Quantum Star SE

Since I won’t be online tomorrow… Hope everyone has a good St. Patrick’s Day, and for those with the day off from work, enjoy the parades!

I won’t go into huge detail on current QS progress. I’ve not had much chance to do anything on the project this week, so at the weekend I’ll spend a few hours on it. I have most of the game support ready to go, so all I really want to do for next release is have a location page finished, and fleet navigation enabled. Maybe an Admin Panel section for universe generation. That would make the first release where you can explore the universe and actually do something .

I also need to get that translation code pulled together and tested – see if this system is workable or an unrealistic pipedream. No detailed planning for this one so its off to unit testing to build it from the ground up.

Back to topic.

I made a new topic on the QS forums regarding what players/users want in QS. It’s one of those sticky threads that are meant as permanent fixtures. So far there’s been a good amount of contributions, and some ideas being swirled around. Many at the moment have been covered by QSE planning – its sad to see the most mentioned are truly bad areas of QS2 in terms of gameplay. Even QSE in its basic form would be a significant improvement over QS2 I think… Anyways, one of those perpetual followers of all things QS (and BNT/AAT more likely ), Kitty, made some good points. One thing she noted was planets and how they’re done in SE style games. QS2 did a little tinkering to limit planet counts, but it was never ideal (and it’s buggy in the current QSG legacy release unfortunately). BNT of course uses the star type to determine number of planets allowable – most logical system.

The QSE aim, and I’ve thought about a bit more, should attempt to force a diminishing return in benefits from creating more and more planets in the same star system. Rather than having an upper limit of 5 planets where those planets will all be identical in type, instead do something more along the lines of reducing the size/limits of each extra planet created (noting there would still be an upper limit of about 4-5 planets).

So a 5 planet limit would give rise to a normal “large” planet, a medium, and three smalls – or maybe just use a fixed scale where the limits for subsequent planets are always 15-20% less then the last preceeding planet. This would encourage players to move outwards since a star system would only support one large planet – the rest being smaller. This of course has a neat side effect of placing a lot of value on the number of systems controlled by a player – something completely missing from QS2. What’s a strategy game without some need for grabbing territory?

A few other posters have noted a need for more ships (and more variety within them), along with similar suggestions. The point to make is that Ships technically are nothing more than a virtual container of attributes in QS Evolved. They basically act as a collection of “Components” each of which confers an Attribute value upon the ship. So, for example, you could have a ship comprised of Cargo Bays +1000, Mining Laser +5, and Thrusters +10. Result is a ship with attributes of:

Cargo Bays: 1000
Mining Rate: 5
Manouver: 10

These attributes would be used within certain calculations and process effecting that ship, as well as specifying any ship restrictions. Since they’re all component based, and attributes are simple serialised arrays, attributes can be added to the current list with ease – another factor to consider in creating future modifications and plugins.