It has been suggested in another thread that carriers could have some speed upgrades, and rightfully replied that varying carrier speeds between players might make distances between stars confusing and (a bit) meaningless.
But what about increasing the speed of all players’ carriers ? And players would have to contribute as much as they wanted towards a common research pool. Once the pool’s current goal is reached, all carriers’ speeds are increased by 10% (similar to how banking or manufacturing works, for example). Or seen from a different perspective, increase the distance a carrier travels in a tick by 10% (or some other percentage).
By common pool I mean a technology in the research menu towards which all players could contribute, if they wanted to. All players have the same research status and any contribution of one player is added to the same pool. Once the research goal is reached, all players, regardless of how much they contributed, gain the technology increase.
This would obviously increase the game pace globally towards the later stages of the game, but each technology level could have a much higher price than the one before it (double, for example), so it would be quite hard to get to crazy fast speeds that would “break” the game.
As I understand it, the speed technology was dropped after the 1st Neptune’s Pride because it sped the game up too much towards the end. Imagine for example, in a long lasting 64-player game, that all of your empire could be taken during the time you have to sleep! Combined this to the fact that it is pretty easy to monitor a player’s ‘active times’, this would make the game pretty much unplayable at the extremes.
That fact aside, I agree that having a speed technology does bring many neat tactical advantages and situations with it, and it would change the warfare as weapons technology does - maybe even more dramatically. However, if you make the speed technology common for all, you lose all the pro’s and get to keep the cons… You might as well have started a double- or quad speed game. It’s not quite the same mechanically, but I don’t see much significant difference.
As I said, the price for each level could increase exponentially. Assuming you get a 10% increase per level, you wouldn’t risk increasing carrier speed more than double the normal speed or “maybe” triple over the duration of a game, but that still sounds very far-fetched.
I’m really happy with the warp gates that we have now. Strategically it’s interesting to pick the right time and place to buy them, and tactically its interesting working out when and how to use them on the front line.
The only thing I would want to change is to add levels of gate so you could make your speed bonus faster and faster. Level 1 gates gives 2x speed, level 2 gates give 3x, level 3 gates give 4x.
THIS. My god, I want this. Warp gates are already fantastic, allowing not only the streamlining of supply chains, but also faster effective reaction times.
1=2x, 2=3x, and so on sounds good, as the relative benefit to upgrading would be inversely related to the cost (assuming cost scales with level), which should nicely prevent ridiculousness.
Yea, Warp Gates has a very interesting dimension to the game - brilliant addition Jay.
I assume this would be an infrastructure upgrade (i.e. similar to EIS) and the speed would only be as fast as the WG’s at both ends. And when you “destroy” a WG, you can do per-level … i.e. if someone is coming in hot to a 3x WG, you may only want to knock to a 2x.
BTW, have you considered also showing number of WG’s on the data screens/intel charts? And I assume it would be total levels. Right now, it’s actually a great way to “hide” assets.
Ugh… I’ve already seen games speed up to 3x because players gate all their stars. And now you could take it even further? I can’t say I’m looking forward to that, but then again I don’t know when I’ll join another game.
I don’t know how much real depth gate levels would bring to a game. Most of the games end with ~20 % or less of the stars gated, so I don’t see how the extra speed would make a real difference.
I’m in a turn based game at the moment and there has been quite an interesting tension between wanting to have gates on your front line, but not wanting your enemies to take advantage of them.
I’ve seen a lot of folks building gates for a single turn, where you can get a single turn of speed up before your enemy can see where they are.
I think they might work better in turn based because you get 6-8 hours of benefit before the enemy can react. Players are switching them on and off a lot.
I haven’t seen this happen much in the real time games.
Ditto what Jay said … in the turn-based games, there is some serious strategy (agony!) over the Warp Gates … because if you aren’t careful, the “bad guys” use 'em against you … and worst case scenario is they not only win, but get it with the WG intact.