Warp Engine

So, for the first suggestion in the new forums, we have Warp Engines.

Now, I know Syndrome is going to tell me lots of reasons why this is a good thing. Question is, how's it going to work?

* Is it just a huge speed boost in the target direction or does it teleport you to a random place on the map?
* Does it have to charge?(probably)
* Are you vulnerable while charging the warp? (Probably, but in what way? No shields or weapons?)
* How far does it go?
* Is there another downside after having warped? Maybe the shield is turned off for a minute after warping and the ship takes a lot of hull damage?
* Should it require an upgrade?
* Will you still collide with asteroids while warping?
* Should it have a cooldown?

Now, what prevents the enemy from just warping after them in the same direction?

I think it should require an upgrade and give a huge speed boost(like the turbo jump with a longer duration). I think you shouldn't collide with asteroids while warping and that the the shields should go down when you start charging the warp until 1-2 minutes afterwards.

The ship should take massive hull damage down to a certain point(like 15%). So let's say it deals 20% hull damage. If you have 100% when you warp, you go down to 80%, if you have 30%, you only go down to 15%. If you have 15% or less, you don't take hull damage. I don't know, maybe it should always deal the same amount of damage.

I'm not sure how far it should go, probably a lot. Enough for you to escape the enemy for more than a couple of minutes. I think it should have a huge cooldown like 10-15 minutes.

The enemy might not follow because if they misjudge the angle by a little bit, they'll end up far away anyway. At least if the warp warps you far enough. It's a risk which may end up hurting them.

What are your thoughts on this? Also, if you have any other suggestions, please post them here on the suggestions forum.

Should take a 15-30 second charge time, in which shields, weapons, and engines go offline, then a non-collision teleportation to the chosen destination with a kerm + other ores cost. After teleportation engines should be offline for 30 seconds or so, and shields for 5-10 seconds.

EDIT: Similar to yamato, you buy it but its not an upgrade

Hi!! about ththis new upgrade, i realy don't see this very usefull for the cruiser for this reasons:
- First, it let's you completly disarmed, so if you want to escape, you'l ve receiveng a lot of damage until the engine activates; also, if it hurts you, then after being damaged, you'll be even more damaged when you warp-out; it's a big risk, just for a few minutes to restore/repair/resurrect/create missils...
- Second, for almost the same as above, you can't use this to chase the enemy, because when you warp out, you're without shields/energy and other stuff.. you can launch missiles, but you have to be so lucky to kill just with missiles.
- Third, with the size of the map, the radar ping, and the actual skill to power up the engines... the enemy's cruiser will be able to catch you in just a minute or two later.. and then just if you're extremly skillfull/lucky or you have and awesome team, you could crush the enemy.

It's a good idea, but i think it can be implemented better as an item for the vessels, as a way to make a quick scape (better than turbo-jump) also, this item would have only 1 use.

Actually,Targaryen, i think it's better to be an upgrade that might come with a battery(each use requires you to buy new batteries, beacuse to make the warp jump you need a lot of special power(1 battery is used up when you activate the engine)).

Maybe this would be more beneficial when/if map size increases

Roflcopter wrote:Maybe this would be more beneficial when/if map size increases

Totally agree with this, in fact i've also to check if the WIII map is bigger than this one... All the times i played, i could find the enemy's cruiser really soon. Nad i think that make a little bigger the map will be better.

Also, I've a doubt, right now when i'm at full speed with the cruiser (like 120 or more), did the cruiser gets damaged when u are at that high speed?? I think it's really realistic, if your cruiser starts to get damage when goes to really fast speeds, and that makes to scape really dangerous.

I would love to increase the map size, but right now it's impossible. We are already using the maximum size(256x256). If Blizzard at one point increases this, we'll not only have a bigger space, we can also have different ship types(instead of the battlecruiser, we can have a carrier as well or something like that)¨

I am going to fix so you take damage while going fast... some time in the future.

Yeah.. i've played with the map editor, and i know there's a max size, so to make things bigger; what about use the trick to make the items smaller?, if the cruiser and meteors are smaller, and the max speed it's slower, then the space will look more infinte and empty... like in real life xD.

Anyway we can hope that in the expansion, they include some new feature like that .

If we skip the obvious issues with having to scale down EVERYTHING(all the units, effects, effect offsets, coordinates and stuff), there will still be problems with the ship movement system. We can't move it slow enough since the precision is bad.

I might know away to increase the map size by a very high amount but that would require a heavy rebuild of the game. Idea is complicated but I think I can relate it somewhat to games like Fallout 1/2 or Mount&Blade. Don't be affected by these thoughts too much. It's still RTS. It's Thing is:

The things which are relevant are: the ships, battlecruisers and smaller; possibly some important stations or stuff. The asteroids and the mines are not quite that important but their positions being constant could come useful. Main idea is to build up the fraction of the map which is in the immediate vicinity of the player. The objects which are player-free would be stored in the memory an then rebuild in his location. You could save the positions of asteroids,mines e.t.c. in an array in which you can transfigure without these fake barriers.

You probably don't get a lot from what I'm performing so I'll put It differently. The idea is to make a coordinate system in coordinate system (floatception ) with which you could extend the barriers given by the producer not breaking any code apart but adding only new one. This will work only in this kind of map but also require a lot of work translating the input of functions which you already have. It's likely to cause rain of bugs which will need to be fixed but I think that it can be puled off.

Wow, that is an amazing solution.. but in my opinion, it's really hard to implement. but anyway, instead of playing in a solar system, we could even create a universe!!.

It just will require to save some (well.. maybe it requires a LOT) matrix, because we will divide the space in little squares and for every square we keep the info into the matrix, so when the cruiser moves to another square(like, from [0,0] to [0,1], he just will move from one square to another, like a HUGE chesstable, where every square keeps it's own information, also, every square will be a coordenate [x,y] and when the radar pings the enemy, it gives you the coordinates; let's say team 1 starts in [0,8](bottom left) and the team 2 can start at [8,0] (up right) (in a chesstable, with a table with size 8x8)

But when i'm thinking it, i'm seeing a LOT of bugs with the missiles, lasers, and... who knows what else.

Anyway, i'll keep thinkig about it.

I think he meant the Space Rogues' system, but probably more advanced.

My original idea wasn't dividing the map into squares but I thought about it as well. ;D That would be quite easy implement with battlecruisers, but not with little ships, lasers or rockets. It would create situations where one ship has escaped from rockets just by jumping to other square. Ships would also circle thru 4 squares to avoid damage.

Making the ship stand in one place and actually using simple Newtonian trick to move things around in relativistic motion would be much better. Ship would just rotate and burst engines and other things like asteroids, beams, rockets(targeting system rebuild needed) or stations would add -u vector of ship motion to their own. One of Siretu's problems with increasing the size of the map through scaling was not accurate motion. That wouldn't be a problem as the motion would only happen in normal scale, in the ship's vicinity. Everywhere else It would just not exist and It's velocity, location, properties would be stored in script memory.

It should work nicely until you would have other ship in range. I think that creation of a clones of the ships controlled by other player would be the only viable solution. Clone would be the exact copy of the other ship, and It's movement would be "played" by the clone. That's where the ship would really move.

I think I spoken too much a bout the technical(important) stuff and not about the pros of this solution. As The Dragon Lord before said we could map HUGE waists of space. Real life scale solar system perhaps. And If we would scale the objects we could really make multiple solar systems. The script memory in 1.5 will be greatly increased(like 10 times). So it could really be puled off especially knowing CC team skill shown so far.

If we say that we want to use one kB of memory on X coordinate of battlecruisers position, then It would mean that we have 2^(8192)-1 number to map it. If we would use meters that would be 1,1529254025805869855961865873918e+2450 m to chose from ;D For comparison light year is 9,4607·10^15 m. Can you feel the power?!!! ;D

I haven't played Callex's Space Rouges because all the versions were outdated when I stumbled upon it. ;/ I see how good It would work with one ship. ;D Expanding it to many is still possible.

PS: I forgot to say that asteroids would have to be generated on sight as their coordinates would make the gogol memory disc full to it's cache.

Chevronn wrote:That would be quite easy implement with battlecruisers, but not with little ships, lasers or rockets. It would create situations where one ship has escaped from rockets just by jumping to other square. Ships would also circle thru 4 squares to avoid damage.

Hi! this is the main problem that came to my head when i thought about this, but if you can solve this issue, then the posibilities are HUGE just as you said.
Anyway, right now, this is not the most important thing, there's still a lot of things to implement, so when the team has more time, maybe they can try complicate stuff like this.

Also this post is about Warp engines.. and our conclusion it's that if we want to give it a chance, we need first a bigger map, so warp engines became much more useful ^^(because the main use for this it's to have a better way to escape than he actual engine boost.)

bb!

I wish the game was a separate one(using a custom engine(preferably) so that we don't have the size limit/player limit, maybe play it on a bigger scale(with different star systems, asteroid fields(where they are supposed to be, not just random fields across the map), and warp-gates, and the warp engine to be able to jump from anywhere in a solar system to a warp-gate/random location in another system) also maybe mining stations with automated mining ships(and maybe to have an upgreadable comunication array to tell the station what mineral to be a priority), and asteroids composed out of different minerals, and rock(maybe you can refine/use the rock for something like a mass-driver(or use a reverse mining beam to put rocks around an explosive to make it look like an asteroid and to explode when someone mines from it/eats it(or the mining beam to take the bomb and it to explode when teleportation completes)))), and other cool stuff.

The problems with that implementation(excluding the obvious massive time it would take and the bugs), is that it only works with one ship. Think about it, the entire point is that you never actually move, but the things around you do. If there's two battlecruisers and both are "moving" but not actually moving. But you have to move them so it looks okay from the other point of view.

Even without that, it's a extremely big project. Almost all the code that works on the outside would have to be re-done with the new system and it would take a LONG time to implement, if I could even pull it off.

I know that is extremely hard to do and would require a entire programming team to pull off or years of work. Just throwing ideas. ;D There is a game called Orbiter where all this can be done but it's not even close to CC with is playability and multiplayer so I know that there are the things you are focusing on. Don't fell like people are demanding you to make an second EVE Online without RPG elements. The game is extremely fun without thousand of light years map. ;D

Hi!, now that you're talikng about space games and diferent game engines and stuff like that; i think that you should know also that Notch, the ceator of Minecraft, it's developing a game with ships, lasers, and programable computers called 0x10c; you should check it; right now there's still nothing, but he pretends to release the alpha as soon as he cans (like he did with minecraft when it was in alpha state) so you can try all the stuff that we want's to do; i think that the game would be like and EVE online, but with ships builded as you like; and 16-bit Programable computers!!! that's awesome!!!!

If you think this is not the right place to post this, just tell me and i'll move it to general discussions.

website here : http://0x10c.com/

I think the warp engine would be a good idea. What I think this game currently lacks is a good escape mechanic. You could give the warp jump a High energy cost (25000?) It would turn off your engines/shields/weapons when you use it and it takes a couple seconds to charge (5-10) But it also warps you to a random (selected?) on the map. I think a BC escape method would really add complexity to the game. Because where it stands now if you get engaged its pretty much game over since this fight decides the victor. I mean I know there is an engine boost but I think that's more of a chase system since both people can use it. Meanwhile the warp would be a valid escape method. Thoughts?

My idea to warp jump
It must be researched.It have endless range and costs 25000 energy.It needs 30 seconds to charge.While charging,only shields are active.While flying (think about speed=250) you will get continous shield damage.When directional shields are added,you will need full energy on front shield.If your shields are down,The whole crew die (the stun if you have no hp,not a death forever),and you get around 1000 hull damage.While in warp any asteroid or small ship instantly explode at collision with you.

Roflcopter wrote:Maybe this would be more beneficial when/if map size increases

I think this sums up the thread. The map is too small for a 'teleport' mechanic to make sense. At best, I can only see something like a stable wormhole generator making sense for fast travel, something that effects the map rather than something that effects the BC. And as far as escape mechanics go, I think 'whoom POOF vanish' is pretty unfair to the attackers.