Post by subunit on Nov 4, 2016 23:43:28 GMT
tldr; below follow some suggestions for how the sandbox could be expanded to allow scenario designers to use it. main points are bolded
I want to talk about what would be required to produce a system that allows us to produce credible strategic-scale hard sci-fi scenarios for CoaDE. By "strategic scale" I mean a category including anything from a small 1-gravity well engagement between a couple of podunk oil-age powers (with, say, a few laser sats or kinetic kill vehicles), to a full-scale Jovian invasion of the inner planets with tens of "main" fleets (perhaps themselves throwing off a handful of missile/drone fleets now and then) assaulting multiple bodies simultaneously and lasting 20+ years.
My basic suggestion is to try to avoid adding anything that cannot obviously be handled by current mechanics for now and try to come up with suggestions the dev could easily implement on their own while handling sales, updates, communications, and all the other stuff a one-man business needs to do. An example of such a mechanic is, say, Q-ships hidden among civilian traffic. I would love to see this as a mechanic, but I don't know if the game's detection model can do it at the moment, so I'll refrain from mentioning it again.
I would propose trying to expand the sandbox level preset system to allow user-defined preset files. I am guessing that the sandbox preset system reads from Resources/Data/Levels.txt. Levels.txt is (obviously) exposed to editing and appears to specify:
-bodies modelled in the scenarios (unsure exactly what "MainBody" specifies in terms of what's going into the n-body sim)
-enemy behaviour
-composition & fuel status of enemy fleet
-starting orbits of enemies
-initial player fleet compostion, customisation (mass & cost) limits
-mission triggers (incl. messsages and mission ends)
-time limits
and other things. When loaded into the sandbox, some subset of the level's presets are loaded, but other things seem to be stripped out, critically including mass and cost limits, messages, time limits etc.
I would suggest the following alterations be made to allow the system to accomodate strategic-scale scenario building:
1) the level preset load code be expanded so that the user could select what parts of the level are read from the preset file- if you don't want to deal with scripted mission events, or fleet composition limits, you could turn them off, but it would allow scenario designers access to those systems.
2) a few further (completely optional) mass/price fleet composition limits. Presently all solar polities in CoaDE are going to be paying the same price for the same materials because everyone has access to the same ship design menu. I would suggest adding the following (all on a per-fleet basis):
2.1: mass-by-fleet-composition limit (refers to default player/enemy fleet material composition to constrain the fleet to the total masses of materials required to produce the default fleets)
2.2: price-by-accessible-body limit (allows designer to "rejig" the economy by listing bodies the allied/enemy factions have access to- prices are determined by abundance across only these bodies)
2.3: designer-specified-material-price limit (allows designer to directly list materials and prices to build a "custom economy" for both fleets)
2.4: banned-material limits (materials can be removed from the design list without modding or preventing their use for the other fleet)
If this all seems like an odd ask, I would respond by saying that this is actually critical to building thermoeconomically plausible fleets. What I mean by that is that any given solar polity's access to material resources (the "price" it pays energetically to obtain that resource) is not determined solely by the average solar abundance of that material but rather by the abundance of the material discounted by the amount of energy spent getting to the extraction site, extracting the material, processing it, sending it home, escorting all the fleets and fighting all the invasions required to do all of this, etc. For instance, if a CoaDE power is mostly a Jovian one, the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) on fuels in the Jovian gravity well will be MUCH better than that available from fuels that are uncommon in that well. They will prefer to use rocket propellants that are "locally available", and it will be cheaper energetically and economically to do so. Allowing the user to specify fleet composition limits along the lines mentioned above allows a scenario designer to simulate the constraints on a hypothetical Jovian polity's shipbuilding program far more accurately than the present model. This allows for "asymmetric" encounters between logistically-differently-constrained opponents which are the essence of all real warfare.
3) blacklists for particular components by type and name. This allows modded "stock" components to be introduced or removed over the course of many scenarios, simulating development or decay of a particular polity. It also allows the simulation of differing cultural and organisational proclivities- moral aversion to nuclear weapons, a lack of laser production expertise, etc.
4) support for multiple fleets and triggered fleets under "allied crafts". What I mean by this is that the "engaging crafts" list would allow the player to specify that particular spots in the list will be in particular fleets (playable or no) in game- ship 1-3 will be around mars, 4-6 will be around earth-luna L3, etc. Ideally we would be able to trigger the appearance of particular fleets (as reinforcements, new cosntruction, etc.) with a delay, and a designer-specified limit could be placed on the number of ships in each fleet.
These changes would do 90% of what I would want to do as a modder in representing any kind of near-future, realistic space war, in a way that doesn't ask the player the same strategic/tactical question every time (optimize within the default "bitcoin glibertarian solar economy"
). If there was a simple GUI to edit these parameters in game (ideally with a preview window, although that might be a big ask) that'd be amazing. This would all allow people to distribute missions on the forums as snippets to paste in your levels.txt. You could even give backstory/intel in the forums post with spoiler tags, so that you have to read old intel before designing the currently-existing legacy fleet, and then more recent intel before designing the "triggered-appearance-at-the-shipyard-in-1-year" fleet. The possibilities are endless.
Well.. except for Q-ships. Ok, I mentioned them again.
Please share any ideas you have about this.
I want to talk about what would be required to produce a system that allows us to produce credible strategic-scale hard sci-fi scenarios for CoaDE. By "strategic scale" I mean a category including anything from a small 1-gravity well engagement between a couple of podunk oil-age powers (with, say, a few laser sats or kinetic kill vehicles), to a full-scale Jovian invasion of the inner planets with tens of "main" fleets (perhaps themselves throwing off a handful of missile/drone fleets now and then) assaulting multiple bodies simultaneously and lasting 20+ years.
My basic suggestion is to try to avoid adding anything that cannot obviously be handled by current mechanics for now and try to come up with suggestions the dev could easily implement on their own while handling sales, updates, communications, and all the other stuff a one-man business needs to do. An example of such a mechanic is, say, Q-ships hidden among civilian traffic. I would love to see this as a mechanic, but I don't know if the game's detection model can do it at the moment, so I'll refrain from mentioning it again.
I would propose trying to expand the sandbox level preset system to allow user-defined preset files. I am guessing that the sandbox preset system reads from Resources/Data/Levels.txt. Levels.txt is (obviously) exposed to editing and appears to specify:
-bodies modelled in the scenarios (unsure exactly what "MainBody" specifies in terms of what's going into the n-body sim)
-enemy behaviour
-composition & fuel status of enemy fleet
-starting orbits of enemies
-initial player fleet compostion, customisation (mass & cost) limits
-mission triggers (incl. messsages and mission ends)
-time limits
and other things. When loaded into the sandbox, some subset of the level's presets are loaded, but other things seem to be stripped out, critically including mass and cost limits, messages, time limits etc.
I would suggest the following alterations be made to allow the system to accomodate strategic-scale scenario building:
1) the level preset load code be expanded so that the user could select what parts of the level are read from the preset file- if you don't want to deal with scripted mission events, or fleet composition limits, you could turn them off, but it would allow scenario designers access to those systems.
2) a few further (completely optional) mass/price fleet composition limits. Presently all solar polities in CoaDE are going to be paying the same price for the same materials because everyone has access to the same ship design menu. I would suggest adding the following (all on a per-fleet basis):
2.1: mass-by-fleet-composition limit (refers to default player/enemy fleet material composition to constrain the fleet to the total masses of materials required to produce the default fleets)
2.2: price-by-accessible-body limit (allows designer to "rejig" the economy by listing bodies the allied/enemy factions have access to- prices are determined by abundance across only these bodies)
2.3: designer-specified-material-price limit (allows designer to directly list materials and prices to build a "custom economy" for both fleets)
2.4: banned-material limits (materials can be removed from the design list without modding or preventing their use for the other fleet)
If this all seems like an odd ask, I would respond by saying that this is actually critical to building thermoeconomically plausible fleets. What I mean by that is that any given solar polity's access to material resources (the "price" it pays energetically to obtain that resource) is not determined solely by the average solar abundance of that material but rather by the abundance of the material discounted by the amount of energy spent getting to the extraction site, extracting the material, processing it, sending it home, escorting all the fleets and fighting all the invasions required to do all of this, etc. For instance, if a CoaDE power is mostly a Jovian one, the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) on fuels in the Jovian gravity well will be MUCH better than that available from fuels that are uncommon in that well. They will prefer to use rocket propellants that are "locally available", and it will be cheaper energetically and economically to do so. Allowing the user to specify fleet composition limits along the lines mentioned above allows a scenario designer to simulate the constraints on a hypothetical Jovian polity's shipbuilding program far more accurately than the present model. This allows for "asymmetric" encounters between logistically-differently-constrained opponents which are the essence of all real warfare.
3) blacklists for particular components by type and name. This allows modded "stock" components to be introduced or removed over the course of many scenarios, simulating development or decay of a particular polity. It also allows the simulation of differing cultural and organisational proclivities- moral aversion to nuclear weapons, a lack of laser production expertise, etc.
4) support for multiple fleets and triggered fleets under "allied crafts". What I mean by this is that the "engaging crafts" list would allow the player to specify that particular spots in the list will be in particular fleets (playable or no) in game- ship 1-3 will be around mars, 4-6 will be around earth-luna L3, etc. Ideally we would be able to trigger the appearance of particular fleets (as reinforcements, new cosntruction, etc.) with a delay, and a designer-specified limit could be placed on the number of ships in each fleet.
These changes would do 90% of what I would want to do as a modder in representing any kind of near-future, realistic space war, in a way that doesn't ask the player the same strategic/tactical question every time (optimize within the default "bitcoin glibertarian solar economy"
). If there was a simple GUI to edit these parameters in game (ideally with a preview window, although that might be a big ask) that'd be amazing. This would all allow people to distribute missions on the forums as snippets to paste in your levels.txt. You could even give backstory/intel in the forums post with spoiler tags, so that you have to read old intel before designing the currently-existing legacy fleet, and then more recent intel before designing the "triggered-appearance-at-the-shipyard-in-1-year" fleet. The possibilities are endless.Well.. except for Q-ships. Ok, I mentioned them again.
Please share any ideas you have about this.
