[suggestion]Idea for Diplomacy - limited trade of ship specs

As far as frigates go, the ONLY one that would be worthwhile is the Vasari scout.  Think about it; as far as combat frigates go (scout, lf, lrf, and flak) you need to build them in bulk.  One illuminator isn't going to do anything useful if it doesn't have a small fleet of other illuminators backing it up.  Siege frigates don't vary dramatically between factions.  So the only frigate that really offers something worth pursuing with this technology is the Vasari scout.  I think it's highly inappropriate to create a technology that's only useful for procuring a specific unit from a specific faction, and will never be useful in any other circumstance.

I would never support this for capital ships.  These are the real unique figureheads of the fleet, where the racial diversity is at its best.  This takes away too much from the game, in my opinion.

Now, with a focus on cruisers, I think we can safely ignore heavy cruisers and most carriers for the reasons I detailed in the frigate section.  They really need to be built in bulk to have a big impact anyways.  Support cruisers, mine layers, and assault cruisers are the obvious ones that would be shared (Vasari lacks assault cruisers, TEC lacks mine layers).  Even presuming we find it acceptable to allow Vasari and TEC to "trade" units they don't normally have access to, I'm troubled by the sharing of support cruisers.  You only need a couple Hoshikos or Guardians to greatly increase the power of a fleet.  I think this has the potential to become a very major balance headache.  An obvious case would be Advent with hoshikos; you only need a couple to have a big effect.

Yeah, I thought of most of that so I can't argue that you have some good points.  Here was my reasoning:

Overall balance of being able to trade designs:

This was all predicated upon the potentially incorrect assumption that gifting ships would be allowed.  If that was built in, I would have assumed any balancing issues were worked out to at least a moderate level (to be later refined by additional player experiences, as per usual).  If the information I had was wrong and ship gifting is *not* happening, then throw this all out - that would be introducing an element that very likely none of us outside of Ironclad have the expertise to handle in an elegent manner.

Frigates:

The idea would be that it's adventageous to make alliances for more reasons that typical support and protection.  As far as the usefulness of borrowing frigate models, I can understand where you're coming from.  However, how useful is a 5% increase in beam damage?  It helps, but nothing spectacular.  Yet when you get it up all the way to the highest level, you've got a lot of resources and the expense is no longer prohibitive for the value.  I wouldn't min

Cruisers:

To have access to support cruisers not your own would require the investment in trading frigate tech as well as trading cruiser tech, so yet again more value to the former.  It would be of high enough value that everyone would want to fight for allies and make people play the game very differently than by just applying blunt force trauma to their enemies - kind of what I thought the whole purpose of Diplomacy was.  Maybe upiing that to a level 6 tech might be better.  By the time you get there, any pieces you pick up from an ally would be complementary, but would potentially be powerful enough to provide a major advantage if your oponents haven't worked with other players - driving them to do so.

Captial ships:

I hear you the most on this one.  Distinctiveness is the most important thing to me, and as such if it was to be allowed, perhaps upping the point cost of both Cruisers & Caps might be best to keep such thing at a lower level.  On the other hand, it could lead to extremely interesting mixes.

All that said, I'm fully aware there are plenty of pitfalls here, and I appreciate you bringing up more of them.  I think there's a part of that me worries that the additional choices Diplomacy will provide just won't be compelling enough to significantly change the gameplay, so I was trying to come up with something a little more dramatic.  Perhaps too much so

The technologies are vastly different.

No one could use the Advent tech other than the advent - it's psionically operated.

Vasari tech is nanoteched out, for all we know operating Vasari tech requires a nano interface within the user that's incompatible with non Vasari minds (what better way to keep slaves from rebelling?).

TEC... well, ok, their shit could be used by just about anyone, but who'd want it?

Plus I just dont see technology sharing between races that are for the most part, at war (in today's world, any military technology we (USA) sell to our allies is usually a generation or three behind current - and in very limited quantities). Pinging the map the attack/defend seems like a good enough way to get allied ships fighting for you to me.

It's a cool idea, I just disagree with it. If you want enemy ships, you can bust out some Rapture battlecruisers with the Advent and steal your opponent's fleet with impunity .

-Itharus

maybe insted of tech ship sharing, you share tech LEVEL?

Your ally is at militery level 6, and can boost you to level 6 with the right reaserch ( say civic lvl 6 )

That would make for some interesting dependencies, yes?

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Ahahahhahahha love you too Pbhead

PS: Watch out for those glowing space witches, they're out to get you!

Guys. No one here is thinking instead of trading tech for the ships why not just get the ships from  your ally. What I am saying is if you have allince with a vas player and you realy need his egg. He can loan it to you. This would give you control over the ship but keep ship techs in each race's tech tree. Example, you have 100 ship slots open. Your ally could give you what ever he wants to fill those slots if you accept the ships. This would need a tech of course to do this. Just think of having a fleet of assailents with Illums and hohos.

Personally instead of trading ships, I think it would be neat/headache-y to have moderate control/control over your ally's fleet.

I think this was in some rts gae i played like 10 years ago, it was a lot of fun.. though the game was obviously much less complicated. but in that case it was "share control" which meant 2 people were playing as 1 player.

have a research tree for allied control, first be able to control only x amount of ships, only if in your GW. next tier, control x amount of ships, only if in same GW as your capital ship (or fleet leader?). next tier, control x amount of ships, period, no limit.

each one has two levels, increasing the number of ships available for "loan". this would let allies be able to back each other up, and allow one player to micro his reinforcements if he needs to. putting limits on the amount (or fleet capacity) would prevent a fleet of hosho. guardians, overseers and subverters back up illums and drone hosts. We could also place a small nerf on all abilities and dps due to "communication/translation" lag between players' ships. these ships would obviously only be part of a joint fleet TF, and could be taken back by the original owner at any point.

I think this would put a new twist on betrayal too, if you went into a firefight assuming your ally's 15 drone hosts were going to back you up and half way through the fight they betrayed you... well, youve just got screwed. similar to putting a starbase in a friendly GW and then killing the treaty. trading ship specs just allows for too many buttons and too much to remember.

That was more along the lines of what I was thinking, just didn't have the time to type it all out. The loan system where you keep your ships but your ally controls your ships would be great. Maybe you would need a cap that has a techable ablity to to give control over to your ally because who is going to be transalating all your vas allies commands? I think though if this is a in race loan you can just hand over control of the ships with a treaty.

Oh, c'mon.

I know all of you want a nano dissasembler+mb+malice combo...

Or Repair cloud+shield restore+armistice for instafleet regen.

I can do that already since I usually play with my roommate.

What I REALLY REALLY want is the combo i listed above. hoshis+guardian+subverter+overseer= best support combo ever. literally nothing will ever hurt you again. especially with any capitals backing you up. nothing. including a fully upgraded orky in a totally defensed up GW. not global warming, not aids, not oprah, nothing.

This idea is terrible for any sense of balance and would frankly destroy the game. We'd be left with a steaming pile of shit instead of SOASE.

There's no need to gain access to any other race's ships. It makes no sense on any level. Allied fleets flying to assist you, however, does. And that is already in the game.

/thread

thats where there have to be limits and nerfing factors, it could be a back breaker, but it could also be a disaster/last ditch move.

lets say you have a smallish fleet, nothing too fancy, and youre out hitting neutrals for fun/exp/colonizing. your position is pretty secure and everything is going pretty well. all of a sudden your allys homeworld get attacked and he, for some reason, is weak as hell. you send your fleet in, and its juuuuust enough to beat them off. all structures are destroyed or the enemy is sending in reinforcements. you have like 10 ships remaining, basically holding the enemy at bay for your teammate while he rebuilds. well, because you have gotten yourself invovled over here, someone else is attacking you, and you are spread too thin. your ships arent going to make it back, and wouldnt make much of a difference anyways. you have a fleet back at home, but you need to pay attention to that, and not protecting your ally.

so you let him boss your guys around, maybe send them into an asterdoid with what hes built up so he can expand. because they are at half strength, youre really only there to be back up and bluff the enemy. which leaves his small fleet to go actually accomplish something. (say he could only get a colony ship out with your ships) if its just rebels, well even half strength ships can take them on while he colonize. maximum payoff, minimum investment. total last ditch effort to get yourself out of corner.

or because it lets the two of you sync up a bit better when phase jumping.

regardless i think it could a powerful ability. like domination for advent, but across the board and with a hit to DPS, or antmatter regen, or sheilds, accuracy, speed etc.

or allow them to be controlled as a "move to" but dont allow the other player to direct attack or use abilities. In any alliance battle group there are "supreme commanders" and then there are ally commanders. I reference NATO, there is a commander for all NATO forces in afghanistan, but each country has a CO, who takes cues and orders from NATO, but otherwise operates independently.

I think it would be a game changer, not a game ender.

52500: Your idea sounds like "hotseat" cooperative play. That's fine, I think it should be an option to enable or disable when you start the online match (if implemented). Although it should be limited in application, it should be like having an absolute attack/defend ping that MUST be responded to by whatever ships your ally makes available to you - and that should be limited to frigate/cruiser only, imo. A multiplayer option, but not a researched Diplomacy tech.

You know, this sounds really, really familiar... I think we played the same RTS ten years ago, but for the life of me I cannot think of the name of it!

My bitching and moaning is towards the idea of actually gaining access to make your own ships from another faction (or for that matter buying ships from another faction (thats of a different race))... sharing technology, I am vehemently opposed to that idea. Buying ships of a higher tier (or paying to use their construction facilities to produce them) than you are capable of making from someone who is playing the same race as you, and that's an ally? That I'd be open to, with certain limitations, or vastly increased cost.

-Itharus

@itharus:

Was it starcraft? I dont remember... ive played like a trillion games....

anyways. i agree that allowing a player to make an ally's ships is a stupid idea. and if thecnology is allowed to be traded, im almost convinced it should have some kind of disadvantage and im not sure how it work cross-species. i guess if the game get a hundred times more complicated and allowed us to customize weapons on ships then trading phase missle technology for the beam tech would make sense. but we cant, and most would say we shouldnt, personally i think this would be a MUST featrure in SOASE 5 . but the ability to control a finite number of ships with reach is a reasonable option. it would certainly make having a computer ally easier to deal with (if anyone ever did this, which they shouldnt)

perhaps make the tech tree for it optional in startup?

Trading technologies? Once that happens, I hope we can deal with Advent fleets that have been hardened with the TEC's armoring techologies while utilizing the Vasari's Phase Stabilizer technologies to move about quickly, not to mention their already powerful shields.

Then it just becomes a contest of who can come up with the best mixture of the three race's technologies.

I think that some of this would be neat. NOT CAPITAL SHIPS. Caps and SBs (and SB constructors/construction frigs/Envoy Cruisers) are OFF LIMITS for this IMO.

I think that trading common techs would be interesting.

You guys want to completely freaking homogenize the game!!!

There's no point in having factions if you can trade techs. It's just freaking stupid.

as livid as Itharus is, I have to agree with him. 

What is the point of choosing factions if they can all get the same techs?  It just waters down to every other lame RTS out there.

I'm a passionate person, what can I say...

notice I put the feature in the 5th incarnation of this game.

In terms of my overly geekish/detail oriented fact finding mission: If you assume that these fleets actually capture ships, they can reverse engineer techs. assuming that they do not is silly. however one of the better parts of this game is that i dont have pay a ton of attention to research like Galciv. and once we get micromanaging an empire like those games SINS wont be as much fun. that being said, a liiiiiiitle more wouldnt hurt either.

k. ive lost my point: trading ships=dumb, borrowing limited ships with a nerf=neat!, caps or SBs=stupid. trading techs=good, but i would wait until a sequel where it could be integrated without being alpha centauri.

there are a billion awesome things we could request that the devs do, some of it will inevitably make the game more complicated, some will make it more frustrating, and some will make it exhaustingly comprehensive, and some will make it really homogenous. i prefer fun mixed with realism, but even that can be too much (do YOU want to fight a war over interstellar distances?, hellllo month long games)

Some technologies are beyond reverse engineering due to wildy different base technologies.

For instance, the Advent use psionic tech that the other races could simply not replicate (well, humans could after centuries of drug induced mutations...). The nano-tech of the Vasari probably has safety protocols within it to hinder study, and on top of that - the level of nanotech they employ is far in excess of the TEC/Advent's abilities, they couldn't understand it at this point. TEC technology... again... who'd want it? Although I imagine the Vasari might have an interest in the Kol's adaptive forcefield.

but i mean, if you really think about it, the advent are already human, just... edited. if TEC go desperate enough they might try leaning something into that direction. Im sure vasari would be interested in ... well nothing really, we don't care about your piddling race and its piddling gauss platforms.

but in the future as the game grows up, maybe we wont be limited to only one specific tech, or three research trees. thats why we come on this forum, we love the game, we just want ... more to love lol.

WCIII has share control, I don't believe SC did it may have.

While i agree that some tech sharing is a nice idea it will cause the rush to get the best design fleet out there i remember all the calculations that went into Stars! sheep and fleet design .

The only way you could implement tech sharing is to make the races have different benefits inherently (such as what worlds could be capitalised i.e. Advent couldn't colonise volcanic worlds but get a huge bonus for desert world types that allows their culture to spread at +50%)