle the case where beacons appear or disappear while jumpships are in transit. If a beacon disappears the jumpship would have to move to the edge of its current zone and then either stop or go at slow speeds to its destination. And if a beacon appears while a jumpship is in slow-mode, it needs to speed up. In both cases it's lots more code.

There is one current bug that I want to fix, though. Right now, for F&M doctrine, a jump beacon appears as soon as you designate a sector capital. It should instead wait a full cycle until the sector capital is done.
starxplor
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george moromisato wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2017 3:05 am
WorldsStrongestNerd wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2017 1:41 am
George, there is something that I ask you to consider.
I get your point, but I would like to see how the current arrangement works before changing it. In practice, I think it will be hard to set up such discontiguous outposts because you'll have to use slow ships to do it. And once you've decided to send a fleet of slow ships to the other side of the galaxy, there's no impediment to creating sector capitals on the way. So even if we required a contiguous region, it wouldn't take much longer to do it.

Another reason for deferring is that restricting to contiguous regions is much harder to implement. In particular, we'd have to do all the same pathfinding that we do for nebulae. But unlike nebulae, which have a pre-computed mesh of points, we would have to dynamically adjust the pathfinding mesh every time a beacon is created or destroyed.

Plus we'd have to handle the case where beacons appear or disappear while jumpships are in transit. If a beacon disappears the jumpship would have to move to the edge of its current zone and then either stop or go at slow speeds to its destination. And if a beacon appears while a jumpship is in slow-mode, it needs to speed up. In both cases it's lots more code.

There is one current bug that I want to fix, though. Right now, for F&M doctrine, a jump beacon appears as soon as you designate a sector capital. It should instead wait a full cycle until the sector capital is done.
Could this jump beacon be a partial cycle(maybe 1/2?) instead of full cycle?

Edit for additional thought:
Is it possible to make some building constructable when outside the range of a capital? If so, maybe make the jump beacon a building that could be built and uses resources until the capital administration is built, risking a new planet go into revolt for lack of resources if the beacon is built early, but an option on major/major resource worlds?
--Imperator--
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Hypersonic missiles are overpowered with R:25, they are better than plasma towers and armored satellites which have a higher cost. This was confirmed over multiple combat tests in game. I think we should revert their range to the original R:20.
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