A conversion plug project idea, up for grabs!

So I've been playing Acheron recently, and was pleasantly reminded how much fun EV battling can be, even without a storyline. After a while, though, I had worked my way up to a decent ship and had figured out the tactics needed to regularly win with it. Once that got dull, I popped in the "Renegade Enhance" plug, and got a new lease on playability -- new ship variants with new weapons, and therefore new tactics to figure out.

I thought to myself: Wouldn't it be cool if the new technologies were doled out over time, so there were a bunch of points where new challenges appeared, instead of just one? This is how Starfleet Adventures works: each dude contains ships from multiple eras. Crons set bits at certain dates, and each ship has matching AppearOn conditions so that it only appears in its era. Outfits and shipyard ships are similarly controlled. (Stock Nova uses the same techniques, but not as pervasively.)

And then I thought to myself: Wouldn't it be cool if the order in which new stuff showed up was different each time I played?

And then I thought to myself: Yes. With some clever use of the R operator, this is doable and would be an efficient way to give a TC re-playability without writing lengthy and branching storylines. This could be added to Acheron, but it also could be created from scratch, built from any other completed or not-quite-completed TC, or done using items from the EVN stock scenario. It could work well with inventive weapons and modular engine, shield, etc. technologies (think Colosseum).

(Maybe someone else has suggested this before; if so, I don't remember it. It might overlap somewhat with Charred Snowman's thinking, though without his emphasis on having the player lead major fleet campaigns.)

Basically, you would be simulating R & D, but not dictating the order in which technologies were developed. The appearance of a particular weapon or other outfitter-accessible technology (A1) would be tied only to the appearance of A.I. (A2) or shipyard ship (A3) variants that used it, perhaps with lags (and varying order) between the appearance of A1, A2, and A3. Technology A might appear before or after technology B, but a ship variant that used both technologies wouldn't appear until both had been developed. You wouldn't want changes to come at such a fast clip that the ground would always change radically before the player was able to figure out a winning strategy for a bit, but you'd get regular doses of unpredictability. The long-range railgun that let you dominate for a while the first time you played might show up too late to matter the second time, and the massive barrages of missiles that led you to invest in PD cannons early in your second run-through might be a lesser threat than fast corvettes with anti-armor beam weapons the third time. Sometimes the slow-firing Heavy BlastoCannon would be available before the rapid-fire Light BlastoCannon, and sometimes the reverse. The Belligerati League might field ships with Rhinoplate bioarmor before or after they develop Bipolar Mindshields. And so on.

To spice things up, you could add spaceports and hyperspace routes that appear and disappear based on R operators, bar news items that announce the appearance of new tech in far-away places (finally, a real reason to check the news!), technologies only available for sale after you captured ships that had them, local tourneys and other events that occur annually in certain months, "ship maintenance" ranks that give the player negative income so he's always hungry for money, a backstory about something like the Age of Revelations, when the encryption systems of fragmentary ancient archives found throughout known space were cracked and teams of philologist-engineers everywhere raced to produce wildly divergent inventions based on their discoveries.... But all of that would be gravy, and too much might negate the benefit of the random-order-tech system as a relatively quick way to produce an enjoyable and new EV experience without writing lengthy strings of storyline missions.

I offer this up to all of you; there's no reason why any one person should monopolize an idea of this sort. I don't think I'll be using this myself, anyway: SFA needs lots of things to be deterministic to match the Star Trek timeline, and my other project.... Well, let's just say that it's going a different way.

I like the idea... I remember reading somewhere recently about being the director and being allowed to choose the direction that funding for R&D went... I can't find that post now. Perhaps and higher ranks the player could choose, and at lower ranks participate in a "vote" that may or may not also activate R()'s which may or may not correspond with what is actually Researched and Developed.

Systems that you need tech to reach. A place has been shut away from the galaxy for thousands of years by some sort of space ion storm, and the tech has completely deviated from the rest of the galaxy. It's inaccessible, but with the development of a new hyperdrive, you can reach it.

@0101181920, on Jun 17 2008, 09:14 PM, said in EV Unlimited:

Systems that you need tech to reach. A place has been shut away from the galaxy for thousands of years by some sort of space ion storm, and the tech has completely deviated from the rest of the galaxy. It's inaccessible, but with the development of a new hyperdrive, you can reach it.

So to access these places, you'd need to set a bit when you purchase the hyperdrive, or receive it in some way, so that the systems are accessible to you. Interesting thought there.

Player-controlled R & D would be a cool trick, and systems that have been cut off and then turn out to have different tech traditions when they become reachable again are always good. Feel free to run with those ideas.

...But maybe I wasn't clear about my own brainstorm. I wasn't suggesting that the player would have any say in R & D, I was just suggesting that you (the plug-maker) could set things up so that the order in which non-player governments/races/companies/whathaveyou developed new technologies was random, so that you had a game that never, or seldom, played the same way twice.

For such a scenario, you might not want to completely cut off systems from each other for too long at a time, since that would lessen the player's exposure to the progression of tech changes going on in those systems. What might be good, though, is having certain (randomly-appearing) tech advance events or equipment purchases enable new hyperspace links between systems, so that the travel routes open to the player shift mid-game.

Yeah, I got it. I was thinking that at some random point this guy comes up with the tech, and releases it to the market, or wants you to test it. And for your comment on the length of the system being cut off, I'm talking tens of thousands of years, starting tens of thousands minus one of years before the scenario starts, so you don't really have to wait that long.

I always thought it would be neat if you could build the navy of an underdeveloped or pirate organization by capturing enemy ships and selling them. New captured variants would start to appear in space and shipyards...

@geek, on Jun 18 2008, 04:40 AM, said in EV Unlimited:

I always thought it would be neat if you could build the navy of an underdeveloped or pirate organization by capturing enemy ships and selling them. New captured variants would start to appear in space and shipyards...

thats a good idea.

also, in Apophis, the ACIA is continually reverse engineering alien technology, and once you get to a certain level within the gov't, you can go to their main base, where every now and than, one of the invention's they found is available for purchase.

You could use the onCapture field to set a bit which would enable the buying it in shipyards. You would have to give it a regular availability percent, and put bxxx in the onAvailability field, where bxxx is set when you capture the ship.

I'm using technology R & D to explain the appearance of many of the outfits in CTC:C, but nothing as complex as what you're suggesting, Dr. Trowel. I've set the pilot starting date five years into the future as opposed to the CTC:F starting date to add to the feeling that you're in the future, but I'm not using any crons for the fighter section.

Interesting idea, though.

I'm doing this with ships in Spacelane. Doing it with outfits never occured to me. This is a fabulous idea, Dr. Trowel.

I've been toying around with this same sort of idea for a while, mainly just in my head though because I have no real time to actually work on a plug. (Aside: trying to plan out ideas for a plug while re-watching the DVDs for Battlestar Galactica is not conducive to a lot of work being done). My idea is allowing the player to basically build up a new government when they start dominating planets - and using the same kind of random/not so random R&D approach for what technologies your new regime creates, and for how the AI governments respond to you usurping their colonies for your own goals.

LNSU said:

You could use the onCapture field to set a bit which would enable the buying it in shipyards. You would have to give it a regular availability percent, and put bxxx in the onAvailability field, where bxxx is set when you capture the ship.

This idea work well for this as well, but mainly for the type of ships you see patrolling your systems. You capture an Earth whatever, and soon you start being able to use it in your defense fleets and patrols.

Makes me think even more about this...

This is certainly a good idea...

Also, I'm glad you liked the Renegade Enhance. I hope that I make a few more optional small plugs and either upload them alone or include them with a future release.