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Topic: Stinger (Read 8555 times)
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Angelfish
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #30 on: July 28, 2009, 01:14:29 am » |
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To be honest, i'm more for ditching the entire 'crew is hull' principle. That way, only one kohr ah per ship is viable and you won't have the problems with the earthling and androsynth remaining with 2 and 4 of them while crew has gone to 1 .
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Lukipela
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The Ancient One
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #31 on: July 28, 2009, 09:34:48 am » |
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To be honest, i'm more for ditching the entire 'crew is hull' principle. That way, only one kohr ah per ship is viable and you won't have the problems with the earthling and androsynth remaining with 2 and 4 of them while crew has gone to 1  . This works well because there is no such canon principle. It's just handwaving by people who don't like the crew concept. The Syreen special, commander Hayes tale of serving on board a Scout, the difference between M:bots and Slylandro, the actual buying of crew in SC2, the plundering of crew from colonies in SC1 and so forth all indicate that it is actual crew.
There has also been a lot of debate on the number of Kohr-Ah on board a ship. The general consensus seems to be that since the Kohr-Ah were supposed to be the Dnyarri workers and the warriors they may have had their territorial instinct bred out of them, unlike the green Dnyarri thinkers and organizers who they might have preferred to keep asocial so that they don't manage to organise an uprising. So there might be 40 Kohr-ah, or there might be sentient droids that need to be sentient to be advanced enough.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #34 on: July 28, 2009, 04:37:17 pm » |
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Man, there should totally be special dialogs you can have with captured members of any of the races. It's a shame that would have been way too complicated to do. Maybe for 2.0... or maybe they're too mind-blasted to be responsive?
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spinsane
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #36 on: July 28, 2009, 05:17:01 pm » |
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I tend to think the Korh-Ah must have had the territorial instinct bred out of them. They don't take slaves and there are obviously a full crew on their ships. Otherwise, as others pointed out, the Syreen song wouldn't work. You can capture their crew and take them back to the starbase and sell them. Or trade them for Druuge goods. That would indicate real life forms.
Gameplay > Realism. Anything dealing with crew, in the game, just doesn't correlate directly to canon. The mechanics of melee and the special abilities are quite a bit of fun as is. There is no need to try and force a correlation when it's much more likely just a gameplay feature to keep combat simple. Thus, anything carried over from combat would also need to be simplified in the story mode.
It could be possible that 'crew' includes both staff and the hull of a ship. Who knows, if you dump a bunch of psionics into a Kohr-Ah, it may just flail about, knocking off pieces of its ship that are good enough for a penetrator to utilize. In other situations, as crew leave a ship, they may just be taking pieces of it with them, only to let go of them as they float in space. Is there any canon that says that the number of crew that a syreen picks up is 1 to 1 with the real-live staff on the ship?
The Tobermoon arrives at Sol with full crew, even though the Captain of the ship died. The 1900 staff limit can be broken without Shofixti.
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Angelfish
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #37 on: July 28, 2009, 05:59:40 pm » |
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To be honest, i'm more for ditching the entire 'crew is hull' principle. That way, only one kohr ah per ship is viable and you won't have the problems with the earthling and androsynth remaining with 2 and 4 of them while crew has gone to 1  . This works well because there is no such canon principle. It's just handwaving by people who don't like the crew concept. The Syreen special, commander Hayes tale of serving on board a Scout, the difference between M:bots and Slylandro, the actual buying of crew in SC2, the plundering of crew from colonies in SC1 and so forth all indicate that it is actual crew. The Syreen special will still work and overall effectiveness of a ship will decrease when crew is lost, and thus making it easier to kill. The commander hayes tale is still right, he DID serve on a scout. Ofcourse it is. He just didn't count as a hitpoint, but if he should die it would undermine the effectiveneess of the ship and therefore make it easier to kill. The buying of crew in SC2.. same story, you need crew to operate your ship. Less crew means less effectiveness and no crew means your ship is defenseless and prolly self destructs.
I already imagine the job interview that Hayes had with the Ur-quan commander delegated to Sol. "So... what did you do on board that scout?" "Well.. not much. The ship pretty much only needs a captain to fly, and I just served as a hitpoint." "A what?" "A hitpoint. Meaning the shots from other ships would kill me first, and then the other 4 shofixti on the ship, and lastly, the captain upon which the ship would be destroyed." "Ahh.. okay... well I guess being a hitpoint is sufficient experience to become starbase commander! You're hired!"
So all in all, crew does have an effect on when your ship will be destroyed, but the actual hitpoints of a ship are measured in hull strength, not in crew.
There has got to be something more for crew to do on a ship that haves an effect on its operation, except just being a red shirt. For future star control games I'd like to have a system where the hull strength is influenced by weaponry, but additionally shots on a ship might kill crewmembers because they get burned, sucked into the vacuum of space etc . When the ship is destroyed is determined by hull strength, but the actual crewmembers determine the overall effectiveness of your ship. For example crew working in the engine room of the ship could improve the speed, accelleration and fuel consumption of the ship. Or crew working in the weapons bays would improve the refire rate, energy consumption and tracking systems of the weaponry.
There has also been a lot of debate on the number of Kohr-Ah on board a ship. The general consensus seems to be that since the Kohr-Ah were supposed to be the Dnyarri workers and the warriors they may have had their territorial instinct bred out of them, unlike the green Dnyarri thinkers and organizers who they might have preferred to keep asocial so that they don't manage to organise an uprising. So there might be 40 Kohr-ah, or there might be sentient droids that need to be sentient to be advanced enough.
Still, it's impossible for a race (in this case the brown ur-quan) to become spacefaring, construct spaceships, gain technology if there isn't atleast some form of cooperation between them. And with the abscence of technology in the first few years of Ur-quan sentience, there has got to be some form of way that multiple ur-quan could work together. Probably they DID work together, accepting all the risks that it involved. Probably there were a lot of fights and brawls in their first factories, and probably a lot of those fights resulted in ur-quan dying or severely getting hurt.,but it was neccesary to advance the race.
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« Last Edit: July 28, 2009, 06:01:43 pm by Angelfish »
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Anarch Cassius
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #38 on: July 28, 2009, 07:37:36 pm » |
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I don't think the logic was that they are hitpoints but that as long as you have crew you can perform emergency repairs and make do. Obviously hull strength exists, it's just totally abstracted in combat. Damage to the hull means people die and people dying means less ability to maintain integrity of the ship.
Of course any way you slice it, the fact that a ship with only it's captain is as effective (until it gets hit again) as a ship with a fully intact crew and hull doesn't make for much realism and is less interesting. Of course with SC1 being ancient and SC2 having been over budget and deadline anyway I can see why we haven't had such effects to date.
It would be very interesting if you could have crew, probably specialized skilled crew, boost various aspects of the ship while they remain alive. It would give you room to customize and improve the function of ship and make it so the ship actually perform more poorly once damaged.
Another similair idea I've had is to have it be possible for ships to loose systems from damage. Think of the first Ilwrath ship or Tanaka and Katana's scouts, a ship could be left with a reasonable amount of crew but have important systems damaged or offline. Figure out a system to determine such damage and apply penalties that reduce a ship's capabilities in exactly the opposite of the way upgrades and crew would improve it. Perhaps such effects can be caused (tactics crew targeting well) and mitigated (engieering making fixes) by effective crew.
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Angelfish
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #40 on: July 28, 2009, 08:58:35 pm » |
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"So... what did you do on board that scout?" "Well.. not much. The ship pretty much only needs a captain to fly, and I just served as a hitpoint." "A what?" "A hitpoint. Meaning the shots from other ships would kill me first, and then the other 4 shofixti on the ship, and lastly, the captain upon which the ship would be destroyed." "Ahh.. okay... well I guess being a hitpoint is sufficient experience to become starbase commander! You're hired!" I lol'd I really like the idea of systems penalties/loss and it shouldn't be that difficult to implement as a mod . the targeting , on the other hand , is a whole deal harder , most likely impossible in this base code structure . I actually meant the targeting of the homing weapons, not the targeting of the regular weapons . This should be easy enough to implement.
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CelticMinstrel
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #42 on: July 30, 2009, 05:47:48 pm » |
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Actually, the Ur-Quan certainly did manage to work together enough to create the beginnings of a space-faring civilization. This is from dialog with them, so it's canon.
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Lukipela
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #43 on: July 31, 2009, 04:20:27 pm » |
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The Syreen special will still work and overall effectiveness of a ship will decrease when crew is lost, and thus making it easier to kill. The commander hayes tale is still right, he DID serve on a scout. Ofcourse it is. He just didn't count as a hitpoint, but if he should die it would undermine the effectiveneess of the ship and therefore make it easier to kill. The buying of crew in SC2.. same story, you need crew to operate your ship. Less crew means less effectiveness and no crew means your ship is defenseless and prolly self destructs.
I'm not sure if your arguing with me or not, but if you are you've misunderstood my post. I was commenting on the "There is no crew, there is only hull" concept that you were thinking of ignoring and agreeing with you. What the crew does I don't know. As I recall, the last time this issue was raised, back when someone else was making a mod, that was the main argument against there being crew on board; "What so each hit magically kills them and then the ship explodes?". I'd assume they seal damages and bulkheads, reroute power and whatever, just like you're apparently thinking.
While I applaud your efforts to make a more realistic melee, I'd also advise you to be careful. Part of the fun in melee is that it's simple, if you start adding crumple zone, tons of different efficiencies and whatnot you'll make it more complex. And once it's complex enough the illusion tends to break even more and people start nitpicking and demanding more realism, until you've got a space battle simulation, which might not be as fun as the original arcade battle.
Regarding the Ur-Quan, of course the original brown ones could work together. How would they have built a civilisation otherwise? They didn't like it though and had some problems with it, which is presumably why the Kzer-Za still avoid each other if they can. Or maybe their territorial instinct was strengthened just as the Kohr-Ah instinct was weakened?
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What's up doc?
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Death 999
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Re: Stinger
« Reply #44 on: July 31, 2009, 06:33:55 pm » |
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I don't see why bureaucrats would have heightened territorial...
never mind.
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