So now the war has been raging for ten years and the defenses are getting so thick that the war is going to stagnate. Fleets will get chewed to shreds by capable defensive opponents. A few systems will trade hands but the lines will stabilize. So where do we go from here. More defenses, copying of technology from each other?
I think the next expansion should include espionage, getting planets without having to use a fleet. Piracy will no longer pay as the areas thicken with defenses and they will probably hire out as mecenaries to support fleet operations.
The stalemate will continue until the races build giant motherships. You need an entire empire to build one, but it will let you crash through fixed defenses, and break the stalemate. Ships so massive that the capital ships just hang in it shadows.
My few ideas for the races:
Motherships should require systems dedicated to building motherships. They should have to have all the shipyards, supply yards, and at least 4-5 constructors in the gravity well. This would limit which planets can build them and make taking the necesaary planets important. Although the TEC mother ship should be easier to construct than the other races.
Their abilities should reflect an extension of abilities they already have:
TEC should get an ability similar to their area effect missile attack that encompases the whole grav well. Thier mothership should also allow the construction of ships where ever it is and faster if it is in its own gravwell. They should get a massive nuclear strike on any planet they hover over.
Advent mothership should be able to carry a fighter swarm as well as bolster its fighter and repair any losses instantly once per battle. They should also get an upgrade to their capital ship's main gun that allows them to remove entire planets from the game, leaving only asteroids in the wake. I would recommend that the races get shields that would mitigate this effect on planets, at least till the shield generators are destroyed.
Vasari should get an upgrade to their colony ships ability to extract resources. The mothership would strip the entire planet and leave a molten planet in its wake. The vasari need some more improvements to their colonizing ability of red planets so they get a bigger pop boost than they currently have. Also the mothership should be able to warp itself to any plnet in the solar system with any frigates in its immediate area. It should then be able to shunt all it power into opening a gate to allow fllets to follow it. This would eliminate its weapons till the gate shuts down.
I know this is probably wishful thinking but I hope they continue with expansions for a while to come.
i think the mothership thing would be hard to balance even with the construction difficuties
on a side note ive heard that the next expasion would deal with moar of the non-combat related stuff
i personally am looking for something that will make culture kill moar viable
and also something that would allow... an econmy kill or something like that
Wasn't it said a long time ago that the second expansion would be diplomacy-related?
Personally, I think it should go the opposite direction. Make pirates a real, persistent military threat, the kind of thing that doesn't just become a nuisance in the late game. That means:
> Pirate bases would be HARD to neutralize. Not just a ring of gauss turrets; make their base act like a fully-upgraded starbase, give them some custom turrets (say, a "heavy turret" that's far more damaging and durable than a gauss turret, to make up for the fact that they wouldn't use hangars) and layer the well in minefields.
> Pirate capital ships. Only seen if the bounty gets high (say, 2k or more), with the level of the capship dependent on the size of the bounty. No fighters, light shields, low HP regeneration, but high armor and HP, with abilities stolen from all three races (not just TEC clones).
> Pirates shouldn't target just one empire every 15 minutes, which just leads to a flurry of spending at 14m59s. In any given minute, there should be a small chance of a pirate raid targetting EACH empire based on its CURRENT bounty. If two empires get into a bidding war, they'll both get smashed, and you won't be able to predict when.
> Pirates right now target a single planet, beat up that planet, and either leave or are destroyed. It should be more of an ongoing process; if the pirates bring far more of a fleet than a single planet can handle, part of it should split off and head for the next-closest planet of that empire.
Make it possible to turn pirates into a very significant late-game threat, and you'd have a very different play experience. It'd be possible to actually "win by proxy" by continually paying pirates to beat up on an enemy, without sending in your own fleets until it's time to colonize his now-empty systems.
I also would like to see an expansion focus on the economic side of the game. That is, we've got tons of flexibility in how we set up the defenses of a well, with a half-dozen defensive structures, a starbase, and minefields, but on the logistical side, it's a lot more limited; you put a trade post, a culture generator, and maybe a refinery or some research labs, but they're very interchangeable. Once you have 8 of each lab in your empire you never need more, and for most of the structures there's no difference as to where you place the structure within a well (trade posts being a minor exception). And most of the structures only need one within a well; front-line systems could use multiple culture generators, but that's a waste in back-line systems, while trade posts beyond the first are basically used to fill out whatever logistical slots are left over after everything else is bought. Starbases can have a couple non-combat benefits, but I've rarely found those to be worth the drop in combat performance.
That means we could have:
> Abilities on logistical structures that are position-dependent. This'd make their placement important in the same way as adding abilities to hangars in Entrenchment made their placement non-trivial. For instance, an ability on refineries that improve the production rate of any asteriods within a certain radius, or a culture center ability that gives nearby warships twice the usual culture benefits, or a trade post ability that lets all friendly trade ships move more quickly when near the post.
> A new non-combat cruiser, let's say the Mobile Refinery, that harvests additional resources for your empire from nearby asteroids, including enemy-controlled ones, by spawning small extractor ships that fly to the various asteroids within that well. Give it some remotely combat-oriented use as well, like placing Sensor Buoys (give you line-of-sight to that system and are phased out like a minefield), and possibly allow terrans and advent to use it to tow their starbases at very slow speeds.
> Additional research labs beyond the eighth provide other benefits, like a progressive increase to research rate. Labs should also have some local benefit, if you buy certain upgrade techs. For instance, logistical labs might upgrade to double as Orbital Farms, adding to the population cap and growth rate of their planet, while weapon labs might upgrade to double as repair docks or reduce planetary bombardment or something. As with the other things like this, it should vary by race.
> It'd be nice to have a new structure for each race, although this is UI-limited; Vasari, for instance, just don't have room for another logistical structure.
Well since entrenchment is in a cold war era, total stalemate, either everyone is going to developa even more powerful weapon and they have like a massive genocide, and then the survivors will be forced to rebuild, that is where I think the second, and the third expansion will take us
well first they need to actually scale the threat level with bounty size
currently i mean if it gets to the highest setting it just stays there even if the all bounty is depleted (unless they changed that recently)
as for the other stuff id still like to have something that lets me use money to kill my opponents directly
The pirates are supposed to fulfill that role, but....
Pirates really badly needed an upgrade in entrenchment. They are not even annoying now. I try to keep the bounty on my own empire and leave ships I want to lvl up in the grav well they always attack. Its good xp. Otherwise they are useless. I can crush them with only a few ships.
When a 20K bounty gets put on a player, it should have 20K worth of capital ships + the usual mix they always throw. I like the idea of having them use hybrids that incorporate some of each race.
The only feature Sins needs is drop-in MP support. The online scene would take off if that was implemented.
i dont like the idea of making the pirates mere powerfull, there enough of a pian already
opps double post LOL
That would be hot. I know alot of people who dont have a whole day or even hours to play so online is nearly off limits but if they had something where you can just jump into games where people had to leave early it would make it pretty fun and you wouldnt feel like you need to dedicate alot of time to play. This would boost the online for sure because I know alot of people hate when the computer fills in for players after they leave since they are way more predictable.
I would even be better if someone could drop in w/o you knowing it. Think you are just playing some hard AI, but really a friend has snuck into one of your games. Oooh, the possibilities, though I am sure this would break some laws.
Don't get too hot to trot on that idea, there are some major technical hurdles to it -- specifically, the exact same ones that make desyncs such a PITA.
The game is designed around a P2P system, where each player runs the entire game locally, with only player commands transmitted across the network. So you'd have to transmit the entire game state to an incoming player, and do so quickly enough that it isn't out of date by the time they load it. Which for all intents and purposes means hitting the pause button while the transfer occurs.
um the thing the vasari is running from comes and starts making large attacks breaking alll the frontlines
have the abillity to turn entire planets into offensive units with many guns working in tandom as well as a main gun that does an excessive amount of damage in a straight line and can destroy the populations of planets in a matter of seconds as well as acting as a mobile gravity well with all of it's structures following in it's wake
motherships, though creative, are a bad idea since balancing them would be hard and starbases would utterly become guass cannons compared to its firepower. its true, to the best of my knowledge, that the second expansion is diplomacy related. i also like the idea of pirates becoming serious threats as right now they are more or less push overs.
well...war is an instrument of diplomacy
Entrenchment is not cold war so much as it is World War I, and that was a slow war of attrition just like Sins has become. Personally, I like the mothership idea.
It could work like this:
1. Player sees a game in progress and joins it.
2. Host of that game receives a message that a player wishes to join.
3. Host may reject or accept the new player.
4. If accepted, the game pauses while the new player downloads the current state.
5. Game resumes and everyone is happy.
What is the problem with this? Most people are on high speed and transferring a gamestate probably would take 30 seconds. If the new player was taking too long, the Host could just cancel the offer and resume the game as it was. Considering how long Sins matches can last, I think players would be willing to wait while the new players download the current state.
If this feature is implemented Sins MP will take off.
Slurple, I don't know what the hurdles are either... I just know that you can't do that with desynchs, so trying to do that with regular game states probably won't work either.
Actually, I may be wrong on that; it might be the reason you can't do it with desyncs is because 'whose version is right' kinda issues -- plus, once a desync has occured at all, you can guarantee a new one. I need to think about that.
mother ships are certainy a big NO, theres no point in building a big fleet and putting in tons of effort if ultimatly all you gotta do is build funds then send in some god ship thats practicaly invincible, besides the balanecing process would be a right pig!
If you want game ending super units I suggest you purchase sureme commander to satisfy your super unit needs
That is over my head, I don't understand this desync talk. Drop-in support isn't all that uncommon in other games. Its one of the main reasons Civ4's MP community has thrived. World in Conflict would've been a complete MP flop without it. What I am suggesting isn't even real drop-in support, like the two games i mentioned.
What is it about Sins? These other games don't have dsync issues? Under my hypothetical, the game would simply pause, while the actual 'save' is transferred. Not sure how that involves dsync issues.
Diplomacy.
You are replying to me? Why can't the new player just take over the diplomacy? When someone leaves the AI takes over anyway.
No, I mean, expanded diplomacy features.
I'd kind of rather blow stuff up.
I think they intend to improve the pirates for the next one.
Some other ideas:
1) Choke points between stars. Right now, there is a phase lane between every star.
2) More uniform multi-star maps. Right now, if you create a map with, lets say one hundered stars, the map becomes a big circle with one in the middle.
3) Fleet size capapability should depend on population size...not research! By the way, do ship cost money for upkeep? I'm not sure but if they don't, they should.
4) Starbases should have constructors and tactical upgrade so that hangers, gauss guns, mines(for TEC), etc can be built in non-colonizable gravity wells.
5) Ability to turn off super weapon research
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