Terrain

Asteroids will be in... either as the survey objects as they are now, or possibly in addition they will be minable for resources. Details are thin at this point

Black Holes are an issue of debate currently. I am in favor of them as they make the landscape more interesting, but there is argument on their size on the map. Some say to be a bit more realistic, they would only block out one grid square, much like a star does now. If design went that way, Black Holes wouldn't have much point as they would be too small.

Nebulae would be cool, but I'm not sure how they would implement that as terrain. It couldn't mess with sensors as you're viewing from a galactic point of view, unless they made that area always greyed out, so you couldn't see what was in the cloud unless you had a survey ship or sensor drone planted there. Interesting possibility for ambushes. Another possible implementation would be to slow ships down as they move through them.

Terrain is an odd balance between "fun" and "realism"

Terrain is an odd balance between "fun" and "realism"

I completely agree, especially for a game involving something as empty as space. I just think some level of pervasive terrain would add an interesting layer to the game. Basically I'd want terrain do the following
1) Change the range/speed of ships
2) Change sensor capability
3) Change weapon/ defense effectiveness (quite interesting with the different weapon classes)

It would be more interestign if some devices worked better around certain types of terrains (say an engine type gets a bonus going through a nabula using it for fuel)

I'm all for a black hole and a nebulae.

Nebulae would be cool, but I'm not sure how they would implement that as terrain. It couldn't mess with sensors as you're viewing from a galactic point of view, unless they made that area always greyed out, so you couldn't see what was in the cloud unless you had a survey ship or sensor drone planted there. Interesting possibility for ambushes. Another possible implementation would be to slow ships down as they move through them.

*cough xenofungus cough cough*

Seriously tho, I do think that is a good idea. It's true what Spazzle said, space games tend to feel a little empty sometimes, and some basic terrain with strategic impact makes battles less run of the mill. In addition to adding tactics like sneak attacks, if each star has different nebulae patterns surrounding it, it will give a different feel to the conflict in the system. It's not something terribly compliated for the player to grasp either, a lot of bang for the buck.

jujumbura

I was going to make a post, but then I read Spazzle's.

And, yes, I am still posting, it's just I don't have anything to add.

I wasn't going to make a post, but I just thought I'd say that I don't have anything to add either.

I'm all for being able to build starbases on black holes, to study them.

It would be an interesting surprise if your ship got too close to a black hole and was gone...

Black holes could be one block only but atract ships from a distance and for nebulaes they could have a system similar to the one in advance wars (when they go into a terrain they can't see the units get trapped and can't move) on GBA.

Black holes would not be anything but a background icon. Remember, your ships can go FTL and you quickly get Anti-gravity. FTL means they can travel away from black holes, whenever they like. AG means, they can just nullify the gravitational effects of the BH, and "hover" as close as they want for as long as they can power their AG system. And then just travel away when they don't want to hover any more. They'd detect a black hole's gravitational effects long before they got into trouble if it was big enough to be a danger to the ship. Otherwise, the black hole isn't big enough to bother them, and it would never be dangerous. Just a small, momentary X-Ray source on their sensors.

But hey, keep trying to figure out how to put something on the map that would suck up everyting on the map. Makes playing the game very easy. The program would start a new game, and examine the the map for a black hole. If there is any, then you would instantly lose because it would have already sucked up your homeworld before you ever learned to build starships. Thank you. Please drive through.

The center of the galaxy is thought to be a supermassive black hole, but it doesn't "suck everything in". FTL drives aren't really possible, so if we're talking about made up stuff its simple enough to talk about how it interacts with the world at large, if we desire. The point is that terrain would add tactical variation to the map, not that it accurately models the interaction with (nonexistant) technologies. The question becomes which scenario is more interesting:
1) A map containing nothing but a few points of interest that you can travel to directly with purely political boundaries
2) A map consisting of points of interest separated by some level of natural boundaries with which you can use to your advantage, or have used against you.

The more you think about all of this the less believable it is. The little squares on the map are called "parsecs". What kind of sensor technology can you imagine that would detect things several parsecs away in less than a month? Why can't you fly a ship through a square that's occupied by a neutral ship? The ship can't be taking up any significant portion of the space. If it was that big, it would be sucking up stars and planets. For that matter, why can't you fly through squares occupied by enemy ships? If you were careful, there's no way they would even know you were there.

Realism should usually be given up in favor of fun and playability.

If you want realism go play Outpost, there they tried to make everything scientifically possible, this was done to an extent that playing the game became tiresome and making it fun for about 10 minutes. So let's not get hampered by reality here.

When ships travel in GC they do so at FTL also known as warp-speed, what happens to space when you go beyond the speed of light we do not know, One thing that might conceivably happen is that distances would shrink drastically, so from the viewpoint of a FTL ship one parsec (3.26 LY) could become something like one AU, who knows?

My point is that I agree that playability and fun-factor should always go before realism. Having said that, I’ll add that things that seem unrealistic in the game-universe can detract from the fun-factor.

There are only two things on the current map that bothers me: first I think the planets should be much closer to the stars and possible revolve around them; I’m not sure about the last though. Second I think one square should be less than one light year and not one parsec, after all Alpha Centaury C lies 4.3 ly, less than two parsec, from Sol. But that’s mostly cosmetic.

Spazzle,

First of, we don't know that FTL travel is impossible. What we know is that it takes tremendous amount of energy to accellerate a mass to light speed. However, in the realm of GC, they are getting around some very big issues to us... for instance, artificial gravity. For all we know, they are creating a gravitic counter warp around them, making it seem to them that they are travelling at less then FLT speeds, but to the general universe they are going Light speed or faster. This is why they don't travel back in time (because the crew are experiencing normal time flow). Just one of many wild thoughts. Several governments of the world do believe that some form of FTL travel are possible, and are currently funding all manner of research to find some way around E=MC^2.

Second, the black holes at the center of our galaxy are sucking in everything. But, orbital physics being what they are, as long as the orbital objects in our galaxy continue on at their required orbital velocities (relative to the super massive black hole), they won't fall into it and become another bit of its mass. However, if it wasn't sucking everything into it, we wouldn't be located in a galaxy.

I do agree that fun should trump realism. After all, this is a game that prominently features: FTL STARSHIPS! However, space hazards are "non-existant" to the GC races. Other then some civ coming up with a "NO FTL" field or barrier. So, to make space interesting, would be to have simple resources that are momentary bonues (find 100 BC worth of highly exotice material), or perhaps of low level long term bonus(Starbase built at black hole generates X amount of research per turn). Anything past that point, and it just gets beyond silly on 3D maps that you can rotate above and below on. If you can look at it from any angle, and you have star ships, why can't you send your ships "above" or "below"? The answer is, you should be able to. There is no fixed directions in space after all.

SP
I'm not going to address your science, because like I said, this game isn't meant to be real.
But I would like to address the Point about 3D maps. The game is not in 3D, its in a 2D plane drawn with a 3D engine. Its currently pefectly possible to create blockades by just putting a big line of ships in space. Clearly in a real 3d space you could just go around, but like I said, the game is not in 3D, *nor should it be*.

Look, its one thing to say that you think terrain would detract from the fun of the game, thats an arguement that I could accept if you brought out a really convincing gameplay reason(s). But to dismiss "space terrain" because its not real, because it doesn't make sense, or because of "MEGATECHNOLOGY" is not going to convince me. Its a game, and all we should ask is that it is internally consistent within itself, not with the real world, and not necessarily with GC1.

I'm going to jump in again on this one.

Lets say we're going to work with pseudo-science in relation to FTL and Black Holes. Here's a great bit about motion through space at superluminal speeds... comes from Nemesis by Asimov:

At sub-luminal speeds, mass has a gravitational effect that pulls matter towards it. Think of normal sub-luminal travel to super-luminal travel as a flat line, with the speed of light as a point in the middle. Sub-luminal speeds, all forces (gravety, magnetic etc...) have a negative value. They pull you in. At the speed of light there is no effect at all mass neither attracts nor repells. However cross that point and you see mass repelling other objects of mass. The forces now have a positive value. The further from the center point, the greater the effects in either direction. Faster you go above the speed of light, the greater the "push" you experience from other objects.

Stars and planets exert some influence on the interstellar scale, but due to their mass being so large, their effect is relatively little. A black hole is the mass of a star collapsed down to a very small point. It's already theorized that the pull at the event horizon is greater than you would experience from a star. The gravitational forces exerted from a black hole then are much greater. At FTL the push would be tremendous by comparison to planets and stars.

So what black holes could do is either significantly slow down travel around them (i.e forcing you to go at or just below the speed of light to largely negate the gravitational effect) for a parsec or two, or cause ships to automatically calculate an arc to pass around the edge of influence.

Everything depends on how you want to theorize on the behavior of FTL travel (assuming it's possible). One way to get around this is to use some sort of "hyperspace" idea where you're actually traveling on a parallel dimension where the constraints on speed and distance are different. Saying that it's all defeated by traveling faster than light is more showing a limit on imagination. It's all pseudo-science, it might as well be fun pseudo-science.

Spazzle, that's my point. Nothing in the game should truly block you. It should just have more interesting areas then others. Star Dock actually agrees with this, as in they decided that you should never be able to block a true civilian ship... as there was just too much space to go around anything. Civilian ships will pass through inconvenient objects like starbases, other civs non-hostile warships, blockades, etc etc etc. Warships, on the other hand, always "posture", so warships actively don't let each other go by, and they are too proud to just step around each other or try to run around each other. These statements (and coding in GC1 for the mini-frieghters) by Star Dock does give us something to work with if we want to extrapolate.

As for the science... science stops at light speed. What is beyond is extremely theoretical. If you want to argue that "the map is 2D and that isn't scientific or realistic", I can point you to the science of orbital mechanics as to why that is. Most things are oriented in the same plane. If something orbits too far off the main axis, it will effectively suffer orbital drag, and fall into the orbital center. That orbital center is usually something massive like the planet (in the case of a moon), or a star (in the case of a planet), or the big freaking black hole at the center of the galaxy (in the case of a star). No more object too far of the ecliptic. If we were to look at a map of the Milky Way, we'd see that almost all the stars are in a small, thin orbital plane.

MEGATECHNOLOGY will always be a rationale as to why something could be in the game. The game setting of GC depends on the very magic of megatechnology. To dismiss that, is to dismiss the very game setting. That is possible, as we want the game to be fun, rather then tied up with being consistant with itself. But there is a tug between "realism", and fun. Some people find details to be fun. Most don't. We need to remember that just because we might find a particular idea or possible implementation "fun" that if it adds too much work or micro-management or just confusion, that others will find it un-fun. We want the balance to be more people find it fun, rather then the other way around. For most people in these sorts of games, terrain isn't fun. It's just something they have to deal with. Space games in particular suffer when people add in terrain. You can go from anywhere to anywhere without any modifer or worries, except in these very few cases of a black hole (which you cannot pass or which takes you to a different black hole) or asteriods that don't even have the density of intergalactic hydrogen gas because the asteriod field is located inside a star's helio field. What's the actual point? Fun? How is that fun? It isn't for most people. Even if it is fun for you, how often is it going to come up? Not very often. So again, what's the point?

Zoomba, I do not suffer from a lack of imagination. If the technology possessed by the races in GC permit FTL, then they should be able to engineer a way to prevent ships from going FTL. This would allow races to create their own barriers, whether local or galactic in scale, which would allow for military ships to make blockades or create mobile zones of control. This would even feed into why warships "posture" so much around potential rivals. If they were to just "fly on", the other ship could create a "non-FTL" zone, and they are stuck. That could be bad, depending on the particular military situation. There are literally hundreds of ways to create non-FTL zones, it just depends on the method you are discussing for how FTL works in a particular setting. We don't have much on the "basis" on how GC does it's FTL. Some vague mention of different methods in different places. If you know, please share it with us.

The point, BTW, isn't to make the pseudo-science fun. It's to make a game more fun.

Terrain: a modification of the number of movement points it takes to enter a given square.

For instance, Nebulas could be +1 or +2 or +3 to enter, depending on their intensity (color, animation, etc). Nebulas could also offer some sort of sensor damping effect. Maybe range increase. And maybe shield failure. Depends on the nebula. Some might even be damaging.

Asteroids could cause ships to take damage at speeds over (density of field). 1hp damage for going over rated speed by 1, etc. Mass-driver defense systems and missile defense systems might help.

Black holes could draw a ship at the inverse of their range, out to maybe five squares. So a ship passing within five squares is drawn 1 square towards the center, passing within four squares draws a ship 2 squares closer, passing within 1 square of a black hole draws the ship five squares towards the black hole. Better have good engines, or go around.

Spatial Distortion fields could be a zone of oddly shaped space, maybe several squares across. Not necessarily square. Distances across them are...different from normal geometry. For instance, one distortion field might take an extra three movement points to cross, while another might take three less movement points to cross than expected. Wormholes fall into that category.

AngleWyrm: looks interetsing, but don't forget two important things:
- it mustn't be a too important burden for the player
- the AI must be able to correctly handle it.

And even if it is presented as an option for the player, the AI must still be able to correctly handle it in order to compete with players that decide to use this option.

1hp damage for going over rated speed by 1

Silly question but how you determine this? about the maximal allowed speed for the ships? about the number of movements made this turn by the ships?

Thanks, it just seemed like a good way to look at it.

As to the AI handling movement in terrain that uses variable cost squares, I offer Massive Assault as an example of the AI doing as good a job as the players.

For the hp thing, I hadn't really thought about an algorithm for it. Seeing as I haven't thought of an answer to that, perhaps it would cost extra movement points to enter instead. The density of the field could then be a matter of adding movement cost, and the denser fields could have a mass-driver attack.

SP: the galaxy is in a disk, but by no means are the stars all in the same plane.

I admit I have a (possibly misplaced) desire for terrain in games like this. I'm basically suggesting the same thing that anglewyrm is. Some people may or may not like it, and probably the best solution to that would be to have a "terrain density" slider in the game creation screen so we could have it both ways. I think that terrain matched with varying effects when combined with the new weapon types would add an interesting layer to the game.

If we have terrain, shouldn't we have it everywhere? Rather then one big simple plain, with a few tiles of water or granite peaks (in basic civ style jargon)? Tacticly speaking, terrain is only interesting if it gains or looses advantages in combat. IE, defend while on a black hole tile, and suffer -50% due to having to divert so much of your ships concentration and motor power to not falling into the black hole. Attack out of a nebula, and gain a +25% bonus, because your opponent cannot isolate your ship on their scanners as easily as when both ships are in open space.

If you don't have any combat effects, that only leaves movement effects, and strategic resources. Le'ts examine movement effects. The automatic path finding will just "go around" slow or damaging tiles. Where you can go diagonally 1 over for the same movement cost to go around a tile of asteriods, say, then they do not matter on the main map, do they? Unless you are going to create large regions that are minus movement (some huge nebula that prevents your ship from going more then 50% speed for whatever reason). Any fast move bonus, your path finding will utilize where appropriate. But unless it allows for going in at Sector 1,1 and popping out at Sector 5,5 then a whole tile gained isn't going to be significant. So, that makes me go, why bother? Unless you make large regions... like sector sized or bigger, they won't matter for movement.

What's the last matter? Ah yes. Strategic Resources. These can matter, even if their is only one such item out of nine or more sectors! Build a starbase on a black hole, get a +5% research bonus. Find a spun down neutron star that is pure carbon (diamond)? Build a starbase one it, get a +5% to production (all that cheap, diamond tipped equipment you can make out of material you harvest from the spun down star). I've always envisioned that the strategic resources in GC1 are these sorts of things... terrain that when "processed" appropriately yield some bonus that improves your empire, rather then just generate some extra shields or a bit of extra cash.

Honestly, I think we already have "terrain" in the game. Instead of us being shown a stellar black hole, it's the research bonus icon. Instead of a spun down neutron star, it's a production bonus icon. Instead of a rogue world where some freaky exotic chemistry is going on, it's a morale bonus icon, etc etc etc.

So, do we need move and combat modifying terrain? If we do, then it really needs to be regions, and not just one tile. Otherwise, those type of effects will be meaningless so often, that I don't see why Star Dock should bother wasting time implementing it. Just my opinion, your mileage may very, etc etc etc.

And Spazzle, it's only by scale. Stars too far off the galactic plane, will and do get kicked, one way or the other. We are a bit thicker then the average spiral galaxy, at the moment, because the Milky Way is actively cannabilizing at least one dwarf galaxy. But once its done eating that, the main disk plane should slowly settle (thin). Unless you are talking about the galactice halo stars at the center of the galaxy? What they are doing, is trying not to fall into the black holes, and going to slow to escape our galaxy. But gravatic interaction will eventually slow them the vast majority of them, or get them kicked into a different path, last I was able to see modelled. They aren't well known though, because they aren't as easily observed as there is so much dust, coreward. Although we are always learning.