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Spaced Cowboy
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Dallas TX
Nov 2001 time: 23:21
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quote: Originally posted by Straybow
"Fuel clerks in space," hah hah! Great description. I've played with the demo many times, but I never got to turn 100 and felt a desire to fork out $42.95 to continue dragging population between colonies and fleets between supply depots.
SE4 ships run on "Supplies," which apparently includes cheeseburgers and jolt cola. There is no sharing between ships. The whole fleet is limited to the slowest ship (which is speed=1 if out of Supplies). SE4 does have Solar Panels which add Supplies every turn you're in a system with a star. It is cheap tech available long before quantum reactors; I pity the fool who ignores it.
SE4 fuel use is 10 units per engine per sector, and movement is 1 sector per engine (plus bonus sectors for tech, etc). It isn't often you build ships with less than the max 6 engines so fuel use doesn't vary. It was the same in SE3 (which I also didn't upgrade from the unregistered shareware demo).
Supply is a real bugaboo in game design. Land units include thousands of personnel and hundreds of vehicles, so it can be assumed some of them are dedicated to supply tasks.
But ships inherently stradle the strategic-tactical divide. One ship is big enough to be a strategic unit, but it attacks and defends as a tactical unit. MoO2 had freighters but they only modeled intercolony supply. Had ships required freighter support it would have been a much better supply model. |
Not entirely correct. If you have a ship (or ships) that is out of supplies and you join it into a fleet with plenty o' supplies, then the supplies will redistribute throughout the new fleet. However, I believe that it takes and end turn to do the redistribution.
I agree that making sure supplies are where you need them is MM hell. I personally liked the Imperium Galactum (old, old C64 version) method. Your ships would lose 5% efficiency every sector that they moved. They would repair back to 100% in your own systems.
They would fight at whatever efficiency penalty that they had at the time, however, the penalty did not affect movement. This gave you two options for scouting (or attacking): regular short range missions, and somewhat sacrafical long range missions. Makes you wonder if any of these new guys have ever played any of the old games.
R:PM
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