Posted by: RedKing
« on: December 10, 2012, 12:47:38 PM »I have to agree that it would be a very nice thing to have multiple FTL (or near-luminal) travel techs, with NPRs randomly selecting one at creation. That's one of my favorite game mechanics in SotS.
Imagine the shock when you spend all that time mining the jumppoints, and your enemies just "warp" into the system. Or show up nearly-undetectable after a decade of unpowered (but high-speed) drift. Or have some kind of relativistic time dilation so that you end up with the problem in The Forever War -- you've been in travel for six months, but your enemy has had thirty years to develop better weapons and tactics. Any war would inherently favor the defender and become a lot like a space WWI -- the only effective form of offense is overwhelming firepower and/or numbers.
Rather a lot of coding work to handle multiple FTLs though.
Imagine the shock when you spend all that time mining the jumppoints, and your enemies just "warp" into the system. Or show up nearly-undetectable after a decade of unpowered (but high-speed) drift. Or have some kind of relativistic time dilation so that you end up with the problem in The Forever War -- you've been in travel for six months, but your enemy has had thirty years to develop better weapons and tactics. Any war would inherently favor the defender and become a lot like a space WWI -- the only effective form of offense is overwhelming firepower and/or numbers.
Rather a lot of coding work to handle multiple FTLs though.