Alert Beacon

This was an idea suggested by JoshTigerHeart in this thread. Broken down; the idea of a secondary weapon called "alert beacon" that could call in a reinforcement fleet.

I suggested that an outfit is granted to the player with the function of blocking reinforcements. There is also a mission started, and if you abort this mission in the mission menu, the outfit is removed from your ship (therefore allowing reinforcements to enter the system).

Comments? Inconsistencies?

Well, if you do it that way, then there will be no reinforcement fleets, period, unless the player specifically calls them. For friendly systems, this makes little sense. Why should the player be the only one with a beacon, and not the other ships? For enemy systems, this would have the undesirable effect of bringing more enemy ships down on the player's head.

Perhaps a second mission would be better. When the player hits Abort, it starts a silent mission. OnStart would contain a Qxxx bit to display a message like "Sensors detect reinforcement fleet approaching." The special ships would hyper in after a delay, and then they either defend the player or just attack their enemies, take your pick. Then, set TimeLimit to 1 to get rid of the ships when you land or jump. If the mission is silent, you shouldn't see the fail message.

PBoat

EDIT: Oh, and set OnFail to restart the mission that you originally aborted (reset the beacon).

This post has been edited by PBoat101 : 29 April 2005 - 07:31 PM

Reinforcement fleets come when the ships belonging to the government are fighting enemies and have EXCEEDED the maximum odds. If there was a way to recreate that affect, then you could make the weapon.

Also, the modtype of the reinforcement blocker can target specific either govts or classes or something, So thats not a problem.

Add an invisible, untargetable ship with huge strenght value, and i think you will be in business. You could actually make it a weapon with one max ammo, and have as the second part of the ammo outfit the reinf blocker. im not entirely sure how well this would work. Also note, reinforcement fleets are a field in the syst rescource, so really no other systems could have reinforcements. I suppose that might have been what PBoat was referring to.

Though maybe starting it with missions would be easier. all of the solutions I have for that are clunky (like a Sxxx operator in the ondestroy field of a spob thats way off in the corner, duplicated in every system, with one strenght, and the weapon does one planetary damage over huge radius. This has the advantage that you could ahve more than one ammo. And you can put a Uxxx in the ondestroy field, too, so it comes back immediately, or not, if you want to cap the fleets.)

Would this not, even after being implemented, still be subject to the inflight ship stat adjustment problem? That is, if you make your effect dependent on an outfit, then whether that outfit is removed by a mission or by launching the last piece of a type of ammunition, the game engine doesn't recalculate your ship's behavior until you either take off of a spöb or view the Player Info dialog box ('p' by default).

Actually, I haven't tested this with regards to removing or granting outfits in flight via missions. Mispeled, would you be so kind as to try this and tell us whether or not opening the info screen is necessary?

Qaanol, on May 2 2005, 05:45 PM, said:

Would this not, even after being implemented, still be subject to the inflight ship stat adjustment problem? That is, if you make your effect dependent on an outfit, then whether that outfit is removed by a mission or by launching the last piece of a type of ammunition, the game engine doesn't recalculate your ship's behavior until you either take off of a spöb or view the Player Info dialog box ('p' by default).
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That's why you use a mission, not an outfit.