Posted by: Icecoon
« on: February 13, 2013, 03:25:27 AM »POOP for the People! I like the idea too.
I too, like this idea. We should call it the projection of off-world power update, or POOP for short.
There are so many ways this could be calculated but the biggest hurdle seems like it would be the AI routine for the diplomacy score alteration avoidance. Basically, how and when an alien power would decide to ignore an established border and it's decisions on how to proceed if it was covertly breaking that border and was discovered.
Is there a features thread for version 6.x+ or is it just the bug thread? The original 5.7 requested features thread is stupendously long so I would be loathe to place such an excellent bud of an idea in that thread only to be quickly lost in the horde of previous posts.
It might be easy enough to apply the "ownership rating" via sector commands. If the system is in a sector, it gets a bonus in relation to its distance from the sector HQ. If multiple races claim the system, they'd all gain based on the rating.
Colonies and pickets should add to that rating.
It seems like it should be a relatively simple process for the AI to be aware of actions that cause a decrease in diplomacy ratings. The government type would dictate the level of aversion to decreasing the diplomacy rating. It would be a short table to calculate the rates of decay:
Homeworld incursions always causes a loss.
The size of the colony population of a system causes a proportional loss. The greater the population the more rapid the loss.
The size of your military already present in the system causes a proportional loss.
The first alien power to enter the system gains control. For an unoccupied system for as long as that races ships remains in the system a control counter increases. More ship tonnage causes your control counter to increase faster. When you leave a system empty the counter starts to slowly degrade. When an alien presence enters the system their counter starts to increase. You cannot see the control counter. When their counter exceeds yours you effectively lose control of the system and there is no longer a diplomatic score adjustment for the aliens occupying the system. You shouldn't be able to see the control counters although if you have a fleet presence in the system that has the aliens on sensor you would have an idea of how much your score might be going up in relation to theirs. The counter setup would make it so that if you occupy a system for a decade with a fleet and then leave to go home for refit that an alien scout cannot inadvertently gain control of the system just by flying through it. Loss of a ship in combat will cause a direct proportional loss in control counters. If a fleet of yours gets wiped out in a system by an enemy your control count would be wiped clean. The colonization of a body in a system you do not have control of would cause a substantial diplomacy hit to the opposing power but also nullify their unoccupied control counter.
In all of these instances you would require direct sensor contact for the diplomacy consequences to take effect.
Once I reread this I see it isn't nearly as simple as I originally thought but I really like the concept. It would certainly promote the construction of armed space stations in otherwise vacant systems as projections of power and control and increase the need for JP pickets and routine system patrols by your fleets to keep the control counts high.
Probably a better idea is the homeworld of the nation/race is always verboten unless a treaty is in place
...while multi-empire starts could possibly be solved by making all player races use the same borders
I would really like to see something like the culture system of sins of a solar empire, minus the taking over a system with culture only.
it could be a system where the rate of spread depends on the distance, and there is a constant inwards spread, so say that coming from your home system, outward spread is 10, while inward spread for the game is 2, it would spread out at a rate of 8, as it spreads further and further from populated systems, it gets weaker and weaker, untill outward spread is equal to inward spread and it just stops, this way you have unclaimed space, can push back the boarders of NPRs just by having ships nearby, but they can do the same, of course there would have to be a way to determine distance between systems, and each system would have to reach a certain amount of border strength before it starts spreading from there, like an overflowing bucket.
This allows for border disputes and that ships near your border will make you want to take action, as they will be pushing your border back and other cool things like that. I just dont know what kind of limitations going outside your border would have, maybe unable to colonize, or a constant increase in the unrest of populated planets the further away from your borders it is