Oolite Bulletins

i got thinking about this while designing my Dominatrix. i was playing about w/ stats, juggling various values to make her good but (hopefully) not OTT uber, and was checking against other OXPs to try and fit w/in ballpark ranges, and i got thinking, wouldn't it be cool to try her out against these other ships ~ eg, i've designed her to hold her own against Viper Interceptors, so *could* she? and that evolved into this :

ever wondered if a group of 10 Adders could stand against a Thargoid? Want to know if a Vampire could take out a Caduceus? well how about an OXP to sim this? you have two teams to assemble, red/blue, or black/white if you're a chess person, and each side has (say) 10 slots, each of which you can assign a ship to (obviously only standard ships and those you have in OXPs!). you pick your teams, launch and jump, and when you come out Witchspace, the OXP gens up the two teams and they go at it. say they start off 10km apart, and each would be coded to target anything on the other team. the player can fly up as close as they dare and watch the fun. perhaps onscreen messages can announce kills and a winning team.


could provide some cool dream match-ups perhaps?

Reminds me of the possibility of this fake BBC news story: http://www.newturfers.com/mwf/attach/38 ... -Fight.htm

BTW, how would you stop the ships turning tail (as per their normal behaviour) when they're almost dead?

Or you could create a specific Coliseum area inside a system, analogous to what happens with the race tracks. They could be given their own beacons, and an info screen to alert the player whenever they dock anywhere inside a Coliseum system.

Sounds all good!

Specific gladiator AIs could be used for each of the ships slugging it out, which might be a bit tricky to get exactly right, but still quite doable.
KW, looking forward to the OXP already!

Could a player join a specific team if a place was available? Given a beacon (as an equipment item) to ID which side he/she/it was on so they would be attacked by the opposition? Punished financially as a coward if they fly outside the agreed combat zone? Could you place a bet on the outcome - a Hoopy franchise?

lmao at that link.

turning and running, ah...never thought of that. maybe we can have a new "gladiatorAI" where someone might run just o recharge shields then come back for another go. i suppose this could be done by the script periodically assigning the "go and tw@ something" procedure that would override any current "run like buggery" attribute?

good ideas re the betting. not sure about joining a side though, this was just supposed to be a simulator type thing. legalised killing for money tho, there's a thought. instead of cargo/passenger contracts there could be an additional board stating a team wants another member. if your team wins, you get prize money, the more fights you win the more you get.

and by the way, i can about model a few polygons but not create anything like this - it was a suggestion thread, not an announcement of intent!

the car wars and bzflag of oolite.... this has some fun potential.

Betting sounds awesome. AWESOME!

Player participation too! We can have a leaderboard ranking, persistent for each Galaxy. The more you win the more 'Coliseum Wins' you rack up. Everytime you hit a certain number of wins, you will get challenged to a showdown by an enemy team of a certain level who are much stronger than the average team, and winning that showdown will advance your Coliseum Rank. The higher you go the harder the challenging teams, and there could be some nasty surprise waiting at the final ranks (like a bunch of Behemoths )

When you get to the top, the challenge doesn't stop - at any time you can be challenged by an elite team who wants to overthrow you just lik the way you overthrew your predecessor - and if you lose, you'll lose your rank!

It would be different from Elite rankings - those relate to general survivability, whereas Coliseum rankings would be a kind of 'Duelling Record' - a way to show your prowess in small, controlled fights. And a Coliseum Rank would be much, much more volatile, as the higher you go, the less it takes to lose the rank - as a guide, the second lowest rank requires you to lose ten matches after earning that rank to lose it, the next eight, then six, four, two, and the final rank will be lost if you lose just one rank!

And one may wonder, 'but if I lose I'm dead!' But how can betting be done if the losers die? They need to stick around and try again to generate $ So I'm thinking a ship is considered to be 'out' if its energy level reaches a certain amount (equipment damage is not covered under the terms and conditions of the Coliseum, and will not be compensated ), that ship will automatically de-hostile from all other ships and a point awarded to the opposing team. If it's your own ship that takes critical damage, your team automatically loses (this offsets the 'advantage' a human player brings )

Rules could even be implemented for special purposes. E.g. a 'no Q-bomb' rule' would be important, could be coded for by simply not allowing it to be equipped before the match begins

We could even have special 'no fatality' matches in the more lawful systems, where a kill causes instant disqualification! That would make duelling a fine art, you can't over-rely on anything more than an injection missile or you'll fry them by accident!

Some random ideas here! I'm excited about this

not sure about the "fine art" of duelling etc, the whole point is to blow sht up.

my thought : the premise would be that you use a combat ship when in the Colosseum (proper spelling this time). given the game's limitations of not allowing ship-swaps, the OXP would have you fight in your normal ship but would install an escape capsule, if you didn't have one. you fight until you win, or if your ship's destroyed you simply return to the nearest station and skulk back to your normal ship while people throw cabbages at you for being rubbish. if this happens, then could the OXP be coded to track it, so it both updates your win/loss record and next time you enter the competition you lose xxxx credits, ie being the cost of a new ship?

oooh - an additional sneaky bit is this could make you more of a target : going about your normal trading runs you suddenly get jumped by irate betters who lost money cos they bet against you etc.

Self-promotion mode on: I'd invite people to have a look at the work in progress Feudal States thread in the Expansion Pack area. Non-lethal ship-to-ship combat is already there, along with the ability to place bets and win lots of cash in the process. Of course, if you happen to be flying a particularly uber ship, and you already have lots of kills, you shouldn't expect massive odds. Ranks, promotions, missions and tournaments are all present and correct in the OXP as well.

On Killer Wolf's original coliseum idea (i.e. putting a a group of selecting ships against each other), that would be interesting to see. An issue I've found when I've been working on tournaments though is that even if you give ships a very aggressive AI, they're not nearly as good as the player when it comes to shooting down other ships. The NPCs just don't seem to press home an attack properly when fighting against each other. Unless the ships in question have very low energy ratings you have to wait a very long time for anything to be destroyed.

One thing you can do with the AI to make a ship more agressive against other NPCS is not have a reaction to ATTACKED when already in an ATTACK_SHIP state. Most AI will use a setTargetToPrimaryAgressor when attacked in ATTACK_SHIP. This is normally handy as it creates a 25% chance the at ship will switch targets when hit by a new ship whilst in combat. Its particularly usefull for gameplay as it means if the player turns up and attacks one of NPC ships already in combat, a few shots of the players laser and the ship breaks off and engages him. However when you've set up a battle with set-piece ships to shoot each other it can be a bit of a pain as if several NPCs target a single enemy NPC, its constantly switching target and gets nowhere. I think this is why they tend not to press home the attack. The keep taking potshots at each other, but as they're all at it the ships get hit so often by new enemies that there all switch targets quite often. The dowside of ommitting it it that the NPC stayes locked on it's first found enemy and completely ignores other attacks until it's target is dead. So an NPC in combat will ignore the players attack until it dies or its target dies. If you're wanting the player to pitch in and help one side or another as part of a mission, this ain't much fun for the player as nobody will fight him! Could reduce the checks though by only checking on a d roll. They'd stay a bit more focused then. Or you could omitt it completey but do a JS script check for a player attack and only check it then.

Sounds like Ramirez has most of this covered. But yeah, maybe the ship-team thing could be incorporated as a virtual gambling game (assuming we ignore the player taking part side) - create your teams and bet on one then watch the battle unfold. the odds would depend on the team, obviously. bet on 5 Thargoids against one adder and you'll get like 1/2cr back. bet on a Vampire against ten Mambas, and you're looking at a good few quid if you win. or the two teams could be picked at random by the puter, for the betting side of things, as opposed to the simulator bit of picking your own dream fight teams.