Thrawn's Revenge
Ascendancy [SoaSE] => Ascendancy Discussion => Topic started by: Lord Xizer on December 26, 2012, 11:09:33 PM
-
Will the Knight Hammer and Crimson Command VSDIIs make an appearance?
-
Wow, the rebel scum are nearly ready to play!!
-
Will the Knight Hammer and Crimson Command VSDIIs make an appearance?
If they do I know how I'd do them, but at the moment that isn't a huge concern.
Wow, the rebel scum are nearly ready to play!!
Empire of the Hand are actually the closest to being "playable," however today when doing some weapons testing on some frigates I got ambushed by an Imperial taskforce which quickly ended my testing.
-
:D
-
If they do I know how I'd do them, but at the moment that isn't a huge concern.
I would so love to get a hold of the Deep Core Warlords forces. I just love the Warlords of the Empire for some reason.
-
I would so love to get a hold of the Deep Core Warlords forces. I just love the Warlords of the Empire for some reason.
The most obvious way to include Warlords like this is with the NPFs you see running around in default Sins. You'll see stuff like, Raider Union, and Hypersomething or another. You just don't notice they're unique because they're all using Terran ships.
-
Hm, neat. It'd be nice for the Warlords to actually pack some serious punch as they tend to die off pretty fast as a minor faction in ICW(AI auto resolve I know)
-
Those aren't really factions per se, they're just the small independent groups of essentially indigenous forces, they aren't active on a "galactic" scale. Gameplay in Sins lacks some of the narrative tools that gameplay in EaW has. We can probably mod it so scenarios start with certain forces and planets for each desired faction and whatnot, but I'm not sure how well that would work considering that you can have multiple instances of each faction.
As it is, the different Warlords will probably be used as the names for the different instances of Imperial factions within the same game. So the player would be the Imperial Remnant and called whatever their username is, but then for the AI Remnant players they'd be called Warlord Zsinj, Admiral Teradoc, etc.
The alternative is to make each one into their own actual faction, but then there's no real difference between them aside from what you see in faction select. In order to create the Remnant as it is in the mod right now, and as we plan to develop it, we're drawing different aspects for tech from the different leaders in order to make a more complete faction with clear differences from the Hand and NR. If we were to create a faction for Teradoc, a faction for Thrawn a faction for Palpatine, etc, then we're not really doing much but adding factions that are lacking something, or which sort of blend into each other. The differences between a Zsinj faction and an Isard faction can be more prominently portrayed in ICW because of starting position, and because the research tree doesn't exist, but the opposite is true in Ascendancy; starting position means less, research means more. Considering that ingame there's the different faction tags and leader portraits, the other diversity is already effectively covered. It does mean you might have a faction apparently led by Warlord Zsinj with maybe a Galaxy Gun and a fleet of Crimson Command VSDs, but I don't think that becomes a huge issue in the context of the game, and certainly not worth the gameplay sacrifices to be made for the alternative.
There's some Imperial factions which would warrant their own faction because of some basic institutional differences. These would be the Pentastar Alignment, and *maybe* in the future a split between Palpatine and the other Imperials once we'd had a bit more time to develop them, but the factional differences there would probably be more akin to the differences between playing TEC Rebels vs TEC Loyalists than the difference between The NEw Republic and Imperial Remnant as it is.
I'd basically sum it up like this: We're somewhat less chronologically locked here, so to speak, which is neither a good nor a bad thing, simply different from what you're used to from our other work. So, where Imperial Civil War had gameplay more based around telling a narrative within a sandbox of a galaxy divided between a bunch of different factions (era system, story events, etc), Ascendancy essentially starts with that division aspect built in just by how many people are playing and the fact that more than one can play as each faction, so our focus here is to decide "what makes faction x faction x" aside from individual leader preferences. What this means specifically will be addressed as we progress and familiarize ourselves more with the possibilities and get it implemented. I've always tried to avoid making promises we can't keep.
Hopefully this makes sense. This is definitely still something that's a work and progress, and will be right up until we release and afterwards, so as with everything we'd love everyone's input on what it should all mean or what can be done with it. We definitely have some hardcore Imperial fans here so I'm sure a lot of you have input on that particular faction.
Edit: This goes pretty far beyond basic art progress, so I'm going to split it off into its own topic about the Remnant in general. No reason this discussion should be limited to the Admiral's Lounge.
Edit #2: Missed the specific reference to the Knight Hammer before. Heroes don't exist as such in Sins, however there's a few ways to do them. I don't know how far we're going down that road because there's some other aspects to it that we need to explore first, but as far as their application to SSDs there's some severe balance implications to the number of supers available at one time.
-
Gotcha, thanks for the info.
-
If there are separate Imperial factions or just a myriad of warlords, as the Imperial player do you plan on being able to conduct diplomacy with them, or would they just be in a state of constant war with you?
-
Interesting questions indeed.
-
Well an idea I had was that with the normal Empire you have it split into a myriad of factions like it was and each faction is at war with each other as well as the NR, but as an Imperial player you have the choice of choosing what Imperial faction/warlord you want to play and you have the option for diplomacy with the other warlords. In my mind it would work like Shogun Total War, in that you have some factions that are strong and some that are weak all going for the same goal and being able to use war and diplomacy. Also this way you could make the NR much smaller than the Empire, yet with the huge split they would have a fighting chance.
-
Well an idea I had was that with the normal Empire you have it split into a myriad of factions like it was and each faction is at war with each other as well as the NR, but as an Imperial player you have the choice of choosing what Imperial faction/warlord you want to play and you have the option for diplomacy with the other warlords. In my mind it would work like Shogun Total War, in that you have some factions that are strong and some that are weak all going for the same goal and being able to use war and diplomacy. Also this way you could make the NR much smaller than the Empire, yet with the huge split they would have a fighting chance.
So that would require several factions of the empire to be playable factions? I like the Shogun idea. However, in Sins, everyone starts out with one planet anyway so the republic being at a disadvantage depends on the number of enemy players and the factions picked for them.
yeah, I know, it's not a story telling kinda game.
-
No, it's not. I like the idea of doing the mod like Lavo did SoGE, in individually loadable parts. That way you could have a Core (IR/NR/EoTH), then work on developing the Vong, PA, anything else anyone wanted and be able to load them as you wanted, but not have to have them all load at the same time. My personal favorite part of the SoGE mod, that I load as much as I need and unload the rest.
-
So that would require several factions of the empire to be playable factions? I like the Shogun idea. However, in Sins, everyone starts out with one planet anyway so the republic being at a disadvantage depends on the number of enemy players and the factions picked for them.
yeah, I know, it's not a story telling kinda game.
That's a really neat idea.
-
However, in Sins, everyone starts out with one planet anyway so the republic being at a disadvantage depends on the number of enemy players and the factions picked for them.
You can make pre-made maps that have all the various planet developpment, ships, structures, etc. all pre-set.
In fact, there is even a way to make the map such that supply caps are entirely based off of the planets you control, like in EaW, however this only works reliably with premade maps. Essentially how this works is that all the game's stock artifacts are removed, and replaced with supply boosting "artifacts"; in premade maps specific planets can be set to have their own caps. Of course, in the interest of not having a bazillion files, having certain supply "classes", such as an industrial shipyard class for Rendili/Fondor and an ecumenopolis class for Coruscant/Alsakan for example. Additionally, though I would need a proof-of-concept to validate this, I believe one could set planets to have no purchasable exploration units which would make the supply cache instantly found upon planetary colonization, but once again only for pre-made maps.
-
Well an idea I had was that with the normal Empire you have it split into a myriad of factions like it was and each faction is at war with each other as well as the NR, but as an Imperial player you have the choice of choosing what Imperial faction/warlord you want to play and you have the option for diplomacy with the other warlords. In my mind it would work like Shogun Total War, in that you have some factions that are strong and some that are weak all going for the same goal and being able to use war and diplomacy. Also this way you could make the NR much smaller than the Empire, yet with the huge split they would have a fighting chance.
This isn't feasible. Like this thread says, part of what we're trying to do is stick within a certain identity for each faction, and making it so you have like 5 different options for Imperial leaders within that causes huge issues in that area. There stops being any cohesion within it, and then instead of having 3 or four solid factions (EotH, NR, IR, PA/whoever) you end up with a mish-mash of poorly defined areas, since for many of the Imperial Warlords you have to have different rosters and different tech, while removing a lot of the options those leaders would have given us within a single Imperial Remnant faction and forcing us to spend less time working on each unit because there's so much more we'd have to do just to make there be a reason to have the seperate groups. It doesn't even really add anything to gameplay, while adding a lot of work and diluting the faction as a whole. Who the hell cares if you have two options for a faction, where one is just the other Empire but with Escort Carriers instead of SSDs, when you could just have one faction with both, and a much better developed tech tree? The other thing here is making sure we have enough Imperial options if and when we do the PA. Adding a bunch of other Imperial splinter groups in chips away at the pool of units we can use to make them unique.
We'd have to go out of our way trying to find redundant units to make just to fill the same roles. We had to do this between eras in ICW, but our main goal with ICW was trying to tell a narrative within the GCs, so it was necessary. If we did the 5 main leaders and their rosters from ICW as 5 seperate factions, there's a ton of redundant units we now have to spend time on making for a faction that now is too split up and decoherent to actually survive against a developed NR; it worked in ICW because you were progressing through them as the NR progressed and we made sure each era the IR *could* beat the NR, even if it was with certain varying degress of difficulty. As it is in Sins, Thrawn not only has to contend with the NR's era 2 units, but he's stuck with a smaller pool of options while the New Republic has access to things spanning from ICW's era 1 to era 5.
I mentioned the development aspects of it a bit before, so here's some more on that. Every unit we make requires work to get in. This seems pretty obvious, but what it also means is for each unit added, less time proportionally can be spent on each unit, or it means a longer development time, but again, what are you really gaining out of it besides a few "options" that end up being a series of false choices anyways? A lot of the work from ICW has had to, and will have to be redone as we go, and in several cases in the past the sheer amount of content we had in ICW has made it very difficult to do the reworks we needed for there as well. I'd rather have 20 well done units and a coherent theme within them, than a haphazard collection of units in order to split it into 5 groups which are barely different but no less crippled because of it. It still doesn't remove your ability to have multiple warring Imperial groups, it just means those groups won't have 2 different techs or ships between them, and that the resulting conglomerate has a chance at viability.
This has implications on the performance side as well. I'm sure many of you are aware of this by now, but Sins has issues with memory limits, so we have to be careful with what we add and where we put it or else minidump. Our units tend to be about 5-6 megabytes total (which is actually pretty low compared to the base game and other mods), so assuming we do 5 splinter factions with 2 unique units per faction, we're probably looking at 75-100 megabytes for that, taking into account sound files, UI textures, etc. That's a considerable portion of what we have to work with. It's possible to do the mod styacking thing as Lavo/TLMiller said, however while we're probably going to do it for the fourth faction, it's not really worth it for this. We need to keep the install process pretty simple and don't want significant barriers to multiplayer. It's more necessary in SoGE because there's like 7 or 8 distinct factions, however we currently don't have that issue. On the development side, and I mean no offense to Lavo by saying this, having so many factions under development at the same time has also limited the depth of the factions because there's simply so much to do at once. Those 100 megs are best put towards another whole faction when we have more we can devote to it.
In fact, there is even a way to make the map such that supply caps are entirely based off of the planets you control, like in EaW, however this only works reliably with premade maps. Essentially how this works is that all the game's stock artifacts are removed, and replaced with supply boosting "artifacts"; in premade maps specific planets can be set to have their own caps. Of course, in the interest of not having a bazillion files, having certain supply "classes", such as an industrial shipyard class for Rendili/Fondor and an ecumenopolis class for Coruscant/Alsakan for example. Additionally, though I would need a proof-of-concept to validate this, I believe one could set planets to have no purchasable exploration units which would make the supply cache instantly found upon planetary colonization, but once again only for pre-made maps.
I thought about doing this before, but I'm hesitant to do it because of how "snowbally" it would get. Having more planets than the other player already puts them behind, and if the fleet supply is also tied to that it's just kicking them while they're down. This isn't as big an issue in EaW because until the game is so lopsided as to be won anyways, the differences in galactic cap are balanced out by the tactical cap, whereas in Sins it's just "look at this gigantic fleet I have that you just can't match!"
We do want to have a few preset maps to reflect some canon scenarios, however there won't be as big an emphasis on it as there was in ICW.
TL;DR (jerks) The different Imperial groups will all be represented through one faction, except for the ones that were so different as to have a chance to be the fourth faction (Pentastar Alignment being the obvious one). You can still have more than one Imperial player in a game, however the only way the smaller groups will be depicted is through leader portraits, faction subnames (like where the Ast Eternal, etc go). Diplomacy between Imperial groups will be possible, however the basic hierarchy of ease in diplomatic relations looks something like this, from easiest to hardest:
NR - NR
EotH - EotH
EotH - IR
IR - NR and EotH - NR
IR - IR
The only thing an Imperial Warlord hated more than the New Republic was another Imperial Warlord.
-
Diplomacy between Imperial groups will be possible, however the basic hierarchy of ease in diplomatic relations looks something like this, from easiest to hardest:
NR - NR
EotH - EotH
EotH - IR
IR - NR and EotH - NR
IR - IR
The only thing an Imperial Warlord hated more than the New Republic was another Imperial Warlord.
IR always liked going solo. That order makes a lot of sense to me.
-
Corey makes many valid points
-
Well that answered all my questions, lol. Sorry that I came off sounding like I was suggesting different IR factions, the way that Sins game set up normally works is what I had in mind, I guess I've played to much ICW and pictured preset scenarios and factions. Didn't mean for you to have to write so much :(
-
As it is in Sins, Thrawn not only has to contend with the NR's era 2 units, but he's stuck with a smaller pool of options while the New Republic has access to things spanning from ICW's era 1 to era 5.
I've been thinking about this recently, and have figured that it is theoretically possible to put an ICW-style era system into Sins. Back during the initial Rebellion beta, I was among those who played around with the SetFaction modifier. In SoGE, it's been used to lock people out of one of their faction's two Titans. Theoretically, assuming the 18 frigates/9 capital ships is enough to work with, one could set up a few eras where the a player can only build a select few number of ships (ex. for the NR's capital ships, era 1 [starting era] could be MC80 Liberty/MC80B/Home One while era 2 would be Nebula/Endurance/MC90). I know that a two era setup, aka. starting and "later" era would work, but I'd have to double check the feasibility of multi-era set ups. Further, such an era set up could have multiple tech pre-reqs, or even be almost entirely based around tech research rather than ships. If you wish, I can analyze the feasibility of a multi-era set up when I get some spare time, which I admit won't be for a long time.
Alternatively, for the Imperials, the SetFaction could be easily re-tooled into a "pick your Warlord" dynamic, where at a certain point (at the beginning, mid-way into the tech tree) a player could truly define what style their fiefdom is to be like. Additionally, while ship names cannot be tied to research, ship weapons and meshes can be. Thus, it is very much possible for say, each Warlord to have their own MTC. Of course, the AI is retarded and treats the weapons on a ship as always being avaliable even if research is required, but that's a minor issue.
On the development side, and I mean no offense to Lavo by saying this, having so many factions under development at the same time has also limited the depth of the factions because there's simply so much to do at once.
None taken. In all truth, the six factions in the game were put in before I came across SoGE at all; the NR and Vong were entirely broken and nothing more than an in-cohesive and incomplete mishmash of model assets, most of which were lacking proper texture assets at the time. Your assessment is entirely on the mark; when you have many factions in development at once you are limited by how much detail you can put into them. Sure, you can make them play very differently in terms of ship/tactical combat, but that would come at the cost of economic/cultural/diplomatic differences.
-
I've been thinking about this recently, and have figured that it is theoretically possible to put an ICW-style era system into Sins. Back during the initial Rebellion beta, I was among those who played around with the SetFaction modifier. In SoGE, it's been used to lock people out of one of their faction's two Titans. Theoretically, assuming the 18 frigates/9 capital ships is enough to work with, one could set up a few eras where the a player can only build a select few number of ships (ex. for the NR's capital ships, era 1 [starting era] could be MC80 Liberty/MC80B/Home One while era 2 would be Nebula/Endurance/MC90). I know that a two era setup, aka. starting and "later" era would work, but I'd have to double check the feasibility of multi-era set ups. Further, such an era set up could have multiple tech pre-reqs, or even be almost entirely based around tech research rather than ships. If you wish, I can analyze the feasibility of a multi-era set up when I get some spare time, which I admit won't be for a long time.
Alternatively, for the Imperials, the SetFaction could be easily re-tooled into a "pick your Warlord" dynamic, where at a certain point (at the beginning, mid-way into the tech tree) a player could truly define what style their fiefdom is to be like. Additionally, while ship names cannot be tied to research, ship weapons and meshes can be. Thus, it is very much possible for say, each Warlord to have their own MTC. Of course, the AI is retarded and treats the weapons on a ship as always being avaliable even if research is required, but that's a minor issue.
This is kind of what I was talking about avoiding before; sure you're getting all the same ships as what you'd get with the era system, but the key parts that make the era system what it is aren't there, and don't really fit into this context. The era system is, above all else, a narrative mechanism. It's important that it progresses through events, and that it's connected between factions or else it just looks and feels like a gimmicky research setup while adding a bunch of unnecessary work. Doing a more "traditional" but better developed tech system within Ascendancy would work a lot better for how the game functions. Keep in mind that "advancing" in eras isn't necessarily a good thing, that's why it's tied together. You can get better ships out of it, but your enemy is too. Or you could lose access to some of your best ships. It doesn't really make sense as something that's particular to each faction's own actions taken in a vaccuum.
I should probably clear this up a bit more:
We specifically went in to Ascendancy with the express plan to not try to recreate the era system. We know of a ew ways we *could* do stuff that sort of simulates it, such as what Lavo posted above, but the system really is much better suited to the style of play and tools that EaW provides than that of Sins and we're looking to do something new. If people want the era system they can play ICW, with Ascendancy we want to provide something else. For a lot of the people who play both mods, making a crude copy of the era system may seem more familiar to the extent that it's possible, however it really wouldn't be close enough that it's intuitive without that frame of reference. The Era system was used in EaW because EaW lacks the ability to have any satisfying research system, while having really good tools to provide a narrative structure, so we took advantage of that. Sins, on the other hand, provides much better systems for actual research and not quite as much narrative structure, so we'll take advantage of that too.
-
hey I Would like to recommend the Secutor-class Star Destroyer as a hanger ship for the Empire Instead of the Venator considering It appeared around the same time as the allegiance which is used in the mod and looks more imperal in general i would have it replace the Imp 1 but thats up to you.
-
As discussed, any SW game that has the Empire/Imperial Remnant MUST have the ISD-I. It's simply the Canon backbone of the Imperial fleet, even if noone actually lkes with when compred to using VSD-II's and ISD-II's instead.
-
As discussed, any SW game that has the Empire/Imperial Remnant MUST have the ISD-I. It's simply the Canon backbone of the Imperial fleet, even if noone actually lkes with when compred to using VSD-II's and ISD-II's instead.
I know but its still pointless game bloat and maybe it could be Implemented as an upgradeable base ship rather than a separate ship.
-
What would be cool is if they had the ISD-I in the game, and one of the researches was to upgrade them all to ISD-II spec, and after that any ISD-I's you clicked on to build would be built to ISD-II spec instead. That way you still follow canon of having the ISD-I, yet you actually can enjoy them once you research the ISD-II spec upgrade.
Obviously, no idea if that COULD be implemented since I've barely even PLAYED sins, much less modded it, but would be cool and get the best of both worlds.
-
Yes it is possible to do refit upgrades.
-
so any one else have thouts on implmenting the Secutor-class Star Destroyer http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Secutor-class_Star_Destroyer :laugh:
-
As far as thoughts go, it's a pretty damn ugly ship. I wouldn't even want to look at that in-game.
-
hey I Would like to recommend the Secutor-class Star Destroyer as a hanger ship for the Empire Instead of the Venator considering It appeared around the same time as the allegiance which is used in the mod and looks more imperal in general i would have it replace the Imp 1 but thats up to you.
...
so any one else have thouts on implmenting the Secutor-class Star Destroyer http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Secutor-class_Star_Destroyer
First, having it as a replacement for the ISDI wouldn't work because they serve completely different purposes and theoretically would be available at different points in the game. Technically it would serve the same purpose as a Venator and could supercede that, except for the fact that it's much larger and we have no plans to give the Remnant Venators in the first place.
Second, there's multiple problems posed by the Secutor; the IR doesn't need a large carrier, and the size/powerspace it already filled by the Allegiance. If we were to put the Secutor in, the Remnant would be even more top heavy. The difference between the two would be that the Allegiance has more firepower (one of the few things actually known about the Secutor is that it was lightly armed) while the Secutor can spit out more fighters.t Sins does not get along well at all with huge amounts of fighters so that's not really an argument in its favour.
I know but [the ISDI is] still pointless game bloat and maybe it could be Implemented as an upgradeable base ship rather than a separate ship.
What would be cool is if they had the ISD-I in the game, and one of the researches was to upgrade them all to ISD-II spec, and after that any ISD-I's you clicked on to build would be built to ISD-II spec instead. That way you still follow canon of having the ISD-I, yet you actually can enjoy them once you research the ISD-II spec upgrade.
The ISDI is by no means "pointless game bloat" in Ascendancy. You could make that argument in ICW, but it's there (and also useless) because of narrative reasons, because as Miller says you can't have the Remnant without having ISDs of both kinds represented. As we've said, Ascendancy has a more traditional tech tree so you won't just start off with both available, which keeps the Remnant more in line with the earlier NR and EotH capitals.
It is possible to upgrade ships with a research thing, and even change the mesh. However I'm pretty sure you can't change the actual weapon types being used, which would be necessary to have the ISDI's just all change into ISDIIs. Not to mention that we have some different abilities planned for each of the two types. More importantly, having ISDII's as upgrades from ISDIs would cause a huge power spike for the Remnant which I'm not comfortable letting them have. If you have a fleet full of ISDIs while the New Republic has a bunch of MC80's, that's fine. If the New Republic researches the MC90/MC80B at the same time as the Remnant researches ISDII's, the New Republic has to build up a force of the new Mon Cals, while the Remnant just immediately gets bumped up.