🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <43ddf513$0$11076$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl>,
mcv  <mcv...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>But consider the following scenario: I'm specialising in mass drivers,
>while my buddies the Altarians are specialising in beam weapons. I
>get into a war with the Drengin, and because of my mass drivers, he
>specialises in armour. We go on for a while, and I end up with Mass
>Drivers XXI while he has Armour XXIII. So I talk to the Altarians,
>whom I happen to be on pretty good terms with (although he hasn't
>joined the war yet), and trade my Mass Drivers I-XXI for his
>Beam weapons XVII, and start shooting the crap out of my shieldless
>adversary. And I only have 1 more tech than I had before, so it's
>not even slowing down my research much (although the Altarians may
>suffer). The only way to prevent this is to prevent tech trade
>altogether.

And ship trade. If the AIs are sufficiently clever, I can see a
booming business in building just the ships an AI needs to fight the
current war, and then selling them to him :-)

Alternatively, you can find out which of the AIs has the tech that you
need to win the current war and start buying warships off him. What
the game then really needs is a diplomacy subscreen where you can
negotiate the ship designs that you want them to build for you and
then contract out the construction of n ships to them :-)

>Although I like the idea, I'm afraid that forced specialisation in
>technology may give close allies and/or tech traders a big advantage
>over players in a more isolated position. (This may actually be
>realistic, but it's also a bit unbalancing.) Instead, I think
>encouraging specialisation in ships while allowing diversification
>in research would be better.

I tentatively like the idea of somehow penalising players who try to
specialize in multiple tech directions. It connects well with the idea
that a technology isn't just a blueprint and a bunch of figures locked
up in a safe somewhere, it's something that becomes very much part of
your society. And society will only absorb so many different ways of
doing the same thing. Most of the time, they'll simply use the most
effecient way and largely ignore all the others. This can make it very
challenging to try to develop an inferior alternative even when you
know that this new path will eventually lead to superior results.

It does risk putting you in a position where a game is effectively
lost, however, because you chose the wrong tech path for when the last
alien race needs to be destroyed.

It all depends on how expensive exactly it is to pursue an alternative
research path in the late game. I do assume it's not outright
impossible :-)

>A way to encourage specialisation in ship designs is to have for each
>weapon type also a component that increases that weapon's effectiveness
>(either power or accuracy). Let's say that we have Missile Guidance
>Systems that increase the power of your missiles by 10%, and Targeting
>Systems that increase the power of your beam weapons by 10%. On a ship
>with 10 missiles, each MGS would effectively add another missile, but
>on a ship with 5 missiles and 5 beams, each MGS or TS would add only
>half a missile or half a beam weapon.

This only encourages specialization in single ships, however, not in
entire fleets. With such a system, you would have a fleet with a bunch
of missile ships, another bunch of beam ships, etc.

>> BTW, in the campaign I named some of the ships after regulars from this 
>> group.  There's a ship called the MCV (and Ceowulf and Lucian and so forth). 
>
>This is so cool. And an honour too. I've never been mentioned in a game
>before. Although I'm afraid Ceowulf and Lucian make better shipnames
>than my initials.
>
>
>mcv.

Sounds like a Mega aircraft carrier to me, which is cool enough :-)

Cheers
	Bent D
-- 
Bent Dalager - b...@pvv.org - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
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