SC2Mapster

You could had slower moving torpedos or mines that are launched by a ship. Give the missile/torpedo/mine a hit point value and make it destroyable so that ships with fast firing lasers would be able to shoot them out of the sky where as ships with slow firing weapons like the bc's heavy laser would be more susceptible to them. Having random spell abilities scaled with the quality of a ships tech in different areas might also make the game more dynamic. a chance a getting an emp spell for investing heavily in shields or something like that would make it much more exciting and increase the number of tactical situations you would be up against. The version out now seems a little like armies in warcraft 2, where it only mattered how many guys you could pump out and how fast. The advantages gained from good maneuvering, timing, and strategy seem really linear, and i'm hoping the new version will make this map more popular, because i really do love the base concept. And maybe if you could make some sort of inter-game bonus for various things like defeating the aliens or conquering another player etc.

Generally-speaking, effective-ish and realistic-ish space weapons usually come in the following forms:

• Guided Missiles / Torpedoes
• Proximity Lock-on Mines
• Long-distance Electronic Warfare (possibly transmitted by one of the above missiles/mines)
• Particle Beam weapons (including Lasers and Masers)
• Straight old mass-driver weaponry (guns in space)
• "Plasma-ball" weapons for close range combat (e.g. Star Wars Turbolasers, Freespace Plasma Cannons, etc.)

From top to bottom they're pretty much in order of how practical or useful they would be in real-life space combat. Note that in a purely realistic present-day setting, using anything other than missiles and mines for space warfare is downright stupid and wasteful.

Beam weapons diffuse too fast to cause any damage over reasonable firing range (after a few hundred kilometers, which is a "reasonable range" for real-life space combat, the strongest laser weapons we're currently capable of building would deal less damage than just the light reflecting off the hull of our own ship, i.e. absolutely no damage whatsoever), and for obvious reasons over the same ranges any unguided projectile weapons (mass drivers, plasmaballs) are even more useless since by the time they travel that distance to reach the target the enemy has had several hours already to dodge the shot (not even mentioning that with current technology, plasmaball weapons are probably unfeasible, and even if we could make one the ball would lose integrity and dissolve over a much shorter distance than laser/particlebeam weapons).

Of course, that's for real-life scenarios, not for Sci-Fi. All of the above weapons are commonly seen in various degrees of power and rarity in most SF universes. Suspension of disbelief (or generous application of Phlebotinum, preferably in the form of Minovsky Particles) is a great tool to avoid all the headaches related to realistic space warfare.

Naturally, each of these weapons then has different variants depending on what they're supposed to be used against - small ultra-rapid rotating turrets firing small pinpoint accurate lasers to burn through missiles' warheads and fightercraft's cockpits to disable them both, or huge fixed proton beam cannons that take a ton of space and can't be aimed without rotating the entire ship, but corrode the target ship's hull and then wreak havoc on their electronic systems, and then everything in-between (including the mighty neutron singularity beam that simply warps gravity and matter at the target point through a constant stream of massless particles being shot at the enemy and condensing into massive neutronic bose-einstein condensates on impact).

If the above isn't enough to spark off your imagination, I've got tons more where that came from.

Cant believe i am commenting again, but i finnaly remember the entire point i came here. I wanted to suggest Planetary Defenses. Im sure you can figure the rest out your self.

oh and dont wanna spam this page, but i also forgot what does the Phyics, Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematics do in the Reasearch Centre. No one i have spoken to knows this.

This game is absoutly amazing. I would buy SC2 just to play this MOD. very hard learning curve and a low player base but still a good game. There is 2 things i would recomend, 1 is there a way you can make it so we can name are planets so its easyier to remember, i ussaly remember because of the area its in and i keep all my planets under a tab but a name would help. 2, is there a way to keep track of how much money you put into a research, it gets a little confusing when you are reasearching alot at once, and you dont want to accidentaly put 1 mill twice into an upgrade, enless how much money you put into a reasearch stacks up for your quality.

Hey guys this is an Awesome Map. Really impressed by what Hookah has done with the game. Hookah, there is a hull research bug which is pretty major. I posted all the info with error messages and screenshots on a ticket. Please take a look at it and let me know if it can be fixed. Cheers! KillaKay, NA Servers

@FatsackTony:

Hookah604 already mentioned that colony management is going to be change from a set current percentage to an improvement-over-time system. Thus, you probably want to wait and see how this system works/plays out first.

Just wanted to chime in here and say I love this map, and am actively promoting the channel The Final Frontier on the NA server, hope to see more players there. Also an idea I have for managing the colony development would be to be able to lock certain colonies, so that when you select apply to all, they remain unaffected. This would help for colonies dedicated to mining, production, etc, enabling you to manipulate your empire at large, without having to go back a reset the specific colonies you have doing certain jobs.

I came across an old old game, back then (16 year ago) it was awesome strategy, there are a lot of awesome ideas so if u have time you could go trought this game, it could be very helpful :P

http://www.abandonia.com/games/221/ (you need dos box if u want to play it:D)

Also, and random idea... I would like to make use of probes in a new way, (or some other ships) i would like to make them able to research asteroids or suns for data that might improve your knoweledge dempending on the quality of tech used on probes, or make them able to dig asteroids resulting in random effect (for example: nothing happened, asteroid exploded dealing damage to probe, some alien artifact has been found (could be researched in order to increase your knoweledge or based on your konweledge it will offer u "random" tech) etc.) It would make time between waiting for population increase in times of peace more fun :P

That does sound like it would be very fun to play with, and is more fitting to the game's style than my previous idea. I'll be looking forward to version 2.0, especially with the new dialogs.