Inventive Dingo forums

I intend this thread to be used as a place to discuss what you would like to see in MI. Any ideas, any ideas at all.

What I would like to see, myself, is a little customization. The ability to name your race or home planet would be cool, or the ability to choose your color while in the multiplayer lobby. I'd kinda like to have a little longer name while in-game, I always run out of room when choosing a name + title (Emperor Boris XXI; God-King of Boreesia).

I'd like to see the ability to record matches into a replay file, and the re-run them later. We just had an awesome match where there was only one planet per player (And obviously we all started on it) and we were all one turn away from each other - it became surprisingly tactical, and it's a pity we can't show other people how simple mechanics and a simple map can lead to so much tactical depth.

(Also, I won it and want to brag. <_< >_>)

I love setting up games like that, Jp. Even in singleplayer against the AI it's fun. :)

All good ideas, thanks. Keep 'em coming!

Me, I'd like to see more moddability in the game. I liken this game a lot to Galcon, but the two things that this game has over me compared to Galcon is the friendly community (and developer), and that the game can be played at a more leisurely pace, yet maintaining the complexity

But, like Galcon, I'd hope to see users being able to create their own mods too - maybe develop their own upgrades aside from the default production upgrade, or being able to mod diplomacy options with the computer

I mean sure, these are feasible ideas that can be implemented into the game, but I think that the game's delicately balanced enough right now, so it's probably more suitable to classify it under user preferences

Variable turn time limits? We play a 30 min game, with a large map, 50 sec for a turn, so at  the start I need only few seconds, but in the middle of the game this time is a little short, in the last minutes it is not enough to move all the ships. Is it easy make a little change to put a variable turn time?
Fabio

More moddability would certainly be nice. Some of the things you mention would require heavy amounts of scripting support, though, which is a bit of a problem. Galcon has the advantage here because it's written in Python...

Variable turn time limits is a good idea. Added to the list.

How about some sort of defensive facilities for planets?  Something that you can upgrade like a factory, but instead it boosts the power of ships in orbit.  Maybe even prevent small fleets from taking planets (I would have a pretty high defense facility level to enemy ship ratio for this though, perhaps 2-3 levels to defeat 1 ship).

Fog (Nebula?) of War would be nice.  Make it a little bit more of a surprise when you come across an enemy player's planets.

There really should be some more achievements that can only be acquired in Multiplayer.  I got all but the "Perfect!" achievement in the first few hours of play.  Perhaps something based on the number of human or AI players in the game?  I remember an old computer game ad that showed a picture of a computer chip with the caption that said "This opponent is programed to be challenging".  Then it showed a picture of a crazed looking man with the caption of "This opponent wants to rip your lungs out".  That would be a good basis for a pair of achievements, IMO.   ;D

I haven't played too much with customization yet, so this might already be possible.  How about an option to start each faction with multiple planets in clusters?

This idea is probably just the MoO2/GalCiv2 player in me talking, but what about random events that affect the entire map or maybe just one faction?  Nothing game breaking, just minor things like a small bonus or penalty.

Thats all I can really think of in one sitting.   :)

I really like Vang's Fog of War suggestion. It would go nicely with my idea - a radar system that would be used in gameplay like Starcraft's Terran Comsat Station (http://www.battle.net/scc/terran/bbuild.shtml).
   If the player elects to not build a factory on a planet (as it stands, those small planets sometimes aren't worth upgrading or fighting for control of), they can instead build a scanner. During their turn they can use the scanner on a patch of sky, which would temporarily reveal enemy ships in a small radius that are either orbiting planets or en route to a destination. With fog of war, it would also reveal the locations of planets in fog, but when the scan is no longer active in the area, those planets would appear neutral, meaning occupation is uncertain. How often a scanner can be used (or even available at all) could be set in the lobby options.
   Flavor-wise, think of it like SETI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI)'s network of radio telescopes.

okay i have a idea well its not my idea.. nor origional.. think the game risk and you ahev win :)

continents (or int his case planets groups for bonus to production )

cards.. like in risk

just an idea.. whatcha thinkin?

How would fog of war work if you can only send ships to planets? :)  It would have to be carefully designed, or you'd run the risk of sometimes splitting the map into clusters of planets from which no other planets were visible (and therefore reachable).

I think that the best way for it to work is if you could see dim outlines of planets (This is why I would call it 'Nebula of War') but you could not see who owned them or moves made around them.  You wouldn't know the names of the planets until after you've sent a fleet there.

Hmm, one could make it a benefit of taking another empire's homewold that you would lift the Nebula of War from all that Empire's planets. 

Makes sense. I'll think about it. :)

Idea: "Save map" function. Sometimes the randomly generated maps are really good, and I think would be really interesting to save, play again, and modify. Could add an interesting spin to map development.

Heh, minus, I got on the forums just now to suggest that.  I guess you beat me to it. 

Chris how exactly does the map generation work for random maps?  Does it make a ini file for the map that is delete after the game? Or is it some other system?

It works on the internal map representation directly rather than going through ini files. That is an interesting idea though. :)

This means it won't happen, right? :(

It means I've noted it down, but it is quite a way down the list. Under all the crash bugs and rendering errors and some of the other nifty feature requests. :)

heh, okay. I'll have to stick to taking printscreens and trying to guess how far apart to make planets.

If it helps, the formula for the number of turns it takes to get between two planets separated by distance d (calculated as in Pythagoras, i.e. sqrt(deltaX*deltaX + deltaY*deltaY)) is floor(floor(d/200)*m), where m is set by the "ship speed" setting: 2 for slow, 1 for normal, 0.5 for fast. (The "instant" ship speed setting just sets the ETA to 1, always.)

"floor" means round down to the nearest whole number. The distance is also rounded down immediately after being calculated (because this is all done in integer maths, except for the multiplication by m).

So at normal ship speed settings, planets separated by anything up to 200 units are reachable from each other in one turn. Distances of 201-400 units take two turns. Distances of 401-600 units take three turns. And so on.

Edit: The equation is right, but the last paragraph was wrong: Distances up to 399 units can be travelled in 1 turn. Distances of 400-599 units take 2 turns. Distances of 600-799 units take 3 turns.

Isn't this also affected by the size of planets? Like, distance is measured from edge to edge and not center to center?

Very Nice!!!! Save the random map,  drag and drop the planets,  save again and play it !!!
Fabio

It's measured centre to centre.

Idea: When a planet name appears in the chat window, clicking it selects the planet wherever it is. That way we can easily figure out what two people are talking about. This could, presumably, work for the "X defends Y" and "X conquers Y" messages as well.

It sounds a bit complex, but would be really useful for communication.  Similar to that would be the ability to ctrl+click or some other button on a planet, to copy the planet's name into chat.

@Minus: I had that exact idea last night. Spooky!

@Kumlekar: Not a bad idea, could be useful for the harder-to-spell planet names. :)

Awhile ago I requested a 'talk' message whenever someone said anything. What do you think of this one? All I did was take menuclick1.wav and up the speed, tempo, and pitch a little bit until I had the effect I wanted.

PS: probably wouldn't be necessary in the lobby. Also, since part of the point of it was to be able to call attention to chats that might appear during battles, it would be annoying if game messages triggered it as well.

I prefer to leave all the sound design to Duncan Watt, since I basically gave him full control of it and his name's prominently on the credits screen. I did ask him about supplying an appropriate sound effect when you originally suggested it; I'll ping him again and see where that's at.

In the meantime, I just realised code support does actually exist for this already; if you put a file called chat1.wav in data\base\sounds then it will be played when a chat message is received. You can also add more files named chat2.wav, chat3.wav, etc. and the code will pick a randomly-numbered sound effect from that set. Alternatively, OGG files with the name naming scheme (chat1.ogg, chat2.ogg, chat3.ogg, etc.) can be substituted instead of WAV files.

Hm, sounds like that should be a community release, perhaps it can be included if we can get a map pack together.

I imagine there will be an "official" one at some point. You're more than welcome to provide alternatives of course. :)

Wow, this worked wonderfully. Thanks!

No problem. :)  I just wish I'd remembered about that feature before, then I could have told you earlier.

Duncan sent me the attached sound file. What do you reckon?

Why'd you choose .ini as the file type?

Um... I didn't. That's an OGG file. ???

Sounds good! Thanks Duncan!

Oh, I should have been more specific.  I mean, .ini for the map files.

Oh, right. :)

I chose .ini for the maps because it was convenient at the time. I might have instead chosen XML, but at the time I was looking for one, nobody had written an XML library for the D programming language (although there are now several), and I couldn't find a good simple plain-C XML library. I could have used a C++ XML library, but I didn't want to bother interfacing with it. There was, however, a native D library for reading ini files, so that ended up being the easiest way to go.

Whats the advantage of a .ini over, say, a .txt?

The INI file format is a standard format for representing structured data. (Although, unlike XML for example, it's a de-facto rather than an official standard as far as I know.) The extension ".ini" is merely a convention, like all file extensions are. I could have required maps to have a .txt extension despite containing data in the INI file format, and no actual harm would have resulted. Or I could have specified a .xml extension, or a .smeg extension. It's all just convention. Naming them ".ini" merely signals, to people in the know, that these files are expected to be INI files.

The extension ".txt" is also a convention; one used for unstructured (human-readable) plain text. I couldn't have chosen unstructured text as the map file format, because computer programs require their data files to be structured; otherwise they can't extract meaningful information from the data files.

People will sometimes ask for a ".txt file" or a ".doc" as shorthand for "an unstructured plain text file" or "a Word document", but that's just because they're being lazy. "Unstructured plain text file" is a bit of a mouthful, after all. ;D

Does that answer your question?

IDEA: Add "Blind game" option to lobby - essentially changes every player's name to their color, so you don't know who's playing what. This is for those times when someone (http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197973982160) (:P) decides to attack me first in 3-person games when the other player declares they are new. This would also require ignoring preferred colors, shuffling them as the game starts.

I have the feeling there's a backstory behind this request. :P

Added to the list!

Well, that particular clause is from a joke Kumlekar and I had in-game the other day. But it really stems from play-by-email Diplomacy again, where the meta-gaming prevention is anonyminity.

Minus just got tired of being the first to die in three player games.

Idea: Option to auto-screenshot at the end of a multiplayer match, for later comparison or review.

You mean a screenshot of the entire map, I assume, rather than just what's currently in view?

Yeah, with ship numbers and stuff revealed. Maybe player names too. I'm not being terribly specific because whatever you do would be useful.

Okie dokie!

hm, is there a way to save the game replay currently for multiplayer games? I fugre thats not exactly hard to add, but without current related functionality, it could be a pain.

There isn't, and it's probably slightly harder than you'd think to implement. :)  I can certainly see how to do it, but it's a reasonable-sized feature.

It is on the to-do list already.

I have another sound request. Sometimes people get surprised when the game ends - maybe some sort of warning blips that fire with a message in the chat box at five minutes remaining in the game, two minutes, one minute, and at thirty seconds, or when there are five turns remaining, 3 turns, and final turn. Like, "***Warning! Five minutes until end of game!" in reddish text.

Yeah, not a bad idea at all.

This is strongly seconded by me.  Minus and I were playing on Milky way 6B against a sicilian player, and were completely blindsided when the game ended and he won.  We could have turned the game around within the next few turns too.  Minus had just taken his largest production factory, and I was one turn away from his second largest one. If I had realized the game was about to end, i would have attaked sooner rather than concentrating my forces for a few turns.

I'm not sure whether this was an intentional design decision or not, but it seems strange to me that you can fly 'through' an occupied planet, skipping it and any defenses completely. Doesn't usually come up in random maps, but maps with rifts function unintuitively. Would it be possible to at least add an option to not allow that behavior?

Interesting idea.  I think that being able to pass through planets better simulates a 3d space though.  From a technical standpoint, I'm not sure how hard that would be, but I guess a modification of the rift code, combined with a change in the origin and ending points for pathing between planets would allow for it.

It's intentional. Ships in transit are "moving through hyperspace" (which is also why they can't be redirected mid-flight). The location at which they're displayed is merely a way to visually represent their progress, not an actual plotting of their real-space position.

I realise it can look a bit odd to have ships moving through planets like that. At one point during development I experimented with moving ships to one side when they were intersecting planets, but I decided that actually looked worse.

Hello.

I know, that's a bit of necro, but the thread was still on the main page. And what I'll do is exactly what is in the title : give some general ideas. Also, seing the age of the game and as chriss says, the stage it is in its life cycle, I doubt that so much work is likely to be added. But who knows, if Chris decides to give a last commercial strike to the game, some minor additions might be worth it...


So, I have a few suggestions :
- It has been proposed a long time ago, that when clicking on a line in the chat log, the given plant would be highlighted. I really second that. I actually, I would propose something else : when clicking a planet, the corresponding lines in the chat could be highlighted. So it would be easier to guess what might be waiting for us on an enemy planet. (Edit : or displaying somewhere on the planet panel the last event that occured there, with the turn number. It is probably much easier in terms of programming)
- Rally point are great for automation. However, I wonder if it would not be possible to add another type : repeating the last convoy (instead of sending ships above when there is more than a quantity, it would keep sending a fixed quantity). It would be usefull to keep scouting a few given planets. (but this would create some interface issues : how to select those repeating orders...)
(Edit : Maybe just a "scout" button, to automatically send 1 ship every turn to a planet might be enough...)

- Another one as been proposed already : a radar that could be built on planets. This would change the gameplay a lot and might require to change AI. So it would probably be out of scope. However, the idea is that a planet with a radar stops producing ships, but can see the fleets flying around it. The higher the ships production would normally be, the wider the range.

- Also, if planet swapping is a problem, maybe should a planet not produce the turn it has been taken. So keep moving forward whithout stopping would be more deadly...

Well, anyway, that's a good game. I feared that it would be too much like Pax Galaxia, but the fact the we can move anywhere we want adds a lot. Thanks !

Hi Flap, welcome to the forum! Thanks for your thoughts.

There are some good ideas in there, definitely. As you said, it's unlikely that many new things will make it into the game, but who knows. Maybe one day! :)

Oh, yeah, I understand that.

Though, after more experience playing, the biggest improvement would be regarding AI... The fact that it very often fully leaves a planet, leaving 0 armies to guard behind makes it very easy to develop : just send 1 ship every turn to as many AI controlled planets as you can, and you would grow quick.

Yep. The AI could definitely do with some love. :)

Hello hello !
How are sales going since the game is on Desura ?
Ok, seeing from the website and the comments on indiedb, things must still be very quiet there... But hey, is there any chance that IA gets the slight beefing up I mentioned in previous post ?  ;)
I am sure that if we doe a bit of brain storming, we could find some good strategies.

Ah too bad that this game is not more successful : there are many competitors which look relatively close ( auralux, galcon, star baron, eufloria), but Mayhem Intergalactic is the only one which has automated supply lines, fog of war, and most important : is turn based.

I know, right? Totally superior. ;)

I have a list of AI improvements I'd like to try out some day. I'll keep you posted if/when I get around to implementing them.

Hmm. Totally superior. indeed  ::)

Well, I have just set up a game with few planets on a huge map. That was cool : most planets were at 2 or 3 turns apart from their closest neighbour; except some clusters. There is quiet some tension when you try to guess how populated will the planet be in 3 or 4 turns, and try to plan some expansion an reinforcement 4 or 5 turns away.

Anyway, I might try to write down the some strategies a bit later, that could give you some more ideas.

Heh. :)

Yes, that's an interesting way to play for sure. Galcon has presets for generating different kinds of games, which is a feature that would probably be worth copying, just to expose people to the range of experiences you get with different parameters. That would definitely be one such scenario.

It's always nice to discuss strategies, I'll look forward to your thoughts.

Game modes. Interesting.

That's really a fun exercise to imagine what could be done ! I fell like in Desktop Dungeons, were the developers have tried to twist their basic concept in every directions possible.

Blind
I could imagine a totally blind mode : You don't know the results of the battle were you are not involved. And thus you only know who owns a planet when you have a fight there (the colour could gradually fade away as last fight there is getting older).

Or one where you see fleets which are flying at given distance from your planet (maybe in proportion with the number of remaining ships)

Race
Another could be the race : you have a given number of turns. The player with highest ships production capacity wins. (players could start with more ships)

Duel
Close to that idea, pushed a bit further : Each player have one or more planets, with more ships than vanilla game. They give orders on turn 1. Then we wait until they are resolved (every fleet have travelled to destination) an the winner is the one with the most production capacity.

Bureaucracy
Still that idea, pushed a bit further. But it would require some change in the interface and game logic : Each player (human and AI) play a few turn as if they were alone on the map. They do actually enter their orders these few turns. Then, the orders of each player are being played, and the one with the biggest production capacity in he end wins. The fun part, is that you need to plan in advance without knowing if the enemy will be there, leading to catastrophic failures.
In terms of interface, when players are entering their orders, ships are being moved as usual, except that there is no fight. Instead of proposing to send a given number of ships, it proposes to send a proportion. Rally points command would work in the same way as normal games.

Exploration
We don't know were planets are at the beginning of the game.
The player has a scanning capacity in proportion of the number of ships (area scanned proportional to the number of ships).
We can launch a ship in a give direction from the planet (maybe with a message for confirmation). It will keep going in that direction for ever. The more ships are being sent, the larger scanning area is.

Ping pong
Same as Galcon (I haven't tried it though). The speed and direction of the planet depends on the origin and quanity of ships being sent at/from it (so a player can choose how to move a planet).

Exploration and ping pong could be fun when mixed together.