DLC 3 and 4, from the Suggestions thread...

[zolobolo]

4. Planetary defensive platforms (in front of space bases and star bases

I suggest these to be the Asteroid bases

7. Ramming

I got flashback from this to "Last Jedi" and PTSD right after that... such a mechanic can be recipe for disaster if not handled with extreme care. If it provides anything beyong low-damage we could end up building small hulls with only engine and no armor or weapons as sort of self-guiding torpedoes

12: Random space monsters (Hybrid harpies?)

Yes I was thinking on mutated harpies based on the strategy of their branch e.g.: defense, scavenger, retaliation fleets

13 : Capital structure (for only some races)

These could provide a lot of additional flavor to each race yes and in order to minise effort they would need to fit into the current mechanics not introducing any new mechanics (they can be destroyed but not built) e.g.:
1. Ancient Imperial Palace for Haduir providing a large coin and some influence per turn
2. Palace ruins for Gremak housing 3M slaves or increasing slave "reproduction" rate
3. Machine Altar might be a target of some change as soemthing that does not replace factories but is built automatically after x turns on each planet the faction owns. It is only built once and if destroyed the same effects apply as now. This could also lend itself to some research option improvements for Tinkers as they would be able to upgrade the altar and the factories independently and with differetn effects
4. For humans a fleet biome module on hteir largest vessel "Refugee Haven" providing food

The benefit of such an implemntation besides giving more falvor to the races is to encourage capturing of at least home planets witouth bombardment.
With the latter, the unique building would surely be lost and the planet can never be bult up to be as valuable as before. Same for Tinkers who gain precious time if recapturing their colonies with the Altar still intact (as they normally dont even have to worry abouth negative moral effect from bombing)

[Captainspire]

https://youtu.be/a9HcAUHBFmg

Trust me, when I thought about the ramming ability I had to go to my happy place to even forget that jedi nonsense and even the Nemesis impact. Wing Commander 3 did it just fine.

As for the cease fire and defensive fire, dont you need to manual click on each weapon to get it into that mode? Having one button do activate/deactivate that option would be helpful when you got 40+ ships

[gaerzi]

Every vehicle can be used for ramming, at least once.


Also every speed is ramming speed.

[Arioch]

Realistically, at the speeds and scales of space combat, collisions would be very difficult to achieve (assuming the other vessel was trying to avoid you), and if the attempt was successful, the incredible kinetic energy of the collision would instantly and completely destroy both vessels.

In game terms, if the enemy can take out even your largest dreadnought simply by ramming it with its smallest frigate, I don't think that would be very much fun.

Granted that SiS combat is very abstracted, and things like boarding also aren't terribly realistic... but even if we wanted to treat starships like Greek triremes, I think the gameplay implications would not be good. If you can turn a nearly destroyed ship into a deadly weapon via ramming, then that would probably become the optimal play style. Currently you can mostly ignore the boarding subgame if it's not to your taste, but I don't think you'd be able to ignore ramming.

[zolobolo]

Exactly: mechanically, raming may only offer minimal damage less it will overwrite all other mechanics but that would make it not fun and meaningfull to use: only as a kinda last resort that causes minor damage to the enemy - but even a heavily damanged ship can usually pull that off

Realistically: there is nothign that would be instantly destroyed if rammed with even a fraction of ligh-speed by anything weighting more then a pencil

The WC3 clip seems pretty realistic given the CGI of the time

For real-world gaming examples I would point to Rome 2 where they introduced ramming and instantly made everything else a suboptimal choice. you could basically spam the cheapest missile boats and out-manuever and mass-ram other ships taking down evne the largest ships with ease. In release version it was even worts I heard you could simply use transports

[gaerzi]

Realistically: there is nothign that would be instantly destroyed if rammed with even a fraction of ligh-speed by anything weighting more then a pencil

Doesn't it depend on the relative speed between the two ships? If one ship is chasing the other (so they're both going in the same direction, just the pursuer being slightly faster), the speed difference might not be that big.

And again, any speed is ramming speed. If you have more mass, you can ram at 0.01 km/h. Plate tectonics is all about continents ramming each other.

[zolobolo]

Doesn't it depend on the relative speed between the two ships? If one ship is chasing the other (so they're both going in the same direction, just the pursuer being slightly faster), the speed difference might not be that big.

Correct. All movement in space is relative to the objects observed. So when saying ramming another ship with x km/h that means that the relative speed of the raming object compared to the vector speed of the rammed object is x km/h doesnt matter at that point what that base vector of the rammed object is. Otherwise, if they have the same vector, their relative speed is 0

Like our planet has a speed compared to the sun but it has another speed compared to other galaxies as the sun and beyond that the milky way itself is also moving

Realistically speaking (which is of course not the point of a game at all ), ships that would ram other space ships would need to have a very high speed as the other ship wold not want to be cought up with and the distances and innertia makes it extremeley difficult to hit jsut the right speed to intercept. We are basically hurdling through endless distnaces at breakneck speed and trying to hit a dust particle in this was t ocean of nothingness that is equally moving at that speed and doesnt want o be hit: the faster we go the more energy we need to change our speed OR direction in any way + reaction speed of target would make such an attempt almost impossible to pull off

Kinetic weapons might have a chance as they can fire multiple valleys at the expected point of the target, missile weapons cna create a blast zone and energy beans literally travel at the speed of light which the enemy cannot go faster then

[Serenitis]

Re: Ramming
It's already in the game. It uses the exact same abstraction that MoO2 did - fly ship to 'ramming' target, then self destruct.
There really is no need to go into any more detail than that.

[zolobolo]

Any updates on the ucoming DLC?

I was eyeing the discounted DLCs for ES2 - but as always I think back on my expereince with the the first one where I was hoping it would fix the game and just realise I would still not enjoy the UI

[nweismuller]

Yeah, I'm always excited to hear more about progress on SiS. At this point I'm essentially done with Stellaris, I'm beyond frustrated with design decisions around the population growth and migration model and other things, which leaves SiS the big strategy game whose development I'm actively following. I've gotten a ton of fun out of SiS thus far, and honestly am anxious to see DLC 4 hit- I started a narrative Let's Play for the game that got left off because updates obsoleted the save, and on hearing what's planned for DLC 4, I'm planning to wait until DLC 4 hits until I try a Let's Play again. Getting the culture stuff in is going to provide even more meat for the Let's Play, and I'm excited for the new elements DLCs 2 through 4 will bring to the gameplay. Wish there was something I could do to toss some support at you guys to make it easier to dedicate some time to SiS development. Thanks as always for your great work!

[zolobolo]

DLC3 & 4 might be somewhat down the line: we are still holding on for #2

That beign said the game is effectively feature-rich at this point even though I do miss pirate and Harpy raids

Yeah: I have 85 hours into Stellaris 33h into MoO and 120h into ES2
This might seem a lot till I got fed up with them but I have 1262h in SiS and am actually interested for new content for this one

Though the hopes were so high especially for Stellaris. On paper it should have been a dream come true for me but ws very dissapointed by the result.

[nweismuller]

Yeah, I know it will take a while, but I still want DLC 4 or the knowledge development is halted before I start LPing this game again. If SiS gets a culture system, it will feed in nicely to my general LP style, so being patient will be rewarding.

[Arioch]

Development hasn't been "halted," but there hasn't been much progress in the last month or so. Hopefully we can make more progress soon.

[nweismuller]

I didn't think it was done, was just responding to zolobolo I'm willing to wait quite a while to do a Stars in Shadow Let's Play again as long as I believe DLC4 is coming. And, in the interests of helping support the project, just tossed a donation to Ashdar Games.

[Arioch]

Thanks!