Fleets and player start location

That is why I was thinking the Caliphate of Yezhid, as opposed to the Sultanate proper. I am assuming the Caliphate would be a bit poorer, and or I will make it that way. According to the docs. it is rebuilding, plagued by some pirates, and low in trade.

Loadouts:

It is very painful to change the subsystems of AI ships dynamically. It is quite easy to randomly select between multiple ships of the same class. You can see this in the PS ships all the time. Fighter Mark1, Mark2, Mark3. All with slightly different weapons.

The only problem with starting in the north is that the Sultanate is very corrupt. And very wealthy. And surrounded by hostile systems with difficult jump routes. It makes a pretty good last location for the richest and best armed ships, hauling the most expensive cargo. I do think that the Leung Empire makes a poor and safe starting location. But I am not married to the idea.

Sigh. I had the Leung and Sultanate mixed up. Leung looks good to me as a starting point.

Whew! I thought I was all confused...

I think the original idea is good.

Will we have pirate and independant factions as well?

EDIT: Actually, how do we choose which ships are chosen in each instance? I could create a big fleet of ships and we might use an array to choose the appropriate ships for each faction when they get created ingame. Some, of course, would be Sultinate only (or whatever faction), and so on. But for independant and pirate factions...

- Qlippoth

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How to choose ships for creation/placement: Well depends how complex you want to get I guess. You could have a "chooser" table that has keys for faction, ship variant type and % chance of being in a group. Then you have a function that uses this data to randomly select ships to be used for a sepcific faction.

You could take the selection process further by specifying the group size to be generated and having data in the table to modify the chance a ship is selected based on the group size. You might also want to group ship variants by ship classes and control the select call by class to provide some more control over selection.

There is probably much more detail that could be added to this type of approach but I think this describes the concept I thought of.

This thread describes the ship selection technique in painful detail. It has not changed since (sigh) 2003.

www.i-war2.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1102