Dark galaxies shouldn't re-hide stars you lose scanning on

In a dark galaxy, the status of a star that you lose visibility on should disappear, but the presence or absence of the star itself shouldn’t vanish. If it’s in hyperspace range you should still be able to target it, but simply have no idea what forces are there or even who controls it.

The rules as they stand don’t seem to make any sense to me. I can leap to world B from world A if ANY world can see B, even if it’s not world A. By the same logic I should be able to leap there if I know it’s there and in range of my hyperdrive, whether I can scan it or not.

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I can think of a few logical physics based reasons why you wouldn’t be able to jump to a star outside scanning range.

However, I can’t think of reasons to remove it from the star map.

Also, in clear galaxies, shouldn’t we continue to see the resource value of a star that was previously on scanning range?

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Exactly. The game should do everything that a player could do with more work, such as taking a screen shot of the resources of the star, recording its position, etc.

Personally, I like the idea of (like the lit game) being able to jump to a star in Hyperspace range even if you’ve lost scanner range, but’s that’s separate from simply showing stars and resources that you’ve observed before.

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I logged onto the forum today specifically with mentioning this.
I’m not surprised it has already been raised!

Its particularly a problem if you have lost your homeworld yet still in the fight due to a strategic withdrawal.
The game loads centered on blackspace because my homeworld is now outside of scanning range.

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Losing your home world can never be considered a good strategy. If it happens, it is bound to have unpleasant consequences.

Well, the strategic withdrawal was part of going out in a big bang when massively outgunned and attacked on all sides. :wink:

There was nothing I could do to recover, but I could take another player with me.

This is a very good UI suggestion that I couldn’t find having been addressed elsewhere.

Losing static-variable intel (eg. planet resources) on planets you’ve previously scanned, doesn’t make any sense either in a dark galaxy or non-dark. Losing intel on ships scanned makes perfect sense.

As an additional UI enhancement, I’d love an ability to create a “comment” or “note” text-box for each planet (sorta like how you can create comments in the review pane when editing a word or excel doc), so I could manually type in intel notes, (eg. Arrakis - Comment: “2.5k enemy ships Sunday 2/28”)

Cool idea Gakl!

You can already jump to planets far outside your scanning range if you don’t have the requisite scanning tech. Explaining reality backwards from the existing game mechanics in this way, it would suggest that basic Hyperspace technology requires some basic scanning–that you will know if the planets/stars, but not the attributes. This would create a logic that maybe we should be able to see the existence of all galaxy stars, but just not ANY attributes of inhabitants, resource values, etc for those not in scanning range. INformation should only be UPDATED for each player, when a target is within scanning range, otherwise, the player sees only the most updated scan.

I just had another thought of how this could work with regard to overall scanning functionality in a dark game (or non-dark for that matter), but would require a bunch of format changes.

Day 1:

You occupy both planet A & B, and can see planet C thanks to the scanning from your base on planet B.

On day 1, you can see an enemy fleet at planet C, has 17 ships.

Day 2: 5 out of 17 enemy ships travel from planet C to planet B, taking out your base and your scanning.

Your scanning shows current intel for planet B. Your scan retains all variable data about planet C from the moment just before you lost planet B, but to make it clear that this data is OUTDATED, it is grayed-out/semi-transparent or smaller. You retain the OLD data from Day 1 about the infrastructure on planet C, the number of ships it was producing, and a grayed out fleet total, as “these ships were here” which you can then interpret as–“they may be there or may not be there.”

Due to the amount of variables that would be stored in different forms and the visual format changes required, this could be a very big change to implement, however.

Yeah, I won’t try and get to complex, and try and save everything, but that a star exists at all I think is not unreasonable.

Or as you said, If we had some support for note taking, I might just leave it to the player to record whatever they want.

FYI Gakl: You can send yourself a note in NP - just don’t put any recipients … although I know that’s not as good as a note associated with a star.

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Adding notes to stars is good, provided I can see them. If I take a star in a Turn Based game, say hour 1 of 8. The defender has seen this coming, and has fleets that were 3 hrs away. I maintain control of the star for 2 hrs, but I can’t record the information I scanned, because it’s gone again.

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That was one of the reasons that I suggested the complex changes above…a note would be the quick and messy workaround to a major way that data is saved and displayed.

Maybe we can hope for an NP3: Nereid? :smile: