I need governments caring about actions far away

Hi,

One annoying problem I'm having with my TC (Homeworld) is that since planets are separated by long corridors, actions taken in one barely affect the player's legal rating in "systems" in other planets. For exemple, a good way to improve the way the WA perceives you would seem to be to head to Mars and fight the Republic there - except that it's ten jumps or so to the WA Navy's HQ, which is where you need a good rating for missions. Anyone knows of a workaround?

Make systems closer together, add more hyperjump routes.

Here's a more radical approach:

lets say you have govt A and govt B. They hate each other. There in a war. In each system where the player would be fighting ships of one of the govts to improve his/her rating, put two invisible spobs in, and place them on opposite corners of the system. One spob will belong to govt A, and the other to govt B. Both must be uninhabited and be set so the player cannot land ("The planet's environment is too hostile").

@lnsu, on Oct 9 2006, 09:47 PM, said in Long-distance law effect?:

Make systems closer together, add more hyperjump routes.

Could do that of course, but don't want to for plenty of other scenario reasons.

@lnsu, on Oct 9 2006, 09:47 PM, said in Long-distance law effect?:

lets say you have govt A and govt B. They hate each other. There in a war. In each system where the player would be fighting ships of one of the govts to improve his/her rating, put two invisible spobs in, and place them on opposite corners of the system. One spob will belong to govt A, and the other to govt B. Both must be uninhabited and be set so the player cannot land ("The planet's environment is too hostile").

But will that help? Won't it just boost the player's rating for the govs in question in that particular system?

As long as the first spob in the system is of the govt the system should be, then that is how the system will treat the player. It should work pretty well. Try it out.

If that doesn't work, you just might have to add hypergate routes. You can make one-way routes to a hidden uninhabited system. The routes would lead out of the system only. That way the status would work, but the player would still have to jump around the long way.

Here's a long shot: check out this topic, which deals with one-way hyperspace links. It may be possible to put a link between a pair of unreachable duplicate systems that have the same coordinates as the two systems that you want to affect each others' friendliness. The engine might interpret this as meaning that your two visible (and unlinked) systems are neighbors.

Or not. :mellow:

Edit: What LiAnNaSu just posted is similar in theory, but much more likely to work in practice.

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 09 October 2006 - 03:31 PM

@dr--trowel, on Oct 9 2006, 01:29 PM, said in Long-distance law effect?:

Edit: What LiAnNaSu just posted is similar in theory, but much more likely to work in practice.

(edit) I'd misread the thread- what I'm posting here is just a longer-winded explanation of LiAnNaSu's idea.

What the problem is is that the change in your legal status in a system decreases by some amount with every system farther from the point where the change occurred. There are two ways around this that I can see:

First, increase the amount of the change. This would allow legal status changes to be felt at great distances, but it would also cause some problems in that the legal status change at Mars would be 10+ times greater than that at Earth, and vice-versa.

Second, you could decrease the distance between systems. I don't think you would need to decrease the length of the corridors to do this- what I would try is creating a "hub" system for each cluster of systems around a planet, that connects to every system in that cluster, and connect those hub systems to each other. Make sure that the hub systems are invisible. Poof- every system is now three jumps away from every other system, give or take how the game calculates distances. I can't guarantee that this will work, but it shouldn't take more than an hour or so to test.

Edwards

This post has been edited by Edwards : 09 October 2006 - 04:01 PM

LiAnNaSu & Edwards, that invisible "hub" system sounds like a good idea. Assuming it works as expected, it would give me a behaviour close to what I want. Thanks!

I'm thinking you could have a similar effect with missions...but the limited amount of active missions would limit your ability to do this effectively.

My thought was use a mission that's invisble to the player, uses the dudes for government ships that appear in government systems, and then make the mission to destroy certain ships. On Ship Done would have a negative legal reward, and you could use bits and crons to make sure that it starts again (but never more than once). Then if you killed X ships, the mission would decrease your legal rating across the entire government, plus the system penalty (I think).

You could use it for specific government ships, like official couriers, or something.

Or not.

The "linking system" trick doesn't seem to work I guess it would have to be visible for it to do, and of course I can't have that. This is going to be a real pain.

GutlessWonder, that would work but would be very inflexible. Not very keen on it...

I guess I can always add some of those ever-convenient pirates around the Moon to give the player a way to make himself well-seen...