Natural disasters

Randomness is cool in mods and all but in the actual game it can be a BS moment when you're about to pull ahead in a game but get disrupted by a random event. I'd rather they keep these kinds of gameplay elements in mods.

could be interesting, maybe make plasma storm periodically impassible, but not at regular intervals.  It would add a fun little extra random element to the game.

You know, I remember someone suggesting this back in the Starcraft II beta, random asteroids and stuff.

You know what they told him?

This isn't super smash bros.

Having the tide of battle change drastically by a completely random, uncontrolled event is not the way to go.

I think that the pirate raids are a good "random" event. 

Besides, erratic human/AI behavior can be random enough (you notice the entire tech tree and strategy devoted to mitigating both of these).

Cheers,

-tid242

Pirate raids aren't really random though...you can tell how long there is until they arrive.

Im going to refer to goa's really well made 4x mod, I think that the devs should make a 4x option that can be turned on and off. This would essentially make all allies spawn on homeworlds close to each other(essentially eliminating the suicide position), makes all maps close to symmetrical(such as if lets say there was a volcanic planet 3 phase jumps away from you, someone else on the enemy team would have a volcanic planet 3 jumps away), all militia would be consistent with the planet type, all randoma artifacts would be symmetrical as well. But when turned on it could have all the cool random stuff on it(even your meteor storm, they should even incorporate some of goas mod, I personally like the new planets he puts in).

Thanks Mayall. While my mod does indeed add a degree of randomness by spawning lots of unique and interesting things (colonies, captureable structures etc.), they aren't quite random disasters in that events happen at random times. If they do ever get around to adding triggers in Rebellion (and I would cross my fingers on that), they could certainly be possible, and even without that, I've got some ideas of how to do them. Stay tuned.

Actually the easiest way to do this would be to make different version of the maps. While you perhaps couldn't do "symmetrical" with random maps, you could make a mod where the planets, militias, and bonuses are all the same, taking a large degree of the randomness out of the picture. Thus if you do those specific "Competitive maps", its mostly standardized, if you do normal maps its as it is now, and then you could add more random stuff.

I think that's too much work. Think about how many lines of code would be needed.

I like the feel of randomness maps, just its hard to replicate that feel(I dont mean I like the randomness but it seems to always work out with planet placements that clearly define their roles). Eventually I plan to make a pack somewhere but im only concerned will people download them.

What is? If they add the triggers or making competitive maps? The later actually wouldn't be too bad, and its hard to say with the former, but depending on how they set it up it need not be complicated either. And again I have ideas even if they don't do that with the current engine, though to be honest natural disasters will almost certainly remain mod territory if they happen at all.

You have to understand that coding in C++ isn't easy. I spent about two hours making a basic command-promt-ish calculator that can add, subtract, divide, and multiply. Think about how long the natural disaster thing would take.

First, you need a function that would trigger an event to go off randomly. Then, you need a function to choose which natural disasters to putt on a randomly chosen planet. Then you have to make sure that the function applied it correctly (debugging). You'd have to make sure that a 'volcanic eruption' won't occur on a ice planet, or a blizzard in a volcanic planet, etc etc.

The big problem is that with the 'random' function. I dunno much about libraries, but you might need to install a new C++ library for random timers. (I remember I made a program that had a timer-I think I used the libraries cstlib and time and stlib... something like that.)

It is true that it may not be that complicated, but you can easily run into problems along the way.

Oh yeah. The first bit of programming I ever did was in a game script editor based on C++ syntax. I was in 8th grade and apparently too stupid to ask the internet, so I tried to figure it out stubbornly one syntax error at a time, often times blindly guessing.

Also I doubt that they're starting from scratch and I'm sure they're better programmers than we are. And if it only takes you two hours to program or even mod something that's pretty good.

Well once you add a basic trigger, its not hard to make a Boolean trigger condition that gets input for a random number generator somewhere down the line. Its whether they'll ever add the triggers that unlikely part, despite the Galaxy Forge having an interface for them.

Considering Sins already uses timers for pirate raids and random numbers for all kinds of things, I'm sure they already have the basic libraries for that. Really that's pretty mandatory for any game to have under the hood.

Basically, if the developers do it right and effiently, then It'll work out well.