Alexander SquidLord Williams

Or, er, not. But it seems that all that's left is tiny crickets. I miss my Mercury drops ... Has the community moved on? Is it truly the dust of devastation remaining?

<blockquote> Awesome to see you’re still here! And it’s really amazing you got the devs of Sins on your show. I recently got that game and I’m finding it really good! Once again, it’s great that you’re still playing, and I hope you can get on sometime!</p> By the way, these days we’re playing Sundays at 3:00 EST and Wednesdays at around 7:30-8:00 EST. Hope you can make a few games.</p> </blockquote> The Sins guys are nice, cunning, and feeling hugely swamped by the response to the first commercial wave. Not unlike Clay not so very long ago, I’ll wager, and for similar reasons. Given the over-all “mod-ability” of Sins, I’d love to see some folks do a DropTeam mod to cover the space-based operations of the environment, but we’d need a lot more info about the setting than we have at present.</p> I might can actually catch the odd Wednesday night runs. Sundays are pretty much the mad scramble to get the show finalized before my reporters swarm on me, demanding assignments and such. It gets crazy there.</p> <blockquote> It’s great to meet you, SquidLord! If you show up one Sunday or Wednesday (Sunday still has more players), try to get some video capture of the games so you can have a vodcast about us. [Wink] Maybe even make it a weekly feature, so everyone can see the battles of Jung, jby, Phonan, myself, and others. [Wink]</p> </blockquote> The last thing anyone wants is for me to do any kind of vidcast, since I might have the horrible temptation to actually appear in front of a camera. Imagine the worst excesses of a Guild Navigator from Dune, and that’s what I look like. Nope, nope, too horrible for words. I’ll stick to the audio, danke. [wink]</p> That said, it might be fun to do some voiced-over video capture of some major battles with analysis from the best players at some point. Sort of like Monday Night Football with more anti-matter and less pigskin.</p>

Strangely enough, I’m still out here though I don’t get to play as often as I’d like. I’d love to have Clay and the gang on my Sunday night talk-show (Operation BSU), but his location on the planet might be a difficulty for scheduling. I did have the guys that did Sins of a Solar Empire on, which at least gives me some street cred with interviewing game designers. </p>

Well ... this is new. I'm getting a CRD with no errors being generated, just flopping over dead, when trying to join the Delta_Pavonis server, during the "Growing Trees" process. Log shows it loading the HopePine, then ... nothing. Very, very odd. The scenario being spun up is "H S" if it's useful to know. The only meaningful change on mt system for a bit was going to a dual-monitor config with the primary being 1680 x 1050.

No, you can't, the main version and the demo are at completely different revision levels, at this point. That doesn't mean that some of us don't play both, of course ...

"It's a hard knock life, for us; it's a hard knock life, for us!"

I'm trying to be a nicer person, lately. It's good for the new career. We could probably simplify things even further by simply classifying the chances to hit/be-rendered-useless-if-hit to a set of ranks, ie: Terrible Poor Average (0) Good Great Superior ... because there's just no way we'll need anything more than "Good Attack vs Average Defense" as a mental descriptor and your mental understanding should map to the mechanical world pretty directly. Give each of those appropriate percentages or die values or whatnot, then make one "survival check" every 30sec (this is a key point), and away you go. The reason to be making one check every 30sec is to give one side or another the time to retreat ... or get reinforcements. Process would probably be: </font> AFTER 30sec in the same building.</font>All inhabitants roll to hit.</font>Assign hits randomly on other team in the building.</font>Each hit trooper rolls defense.</font>Failed defense rollers are removed from combat/killed/casualtied.</font>Return to top.</font> If we want to give the guys with heavier weapons the chance to be more lethal, bump them up the chart a step. If we think the weapons are too unwieldy indoors, bump down one. If we figure those cancel out, set theirs to the level of the average trooper in the squad. This, of course, could open the door for custom squads, maybe assembled in the drop menu from an overall pool. "I want two riflemen and two engineers, for a reinforced Engineering Squad," or, my favourite, "I'd like 5 6mm ion guys to go, please?" This feeds right into the whole "Engineers Accrue Takeover Points" idea, which I find neat, too.

Rare, but the possibility leads to a real mess of a map full of crater and cracking events. Which, of course, is fun. The next hard part is to decide why there's a fight taking place over such a Hell-forsaken nightmare of destruction. Unearthed Ancient base/artefacts or somesuch would be the obvious reason. There sure won't be a happy populace lounging around in the debris. Can't even use the old saw about "wanting rare materials from the interior of the meteor," since they could have more easily just scooped it in space. Fun, though.

The point accumulation system is really rather clever, poesel. I'm rather impressed; it's lightweight, keeps the current status quo dependeble but adds in some counters. Big plusses, bravo. Plus, it's not exactly heavy duty computation (since it's simple integer math and a counter; it's about as simple as computer calculation gets). I'm not so sure about the in-building clearance method, but it's certainly worth experimenting with. As is, I seldom see more than one squad in a given building, which means an Eng squad'll be alone out there most of the time. Not sure if I buy the subsequently suggested "per rifle" method, either; how do you count that SAW 20mm? It's big, but you'd get nice penetration through interior walls with that thing. And the 6mm ion? Counting per trooper at least would let us sidestep that issue for a while until we got things shaken out. (For my money, I wouldn't take an Eng squad anywhere not in the back of a Paladin. Too slow and obvious otherwise. Either drop in directly on an untaken target or APC in. Too much risk, otherwise.)

Tough one to justify, though. Anything that's really high mass probably accumulated a large atmo during formation. You'd pretty much have to postulate a system where the sun'd had some kind of critical event and vlew the atmo off after formation and cooling. (Yes, I'm in and out a little more lately. Life is slowly settling down.)

Probably worth noting that the assumption seems to be that the vehicles are pressurized ... which is not necessarily reasonable. It'd be a far wiser course when designing a multi-atmo-capable vehicle to leave the whole thing unpressurized and simply suit up any pilots. Thus, if holed on a zero-atmo planet, you don't get explosive decompression with resultant secondary damage and you don't get compressive flooding when holed on an underwater/dense-atmo run, either. You save on resources, cost, and required stores as well. If you put pilots in the vehics at all, but I've beaten that necrotized equine before. If the vehicle itself is unpressurized, there'd be no hearing of anything save through chassis induction, and hopefully your crew compartment is shock-proofed, which would damp even that out. So, silent damage hits in zero-atmo are actually sensible and defensible. The only thing you might hear would be a crew hit ... and then there's no ears to hear it.

As I recall, the next patch release should be beating on the bot AI pretty heavily, so we may see fixes to this sooner rather than later.

[laugh] No birthday until later in the spring, I fear. Which may be just a sad admission on my part of having no excuse to indulge in this madness. The bot voices actually give me some tactical awareness of the battlefield, especially when I'm face-down in my Mercury trying to plot drops of supplimental turrets. And remind me one reason I wish the "element side-bar" were back in place, as it made it fast and easy to determine what a bot was doing at any given time. A better measure would be a somewhat different icon for the various stances, but ...

Unfortunately for the sanity of my friends and I, DropTeam has actually infected the way we discuss ... well, pretty much anything that has to do with communicating semi-covertly in public places. As typical for a group of geek-guys and lesbians, it's typically about the fairer sex. (What? I told you it's a weird group.) </font> I'm goin' after the enemy flag! or I'm goin' in! Translation: "Your choice of female target is so overwhelmingly attractive that I'm going on the approach; cover me."</font>I'm attacking! Translation: "I'd hit that." "Your choice of female target is quite attractive." Alternately, emphatic yes.</font>I'm escorting the flag! Translation: "The target is quite attractive but more observation or data is required for confirmation." Alternately, "I'm covering you."</font>I'm holding position. Translation: "No opinion." Alternately, "Meh."</font>I'm recovering our flag. Translation: "The target is somewhat unfortunate or is otherwise not really desirable, but not immediately offensive."</font>I'm defending! Translation: "Your target is unacceptible to me." Alternately, "emphatic no."</font>It's at this point that I start getting worried about the sanity of those I spend too much time with ... Now, if we could just get a few more voices for the bots, this would become ever more ironic.

I was just thinking that compatibility between the two would be a very nice touch, frankly. From a code PoV, though, I see where it would be complicated, unless the demo were built into the whole latest version of the game as a whole, and buying it simply generated a code to unlock the additional content and servers. But that would require a restructuring of some significant ap things, so I do not expect it anytime soon.