Agree, No Warp Points

[Maj_Doogie]

Agree, get rid of Warp Points

[Davor]

well this was very insight full. Something a kindergarten student would say. I would thought teenagers and adults would give reasons as to why.

[Hans Lemurson]

My interpretation is:

In their current implementation, Warp Points as discrete locations in a system enforce a minimum 1-turn transit time for any and all ships travelling through them regardless of their engine speed. I find this very frustrating as it makes long range fleet movement in the late game un-necessarily slow.

Something with which I do in fact agree!

[Jammy]

yup, but big arse alien fleets popping up randomly in the middle of your empire causing havoc, is more annoying...

[Simpson3k]

Its not only the increase in travel time its the fact that hostile ships are always engaged into combet from ships guarding a warpnode. So you can pretty much siege a whole enenemy race and lock them into their territory.

You could put a command and Conquer grafik with roads over it..where no air units are allowed..thats pretty dull for a space game imo.

[Avalanche]

Well, technically, you could make jumpgates, maybe if you are spanning 3/4 of the galaxy and instead of 25 turns worth of movement, you can have 2-3 jumpgates set up in secure areas that can lower it down to 5 turns or something.

I just think, 20 turns of travel to fight an enemy that i will beat in 2 seconds flat.....next time, i made sure to have jumpgates at select locations that are heavily guarded and that 20 turns went down to like 3-4 turns...totally worth it to be honest.

I always hope that my home system is next to a system with a habitable planet in it, that way, i can colonize it and put up a security station at the warp point to my captial world, which means, i can use the warp point from my capital world as a jumpgate, cause if they can get past my security stations, why would one more make a difference? you get my drift?

Overall, jumpgates can help alot, especially in the end phase of the game, which i believe you are all having a hissy fit over.

[Flashfires]

Yes, jump gates are a good thing and definately cure this by the time it's an issue.

[kzielinski]

Its suppoed to be a space game. Space has freedom of movement in all directions. Thats part of what made the first two Moo games so awesome. space lanes where a controversial decision in Moo3 and they remain controversial.

[Dark Fire]

Originally posted by kzielinski:

Its suppoed to be a space game. Space has freedom of movement in all directions. Thats part of what made the first two Moo games so awesome. space lanes where a controversial decision in Moo3 and they remain controversial.

MoO3 had freedom of movement in all directions, but it was slower if you didn't use the star lanes.

MoO2 essentially had invisible star lanes with later options to change direction assuming your ship was close enough to a particular outpost or colony. In MoO2 there were Black Holes that forced travel around them and resulted in a similar system to system traversal. It was actually a strategic expansion move to use Black Holes as a means of forcing another empire to attack you in a certain fashion.

Based on that, one can interpret the use of star lanes to mean that wherever systems don't connect, there is something (like a black hole) impeding the traversal.

As for the loss of a turn when traversing a system, this does make a bit of logical sense as well. When moving through star lanes, there are no obstructions to impede the ship, however when moving through an actual system, the ship must navigate around planets, asteroid fields, and the star itself which would necessarily reduce its speed as these bodies, although we don't see them do so in the game, are constantly moving in position.

Most sci-fi concepts about space travel have their ships with two types of engines: warp or hyper drives which allow a ship to "sprint" from location to location in straight lines over long distances, and thrusters, etc, which are used for short distance and tactical manuevering (Think Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica). MoO3 actually touched on this with its VERY dynamic ship design system that allowed you to even modify how much of each type of engine's capacity the ship could use (Thrusters in MoO3 had a maximum capacity of 1500 speed units, but you could make them as slow as 250 units, or any other number between, I believe).

In reality, space isn't just empty between star to star, so several factors could impede travel from one system to another, or create a situation in which although a system might be positionally closer, it would take longer to get to it due to circumstances, than going a more round-about way.

[kzielinski]

I remember the first thing I did with MoO3 was modify the settings files so that the star lanes didn't do anything. Unfrotunatly the system AI's insisted on using them anyway.

And No MoO2 did not have anything resembling an invisible star lane. It had a system where your ships could only go a set distance from your nearest colony or outpost . And you could go directly to ANY system within that range. that does not resemble starlanes at all. It also had the extra component you needed to upgrade on your ships, the Fuel Cells which set your maximum range, as opposed to the drives which set how long a jump to maximum range would take.

As for balck holes. The difference was that they where very rare. you'd get 1 or 2 per galaxy, not all over the place.

Finding reationalisations for why the starlanes are there is not something I see a point to doing. I'd rather they just wheren't there at all.

[Dark Fire]

Originally posted by kzielinski:

And No MoO2 did not have anything resembling an invisible star lane. It had a system where your ships could only go a set distance from your nearest colony or outpost . And you could go directly to ANY system within that range. that does not resemble starlanes at all. It also had the extra component you needed to upgrade on your ships, the Fuel Cells which set your maximum range, as opposed to the drives which set how long a jump to maximum range would take.

As for balck holes. The difference was that they where very rare. you'd get 1 or 2 per galaxy, not all over the place.

In MoO2 you could only travel from one system to another that was within the range limitation of your fuel cells. Travel was point to point and could not be changed until you had researched or otherwise acquired communications technology from the Physics discipline (even then, the change was limited to being within 3/6/Anywhere parsecs from a colony or outpost). MoO2's traversal system essentially was every system was connected to every other system so yes, it can be said it used star lanes that were not visible in the game. Before you got communication technology you could not even turn the ship around mid-flight. The only difference occurred when Black Holes were present because you could not cross them, and had to move to systems around the Black Hole which was functionally similar to star lane traversal.

Yes, in a galaxy without Black Holes in MoO2, assuming enough colony spread or Thorium Fuel Cells, one could access any system from any system, but that is the same thing as saying every system had a star lane attached to every system. If you also had Hyperspace Communications then, and only then, could you go wherever you wanted whenever you wanted.

The fuel cells determined how many parsecs a ship could travel away from a colony or outpost from a minimum of 4 from Standard Fuel Cells to unlimited range from Thorium Fuel cells (Chemistry discipline), where as the engines determined how many parsecs a ship could travel in a single turn from a minimum of 2 parsecs/turn from Nuclear Drives to a maximum of 7 parsecs/turn from Interphased Drives (Power discipline).

But none of this functionality was available until late game in any case considering their placements in the tech trees.

In this game, you essentially get Thorium Fuel Cells automatically (since you have unlimited range with the exception of in a spiral galaxy having to wait until you research red lane traversal), and with the best engines you're moving between each system for the most part in a single turn. Therefore the ONLY difference is you cannot change direction in late game until you come out of warp, and the star lanes are visible and suggest there is a reason you cannot simply move to certain systems (i.e. Black Holes).

There is nothing wrong with either system other than personal preference.

[NE14PIE]

A problem I see with free travel is that the AI tends to attack your least defended worlds, even if it does not have the information to know it is undefended. It happened a lot in MOO2. It also kept switching targets on its turn, making it impossible to defend against. The star lanes are in my opinion really good for the early part of the game, first 150 turns, as they deter early rushes.

I think it is critical that an off grid form of travel is available for the later part of the game, when you have large expanded empires. Maybe something like a 5th warpoint in a system at the star, so you can travel star to star later on, or an advanced Super Jump Gate, that can exit anywhere. I am sure the devs could work out how to make this happen.

Reason I think it is critical, is with star lanes, it forces the two opposing forces into one battle. The losing side has then lost the war, they cannot counter attack as any surviving or new forces have to pass the enemy stack to get to the enemy worlds. If you have access to off the grid travel, then you can launch attacks at enemy worlds from a far, at least making the enemy draw forces off the front line to deal with them.

If it was some form of super jump gate, i.e, a one way trip, I would be happy with this.

[Smugass Braixen-Chan]

Endless Space had a technology that allowed you to go "Off the grid" albeit at a massively reduced speed. I actually prefer Star-Lanes in these kinds of games, even if it's a bit gamey, because it makes expansion and holding territory more relevant (Enemies can't get to your weaker inner colonies because they have to go through your heavily defended border colonies first)

[Stelar Seven]

Star lanes are better. They make for a more interesting early game, prompt quicker interaction with the AI and they don't cause an invisible wall in space due to range. Seriously, did any if you ever see the starship enterprise or the Millennium falcon have to stop and go home because the star they wanted to go to was two parsecs too far?

Are we beaming power to our ships from colonies? Are ships radio transmissions?

Starlanes I can tech babble without losing immersion, gravity blah blah reasons. Range? Why would a ship have a range, not on total fuel carried, but on proximity allowed to inhabited stars?

[𒀀𒂵𒉡𒆠.n0 m3rCy☣☠]

Originally posted by kzielinski:

Its suppoed to be a space game. Space has freedom of movement in all directions. Thats part of what made the first two Moo games so awesome. space lanes where a controversial decision in Moo3 and they remain controversial.

Word, get rid of space lanes and reimplement fuel for distance to travel from planets.

[kris44dad]

Without reading all the comments above, I find that the lanes give a good tactical aspect. I will admit to losing a small fleet more then once, whilst it was catching up with a larger battle group.