2018-07-24 Turrets, Sensors, World Building Limit

[Haxus]

Turrets Too Accurate
Turrets on gun towers are too accurate.

Turrets now have a small probability to miss stationary targets. Target speed increases the probability of a miss by the turret. Also, being under water when the turret is above water (or vice versa) highly increases the probability of a miss.

Cannot Scan Under Water
Scanners don't detect things under water. That means you cannot target things under water with bay weapons, even if your ship is under water.

Scanners were changed to consider the domain of the scanner vs the domain of the target: under water, above ground, and space. Scanners can detect targets in their own domain and adjacent domains. Scanners cannot see across domains so a scanner in space cannot detect targets that are under water, and vice versa. This affects all kinds of internal searches for targets, including sensor/fire control/transporter stations and AI operation of those things.

Buildings on Sensors
Buildings do not show up on sensors.

Individual buildings now show up on sensor screens, fire control screens, and transporter screens. You can destroy buildings using weapon bays. You cannot activate the transporter to|from a building yet; that is unfinished.

Life Forms on Sensors
Transporter screen shows too many life forms.

Transporter screen now only shows creatures who hold a berth aboard the scanning ship.

Buildings as Targets
AI does not fire at buildings with bay weapons or turrets.

AI will now fire at enemy military buildings with bay weapons and turrets. If turret gunners are berserk, they will also fire at enemy civilian buildings.

Destroyed Capitol Police Turned Neutral
I destroyed the capitol building of a city. The police stations changed to empire 0.

Fixed the change to empire 0.

Fixed the ability to destroy the capitol building while the city has police stations. Police stations must be destroyed before the capitol building.

Gun Tower Lens Bug
Gun towers do not automatically load lenses for energy weapons.

Fixed.

Gun Tower Tracks Underground Targets
I observed a gun tower tracking a target but nothing was visible. It was trying to target an underground creature.

Fixed by the scanner domain change.

Gun Tower Shoots Creatures To Meat
Gun towers persistently attack the same creature (me) until it is a meat pile.

Gun towers now stop attacking a creature once it falls unconscious.

Building Size Limit
Buildings have no volume size limit? I discovered that no volume size limit was being imposed on buildings, as it is on spacecraft. The code was there, just disabled. I could not remember why it would have been disabled.

Building volume size is now limited to the same maximum as spacecraft. That size is pretty large, at 104,857,600 cubic meters.

62 building designs are larger than the maximum and they all exceed it by more than 2x. Those existing designs will continue to be valid but they can't be finalized again without some changes.

World Building Limit
The world building limit enables 400 buildings with 104M cubic meters each. This permits the creation of defenses that could never be conquered. The building limit feels arbitrary and it does not achieve the desired balance.

The world building limit was changed from a number of buildings to the volume of buildings. The world building limit is now the same as the size limit for the largest possible spacecraft, 104M cubic meters. Every 1000 cubic meters above that results in an additional -1 to morale.

This enables tens of thousands of small buildings to be built on a single world. Things get slower as the number of buildings goes up. It could create excessive load on the server. Adjustments will have to be made if this becomes the case. Don't be in too big of a hurry to populate lots of worlds with thousands of buildings.

[zslayern]

Oh well, that was fun while it lasted.

[Ikkir Isth]

Well, at least, technically, with buildings you could potentially counter -128 morale in order to make a mega city with mega defenses, right?

[Haxus]

The current morale was pegged at -128. Otherwise it would have been -3144103. That could be difficult to counter.

I apologize for the negative effects of this change.

[zslayern]

Well, at least, technically, with buildings you could potentially counter -128 morale in order to make a mega city with mega defenses, right?

Is it even possible to get past +8 morale with the current system? I don't even know.

Being that I'm pretty a n g e r y about this change, I've done some number crunching to determine the maximum amount of pop with the current volume limit.
!!!Warning, this (probably erroneous) calculation is 50% halfassed by a sleepy and tired student and will definitely trigger authentic mathematicians and statisticians.

sorry for the shitty math and formatting
This assumes you are only building the base level of the building, since adding any extra levels require much more building volume. Which also means you have to place down a metric shitton of buildings.
And this only assumes if you are building on a habitable world since building on a harsh world requires more building volume for armour and life support. Electricity is not accounted for either.

So the maximum amount of pops you're able to support without incurring any morale penalties (at 0 morale)seems to be 134013, which is not even close to the half-population-cap of a ringworld(slightly over 2 million) and almost barely a 9,500 diameter world(about 280k). Now, this begs the question of why are all these numbers so arbitrary(building volume size cap, actual world population cap, why does adding any extra levels to an arena require 700k volume space? and etc)? None of these values complements each other, why even bother?

Now, giving this the benefit of the doubt and presuming that this is only a temporary fix until a better one is found, why not let us look at some better examples, and if you haven't guessed it yet, we're looking at the old style buildings.

The old style buildings were perfect in its own way, the level cap for each buildings using different materials was perfect in that it standardized buildings across the whole game albeit sacrificing functionality as you could only change it cosmetically. The population cap for each planet size was also reasonable and very much realistically achievable, whilst standardizing colonies all over Hazeron as well.

I would really like to expand on this unfortunately its almost 1am and there's school tomorrow, I'll see if I can go into any more detail next time.

[Haxus]

I don't know about "mega" but very large cities are now possible.

For example, the coal power plant in the exchange is 7,000+ cubic meters. You could build almost 15,000 of them within the size limit. The colony nuclear power plant is about 15k cubic meters. You could build almost 7k of them.

Ofc, you might want to balance that with a few mines, homes, food production and other things.

[Haxus]

The population cap on the largest worlds using old cities is barely over a thousand. Okay, that's per zone, so barely over 3000.

[Deantwo]

Turrets Too Accurate
Turrets on gun towers are too accurate.

Turrets now have a small probability to miss stationary targets. Target speed increases the probability of a miss by the turret. Also, being under water when the turret is above water (or vice versa) highly increases the probability of a miss.

Interesting, but how does that make sense for projectile weapons? Laser weapons seem like they might have an advantage here.

Still wish projectiles turret weapons would be direct damage like laser are. Projectile physics is a needless complication of anti-infantry weapons.

Or maybe just add a new turret module for machine-gun, rather than cannon. Let cannon turrets be more against buildings, spacecraft, and heavy vehicles.

Old related idea thread: Light and Heavy Turrents

Cannot Scan Under Water
Scanners don't detect things under water. That means you cannot target things under water with bay weapons, even if your ship is under water.

Scanners were changed to consider the domain of the scanner vs the domain of the target: under water, above ground, and space. Scanners can detect targets in their own domain and adjacent domains. Scanners cannot see across domains so a scanner in space cannot detect targets that are under water, and vice versa. This affects all kinds of internal searches for targets, including sensor/fire control/transporter stations and AI operation of those things.

This is interesting. How does it affect "hide in ground clutter"?

Related old idea thread: Hiding Ships in Gas Giants

Building Size Limit

Why not list the violating blueprints and give people a little time to replace them? Then remove the blueprints.

World Building Limit
The world building limit enables 400 buildings with 104M cubic meters each. This permits the creation of defenses that could never be conquered. The building limit feels arbitrary and it does not achieve the desired balance.

The world building limit was changed from a number of buildings to the volume of buildings. The world building limit is now the same as the size limit for the largest possible spacecraft, 104M cubic meters. Every 1000 cubic meters above that results in an additional -1 to morale.

This enables tens of thousands of small buildings to be built on a single world. Things get slower as the number of buildings goes up. It could create excessive load on the server. Adjustments will have to be made if this becomes the case. Don't be in too big of a hurry to populate lots of worlds with thousands of buildings.

This was a big one. If you really want to limit military buildings like this, I would totally suggest making separate limits for military and civilian buildings.

Volume is just too weird to calculate in your head, so it is almost impossible to know when you exceed the limit. For military buildings it might be less annoying, since morale might work different for bases.

You can always lower world civilian building limit to 300, and then limit military buildings by volume.

[Haxus]

Btw, thanks for calculating the population numbers. I wondered.

[Haxus]

It wasn't so much an effort to limit military buildings as it was an effort to balance the immense power difference between cities and spacecraft, that heavily favored cities. Spacecraft were hopeless against cities when it should be the other way around.

When you rule the air, you rule the ground. When you rule space, you rule the air. This fits with Star Trek lore, where in several episodes they said the Enterprise was capable of leveling every structure on a world or reducing the entire world to cinders.

With this change, the war capabilities of the most built up world are roughly equivalent to the war capabilities of the largest possible space station.

To achieve that balance by limiting the number of buildings, that limit becomes 1, maybe 2.