[Zorro]

thanks for taking the time to suggest improvements, some quick thoughts:

Fleet designations is something i’m thinking about. Exploration sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s also pretty useful for agent behaviours so was pondering letting players define their own designations. It’d be a bit of work as at the moment it’s an enum and shared with the AI but could be worth it if it makes creating agent services without variables easier

Yeah freight transfer sucks when you’re splitting fleets. I’ve got into a pattern of just “export right/junk left” and going with it but it’s not very obvious,intuitive, or particularly useful for 99.9% of the game (maybe right at the start if doing an eccentric start you might care about not losing specific bits). Inhabitant transfer is even worse

yeah “mission complete” stuff would be handy, there are callbacks for when things finish but not really wired it up to anything meaningful yet. I’ve left scout fleets sitting in space far away almost to starvation too many times

i forget how/why i set up the survey limits. I’m not sure if i even use them myself! (probably set them military). I’ve added so many custom cargo limits of my own that i just load in my set at the start of a game and forget what the defaults are. Probably worth a look in case they’re out of date

will take a look at the ship design screen. i think that’s caused a few problems (grown a fair bit over time, and i’ve just kludged new fields into it without taking time to consider a broader redesign. It always tends to get longer rather than wider, the opposite of display monitor shapes.

i nicked the alarm sound from the US Navy, i was using it for an alarm sound for monitoring systems at work, where the “attention-grabbing”-ness was handy. Perhaps another one to make configurable

good point re: remarkable and scanned views, they are essentially compatible (remarkable implies scanned)

fleet templates: yep i’ve had this on my mind for a long time. Definitely nice to be able to build a suite of ships in one click, shouldn’t even be that hard and need to put time into it.

fleet escorts: have been trying for a while, was originally implemented keeping the fleets entirely separate and buzzing around each other but it’s quite CPU intensive and not always perfect (the cargo ship jumps first and gets interdicted before the military jumps).. might end up with a new generalization of a “wing” or “group” or something that is a set of fleets so if there is an interdiction you get to choose which fleet(s) go into combat, and would always jump together as if the same fleet. Still working out how best to implement it (potentially huge number of changes as just about everything is fleet-oriented so hoping for a stroke of genius)

[Zorro]

hi,

thanks for the detailed thoughts. I’m definitely considering a lot of what you said. Even after the first post i did start wondering whether real-time combat would work/fit… it kinda could since fleets might end up barrelling towards each other at such relative speeds that even with displacement munitions they might not be in range for too long and have a quick mutual exchange of fire and then have to twist and turn to get back in range… OTOH if a fleet is fleeing then the relative velocities would be lesser and easier to keep in range so would hopefully not penalize asymmetric combat too much. I’m definitely considering it.

for the turn-based combat, i decided that if there is such a thing as teleported/displaced munitions and AI are in control then the amount of incoming munitions you’re going to have is so overwhelming that whoever had the “longest range” would generally win so bodged that into being a universal physical constant and everyone gets exactly the same range so mutual bombardment at all times. With that in mind i’d avoided multiple range stages and everyone just ends up in a single bucket that can launch things at everything else. It’s pretty crude and could certainly be adjusted to have multiple “buckets” and some rule such as each bucket can hit things in the same bucket or adjacent ones, then you might have something like -3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3 to play about in… would like some kind of support functions in the game, so limited only by imagination at the moment, could imagine most of the combat happening in bucket 0 but support ships in bucket -2 throwing “friendly” munitions (shield regen? warping space-time to deflect munitions? sensor fusion/triangulation for targetting bonuses?)

In the end i might end up doing both (enhanced turn-based AND real-time), and then just have a flag so you can pick what style you want (maybe other flags for modifying the flavour of turn-based too)

The “Souls” in-game are a rip-off of Iain M Banks “Minds” from the Culture series. I’ve thought about doing more with them, having them develop personalities (bonuses) over time that might have certain beneficial (or negative) interactions with other souls in the same fleet for “set” bonus type stuff. It’s come and gone in the dev branch for years now as i worry it might end up too micro-managey… oh damn this idiot has gone and turned eccentric now i need to ship it back off home and replace with other.. jiggle jiggle etc. Have also gone to- and fro- over whether to make souls transportable between ships, possibly being able to back-up their “state” somewhere as a snapshot in case they get wiped. In conjunction with getting “quirks” it might work where the Soul of your most prized ship/station goes a bit wonky and would be better off swapping it out…. if it goes ahead it might be another one to put on a flag so players that find it tedious can turn it off.

[Zorro]

Hi,

yeah combat in Diaspora hasn’t worked out as I expected. My original plan was for the game to be distinctly “small unit actions” and have much more tactical decision making to make, but unwilling to impose arbitrary limits on fleet sizes I have always ended up with huge stacks of ships which makes the original idea of manually targetting things essentially impossible. Some of my first major forays into serious gaming were roguelikes such as Moria and later Angband. The turn-based combat in Angband is gripping when you’re in a tight spot and trying to work out what spell to cast next to improve your chances, or taking a punt on a phase door/teleport and hoping it doesn’t make things worse. I’d like combat in Diaspora to get a bit more like that; at least additional unit/effector types that might be able to boost shields etc…. Unsure about changing combat to be “real-time” as you state it, my main Sci Fi influence was Iain M Banks “Culture” where I imagine combat is over in the blink of an eye, with munitions displaced to targets and taking effect instantly, so technically the combat here is already “real-time”, it’s just slowed down into turns to give humans/players a chance to see what’s going on, but yeah right now there’s no point doing anything but sticking everything on Auto and seeing what happens, and combat tends to end up “biggest fleet wins” (assuming equivalent tech levels) with no chance of clever moves to save a fleet that finds itself at a disadvantage; i’d like to fix that.

No, the AI does not play by exactly the same rules. I had intended to use the agent infrastructure for AIs to use and be 100% simulated, but it’s just too CPU intensive for any non-trivial sized cluster. As it is the game simulates too much (all the systems are AI populated and grow in the background even if you’ve never visited the system), factions can be wiped out without ever seeing them. The AI does not have infinite resources, each system has a certain carrying capacity that the AI will not exceed so they can be worn down.

[Zorro]

Quick one on hostile fleet alerts. On the [Agent] tab of a fleet there’s a checkbox for “alert detected hostiles” that can be worth turning off on fleets you expect to avoid or survive combat.

[Zorro]

Hi,

Orbital stations use warp inductors as positioning systems to maintain the orbit. Planet-side constructions do not need them.

I’ll have a think about where to talk about yield/abundance more. There’s not really enough to say to justify a separate appendix. but also don’t want to distract too much from tutorials with too much technical detail…

Essentially yield is a direct percentage indicating how much SCU of refined material you’d get per SCU of raw material. e.g. at yield 40 a refinery should turn 100 SCU of raw material into 40 refined materials. “Abundance” indicates how available the resource is and effects a couple of things.

Firstly, it affects the extraction rate, with more raw materials per cycle being extracted for more abundant resources.

Secondly, there is a ceiling on how much of each resource can be mined in a given period of time. If more than this number is mined then the “efficiency” of the extraction operation decreases such that less raw material is extracted per cycle. The amount mined is per resource rather than per extractor or per fleet (you cannot extract more by using 2 fleets than you could with 1). There are diminishing returns once the ceiling is reached, but dropping below 100% efficiency needn’t mean that you should stop adding more extractors, you can still extract a greater number of resources per cycle, except at a lower efficiency. For critical resources (e.g. precious metals) i’ve often gone down to 70% or so.

(maybe there is enough to say to justify an appendix page of its own, especially if I give some examples comparing extraction at an efficiency less than 100%)

[Zorro]

Note i’ve never transported raw materials directly, i’ve always refined them at source then transporting the refined goods instead. Logistics bottlenecks are often caused in the transport of goods between sites so usually advantageous to reduce the size of the package by refining at source (e.g. transport 1000 refined precious metals directly rather than 1000 low yield raw precious metals that would only produce 200 or so refined goods)

[Zorro]

Also, you can modify existing cargo limits, or create new sets.

If you change a limit it’ll change for all fleets using that set, so be careful.

These are editted on the faction view, “Cargo Limits” panel. If you select a set then a cargo type on the right handle panel an “edit limit” tool should appear on the right hand side of the panel. The limits are set in basis points (hundredths of a percent)

[Zorro]

Hi,

All construction is done with cargo of type “products”. I use fleets with the cargo limits “Product Transport” to distribute those products around a system to bases that cannot manufacture their own.

To build products I tend to use bases in asteroid belts or planets with all of the basic resources present (using “General Manufacturing” limits). They will process raw into materials/chemicals and onto components and finally products. The only import such bases need is K filaments from the filament belts found around main sequence stars. I construct a processing station in that belt with limits “K Filament Extraction”, and use a point-point transport to take refined K filaments to the manufacturing base with limits “K Filament Transport”.

I think this is covered on https://diaspora-exastris.com/your-first-system/

finding the construction requirements can be a bit fiddly. For the hull you have to open up a fleet member view for something that can be expanded (a static base) and hover over the “Build more modules” tool (first brick tool you see). That should bring up a table of requirements for the hull itself.

For the modules if you hover over the name (Cargo,Dock,Shipyard etc) then that should bring up a tooltip with the modules required for those.

For factories on the industry tab, hovering over the “type” will show what that factory needs to build a new module, hovering over “specialization” will show manufacturing input requirements. Everything tends to feed down through intermediate goods towards products/supplies.

In theory you could separate the different kinds of manufacturing and be shipping around materials or components, but it’s not something i’ve done and there are no built-in cargo limits for that.

After developing a system a bit you might find a main manufacturing base to be a bit short on a key input such as precious metals, which you might find in better quantities on rocky planets orbiting closer to the star that themselves lack volatile resources (chemicals/water), so it could be beneficial to extract & refine something like precious metals on that hot planet and ship those out in a similar manner to shipping refined K filaments.

Hope that helps

[Author]

Posts