Oolite Bulletins

Sorry, the title is a bit vague and I did think about putting this on Suggestions first - but perhaps it needs a little discussion first.

Reading some of the other threads about the uberness of certain ships I had this thought:

An oxp'er creates an uber ship which, because of its uberness, costs a fortune. He also states that a limited number were produced - let's make that number, say, 1000...

Now, every time one of these ships appears in game and then is destroyed (accident, pilotting error, pirates, police etc) the counter goes down by one and the cost (when the ship appears in a shipyard for sale) goes up by an ever increasing amount (exponential?).

When all 1000 ships are gone, no more ever appear, in the game or in the ship yard - you could own the very last one ever - you could even hunt all the rest down just to increase the value of your own ship...

How you'd stop Oolite placing it in game when you had the last one and/or there were none left I don't know - but that's mechanics I was just thinking about the idea of it at the moment.

Any thoughts?

DH

I think that would be doable by having a death_action that increased the counter. This is how Murgh's Military oxp keeps track of the number of stolen ships destroyed. You could also have a condition in shipdata that the counter is lessthan X. So once 1000 ships were destroyed no more would appear. However I don't think you could tie the number of ships in existance to the price, as the price is fixed by the ships entry in the shipyard.plist. I'd have thought though again a condition in shipyard that the counter is less than X would mean when the last of run is destroyed no more appear. So partaly do-able, but probably no way to effect the price.

LittleBear wrote:

I think that would be doable by having a death_action that increased the counter. This is how Murgh's Military oxp keeps track of the number of stolen ships destroyed. You could also have a condition in shipdata that the counter is lessthan X. So once 1000 ships were destroyed no more would appear. However I don't think you could tie the number of ships in existance to the price, as the price is fixed by the ships entry in the shipyard.plist. I'd have thought though again a condition in shipyard that the counter is less than X would mean when the last of run is destroyed no more appear. So partaly do-able, but probably no way to effect the price.

Well you could, make alot of clones, and do different conditions for each clone...

If you make 10 clones, then for each 100 of the Über-ship destroyed it drops the current activated clone from being included in the shipyard, and the next clone bearing of course a bigger price tag is Activated...

sort like this for the first clone then for the next clone and so on... until you got 10 nearly indentical clones that has different conditions and price tags.

You could even advance them so that they get tougher and tougher to destory... there is no end to the possibilities...

Cheers Frame....

Given the number of times I've used clones in my own OXPs, should have thought of that! Definatly do-able then. I'd guess the value of the players own uber-ship coudn't be increased though as he'd own whatever cloned version he bought at the time. So destroying fellow uber-ship commanders would only cause the price of uberships in the shipyard to be upped rather than increasing the players ship value.

Interesting idea. Now we have to see whether any of the ship designers jumps on it.

One thing though: 1000 is a pretty huge number. I am playing with military.oxp literally for years now, and have only ever killed 64 of the stolen ships. I don't think I will likely see that number grow to 1000 during my lifetime. (To get a bigger sample, please, all you long-time-players, have a look into your savefile below the line and see what number you are reading there.)

So 100 or even less might be more realistic, if you ever want to see an actual effect of the counter.