Movement in MoO3?

[Grumbold]

MoO2 ship capacity was based on the space station ship capacity. Since it didn't care which sector your ships were actually in it can be supposed that the space station supported the necessary space tugs etc to supply the warships.

Making them invisible does prevent you from attacking them. One old (but classic) game I played on the Atari ST treated things far more like wet-navy. You could allocate ships to raid enemy commerce/supply ships and others to protect your own. Each turn this kind of submarine v destroyer combat was done and had as much importance in its way as the maneuvering of the main battle fleets which you did on the star map.

[Spaced Cowboy]

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

[Straybow]

[loads up demo save game]
[tests premise]
[confirms sharing of supplies]
[smacks head]

D'oh! I so rarely split fleets I never noticed. I knew there was no way to manually transfer supplies from one ship to another, which now seems even more dumb if fleets can share.

[vmxa1]

Well you would not say that if you were ever in the Navy and had to sent supplies from one ship to another.

[Grumbold]

That's true, but docking in space is considerably easier than doing so mid ocean because you don't have the wind and waves threatening to wreck you. Midair fuel transfer is already routine.

[wervdon]

The same link I found for custom races explains what the original plan was for this at least:

http://www.orionsector.com/faq.shtml

Star lanes are just faster.

The galaxy map is 3d, meaning you can rotate it, zoom in, etc. But they pointed out that real galaxies tend to be flat discs anyways Im assuming the smaller stars in the screen shot mentioned are further "down" in the galaxy disc than the large ones.

Course the stuff on that page is definately older as it mentions stuff thats definately been cut, but it does at least show where they started from design wise.

[Straybow]

Of course, galaxies tend to be a little bigger than just a couple hundred stars, too. Graphics are 3D, star map is really 2D. There is an illusion of depth, but it wasn't going to be included in movement or distance calcs. Or something like that.

vmxa1, if sharing is automatic within a fleet, it is dumb that no means to transfer Supplies at will exists. Sharing cargo space, satellite/fighter hangars, etc, is automatic within a fleet. Transfering all cargo and unit types between ships at will is implemented.

[vmxa1]

I all I was saying is that we transfered supplies and people between ship in the Navy, so it can be done. Space walking would allow it as well. This being so it is fine by me if it is automactic or we need a tech to have it done. In trek universe they have teleports. Forgive me if I lost track of the original question/statement, but I thought it was that supply sharing should not be implemented as it can be done.

[dexters]

With all due respect guys, the quesiton was about movement in Moo 3, not SE or whatever crap you guys are talking about (pardon my french).

A lot of the subsequent comments did not even bother to state which game it being talked about leading to a reader like me to be genuinely confused.

Please, this is a help thread, or was supposed to be. Being highjacked by fans of an obscure Moo clone isn't something I was expecting. Now, can someone please answer the question? or at least repost the answers AIMED at the question?

[vmxa1]

Well actually this is just a bull session as there is no Moo3 yet so we do not have any facts or experiences. When you consider the low number of people posting here, we were allowed to stray, sorry.

[Straybow]

Hey, dexters, don't you know that it is our obligation to drive a thread off topic? If we could just figure out how to do it in the initial post we'd have it made.

If you want a relevant answer (harumph!) follow wervdon's link.

[Grumbold]

Yeah the original question had been asked and answered to the extent we know it by about hte sixth post. The subsequent diversions have been about how sensible the MoO3 movement and support model is.

[Spaced Cowboy]

And how it compares to other games!

[moomin]

This forum would be next to useless without topic drift.

Once they release Moo3, let's all do a big, co-ordinated effort to stay on-topic. For a day, or so.

[Grumbold]

Absolutely! What was the topic again?