A few suggestions.

(Note, it sort of seems like 4 is EV's ritual number. Whish it was something higher, like 5)
These suggestions mostly entail changing the nature of EV's resource fork. Not just adding more flags or a couple feilds at the very end, but changing some of the existing feilds. If this new engine turns out to be just the addition of 16 bit sprites and transperency, I'll be very dissapointed.

I hope the fact that EV3 seems to be Nova won't discourage these sort of improvs. I realise that if the Nova people have already done a great deal of work, it might be annoying to go back and fill in the 5th ship type feild in every dude resource etc)

First, more than 4 ship types in a dude (Not a whole lot more, 5-6?)

More than 4 dude types in a syst.

More than 4 spobs in a syst.

More than 4 weaps to a ship.

More Ally and Enemy feilds for govts

(Most of the above I think only need say 5 or 6 feilds where there are now four)
More Nebuli

Maybe a couple more base commodities? (Maybe not)

Different sets of asteriods and the ability to decide which kind appears in a system? (Looking at the same 'crushed up metalish' asteriods in every system gets tiresome)

For gods sake make it so AI ships will be more willing to use exotic weaponry without lots of resource tweaking. Make em so that they can use space bombs or tractor beams or stuff like the miranu defense pods which I've never seen used. Ex: Make it so they'll use a suicide weapon (-999) without having to make it a turret and make the ship such and such speed etc...

Improve the AI, so they don't just go back and forth at each other all the time.

Give the AI some brains. Why the hell is a stupid Krait attacking my UE destroyer? Why the devil is a UE fighter attacking a voinan cruiser? They should run like hell to hyperspace! If nothing else just let developers give each ship a relative 'toughness value' in a resource feild. Lower toughness values flee from higher ones, although they should take into account sheild level of both ships, and if they have freinds around etc.

I'm sort of curious about this EV3 == Nova deal. I hope that these Nova people don't don't become overambitious, like EVO did in some ways I feel. So many governments, so many wars, it all seemed rather unfocused somehow.

:::::rantish:::::
Refine docking bays. Now, maybe this has been fixed... but when I was messing around with normal EV, I found something... Say you had your 'star destroyer' and your 'super star destroyer' You want your 'star destroyer' to hold 3 TIE fighters, and your 'super star destroyer' to hold 6. (Yes, I know a REAL star destroyer has a full wing of TIEs) Along with this, you don't want the star destroyer to be able to hold up to 6 TIEs, it must only be able to hold 3. However, since the maximum of an outfit (in this case the TIE) is determined by the outfit itself and not the docking bay... things get messed up.

If you set the max # of TIES a player has to 6, then the star destroyer player can still buy 3 more and have 6. If you set the max to 3 and include 6 with the Super destroyer, as soon as his TIES get destroyed or whatever, he can only buy back 3.

There's no way to make a 'tie bay' and a 'big tie bay' and have one allow the player to hold 3 ties, and one allow the player to hold 6 ties, unless you make 2 outfit types (Both TIE fighters bought in outfits), identical but with different IDs, one going to each kind of docking bay. But that sucks and wastes resource slots and confuses the player.

Well, at least that's how it was in EV original (I think?). Is it still this way?

Er, did anyone follow that last bit? Guess it's pretty obscure. But it basically calls for a little more love for the weapon guidance type 99 (Carried ship)
::::/rantish:::::

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I followed it. You can't forget boarding disabled ships; a ship can hold up to nearly unlimited (I dunno what EV's programming limits are) fighters by boarding disabled fighters of the type that you have a bay for.

All those are very good and desperately wanted (at least by me) things. listen up Ambrosia!

er...with all due respect, o programming people who control what we get or not...

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Would it be posible to add an extra field to the outfit resource that tells EV how much ammo per launcher to allow? (e.g. 3 = 3 fighters per bay) this would also allow for other things - for instance, the missles in EV were on a rack of 3, if i only have 3 places to put missles, where am i putting the other 996??

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• Mordon
  "A government worker is like a shotgun with a broken firing pin -- It won't work and you can't fire it"
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I agree totally about the AI. The other suggestions are cool, too, but I really want to see some AI which manages to be more intelligent than artificial.

I can't tell you how many times I've wondered why it is that those dumbass Kraits that I kill by the dozen keep trying. AI needs a better sense of self-preservation.

Perhaps some things to work into that are:

AI could (as mentioned above) recognize the "toughness" value of a ship and flee if it exceeded a certain point relative to theirs, possibly also the combined toughness value of other ships in the system.

AI ships could flee if a certain ammount of damage were done to them without any return (would you stick around at 30% sheilds if your opponent hadn't even taken a hit?).

Also, combat rating would be cool to work into it. When you reach Deadly and or Ultimate, then your reputation starts being legendary. Ships seeing you would probably piss their pants if you started firing on them. Rather than sticking around for their almost certain fate, they would flee.

All of the above modifications would be best if they were random, meaning that even an Ultimate pilot flying around in a maxed-out UE Cruiser which has six Igazras for escorts would now and then see some upstart Krait trying his luck. But most of the time they would just run away.

Also, it would be necessary to make it so that you could turn off these modifications. The most obvious example is when demanding tribute, the ships coming at you shouldn't have any sense of self-preservation. Although, it would be funny to watch ship after ship come out of a planet, only to run away and hyperspace out! hehehe....

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A woman came up to me and said, "I'd like to poison your mind. With wrong ideas that appeal to you, though I am not unkind."