Hey guys. We're looking at ramping into Rebellion development now that 1.2 is out, and I'm looking at core work we could do while simultaneously working on Rebellion specific features. These would be things we could look into patching into Diplomacy while we go forward with Rebellion, so this isn't a feature request thread. There are really 2 types of things I'm looking for.
1. Long standing complaints, bugs, and glitches: Anything that's existed in Diplomacy, or previous versions that we might be able to fix between major tasks. I know many of these have likely been posted or reported, but combing through all the threads seems rather daunting in addition to actually getting some programming done.
2. Realistic concerns and mechanic suggestions: I can't make the game multi-threaded or 64-bit, and I can't make the AI scriptable in Lua, python, XML, or legos, I want to get that out of the way first. What I can say is that if you think a certain part of the game is a real mire or CPU bottleneck (like say the empire tree) I can focus some attention on that and see if there are any optimizations the team might be able to make now that we have some memory to play around with. I can also see if there are design or balance concerns we might address, though these are harder to deal with as they require a certain amount of bureaucratic process to actually be implemented.
I won't guarantee we get most, many, or even any of your suggestions in, but in a perfect world I would love to give you guys as much as we can in terms of the products you want and deserve, and if I can pluck a few cherry suggestions from the community then I will certainly do so.
Thanks for all the feedback, we'll likely be looking over this for the next few weeks/months, and I'll try to post when we can actively fix anything in there.
This please.My suggestio is to have the top and bottom of the tree move as things added and subtracted.Keep whatever the player centers the tree on stationary.So if you have tree center (imaginary line) between your army and enemy in a well and you warp in something then the top goes up and vice versa if enemy ship jumps in.This would also apply to things entering wells above what your looking at.
I understand what Pbhead and MindsEye are saying here, and I agree, and was trying to suggest a similar solution in my number 4. 'Lock' the cursor to its location, and have the empire tree expand away from it in both direction. If you will, call it another type of 'zoom to cursor'.
I've spent some more time thinking about, and watching the empire tree jumping; analyzing the problem. The jumping stems from ships leaving one planet to go to another. As ships leave one planet, the tree contracts there, while growing in the "in transit" icon, then later contracting there, while the destination planet's tree expands. If the "in transit" icon was placed in between the two planets on the empire tree, they all would remain largely stable as one area absorbs the changes of the other. But that would require "in transit" areas between all planets, and would be further complicated when multiple planets are listed. So I don't see an easy complete solution to the problem. (Other than entirely eliminating "in transit" - not representing travel in phase space at all, and show departures or arrivals only when ships are halfway thru the jump, or halfway thru phase lanes).
I have one more suggestion that I think will help, and possibly also greatly enhance the empire tree:
6. A Hybrid Collapse, or a third intermediate stage collapse/expand, between the existing stages. Which would allow more ships to displayed in each row, yet be also functional. Combine the elements of the two current stages. For Example: show 3 ship icons, then a group of dots to represent the remaining ship of that class. Followed by 3 ships and dots of the next type of ship, etc..
This would greatly reduce the number of lines needed to display all ships, therefore reducing jumping, with the additional benefit of showing more planets on one screen! Less row changes means less jumping.
If you could get the ai to build starbases in neutral wells,stars that would be great. And ai superweapons would be a change.
I have another seperate issue I'd like to address: In the map mode, if you double click on a planet to select and/or center it, it jumps away from the mouse cursor. Meaning you have to refind the planet to actually give it instructions. (LOL, another jumping issue).
It would be much more intuitive if you could 'lock' the cursor to doubleclicked map selections.
I hope this makes sense.
As an aside, I also have been experiencing significantly more lag in the 1.2 lobby online. And games also seem slower, or laggy.
Another good opportunity to differentiate easy/normal ai's from Hard or above.
Scale ships down or make wells much bigger. increase weapon range all around.
Ships sitting still firing at each other is SO 2008.
This makes absolutely 0 sense. How would shrinking ships or increasing ship ranges change ships sitting still?
They are two separate pet pevs of mine. 1 ,2.
Other than strikecraft, it makes sense that large ships with high mass aren't zipping about. Sins might be small at the gravity well scale for the sake of gameplay, but it takes time to overcome inertia for ships that size. Also, it would screw the Advent a bit since they have to aim their lasers while the TEC and Vasari could spam missiles with their own tracking. You just have to kind of roll with the gameplay.
Well, tbh I think it would be too much work at this point to change this and have it actually look and feel good. They've added the moddable option in every ship entity to make them use fighter physics. Anyone can turn it on in 5 minutes for every ship and see how good it looks when you have 2 maxed out fleets (it won't be pretty).
In fact, there's even a mod that already does so.
As an aside, the mod does look pretty, but that's mostly due to an overhaul of the effects to be awesome.
By 'pretty' I meant watching ships bounce into each other while trying to fly around and fight, not really weapon effects It's one of those high-effort, low-payout things. They'd need to do a lot of work to make it work and play right, and in the end it's just an aesthetic change.
But hey, if these new corvettes are sufficiently small, I could maybe see doing it on them so you'd just have one ship class zipping around and it wouldn't be a big mess with maxed out fleets.
Yeah, that's true. Personally, I really hope corvettes do get fighter movement. It'd be wicked awesome.
I haven't seen anyone mention this. Could we get a fix to end "combat auto-jumping" by units that have been ordered to attack an enemy ship that then phase jumps to another gravity well? It's so annoying to watch your ships auto-jump after an enemy frigate only to jump on top of an enemy starbase and get destroyed when that's not what you wanted them to do and when you never issued a jump order.
These are some of my suggestions and concerns about specific autocast behavior that could be altered for Rebellion. A fractured wall of text shall follow, with a bit of formatting:
**TEC Capitals**~Kol~Flak Burst: I believe this was already implemented, but have it set to fire when 'n' strikecraft are in range. '6' seems to be a good number, since that represents two Vasari bomber squads. ~Akkan~Ion Bolt: Set to trigger when a target is using a sustained ability.~Marza~Missile Barrage: Use when many targets are in range. Maybe 30 ships? ~Dunov~EMP Burst: Set to use when target antimatter exceeds 30, to account for the must face target variable. Set to target capital ships or carriers.
**TEC Frigates**~Arcova~Timed Charges: Should no longer target 'Invulnerable' neutral extractors owned by an enemy. Perhaps have this selectively target trade ports or refineries? Maybe culture structures too?
~Hoshiko~'Repair': Since this heals 200 damage, but over 10 seconds, it should cast a bit sooner than the 200 mark to account for combat damage. Say, use when hull damage exceeds 160?
~Garda~'Explore': Add the explore option to flak in general, since scouts are miserably puny at gathering intel when games ramp up.
**Advent Capitals**~Radiance~Detonate Antimatter: Similar to the Dunov's ability, set to use when target antimatter exceeds a specific amount. 30 could work here too, for capital ships and carriers.Cleansing Brilliance: Might be too much to ask for intelligent linear targetting, so instead set to use when target hull points exceed 1,000. This keeps the ultimate from getting wasted on tiny frigates.
~Mothership~Resurrection: I'm not sure if this was fixed, but the ship used to spam the ability to no effect on itself. You'd likely have to write new modifiers to track destroyed capital ship types/levels to let the ability automate. Perhaps it would be best left without an auto-cast effect.
~Rapture~Vertigo: Use when many targets are in range of current attack target. Perhaps when 8/16/24 ships are in a specific range like 3,000.
~Revelation~Guidance: Haven't doublechecked casting behavior, but should be used when friendlies within the AoE range are in combat. Maybe reserve the trigger with the need for a friendly ship to have used an ability as well as the in combat trigger, i.e. when both are true?
**Advent Frigates**~Defense Vessel~'Explore': Same as Garda, allows exploration.
*Advent Structure**~Antimatter Recharger'Recharge': Not sure if this was ever fixed, but this ability would be constantly spammed and wasted like the Mothership's Resurrection ability. Maybe it was targetting itself in error? Anyway, this structure should trigger when targets in the area have lost antimatter exceeding the heal amount.
**Vasari Capitals**~Devastator~Volatile Nanites: Use when many targets are in range of current attack target. 24 seems good since this is a level 6 ability.
**Vasari Frigates**~Overseer~'Repair': Use when target damage exceeds 200, set to target capitals and starbases. Prevents ability getting wasted on smaller targets due to the must face target variable.
~Sentinel~
'Explore': Yup, same as the Garda and Defense Vessel, allows exploration.
Perhaps others have further suggestions, or alterations?
Im second guessing myself right now.... but I dont think theres post game stats for most of the new things in the 2 expansions. like starbases and envoys and diplomacy points. Also, it'd be nice to track these stats over several games.
For Ion Bolt it should also activate if the target is trying to phase jump. Honestly I get much more mileage out of this ability to finish off cap ships than as an interrupt.
While I agree about Missile Barrage, for an ability that powerful it really shouldn't be autocasted at all.
Also I don't think its really worth it to make flaks have explore. That's an easy enough mod to make if you want it, and really not worth the time for the Devs to add (and if they were going to do that they may as well make it a behavior like attack radius that could be set for all units).
I could go for the phase jump thing if it was only triggered on enemy capital ships in range trying to jump away, maybe carriers too. But I certainly wouldn't want to see it stopping a Cobalt or something like that. The cost in antimatter is too expensive to use on cheap ships.
The level 6 abilities are not set to auto-cast at all unless you tell them to. But the option should still be there for those that want it.
And why wouldn't it be worth the developers doing a copy-paste job for the flak to have the explore option? The AI can already invoke this option for all of their ships. The only change would be adding the button on the interface for flak so that they could auto-explore like scouts. Regular scouts are a joke when it comes to scouting later in the game ebcause strikecraft tear them to shreds in seconds. It isn't like this isn't in the scope of simple side things to look at in spare moments while developing Rebellion.
There is. Just right-click on the button.
I am aware of that. That wasn't the point I was making. Goafan77 suggested that level 6 abilities shouldn't be auto-casted at all. I was responding to his statement, specifically the part about 'shouldn't'. That is all.
Please fix circling ships bug.The ships behave oddly when given a move order.They make curves in space,pointless and very dangerous when starbases,massive fleets are near.
The setting reminds me like the game setting is in water.
So, if your target is phase jumping you've probably won the battle and will either have a few moments to recover the antimatter, or you'll pursue the enemy fleet and have that antimatter wasted by the jump. So you'll still lose the antimatter, you just get another destroyed cobalt for free (and even if you feel otherwise, its not that hard to keep your caps focused on more expensive targets).
I didn't say that. I leave finest hour on autocast all the time. I was just saying that of all the abilities they could improve autocast for Missile Barrage should probably be at the bottom of the list because virtually everyone manually uses this particular ability.
Already confirmed they aren't going to do this. At best they'll make the pathfinding a bit better so that they don't collide with stationary objects as much.
Some sort of 'slide by object' routine called during a collision would be nice, instead of the 'drop dead in the space water' mechanic in place now.
And yeah, they aren't changing wide curve maneuvers. I'm guessing the devs see it as the effect of gravity and all that. IIRC, ships are supposed to move a bit slower when going away from a planet. Or at least that was their stated intention at one point.
Please change newly constructed guardian preset commands.
Guardians should not auto-cast their damage absorb ability and waste all their antimatter. Guardians should not be set to auto attack, as their main purpose is defensive. I have not won a battle yet due to their incredible attack capabilities (although i've been thinking about trying a guardian spam fleet with progens...i want to see how strong that will be)
Repulse should work when it put on autocast, a recast the moment it has expired is needed to avoid needless micromanagement.
I find myself constantly having to change these preset commands. guardians protect, they don't need to go blasting things with their weak lasers, and wasting their antimatter pools for no reason.
Overall, I see the developers increasing the usefulness of unit abilities and thereby increasing the depth of the fleet combat. Please keep expanding the strategic and tactical options that players have at their disposal.
If so, please add a hook so that a mod can change this.
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