Astro Galaxy - a realistic space exploration game

I would like to see 'Prizes' (the ships that are beaten by a boarding ship and taken captive (for 'Ransom' or whatever...)).

That's an awesome idea!  Or when you do a COM mission, you get a bonus for boarding the ship and taking it back.

I'd like to see an alternate option to hiring POWs etc. where if you defeat a powerful enemy then out of respect they will upgrade your ship module(s) for a fee and give you a chance to instantly upgrade a module a level or two for like a million solars or something. The more you have onboard the higher mk the upgrade will be. That would spice up the reward for COMs.

A mission with a new ship as the reward would be interesting too... and maybe with an optimization on it too...

Like news that pirates are working on an illegal optimization for their ships... and you have to steal the prototype  :)

Ships are incredibly evasive because of the jump engines, but with the right circumstances, like when it's docked for engine maintenance, it might be possible to capture one...

This is where the yet to be developed tractor beam module comes in. Has a certain chance of holding the opponent's ship, preventing their attack/jump. Only one can fire once during battle, having a certain chance of paralyzing the current opponent. Especially for pirate ships this would destroy them and give extra loot if they couldn't jump or capture them if they surrender rather than jumping.

Joolz that would be a bad idea for the tractor beam.  I would rather you be able to use one tractor beam per ship in the area when you are attacking. It keeps the ship you have it locked on from jumping.  Here is the clincher though.  If they have high enough combat speeds, meaning higher mk combat drives, they can break free of the tractor beams.  This would give a real good use for combat drives. It would encourage us to up the techs of those more.  It also will make it better for actual PVP since it will make it harder for someone to just run away if someone tries to attack them.  With the insane timers we tend to get, it is too easy to pack up and run.  Also the ship caught in the tractor beam should not be able to be recalled back into someone's hanger.  After all it is caught in a tractor beam. So that shouldn't really be possible.

Yes the combat drives should play a role in the chance of being 'paralyzed'. Whether or not we can fire more than one at once depends on how much we want them to play a role and the overall chance though etc..

The idea of them being paralyzed is just dumb. A tractor beam could be used to prevent them from moving away. But not from moving towards you. As for firing rate, the weapons should really be able to fire more then once a battle anyways. Should be once per ship/station/planet they engage with. That is how it used to be a long time ago before SirEmi went and messed things up by limiting it to once per battle.  The combat drives though should play more roles though. But one good role for it to fill is with tractor beams.  To help keep people tractored in bettered they would be forced to build higher MK tractor beams. Of course they could use multiple tractor beams on that ship. But to me that would be a waste of space on the ship. lol

No, a tractor beam can hold a ship stationary like a claw ona stick lol. And no I think it should be hard enough to do that we don't have battles with tractor beams flying all over the place, and hard enough to defend against that we can't do so with just a high mk combat drive.

So I think it should be capped at a certain tech level like the optimizations where you can have maybe a 70% chance max of locking on and the same for resistance to it. When I say one can fire once during battle I mean on your ship, so if you have four ships versus two you could fire one four times, and if one was a at 70% and their best resistance was 50% you would 'pin one down'. But if your other three were below 40 and all theirs are 50 that would be the only one that would work on them.

They aren't flying all over the place with my idea. They just would be with your idea.  With mine there is no need to even cap the level.  That would mean we would need to cap the level on combat drives too.  I think after a certain MK many of us wouldn't bother to go much higher anyways.  My idea though helps us to deal with this very annoying attack timer where it is just too easy to get away.   It's like with this war with Dadds.  Twice he went after corp ships used by my guys. Both times I brought in enough corp ships to crank up the timer allowing my guys to finish their COMs and then jump away.  Then I did the same with the rest of the ships.  With the idea I am talking about here, doing that wouldn't be so easy.  SirEmi though apparently wants to act like timers aren't even an issue.  He knows nothing about the timers of our large ships.  When he test stuff he is using those little piss ant ships of hit that I knock around every chance I get.  The timers on ships those small are nothing compared to the timers on powerful ships like some of ours. At the very least this gives a use for combat drives and maybe a little less frustration with these d**n timers.

Your idea would have to be deployed before battle and therefore is a bit ridiculous because then what else will we decide to apply before battle lol. That redefines the battle and defeats part of the purpose of those timers. If you don't like large timers then build a big fleet of smaller ships or get SirEmi to factor combat speed into the timer.

Mine is like a real tractor beam, keeping them from maneuvering during battle so you can capture/destroy ships instead of jumping them.

And yes if you didn't cap the levels with it my way then high level players would always have tractor beams that keep any lesser player's ship from jumping and combat drives that completely cancel out the tractor beam of lesser players and if the same ship could fire it more than one time then an entire fleet would be frozen.

The only way I can think of to balance that out is to cap it at firing once per battle per ship and only having like a mk10 max tractor beam that has a 100% chance of frezing a ship (without an advanced combat drive), and having advanced combat drives that give up to like 70% resistance max otherwise they will build it up to 100% and it will be useless against bigger players.

If we tied it directly to the existing combat speed then it would be useless on bigger players also so it needs to not be based on that but the drive level.

I like that Joolz...

Joolz your a good player but you have no idea the timers we have to deal with when it comes to larger combat ships. A large player vs a large player means either we have to use a large amount of QP or wait out a timer that can be up to about a week long. Most cases someone isn't going to sit around that long. Yes my idea would mean we could use it on smaller players. But chances are we will mostly be using it against each other.  Perhaps there can be a timer on how long a tractor beam can hold someone there before they can jump. After it runs out you have to reengage it. Once the actual fight starts of course the tractor beam should be shut off.  I can't see it having realistic practical applications in battle. Especially with how battles seem to be done here.  From how battles are done it appears to me like the two ships come up on each other, fire everything they got, then move close for the boarding.  Kinda like how warships in real life tend to fight and how battles with the larger ships in Star Wars are.  Now what could be added in for battles is perhaps some new kinds of weapons. Perhaps ion cannons that help to knock out shields quicker but do very little damage to the actual ships. Nukes could possibly be reworked or some other kind missile type weapons we could build.

You can't see keeping a ship from attacking or jumping from battle, as having any practical applications in battle? Even though it would allow you to capture ships, and potentially destroy them?

 :pokey:
 

I doubt we will ever be able to capture enemy ships or destroy them. So we need to think of better ways to improve the battle system and to make the battle timers more tolerable.

I am agree with battle time need to keep in check. any battle time over 36 hrs is killing the game.  :wounded1:  not everyone will wait that long for the out come.

Wait... Noob question; combat speed doesn't affect the timers for combat???
I have wasted SO MANY modules...

All combat speed helps with is in determining which ship fires first.

 :wounded1: oh dear... I should have known

It's alright.  It still isn't a bad idea to get the combat speed up some. Who knows maybe in the future it will have a better use.

I've got an idea that doesn't fix the problem, but gives a bit of use to ship combat

Imagine that for a ship to use it's FTL drive, it must requisition all of the ship's power.  Maybe we can make it so that if a ship jumps while another ship is preparing to attack, the escaping ship has to take a volley of weapons fire from the attacking ship, and has to take it with no shields to stop it.  It could perhaps be a set percentage of the attacker's weapons.  Or perhaps each weapon has a percentage chance of hitting the ship as it jumps and it's shields are down.  Perhaps long range weapons are more likely to hit or something like that.

This wouldn't fix the timers issue, but would give some bonus to making someone jump away, and would allow you to do meaningful damage to someone, even if they escape.

then come up with a suggestion of your own and stop dismissing those you don't like.

Sargas said "I would like to see 'Prizes' (the ships that are beaten by a boarding ship and taken captive (for 'Ransom' or whatever...))."

I agree with the idea of Sargas.

Somewhere elsethere is the idea of destroying ship. I absolutely object to this. The fact that people do not fear to being destroyed is what make this game different from all other space games. If We could destroy ships of other, then a big player could build an awasone ship and kill all the ship he met and completely dominate the game. In those condition there would not be place for newbies. And if you say it would be a long timer, if I was that big bad player I would pay in QP to have the battle complete immediately and adios to your ships.

I never ment to get off topic. But since he brought up tractor beams here I felt I should give my idea.  Joolz didn't have an issue with me giving my opinions on this matter.  We have been chatting on yahoo a lot as we have debated this on here. lol

Nice idea but it's too advantageous for the top players.

Tractor beams are really handy, but I think before we introduce new modules, existing ones should be improved first (i.e., combat drives and WHDs). Quality over quantity. :)

Raph
I agree entirely, I just figured this is something that people have raised for a long time, and perhaps another approach would be more up Sir Emi's alley if he's dead set on not changing the timers.

It seems ridiculous in terms of story that ships would take a week to line up and fire.  Perhaps with the new blind jump feature that is quick to plot and would allow captains to escape as long as they were active, it would make sense to reduce the max timer to something to the size of a day, or maybe 12 hrs.

Although then this massively changes the balance of COM to SOS missions; which is already arguably out of whack.

I don't envy Sir Emi his job, especially with all the new modules and gameplay factors that are being introduced.

johnnydrinkmeth: changing the timers will completely change the balance of the game. When you suggest to have a max timer of between 24 and 12 hrs you indirectly suggest to multiply my income from 7 to 14 times. lets make a simple calculation, suppose I have a mission of 7 days that is worth on completion 35 millions. If I can do it in 1 day I would make 35 million a day instead of 5 millions a day. Fantastic for me. Remember I am greedy. Imagine if the max was 12 hrs (half a day). Only to say that the timers are there for a reason.

I really don't mind timers as much for when it comes to missions. It is understandable there. Like you said it puts a limit on us on how many COMs we can do in a day.  But for PVP the timers are hell.

SirEmi just probably doesn't want this game to become like any other PvP game.LOL

I agree shortening it a bit though (just for PvP). 25% shorter is a start, and we'll see how much it affects the game.  :)

How about cutting the timer down a bit for orbital stations and planetary forces since those are stationary?

That is also a nice idea. :)

Maybe if someone wants to evacuate a planetary force, they have to beat the besieging force first.  That wouldn't reduce the timers, but would stop people evacuating without some effort.

I was mainly referring to pirate ships, but if we did make it where player ships could be destroyed or *captured* it would be okay as long as there are limiting factors that balance it out. Which again is why I would make tractor beams where your ship can only fire once per battle and it wouldn't be absolute even at max- you could have a certain chance to get free even when it was the highest tech level tractor beam and you have no combat drive bonus etc.

Regardless I still think combat drives should play a role in timer length.