Confirmed features and suggestions

This thread is confirmed features AND SUGGESTIONS.

It's generally better to either look for a thread already containing your suggestion or make a new one to outline yours. This allows for a much better overview of the suggestions made for the devs.
If they have to look through this thread every time there's a new post, it'll be... let's say less than efficient.

Probably should be "Confirmed features, and suggestions already posted."

I want to make a gasgiant into a small sun.

but to balance this, it should be mirrors all over the planet, heating it up.
PLUS it could be used for a dyson spheres

Also, if you waited long enough, I want the planet to go from sustainable fusion, into chain reaction fusion, the blow-up-half-gorram-solarsystem kind of. Can you think of anything bigger and better than this? really, something more violent than using an entire planet as bombfuel?

I want this as a suggestion. really, really bad.

Hey xedi,

Thanks for putting together this list! It was very helpful when I first started looking at the forums. However, the only indicator I have of updates is the "edited" date at the bottom of the post. This makes it pretty much impossible for me to know what has been changed since I first looked through the whole thing. Would it be too much to ask for you to keep a change log of your updates?

Whilst Both DOW2 and Space Marine were very flawed. Army painters are definitely a good thing.

Not a difficult thing to implement, and makes your units feel a lot more personal

The navel planets can the commander look more like a sub or maybe a boat type, because it just kill's immersion if there walking along on the bottom.
The other i thing would like to see is that the factories can be upgraded indvidaly rather than globely

Hi everyone!

I just saw this awesome game coming up a few weeks ago, and now I just want to share some ideas.
They will sure take good care of the "common" combat, and some fancy stuff that was mentioned in this thread allready, so I try to list some things that might have just not been mentioned, yet.

1.) Shields in general:
Though stationary defence and stuff like this might not work on small planets, they should add it. (I know they said they might add it later, I just wanted to say I like shields! )

2.) Planetary Shields:
This should be much more easy to implement, and add some strategic value.
Sure they would be no defence against a KEW, but
for my next points, they would be awesome in combination.

3.) Spaceships:
I know they said, there will be spaceships of some kind, but looking at a galaxy wide war, spaceships would actually be what navy should have been in many other games.
BUT, one needs to be carefull with this, too much of it could easily ruin the game.

My idea for it would be like:
- some battleship like thing for orbital bombardment (maybe countered by planetary shields)
- Big motherships, you know you want them! They could produce and transport dropships ready to use filled up with army/builders and fighters for in space and on planet combat. transports and fighters could fly through planetary shields and try to either take them down or erect a bridgehead on the surface.
- orbital defence satellites (would be what point defence is on the surface)
- orbital artillery, that is cannons on the surface that shoot at big ships but wont hit the small transports and fighters
...this, and some small transports for erecting colonies, would allready be enough
- ah, a deathstar maybe!

- one more "spaceship": take a planet, rigg some thruster on it, mount some large guns, and make it a mobile units spitting, shooting, killing (slow) über-unit
...maybe you love your home planet so much, when the enemy approaches you try to run away with the whole planet to hide behind the skirt of your allys

4.) Transport (interstellar):
- build gates in space that can teleport (or open a wormhole) anywhere in a certain radius
- build gates on planets that can teleport single units on other planets (like a commander or support commander)
- "hyperspace scrambler" to make this "tactical", these units could protect an area, or maybe only a solar system, from opening wormholes, either only enemy ones, or all (you need to shut it off, to travel yourself) BUT the gate for single units like commanders should not be affected by it, this would create some nice tactical options!

5.) Hide&Seek:
- be able to dig into a planet, or at least hide below surface, so you can produce in hiding, and just open the gates of your factories if the next big thing is completed
- probes to scan those hidden bases down, like, you can see everything on the planets if you enter the solar system with a probe, but without scanning each planet individually, you wont see whats hidden there
- dug in bases migh be easily destroyed, once spotted, by ships (orbital bombardment, see 3. or mabye by higher level artillery, KEW ^^ or whatever fits in)

6.) SuperStarNuke:
- 1: rigg a star (sun) with some tech
- 2: teleport/wormhole it to your enemies solar system
- 3: über epic explosions

7.) Anti-KEW
- to protect a very valuable planet, get some asteriods, mount them with thrusters and whatever needed, get them into orbit of your planet, and try to intercept enemy KEWs

8.) More KEW ^^
- set up a base in an asteroid belt, then use some tech/guns/tractorBeams/whatever to sling rock after rock at the enemy, maybe even into neaby solar systems


Well, thats my thoughts so far, hope its not too bad!

There will be no space combat. They have that set in stone (as much as something can be set in stone this earily), there will be orbital units, and those might include units that work somewhat like spaceships (being able to travel between worlds) but we have no confirmation of such a thing (to my knowledge).

We allredy have nukes, astroid projectiles, death stars and mini experimentals, personaly i think thats enof on the weapons of mass destruction front (All of those are confirmed).

They have said that there will be ways to stop astroid projectiles.

Cluster bombs!

So you say theres no spaceships, but deathstars?!

Oh, and what do you mean by "mini experimentals"?

Death stars have been confirmed.

I (And most others) assume that mentioned "Death stars" are activated metal planets. And that those get some kind of doomsday beam weapon (It has been mentioned that death stars can destroy astroids for example).

And you can move moons/astroids/(and possibly planets) around with giant thrusters you build at the surface. Not just to crash into other planets, but you can also move them into orbit and stuff (Fill a moon with thrusters and unit cannons, and you got a giant carrier of doom that flies into orbit around a world and then unleashes the robotic swarm onto the world with its unit cannons).

The game will contain a few experimentals, but they will not be as powerfull or usefull as they were in supcom (The game wont be all about them), thats why they are refeared to as "mini experimentals".

I do not recall this being said, source please.
I only remember neutrino saying maybe:
{O} Experimentals: #1

Finally found one post talking about it, i know theres more info somewhere but i cant for the life of me find it.
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=40465&p=604436&hilit=+experimental#p604436

Thanks, enlightening.

Has anyone suggested adding starless worlds? I mean asteroids/moons/planets/gas giants that aren't in orbit around a star but instead drift through the void of space.

Might make a excellent location (with some or a lot of build up) to launch a surprise attack from or to retreat to.

Though you would need to invest resources in telescopes to even start searching for any.


Edit: On another note will it be possible to recolonize a planet after its been hit with a asteroid? Or would the players have to wait a certain amount of time till it's "safe" to do so?

These would only be useful if you use the assumption there will be a possibility to move between solar systems, which (as far as I've read) has not been confirmed.

(Note: The galactic war has not been said to be realtime)

Well the best way to do Galactic War would be a Total War based turn based and real time strategy mix...

Camera control.

Demigod.
When the game clock starts, the camera is panned/zoomed/rotated for the first 2 seconds of the game. Bots run off and do their thing automatically while humans have to reset the camera to a view they are comfortable with.
After every death, the camera is panned/zoomed/rotated again over ~2 seconds (during which the player has no control), focusing on the location of death. This is not a simple x/y relocation of the camera that the player can easily correct.

Supreme Commander.
When the game clock starts, there is a big zoom-in while the commander warps in. If the commander is deselected during this time, the player can not reselect the commander and queue commands until the animation is done.

The player should have control prior to the game clock starting and maintain control until the game ends. Denying player control is not fun. Resetting random camera changes is tedious and annoying. The person responsible for this "cinematic" camera bullshit should be shot.

Menus.
Animated menus (see Supreme Commander). See Blizzard/id games. When I load the game, I usually have an idea of what I want to do. I want to be in a game with as few clicks and as little delay as possible.
In supreme commander, it goes like this.
Start up game.
Intro video for the millionth time.
Main menu floats down *swish* (The buttons actually become active later than the animation suggests)
Click multiplayer
*swish*
click lan/net
*swish*
and so on.
With DiabloIII, it's literally clickclickclick and I am in a game. People don't buy multi-GHz systems to wait.

Also a "Fill empty slots with AI bots of _____ difficulty" button (where "______" is a persistent dropdown menu of difficulties) would be nice.

I'm not sure I agree with this. It is a way of doing Galactic War, but not the only way.

By turn based, I assume that you are talking about something along the lines where there is a turn based "territories map" that leads to individual battles fought for tiles in a RTS format. Only that the map tiles are star systems and the RTS element are the star system size player battles. This is logical, but I'm not sure that there would be this level of control over the Galactic war. My main question; who controls the over all battle? Sure in SP/CO-OP this could work really well, but in online MP I think we need to look at a more automated format that includes some kind of matchmaking.

There are several issues I can think of without trying too hard when developing something like Galactic War and trying to get it to perform in a turn-based style format. A lot of it has to do with time and place, type things. Such as, if matches are to be scheduled and if they will be conducted by specific players. There's a long list of questions that lead to other questions.

Personally, I would like to see it implemented in a way that anyone who wants to play a match can join and at any time. I wouldn't want to see it made in too rigid a format (Re: time and place, scheduling and so on) so as to exclude shall we say less flexible players. This is a major point IMO as not everyone is flexible enough for scheduled match making and Galactic War is meant to be a massive part of the game. Players could enter the Galactic war menu whenever they want a match and see a list of matches available. This might start as coarse - which galaxy (No one said there would be just one) and then fine - which star system within that galaxy. Galaxies could be outlined by a number of criteria. My main one however, would be player skill or rank IMO. Just in the interest of keeping games fair.

This could be done via menus or a pictorial representation. Pictorial is my favoured option. This representation would show the various galaxies and star systems involved in the Galactic War and, at the fine level, the current "front line" star systems. A pie chart showing galaxy control percentages would be nice. When a faction owns 100%, a new galaxy is procedurally generated and the game starts over. Sort of like a galactic tug of war.

Matchmaking could be determined by several player defined constraints, such as number of players, number of planets and so on. Basically things that would determine the length of the game. Not everyone wants, or has time, to play a 40 player match. Players could also be divided into divisions so as to keep matches fair. This possibly leads in to some kind of Galactic War specific rank? Simply activating matchmaking would put them into a star system game matching their criteria and rank.

Another option is to have players lobbing for time slots. Rather than say you want to play a match of a certain size and number of players, you pick a game length - say 30 mins, and wait for a slot in a game where you then take over from a player for your allotted time. When your time is up, a waiting player takes over from you. If (in the suspected rare circumstance) no player is available, your units would be distributed amongst the remaining allied players.

I have an idea of players as being some sort of Digital Consciousness Pattern that is downloaded into commander units at will depending on when and where they are required. This alleviates a lot of the issues around continuity of battles and player scheduling. For example, it explains why when Mavor Prime II was last fought over, it was this group of commanders and this time it is another completely different group of players. It's the same physical commanders, just different programs. This also leads to another question...

If this territory was previously won/lost, what happened to the stuff that was previously established there? I think from a gamelplay aspect it gives rise to a number of potential game types. You have the vanilla game type where players start on equal footing and you also have the attack/defend style game. For example, you could use the previously saved replay (the ones Uber have been talking about using as save games) to "reload" a part of the territory and occupy it with established bases from the previous game. How you would make it fair, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud at the moment.

TLR - There are loads of questions surrounding galactic war, and these are just a few of my ideas. I'd say more, but my post is too long already. In retrospect, it probably warranted it's own topic.