Ideas For Next Expansion

I think that phase lanes are hardcoded, sorry.

As for the culture thing, once again hardcoded, and without it, the advent might be weakened.

As to your first suggestion, The Vasari already have the phase gate technology. This allows them transportation without phase lanes. I'd imaging that such advances are beyond the means of the TEC and Advent. And destroying them? Aside from in game justifications against such a thing, of which I could imagine many, from a balance perspective, it doesn't add up. What's to stop you from doing utterly broken things, removing all but one, or even all lanes from a planet?

With regards to your second... Messing with phased fleets already exists in a myriad of forms, from the Starbases to the delay functions of several support cruisers. I could see something along the lines of your suggestion being implemented at one point. Possibly not though... Not being able to field a full strength fleet on the attack, It's a little off.

And no worries on the third point. With the way star phase lines work, about the lowest the max alliegence can get is 30-35%. Somewhat annoying, but the price you pay for a solar empire.

There is nothing stopping another empire from re-creating a phase lane to a planet whos empire destroyed them all. But I see your point in that perhaps a planet wouldn't be explored yet (however, if the tech was late game like the super weapons I don't see how you wouldn't have explored the galaxy yet, unless it was a HUGE map).

It might be important to keep in mind that the next expansion is regarding "diplomacy".  So you might want to base your ideas around that.

I've played Space Empires V. The thing I really like is how un-ending the tech tree is. you can just keep on researching something forever almost. I built a ring world and a sphere world and colonized them. Its fun in a Sim City way. I found the AI to not be clever enough to be any fun though. Its good at the start of a game, but once you've got all of these massive toys to create and destroy entire stars and planets, or create black holes. The AI can't keep up.

The cool thing is how populations could be loaded up a colony ship and transfered to a new planet, you had to make sure it had the right surface conditions and had a breathable atmosphere. And a lot later in the game you could gain the tools to terraform to make the more hostile environments into livable habitats.  You can put a colony on a planet thats inhabitableand it would be a domed city type of colony. The industrial output of those colonies were a lot lower than a breathable world, because they couldn't expand and eventually expand and move across the whole planet with cities

I think there was a potential game breaker. You could just fly a ship with a star imploder device into the enemys empire and wipe our their entire star system. But the game had shields that neutralized stellar manipulation devices. But I guess it depends on if you are a Good empire or an Evil empire if you went that route. I got more satisfaction with building up my empire than destroying the AI empires since they were so bad making a decent threat against me in late game.

The game is insanely complicated with tons of sub menus. Its hard to figure out how to move cargo from a planet to a ship, then fly the ship to another planet and offload it. It takes so many clicks.

Some of the more massive projects requires constructor cruisers, similar to sins starbases. but more than one!The massive projects like the Ring world, (think Halo) requires a bunch of constructors all in the same sector which were all individually extremely expensive and long to build

You have some planets that mine resources to build ships, and some that are farms to grow food to feed everyone.  I think this one could work in Sins, If certain worlds like Ice and Volcanic were incapable of producing food on a wide scale to feed everyone, they had to rely on trade routes form a terran world to bring them food. Something to think about.

Ahh, I had thought the 3rd was the Diplomacy expansion? Ah well.

I think destroying phase lanes, or even creating them (assuming either is possible) is a very silly idea. The gameplay is essentially based around those lanes, fiddling with them can only lead to serious complications.

Besides which the second expansion is going to be focused on none combat stuff and your phase lane stuff sounds like a combat idea

Love that game so much.I liked designing planet and ship missiles that you launched from different systems.It is extremely complicating and thats what i love about it.You are right tho the ai sucks.The other prob is like you said you can research forever(100levels with like 100 research catagories) but you get so far ahead or behind you cant compete.Really hard to balance somethin like that.

this is kind of a dangerous idea. phase jump inhibitors (and the jump disruption ability of Starbases) are about as close to shutting down a phase lane as you can get without falling off the edge into the abyss of truly broken game situations. i might however be amenable to a phase-jump inhibitor structure that worked in the other direction (made it harder to jump into a system as opposed to harder to jump out of a system). in fact the Serevun Overseen can already do that, so it would be kinda interesting to see the same ability (Jump Degradation) offered on a permanent structure. 

Slowing down a incoming phase jump really doesn't add any tactical usefulness. While delaying retreating ships b uys you that extra time can be used to to dish out more damage on them.

I think Phase stabilizers could have a function where once 2 of them connect together, it becomes a permanent new phase line.

If you have 2 phase stabilizers at each end of a phase lane, you also get the option to permanently destabilize it(unless you creatre it) But all ships would be able to travel 'wild space' between gravity wells. The problem is that this causes 100% loss of anti matter and they take like 50 hull damage /sec while warping to another gravity well outside a phase lane. Long distance jumps will be fatal to all but the high HP capital ships. There could be special ships designed to cross wild phase to create new phase lanes. It is a mobile phase stabilizer. All 3 factions would need access to these abilities, but Vasari could be better at it or get some perks.

Just an idea

Hmm, at last an idea in this thread that somewhat appeals. The idea of ordinary ships being able to travel through "wild space", albeit with massive penalties, bears some looking at, I think. Perhaps a late game thing with somewhat stringent conditions.

Especially though, the idea of a late game ship specially designed to go through "wild space", this seems to suit the vasari perfectly. I'm not sure what the other factions would get to balance out, but it seems logical that the vasari would develop such a cruiser. Seems to fit their aesthetic.

Nix on the permanent creation of phase lines though. The rules of this universe are the the rules. They can be bent, but not broken.

bad idea, if you did this balancing would be a bloody nightmare, attacks would be virtually impossible, i mean just think about it, big fleet jumps to planet, big fleet is seriously damaged in transit, drfenses chew up debilitated ships easily

Considering the next expansion is supposdely non military (diplomacy based). I'd like to see a more complex economic system, with Antimatter Trading and antimatter construction stations that are fairly high tech, but allow your ships and stations to create antimatter at a higher rate.

Antimatter Ships would come in two versions. Light, merchant like ships that travel between various antimatter creation sites, and heavier, fleet ships, that would carry and provide antimatter for fleets they were a part of. Antimatter ships and stations would cause area damage when destroyed, but be heavilly armored. (poorly armed however).

Another new Resource: Food

Obviously Terran (and organic) planets would be the best at creating food, if you have an excess of food, then you can increase your population, if you have negative food ammounts, then your population shrinks. New structures related to this would be Farming Stations, and food would be tradable on the market.  Merchant ships could carry food to different planets, allowing less organic planets to grow their populations. Planets would be better at food creation if they didn't mine their asteroids and devoted orbital space to Farming Stations. There would also be new Farming technologies to research, each race would be better at mining certain planetary types. Excess food would be default be shipped to nearby planets equally, but could be devoted to a particular planet or planets in ammount per second (eg if you want to make a superpopulated planety filled with hive cities.)

Advanced cultural and Merchant stations. These would have larger merchant ships and tourist ships traveling between them and create more money/culture.

Economic expansions. The ability to create Merchant stations in gravity wells owned by people you have Trade Agreements with (this wouldn't affect their building capabilities)

Mining agreements/Expanded mining. A new capital ship, the mine commander (or somethign like that) would increase the mining rates of different asteroids depending on how you improved it's skills as it gained levels. It would be pretty well armored, not terribly good against other capitals, slow, have a bonus against pirates, and be able to create mining stations in un owned systems (like scouts) Mining agreements would trade resources automatically with other nations you aren't at war with (eg 1 Metal per second for 1 crystal per second).

Leaders

Leaders would be in charge of various things. Some would be good combat leaders, others put in charge of planets might be good economic leaders, they would gain levels and be able to add skills. Who doesn't want Captain Kirk?

(eg, a Combat Leader might gain a skill that allowed him to make ships under his command do more damage, a Government Leader might increase mining abilities in a system (but some might have negative skills, eg reduce morale, an Intelligence leader might have a special skill that can give you information on nearby planets (farther away as his skills inprove) etc

More super projects. Space Elevators (economic), Megadomes (Farming), Planetary Shields(defensive), Hive Cities(population). You could make multiple superprojects on the same planet, but the cost would double each time.

More space objects Moons (like asteroids, but you can build additional mining, military, and civilian projects onboard), Planetary Rings (mineable, can cause some random damage to spaceships, but make the system more valuable for mining), Comets (large mineable asteroids that you could put a few civilian or military projects on, comets would orbit between two gravity wells in the same solar system.

i support your idea for the food resource under one condition: Vasari must be able to eat their enemies. nothing says evil empire of galactic slavers than eating your captives. 

lol, not a good idea, your gonna run out of slaves, unless you clone them.

I like VeryBad's idea of adding a fourth ressource; antimatter. This would make trading a little bit more interesting and make the game a bit more complex. Adding Leaders is also a good idea, it could be similar to Master of Orion II. Each Leader granting bonuses to ships or planets.

I would also like to see more neutrals, like Giant Space Creatures instead of the local militia.

For Pirates, i'd like them to have a new ship, a hybrid (half carrier/half torpedo cruiser). After all, they are missing a carrier unit & a torpedo cruiser, so why not have both in one ship.

We Vasari don't eat ONLY captured inferior slave races, we also enjoy a nice burger, and the lady Vasari's like salads.

Our superior culture merely recognizes the value in not letting good flesh go to waste. If we're gonna suck a hundred million of the human animals up into our whaleships, grind them up and turn them into one gigantic meat blob, it would be wasteful to merely use that for swimming it, eating it is the best thing for the ecology.

Vasari, not just an evil invading race, we're an evil, GREEN, invading race.

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It might be interesting to see Pirates actually steal stuff, and bring it back to their fortess to use, have them capture ships and orbital structures that they use, the more they steal, the tougher they get.

There is already a "food" resoruce, it is fleet supply.  I don't see a need for anythign else, as food has always been used to limit population.  Only units that need limiting in Sins are ships, and fleet supply does this.

As far as more economic ships, I thought about some sort of giant Titanic type liner that traveled between home worlds, and needs to be protected on it's journey.  When it arrives you recieve money.

I like idea of moons that function liek the resoruce asteroids.

Food really isn't a resource currently, and you could use food to increase population on less than terran level planets- so you can hit a terran planet, and that would affect planets in the enemy's empire that were relying on that planet to feed them, for instance, by shipping X ammount of food to a barren planet, it would increase that planets population by an equivalent ammount. Increasing taxes and resistance to bombing.

It would also be interesting if a planets population affected the speed of manufacturing at a planet, but that's a different story.

Fleet resource is completely different, and has no similiar affect. It affects your fleet (obviously) and your economic efficiency.

My suggestion would help add some character to the planetary types. Currently, position is generally the most important aspect of why or why not a planet is attacked. Giving more variance between planets could add depth to the warplans. Right now they're pretty generic.

On the other hand, the danger of Antimatter factories being destroyed (and damaging everything in a system would make placement of these valuable, but dangerous resource generators in low population, hard to reach planets with few other facilities, the distance from an antimatter factory would affect it's assistance capability to fleet vessels/planetary facilities however, so you would need to make a decision based on risk- always fun.

Escorting vessels between homeworlds could be interesting as a mission type under the diplomacy system, I think they should be rare however. Rather than money, a large diplomacy bonus would happen if they were successfully escorted, Being able to pay pirates to attack it would be an option, but attacking it yourself would automatically lead to warfare.

Speaking of which, you should be able to pay pirates to attack different subcategories (eg merchant ships, blocade food generating planets, hit specific planets, specific enemy capital ships, etc) The pirates would ask for more money depending on how difficult a mission is.

Yeah I totally agree. For the diplomacy I think you should be able to plant spys on planets. They give you a view of the gravity well and they can disrupt production, syeal money, or maybe even start a rebellion where a bunch of ships just appear in the gravity well to liberate the planet.

The food Idea is really great and it just adds more depth to the game.

I also think (somewhat off topic) that there should be different planet types like moons which are in a planets gravity well but act as a planet on their own, I also think there should be black holes, nebulae, binary stars, solar storms, and comets. Just an idea for the comet, If there is a comet in a game you shoud be able to get a harvester unit which gathers antimatter from the comet and supplies it to nearby fleets and storage depos. Also the comets should always be moving but slowly.

And as mentioned above a new capital ship would be nice like the mining commander. It could possibly capture neutral extractors, and build antimatter factories anywhere.

Also another thought, for antimatter factories there could be something like solar generators which make antimatter. And they can be built in a stars gravity well for maximum output. This would make stars a more strategic place to hold. Both economically and strategically.

alright.... i know it's not about diplomacy, but i need interdictors. they can travel through "wild space" and create grav wells. also, because I play in giant maps(3-10 stars, 1000-1500 planets), i think stars should be connected by phase lanes like planets, not connected to all other stars.

also, wild space shouldn't be dangerous, just very big, maybe with a small decreace in speed, so if you don't use phase lanes, you can get there, but very slowly. great for surprize attacks, but if most of your fleet is traveling at sublight speeds, you're very succeptable to attacks. again, because i play on big maps, sometimes there are two planets right next to each other but not connected by phase lanes, so moving at sublight is actually quicker than going around through phase lanes

in terms of diplomacy, civilian ships would be an interesting addition. they would be yours but only somewhat contrallable sort of like trade ships. you could only tell them where to avoid or give suggestions and/or inscentive to attack or explore, like the heroes in Majesty. from a lore perspective, they would be independant shippers, smugglers, emigrates, tourists, ect...

I agree that food is redundant, that's what we have fleet supply. as above, there should be different planet type. i know there are mods for that, but i think sd and ic could balance and integrate them better. (no offense to uzii and the others, you guys are great)

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I like to see them rework the whole Pirates system.  They become useless after a while because of the new ugraded defences, mines and what not.  Since Pirates can't upgrade their tech, its just a matter of time before they become useless.

-If they could caqture planents for their own use and board and hijack players (Both AI & Human) ships that would be awesome!

-If they could steal technologies from other races like shields and what not.

-I think there is a cap on the max number pirates per bounty, if so then get rid of that! 

oh the possibilities!

Would be unfair to the vasari, who have this as an exclusive tech.  Would also make the races more and more similar, destroying what asymmetry is there.

I have read a lot of the suggestions and dont believe anyone has suggested this but I could be wrong.

When a planet gets taken over by culture the offending culture should get control of the structures in the gravity well.  Its more realistic than bombing them all out of existence......  also if there was a shipyard you could steal their shipbuilding tech.. reasearch stations.... and get some kind of residual income from the planet until the colony ship arrives to install the new gov't. Because the population chose to overthrow there would be little disruption.  You could include a lot of the Spy suggestions mentioned earlier into this somehow too...

Another suggestion i think was touched upon was boarding parties.  Capital ships should have ion cannons that can disable small ships and tractor beams to pull them close for boarding.  You should have the option to loot/disable or comandeer for the fleet.  This includes civilian ships just cruising around... think the rebel fleet and ships like the millenium falcon.  This could be how you get bonus Leaders as well.....

I like the idea of sub-races but they should be pre-spaceflight or pre-phaseflight, you could culture them into submission, embargo their planet with capital ships or invade.  Which is another topic that I find interesting. Instead of bombing planets, why not have to send down invasion forces.  The ships could fight the space battle while the forces fought on the planet.  You could have special upgrades for invasion forces and special defenses for invasion. (bunkers already and upgrade just have to add militia upgrades) each planet would have to have a militia defense force to repel invaders and/or police the population.

Interdictior ships would be nice so you could prevent small fleets from jumping away all the time. I think an Interdicter capital ship would be cool, it could shut down the phase lane it was parked beside for a set amount of time, or cause damage to ships jumping in to gravity wells.

I know ive seen comets, moons, nebulae, black holes, binary stars, what else could there be other than some variety in the ones we have. more than one look for the gas giant would be nice, and bonus things for some others like strange alien vessels traped in the wormhole to get bonuses from, or ancient battle designs from junk fields, hidden research facilities in nebulae and the like.

Also I like the idea mentioned of wild space, but my take was to leave the phase lanes the same in system for the most part but make it so you can jump from edge systems instead of the sun which is silly and move the HW closer to the sun instead of way out on the edge....lol...maybe use phase gates at certain points around the edge of the system and have the option to build/destroy them.  Or just have special booster gates you have to build to get to other systems would even work. You have to jump in with a special ship that builds a return gate or something. 

Just some thoughts.....that multiply as I type....

I'd like to see many more planet types. That's pretty much a must, I simply don't play vanilla SoaSE Entrenchementany longer because more planet types is more munner, the mods make it better.

It would be interesting if Pirates went after trade ships not planets, and if they ran away a lot when big fleets showed up. They've no reason to fight to the end, they should just jump to a different planet and steal more stuff, perhaps make them a tad faster.

Let you sell ships on the black market. You would get a lot of money (ie more than you spend on making the ship, but you wouldn't have control over who bought it, could even be Pirates... You could sell ANYTHING on the black market, even Capital ships, and so could other nations. You might even occasionaly be able to buy a ship from a different faction, you couldn't upgrade them however if htey're from a different type of tech.

Trade: A planets output should be based on it's culture and the ammount of resources available to it.  You should be able to set up resource trading that sends resources such as Metals, Crystals, Antimatter, and Food to planets deeper within your empire. Food would allow you to grow a planets population to enormous hive like levels (think Coruscant from Star Wars), a planets speed of production should be based on how much of a particular product is avaialble to it, not to the overall pool of resources.

Resources should be pooled, ie you should be ablee to attack places where they're pooled, rather than they be "off the table". You can build resource stores in orbit which are limited, but can be moved between planets (albeit somehwat slowly) or you can store resources on a planet (which can't be moved as quickly, but must be spent on projects in THAT gravity well). Moving resources between wells is possible, requires trade or mining ships, and there is a loss in the resources aboard each ship per gravity well it visits while going to the overall storage. Resources would be limited on planets based on the overall population of that planet and or Starbases in that well.

This makes it cheaper to put factories that build ships in places that are close to areas with high resources, It makes certain planets and g-wells much better targets than others (eg you attack a well and take all the resources based there for your self, this would also make areas for pirates to attack)

Higher populations would result in higher tax income, but after a certain point, those planets with very high populations would be dependant on planets producing an excess in food. It would be a lot of fun to conquer the high population planet's food supply and give them an ultimatum "Surrender or Starve!"

Several new construction types

Antimatter Factories (several sizes), these would blow up in increasingly impressive levels, with the larger ones potentially depopulation the gravwell they're in, and destroying most ships and structures, perhaps even shutting down phase lanes to that well for a few minutes of game time. Antimatter facilities would perform best in wells arround stars (and would be buildable arround them naturally).

Orbital Living Quarters (expensive, but they increase the planets overall population, these would go from small stations to enormous facilities holding buildings of citizens),

Resource Storage Facilities (raise a planets Resource storage levels, allowign it to build larger projects),

Greenhouse Facilities (these would make food, either for the well they are in, or to be traded to other planets in order to increase those planets population capacity. These would have a boost or penalty to their output based on the type of planet they orbit.

Currently conquering a planet merely reduces the overall pool of resources avaialbe to an enemy empire. Makign it so that a mining planet  near a factory planet is more important than on on the other side of the empire will make the game more strategic. Allowing us to increase populations using orbital housing and shipping food from other planets (Terran being the best at creating food) make Terran planets very valauble, centers of fighting)

Making some factories like Antimatter factories capable of causing damage to the well or even Phase lanes passing through it make the use of Antimatter factories both useful (they would boost AM production in ships near them, reduced per well the AM is "passed" through.) but risky (you could poossibly kill one of your own planets or even trap your fleet away from retreat or reinforcement for a few minutes.

International trade: This should be more specific. Eg you should be able to ask or be asked to trade a specific resource and quantity of it from a specific gravity well at a specific cost in resources or money from another well.For instance: The TEC asks the Advent to trade 2 food units food from Planet A (Adventian controlled) to Planet T (TEC controlled) in return for 2 Crystal Units from Planet S (TEC controlled) to planet B (Advent controlled)

Trade skill This is a technology you research, you gain a bonus in what you get from international trade with this. For instance TEC is trade skill 2, they gain 20% over trade policies with other nations, the previous example would result in the TEC getting 2.4 food from the Advent (the Advent woudl still get 2 Crystal) Naturally the TEC would be best at this.

...Just some ideas and finetuning previous ones.

Diplomacy - Trading technology would be cool. Something similar to Master of Orion II.

Leaders - Captain Kirk is awesome! They would have many abilites (most being positive, others being negative) similar to that of MOO2.

Phase Lane Destruction/Creation - Play as the Vasari. However for longer jumps (from system to system) for lower tech people such as TEC and Advent (possibly Vasari since their artificial phase lanes will screw an enemy empire into space dust), they would have to stop during the jump, and recharge their anti-matter then continue the jump. Got this idea from Stargate Atlantis.

Moons - Moons would be cool.

Other Planet Types - Toxic, rock, gaian. I don't want to have to download the Sins+ mod.