Forums » Suggestions
Target Painting and Other Useful Things
It would be nice if there were a few commands that could help direct allied forces in hive and border skirmishes. For example, a command to make the selected ship a high priority target, or mark it as someone that needs to be defended. There could also be a command to mark a ship as one to be avoided, if you would prefer that the NPCs don't waste their firepower on a constellation they have no hope of downing (or that you are about to nuke).
There could also be a command that temporarily creates a cone of avoidance ahead of you, maybe 25 degrees wide and 1.5 km long. That could be helpful for getting the allied NPCs out of your way when conducting a bombing run.
In situations where there are multiple allied players, I suppose they would all have these same abilities, which could lead to people stepping on eachother's toes. Long-run, when the military hierarchy is set up, it could be limited to those of rank.
There could also be a command that temporarily creates a cone of avoidance ahead of you, maybe 25 degrees wide and 1.5 km long. That could be helpful for getting the allied NPCs out of your way when conducting a bombing run.
In situations where there are multiple allied players, I suppose they would all have these same abilities, which could lead to people stepping on eachother's toes. Long-run, when the military hierarchy is set up, it could be limited to those of rank.
I'm right there with you. This is what the "rank" system was about, in part, and also the bits about having temporary "field promotions", where in situations where more command-and-control is needed, people would be promoted to roles as necessary, but it wouldn't stick for more than that particular battle.
There has been a plan (long delayed, like many of our plans) to create an entirely new "torpedo" weapon type that would be used against capships, and would be prioritized for attack by the defense turrets of the respective ship (and, thus, would also have to be shot-destructable, something they aren't right now). If we did have this separate, and somewhat rarer class of weapons, we could potentially plug it into the NPC awareness, so that they would prioritize being outside of its destructive range if at all possible (or attacking it, if it was flagged as a threat to their "side"). Same goes for players, there could be some special warning beep that you're within X distance of an armed torpedo in flight.
Anyway, granted, that all requires a fair amount of groundwork.. the new weapon type, blah blah. But it's probably not that much different than trying to manage and transmit a special "cone of avoidance", plus all the other ramifications that could come from the use/abuse of a system like that.
There has been a plan (long delayed, like many of our plans) to create an entirely new "torpedo" weapon type that would be used against capships, and would be prioritized for attack by the defense turrets of the respective ship (and, thus, would also have to be shot-destructable, something they aren't right now). If we did have this separate, and somewhat rarer class of weapons, we could potentially plug it into the NPC awareness, so that they would prioritize being outside of its destructive range if at all possible (or attacking it, if it was flagged as a threat to their "side"). Same goes for players, there could be some special warning beep that you're within X distance of an armed torpedo in flight.
Anyway, granted, that all requires a fair amount of groundwork.. the new weapon type, blah blah. But it's probably not that much different than trying to manage and transmit a special "cone of avoidance", plus all the other ramifications that could come from the use/abuse of a system like that.
Translation: don't expect the problem to be solved this year.
That depends on which problem, really. For commanding NPCs to "focus all firepower on <enter target>", that could be doable in the short term.
Cones of avoidance for bombing runs, or new classes of weapons.. that might take a bit more time. Depends, really.
The upside though, is that a lot of the stuff in his post is not inter-related. Commanding NPCs really has nothing to do with torpedo-avoidance. It's logically related in terms of usage, but not developmentally related.
Cones of avoidance for bombing runs, or new classes of weapons.. that might take a bit more time. Depends, really.
The upside though, is that a lot of the stuff in his post is not inter-related. Commanding NPCs really has nothing to do with torpedo-avoidance. It's logically related in terms of usage, but not developmentally related.