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35 Ways to Improve DS |
Pentara Cadet
Joined: April 20, 2002 Posts: 327
| Posted: 2004-03-07 22:53  
1) Suggestion: When viewing a planet other than the one you are orbiting, you should be able to see what the starport is selling if you select it.
2) Query: What happened to groups and will they be reinstated. Flying a dictor is very hard since you get almost 0 exp. (Grouping used to be the source of exp for a dictor.)
3) Change: Before the patch, items in storage stayed as they were put in. Now, each time you access the storage, the items re-organize themselves in some obscure order. So if I organize my storage as 5 mines, 4 builds, 2 engines, upon my next access they will be 2 engines, 2 builds, 3 mines, 2 builds, 2 mines.
4) Change: When you store a ship, your fuel should be refilled like before the patch. While I understand the reasoning for stopping storage repair/reloading, fuel should be refilled. What am I supposed to do if I gate mod an AMJD into my ship at my homegate and have no SY to spawn at?
5) Request: I would like an EXPERT mode for the veteran players. This mode would hide all of the funky buttons that were added with the patch which veterans never use anyways since hotkeys are much faster.
6) Add: A toggle to switch off ship/planet names in nav. If I want to target it specifically, I can toggle this feature or use its icon.
7) Add: When selecting a target in nav, show not only the distance but the jump time for your current JD as well.
8) Suggestion: Implement a slot heirarchy for items, allowing lighter items to fit into heavier complementary slots. Example: A CL2K fits only in Heavy Beam slot. A CL500 fits in Beam or Heavy Beam slot. This would require a little balancing, but in the end would allow for a larger variety of mods.
9) Change: When unloading items onto a planet (goods/inf), if you want to unload onto a specific spot, you need to target the diamond for the location. These planetary zones only show when you are close enough to the planet. Right now, that distance is based on CAMERA DISTANCE FROM PLANET, NOT SHIP DISTANCE. Example? A station orbiting a planet can't see the zones until you zoom in to almost full zoom on the ship.
10) Change: Return the ability to build structures on a planet remotely, or at least if you are in orbit as a non-engineer. The advantage to using an engineer is obviously faster building, prestige gain and being able to build structures that the planetary tech level does not yet allow.
11) Partially Fixed: I was going to ask not to count NPC trannies in the ship list in nav. Since they have been removed, the request changes to... If you return trannies at some point, please don't count them in the shiplist, so we can tell how many players are in the mv on our side without counting trannies.
12) Problem: The station has a cargo capacity of 12, but only shows 10 slots. How is a person to select the 11th and 12th items?
13) Suggestion: Add a new feature to jump to/select a point based on an entered set of coordinates. So if I want to select 5.0/-1.3, I enter these coordinates and that point in space is selected/jumped to.
14) Request: Please allow the transfering of credits to enemies in the MV. Also please restore the transfering of cargo to enemies in the mv.
15) Problem: Pressing CTRL+R (Select nearest Depot) also selects the nearest shipyard if closer than a depot. Shipyards don't repair, do they?
16) Add: An advanced dome (dome II) or subteranean complex. Building 9 domes on a planet is very rediculous.
17) Problem: Drones seem to have lost their effectiveness. 1000 drones roughly repair 60% of a dread hull. 2000 drones almost repair 50% of a station's hull. And it takes forever now too.
18) Problem: Distance to be able to USE a shipyard should be based on ship size. Range is 250gu. A station is 50+ gu in size alone, so it needs to get VERY close to a planet to use a shipyard, where as a scout (while it needs to get the same distance from the shipyard), has lots of room left between it and the planet when it gets in range. Make the range add 25gu per ship size increase so a station doesn't have to brush a planet to get into range.
19) Add: Hidden wormholes to the MV. These wormholes would be difficult to find (need to be within a certain range to see). Additionally, the only knowledge you would have that one exists would be a dashed wormhole line connecting the two systems suns together (not actual wormholes).
20) Change: Specialize each faction's engines. Make there be universal basic, advanced, and elite engines, and then each faction specializing in their personal version of an elite engine as well (like now) except the engines would vary. For example: ICC elite engine would have a bonus to turning rate. UGTO elite engine would have a bonus to accelleration. Kluth elite engine would have a bonus to max energy. There would be a con to each elite engine as well of higher cost and a sig gain per engine? So now you can upgrade to elite, or pick a specialized elite and gain even more bonus in one of these field, but also suffer a cost (sig, cash, etc) for that gain.
21) Add: When you turn ship system on/off, there should be a power up/down sound. So if you turn your system all off to reduce your sig and lie in wait somewhere, when you power up your system afterwards, you get the "systems powering up effect" from the sound.
22) Add?: I'm not sure if this is in already or if I stumbled upon one of Faustus's tests. Add unstable wormholes that connect systems periodically. A wormhole will appear for 5 minutes every 30 minutes or so. To add effect, it can even move at a fairly fast speed requiring a chase to get to it.
23) Change: During a jump, you're velocity is locked at the value it had when you started the jump. You should be able to change your velocity setting so that upon exiting the jump, you can start slowing down/speeding up to the new value right away.
24) Feedback: The new nav system is really buggy. If I view a system and just wait, after about 30 seconds I start seeing phantom ships of other players in the mv appear and dissapear at rendom places in my system. (When those players are no where near the system)
25) Return: Please return the ability to camera nonfriendly planets/detected ships. It added a whole new perspective to the game, being able to see things from a different point of view.
26) Add: When viewing a planet in a system you are not in, it takes ~5 seconds to update the planet view to reflect its real status. (Population, structures, etc) When selecting a planet about which you have no data yet, make the target box show "Scanning" for the time it takes to load the data.
27) Change: The interdictor device should block wormholes. (WH cannot be generated within a dictor field. When creating a wormhole in a dictor field, it should appear outside the field. (Not fail to generate)
28) Bug: When mining resources from a planet, if your cargo hold fills up and you continue to mine for another minute, once you sell your resources you will not start accumulating new ones unless you turn off the beams, manually target a different section of the planet and start mining again. (Sometimes requires retargeting several times)
29) Suggestion: Instead of having resources either present or absent on a planet, make resource concentrations. This way, a planet is capable of mining each resource, but the resources with a concentration of 1% would come in at 1 every hour or so. (as an example) The higher the concentration, the more resources would be extracted per mining cycle.
30) Change: I noticed some homegates (SOL) are still less than 3k away from planets in the homesystem. All homegates should be move no closer than 25k gu from the nearest spacial entity (planet/gate) Also, please restore the home gate dictor field with a radius of 2k gu and the safe zone with a radius of 1k gu and auto destruct/capture for any enemy that makes it into the safe zone and remains for 30 seconds +.
31) Change: Lower the repair que icon so it sits on top of the ship component icon instead of higher up, floating in the middle of space. The repair que can be made to grow up instead of down so this shouldne be a problem and will look much better.
32) Change/Add: Right now, you can store a ship by entering gate, using SY or logging out for 3 minutes. Add the ability to store a ship at any time, any place. If using this feature, your ship will remain in space for 60 seconds while you wait for the countdown to end, and then you will be taken to the storage screen. This way prevents abuse of this feature (remaining for 60 seconds), but saves the trouble of logging out if you are stranded in deep space.
33) Bug: Another mining bug, probably related to the one I recently mentioned. If I am mining goods and sell what I collected while continuing to mine, 60% of the time the resources being collected will restart showing their last value (full for example) even though the actual number is 1. (If you sell at this time, showing 50 DM for example will sell for the price of 1 DM. So collection does restart, but not display.)
34) Request: Please change the item storage space back to 50 items. 30 items as it is now is just not enough.
35) Add: A resource maximum for each planet, to prevent 1 planet in a system from collecting a godly amount of resources that will NEVER be used up no matter how many ships are pulled out of a SY.
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Mr tinkles anti wibblinator Cadet
Joined: October 13, 2002 Posts: 435
| Posted: 2004-03-07 23:00  
totally agree with most of these and gideon should be looking at this.
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Varz zZz zz Cadet
Joined: March 16, 2002 Posts: 702 From: East Coast, USA.
| Posted: 2004-03-07 23:05  
Awesome post.
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Smith Fleet Admiral
Joined: October 13, 2002 Posts: 320 From: Pittsburgh
| Posted: 2004-03-07 23:08  
good suggestions. i'd like to comment on this one. i've suggested this before its more for PD than anything.
Suggestion: Implement a slot heirarchy for items, allowing lighter items to fit into heavier complementary slots. Example: A CL2K fits only in Heavy Beam slot. A CL500 fits in Beam or Heavy Beam slot. This would require a little balancing, but in the end would allow for a larger variety of mods
if u want you should be able to seperate the slot and put 2 cl1ks. thats for obviously more beam weapons. the second would be putting the smaller lasers in. And would be 2 cl500 or 300 or what ever for a PD ship.
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Doran Chief Marshal Galactic Navy
Joined: March 29, 2003 Posts: 4032 From: The Gideon Unit
| Posted: 2004-03-07 23:11  
Quote:
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On 2004-03-07 22:53, Pentara wrote:
12) Problem: The station has a cargo capacity of 12, but only shows 10 slots. How is a person to select the 11th and 12th items?
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acutally the station does show all 12 slots.
the problem is that the last 2 are hidden behind the drive slots
ship systems need to be moved up a row, or cargo down one, or extend the row length out 2 slots worth
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Josef Marshal
Joined: February 15, 2002 Posts: 833 From: The Internet
| Posted: 2004-03-07 23:18  
Quote:
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On 2004-03-07 22:53, Pentara wrote:
22) Add?: I'm not sure if this is in already or if I stumbled upon one of Faustus's tests. Add unstable wormholes that connect systems periodically. A wormhole will appear for 5 minutes every 30 minutes or so. To add effect, it can even move at a fairly fast speed requiring a chase to get to it. |
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Yup its already there.
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[ This Message was edited by: Josef on 2004-03-09 00:25 ]
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Fatal Command (CO) Chief Marshal Fatal Squadron
Joined: November 27, 2002 Posts: 1159 From: Back in Texas and noticing some ppl are like canoes.....they need to be paddled.
| Posted: 2004-03-07 23:23  
add one more change
GET RID OF FIGHTERS
in MY opinion fighters are good for 1 thing and 1 thing only..INDUCING lag.
they do not deter anyone as the weps on em are as useful as a screen door on a submarine.But they ARE a wep when used to induce lag.....which ruins the playability of the game.I love playing,but when fighters show up.I am out as lag get to where all you do is lag die or crash into planet.
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Demorian Fleet Admiral Galactic Navy
Joined: October 06, 2001 Posts: 3406 From: Charlotte, North Carolina
| Posted: 2004-03-08 00:20  
Hell, I stopped reading about halfway down just because all of these made sense.
As for transports... they dont show on the ship list, even when in game
-Dem
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Southpark Admiral
Joined: February 25, 2004 Posts: 132 From: Texas
| Posted: 2004-03-08 00:26  
i have a different comment on fighters, i think they are key and integral to the Darkspace "galaxy" in terms of its one of ugto's "strengths" counter to icc's missiles, the difference is fighters tend to hang around way too long (more lag) than missiles.
suggested fix:
Reduce the number of fighters in the game.
Do this by cutting *Everyone*'s fighter complement in half, some ships have 1 figher bay, remove it, its useless anyways.
make carrier dreads launch 4 fighters. etc.
Make the fighters much more powerful.
how? possibly by giving them a 1 time shot IT/AR missile (call it a fighter torpedo)
or actually giving them a torpedo they use occasionally(something more powerful than the pea-shooter they use now).
and
reduce their range, 10k is a bit extreme. and lower their fuel(flying time).
ALSO
there seems to be a bug where fighters aren't recognized by point-defense systems anymore. meaning they fly around forever, and my PD lasers just sit there, i have to manually target each fighter and shoot a beam at it. very annoying.
Anyhow, i'm a big fan of the carrier dread, and always enjoyed launching long range waves of fighters at ICC from behind a planet ^_^.
but as it stands, it needs balancing, fewer fighters and more powerful fighters is what i'd think would be best.
another Future Suggestion: Implement a "Bomber" class of fighters.
These fighters would drop mirvs/whatever on their target, which would be effective against planetary, and slow-moving (dread/station) targets, but themselves would be slower moving/singe-shot(drop mirv, return to carrier to reload).
anyhow, keep up the nice work, darkspace looks much improved since i last played it years ago.
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Photox [F|F|I] Fleet Admiral
Joined: October 27, 2002 Posts: 176 From: Helsinki, Finland
| Posted: 2004-03-08 04:26  
Exelent suggestions, specially: DOME II, Orbit building (disables remote building from deepspace) and Navi probs+JD distance shown as seconds
Most annoying features ATM are useless/difficult to use Navi, speed+sig in lowerleft corner and difficulties in modding.
Great post, i hope they read it and act on it
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NightDragon Cadet
Joined: May 26, 2002 Posts: 893
| Posted: 2004-03-08 04:51  
the suggestions where all good(only read most of them not all too many of them =p)
about fighters the ships that have only 1 of them yea get rid of them they are pretty much useless, but with the balance relase, it should make it somthing, maybe just an interceptor fighter
yes there is going to be different types of fighters, 1 is bomber 2 is assualt, 3 is interceptor, and each faction is going to have a different speicalty, kluth are going to ahve the best interceptor fighters, ugto is going to ahve the best assualt fighters, and icc yep you guessed it, the bomber fighters
and fighters will also be able to fight eachother, be assigned to freindly targets for escort, and also be able to help bomb planets to dust
so fighters will become more useful
anyway tahts what was planed to happen not so much is but one day
_________________ \"Experience is a tough teacher. She gives the test first and the lesson after.\"
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Barthezzz Fleet Admiral
Joined: May 31, 2001 Posts: 5630 From: The Netherlands
| Posted: 2004-03-08 05:29  
I fully agree with everything you said accept for these 3:
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On 2004-03-07 22:53, Pentara wrote:
10) Change: Return the ability to build structures on a planet remotely, or at least if you are in orbit as a non-engineer. The advantage to using an engineer is obviously faster building, prestige gain and being able to build structures that the planetary tech level does not yet allow.
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People should only be able to remote build if they are in orbit.
The problem with the old remote build system was that people could sit on the other side of the system and rebuild everything youve just bombed off.
This is no fun.
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On 2004-03-07 22:53, Pentara wrote:
25) Return: Please return the ability to camera nonfriendly planets/detected ships. It added a whole new perspective to the game, being able to see things from a different point of view.
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No, not being able to see what the enmy has on its planet or what ships are orbiting is a good thing. This also gives scout ships a better use.
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On 2004-03-07 22:53, Pentara wrote:
27) Change: The interdictor device should block wormholes. (WH cannot be generated within a dictor field. When creating a wormhole in a dictor field, it should appear outside the field. (Not fail to generate)
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The interdictor works far diffrent then a wormhole generator so the Idr shouldnt be able to block wormholes.
Also seeing as wormholes are already quite random on the on the end wormhole location this isnt really needed.
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Jim Starluck Marshal Templar Knights
Joined: October 22, 2001 Posts: 2232 From: Cincinnati, OH
| Posted: 2004-03-08 07:06  
Some of these suggestions will be addressed in 1.482.
Others are directly contrary to what the Dev Team has planned for the game (to the best of my knowledge, seeing as I'm just a self-appointed henchman).
Some are returning to problems that were present in 1.480, and were intentionally changed in 1.481. Faustus and/or the Dev Team probably had a good reason for changing those, despite how many players dislike them, and are unlikely to change them back.
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BackSlash Marshal Galactic Navy
Joined: March 23, 2003 Posts: 11183 From: Bristol, England
| Posted: 2004-03-08 07:32  
12) Problem: The station has a cargo capacity of 12, but only shows 10 slots. How is a person to select the 11th and 12th items?
its a station interface bug, its not currently that important as the other bugs, and anyway, you can hide your weapon systems and see the last 2....
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Jlong Vice Admiral
Joined: December 02, 2003 Posts: 5
| Posted: 2004-03-08 23:38  
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On 2004-03-07 22:53, Pentara wrote:
27) Change: The interdictor device should block wormholes. (WH cannot be generated within a dictor field. When creating a wormhole in a dictor field, it should appear outside the field. (Not fail to generate)
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The interdictor works far diffrent then a wormhole generator so the Idr shouldnt be able to block wormholes.
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Another way would be to have another type of Dictor. Maybe Heavy Interdictor, or Interdictor 2? The ship would be capable of blocking WHs up to a certain gu. But then again a station would be impossible to reach a planet with a fleet having 3 of these posted around in strategic locations.
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