Kavik_Kang

The thought occurred too me that there could be another type of fight in the solar system, that takes place on the solar system map. It might be that only the mother ship can be in a fight like this. These would never be PvP, so the retrograde problems don't exist. You design the AI to engage the player, so the retrograde isn't an issue with the AI unless you make it one. This might be the ONLY way the mother ship ever fights, it makes fights in the mothership unique

My limited internet connection over the last 6 months or so has prevented me from downloading the monthly updates for a long time now, so I haven't seen much of the SCO lore yet. But the Interdiction Field thread got me thinking about SC2's story and what made it so special too me. I've realized that it's the same thing I've done in my own universe, a 6000 year long timeline where the game eras focus on the truly epic “WWII moments” of the history. SC2

This is probably obvious, but part of what made me think of an Interdiction Field was Stardock saying that they wanted the barrier to collapse during the fight. The Interdiction Field allows you to do this in a way that makes perfect sense no matter how you want it to work. If you want it to slowly collapse from the moment it is formed that is easy to explain in the engineering lore, or if you want it to hold for most of the fight and then fairly rapidly collapse t

[quote who="Alverez" reply="27" id="3694362"] The drones spawn around your ship at set intervals. The secondary is to place the drones as stationary turrets. [/quote] That explains it! And why it seemed like the button wasn't working a lot of the time...

Markbols, the Tywom defenders drones essentially have 2 stages. When you first launch a new drone it will be circling you. You can get more than one circling you at a time. Once at least one is orbiting your ship, if you push the button again one of the drones will "plant itself" in a location and act as what is called a "Captor Mine". That's just a militaristic term for a mine that shoots at you with something. So first you get a mine, or mines, orbiting you, th

Oops... I realized that “hyperspace” has been used by many sci-fi stories and is often defined differently. When I say that I am always thinking of the definition I use, which is similar to B5/SC2's vision of it. The B5/SC2 version of “hyperspace” is that it is a different dimension (or “place”) where the distances between points are much shorter. Ships that need to travel through hyperspace do so because they aren't capable of t

Problems... this is how lore is born! ;-) All ships of all species have to be able to create an Interdiction Field. Why would they all have the same technology? Obviously, all ships can generate an Interdiction Field because it is a "law of physics aspect" of the drive system that it interdicts. One "hyper drive" can interdict another "hyper drive". All ships in hyperspace must have a hyperspace drive to be there... Tada! What about species with o

So... an SCO “Interdiction Field” pulls a nearby ship out of hyperspace by creating an artificial bubble of normal space within hyperspace. The outer shell of the bubble is far too strong for ships to penetrate. The fight is taking place within this artificially created island of normal space within hyperspace. What you would see in Super Melee is a normal space star field area that is the playable map, and the cool looking hyperspace extending out into

One of the species, whoever it fits best with, might be excited to have finally encountered humans! “Who do I contact to lodge a complaint with... let me see here... Oh, yeah, S-t-a-r-d-o-c-k Entertainment about this bubble thing I have to fight in? Our ships are very fast, and it just isn't fair to our kind. We believe that this is in violation of the Organic Rights Act of 2639, which gives us a right to lodge an official

I thought of a lore explanation for a tournament barrier.... It's an arcade game, sometimes you just have to shrug and say “It's just a game...” and accept something that you can easily poke holes in. You try to be a consistent and “realistic” as possible, but sometimes the game or the laws of reality make that impossible. There are things that even “you are in the wrong Place to understand” do

This build doesn't like my computer, it is crashing a lot, so I haven't played it much yet. But I will keep trying to play it. I am loving this! But it's definitely not what the audience is expecting of Star Control. Not that there is any big problem, but just like in the original Space Wars the gravity well at the center needs to be an option, or the gravity needs to be faint. What you have here is the beginnings of a good &ldqu

Even better, and I am not going to submit a race because I am enjoying just sitting back and seeing this happen again too much, but there are still two missing. You've covered animal, plant, and mechanical. Two other people need to submit silicon and pure energy scavenger species. Then a sixth person needs to submit the species that these five "elemental" species combine into in the end. Then, of course, other people might want to compete with there own version o

Thinking about this more... since the fast player knows the map will shrink, and it will be harder for them to win once it does, simply the threat of the map shrinking will make them want to engage and destroy the enemy before the map begins to steadily shrink down into a boxing ring. You might wind up being to find a balance in this where the threat of the map shrinking solves the problem to the point that it rarely ever gets to that point among experienced players. How big is

Now all three need to wind up merging together in some way in the end!

"The arena will gradually shrink." This is very clever, "The Best of Both Worlds" in the language of my own little world. You can have the map be too big at first, the larger area that modern gamer's expect, and a lot of the time that will work. But if it is going too long, probably meaning that the faster player is refusing to engage, you can shrink it down to an SFB tournament map boxing ring on them. I would have it not shrink at all at first, then have it fairly qu

Now that I've played this for a while, and am at the point that if I was doing this would be ready to start changing things, this is how I would start... Forget all of the other ships exist. Make the Scyrve the highest point ship, and the Measured the lowest. 60/6 would work as a starting point for their points, in the end the range might narrow a little but at first go overboard in wanting to make the Measured as fragile and wea

I was thinking the same thing, that these two species might combine in some way in the end like the Chensu did in SC2. They scavenge their way into uniting/combining into some third species that doesn't much resemble either of them.

Early in the history of SFB SVC's staff members would slip cultural referances and words past SVC that he didn't know the meaning of, so it became a thing to inform him of any meanings words might have that people were proposing. The classic example is that SVC had no idea that the "Plasmatic Pulsar Device" had been named after Wendy O' Williams and the Plasmatics until many years after he had published it. I don't see how this one could matter, but the person callin

Drenkend – I like the design of this ship a lot and this ship is already fun to use. The weapon and boarding parties are really cool the way they work together, and both are easy for a player to use and understand how to use. I don't like the HUGE boarding pods. They should be a lot smaller, and maybe be a little “jittery” in their movement. They move too perfectly now, like they are on rails in space or something, and it makes it feel “inco

Uh huh... Who is the "TL;DR" now? Could you convey all of this in Twitter? See what this turns you into? ;-)

This is all great stuff! Just seeing all these new race submissions is making me feel 20 years younger. This is how games should be made, especially in a case where you are looking for a wide variety of alien species that are completely unlike each other. Each person's mind is like a unique alien species to every other person's mind. The best you could do is to have no two species who were created by the same person;-)

I like these guys a lot, too.

Menkmack – Assuming this ship is supposed to be among the more powerful ships, it gives me the impression of being either a high-point medium class or low-point heavy class ship, then there is a good way to make this ship fun. I would suggest thinking in terms of just 3 classes because it is a lot easier that way, things start to become a lot more complicated to balance with more than 3 classes. In SC you probably never use the word “classes”, thi

Of course. It would be great to see a computer game company doing things the SVC/ADB way. Just like Steve Cole at ADB, Brad is "God" at Stardock, which is the best way for a game company to operate. Most game companies couldn't behave like that if they wanted to, the designer has to be the owner for that to be a possibility. Really, the designer has to be the owner to do this whole game design thing right. I'm pretty sure that Stardock is one of the only, if not

Two "new race submissions" from players, that could potentially wind up in the game... This is starting to feel familiar, keep going in this direction Stardock. SVC's way. Your audience will love you for it;-)