Things that might be nice to add:

From JKEHRBAUM@dsfvax.jpl.nasa.gov

  1) The battle reports should stay the way they are.  I know that it kills
     trees, but it adds an "air" of legitimacy to the conflict.  Much better
     than you win, you lose.  However, I suggested to Glenn a shortening code
        1) index all the ships, it's already gotta be there somewhere.
        2) print out that index only, dont forget to put a decipher key first
                1i1 = "Ichton Gulliver"
                0f0 = "fires upon
                1n1 = "Nefarians probe"
                0d0 = "Destroyed
                0s0 = "Shields"
           This would allow a battle to be summarized with less characters;
                1i1,0f0,1n1,0d0
           which would save on tons of file size as the battles grow, and
           still let the user sort it out and expand it if they want.

  2) Now, if you *really* want to add something strategically great to the
     battle, you could stop the battle report for each race when their last
     ship was killed.
        This could be done by simply counting the number of Ichton ships
        at the beginning of the battle, then copying from the battle one
        line at a time until the counter of Ichton ships destroyed equals
        the number of ships I had there.

        NOTE: this would mean no more days of sending probes to listen to
              the full battle.  When the probe is gone, the report stops,
              and you are at the mercy of other races to find out how it
              finished!

        Further, it would just print a line that says
<< Battle not complete >>
        and not give you a summary of any sort, since you would not
        know how it finished.  [that last bit is to make it easier to
        code for you, because making a summary for a partial battle would
        be a bitch and a half, where as cutting out the copy merge when
        the player has run out of ships is [hopefully] a simple addition
        of a while{} to the code.  or for(shipsleft=max;shipsleft>0;;)
        of a while{} to the code.  or for(shipsleft=max;shipsleft>0;;)
                                          { copy one line
                                                if(destroyed
                                                        {if(race=ichton
                                                           {shipsleft-= 1
        you get the idea.

   +++ 12/10/93 addendum:
        Bombing reports should be this way too....

>      4) CAPTURES: If a ship has no chance of winning, and *no* chance
>       of surviving a battle, then the ship surrenders.
>            The victor then has a new ship (or ships) design, and
>       gets some more ships with which to play around with.
>
>            Note that these ships might actually have techs that are
>       higher than their racial maximum, which is just dandy, but
>       it is only nice.  They can't upgrade their own ships to this
>       new tech, until their racial techs are that high.
>
>      I think that this would add a nice wrinkle to the game.  If you
> think about it, if you have a freighter with col that runs into a warship,
> it will surrender rather than be destroyed.  Note that COL should then
> be turned into MAT.
>
>      Sort of adds piracy as almost a viable option...
>
>      5) PLANET CAPTURES?
>       Haven't decided on this.  Probably would be nice, but have
>       not figured out any mechanics on how to implement it, as
>       opposed to the ship captures.
>
>      Note on the ship captures, you need both conditions (i.e. that is
> an unavoidable ending) for the ships to surrender/be captured. two
> 1 1 1 97 0 against each other will just sit there with nothing happening...
>

   ++++
     Also, I *REALLY* like your idea of every race having a separate index
number for each planet, with the program keeping track of all the offsets.
Considering the number of planets convoluted with the number of players, the
game size will grow rather insignificantly (I hope) for the addition of a
couple of arrays to contain the information.

     I would recommend implementation of this for the next revision.

     Counter thoughts to consider:

        Each race homeworld is indexed for them as zero.  All the other worlds
        are indexed based upon their distance to the homeworld.  [so the
        closest is #1, the next closest is #2, ... to the furthest is #n]

        The one complication that you might not have thought about is that
        in generating the battle reports for each race, you will have to
        go through the master file (player) number of times, with each
        player's indexing, in order to prevent the current 0-450 order
        showing up in the player's turn report ...
        "Hey, how come the battle at #87 is listed before the probe which
         I shot down at my homeworld (#0)?"


Date: Fri, 24 Sep 93 13:54:57 PDT
From: johnk@beowulf.jpl.nasa.gov (John Kehrbaum)
Message-Id: <9309242054.AA07164@beowulf.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
To: bampton@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: Random Pluto Thoughts ...

Howard,
[...]

     The one flaw in the game that I havenot yet figured out how
to do anything about is the absolute power of alliances.  There
is no way to stand up to a three on one, and the only chance you
have against a two on one is if they are not as good as you are
and you get _real_ lucky...

     It reminds me of being back in the dorm, and there would 
always be three people who would play RISK together.  They would
bring in another 4 and then play a game.  However, the three of
them would always act in an unspoken alliance between the three
of them, and knock everyone out of the game then play against
each other.

     The same thing happens here.  Or, I  should say, _can_
happen here.

     Perhaps an interesting modification to counter the power of
alliances would be that all armed ships are _always_ at war with
each other.  Your GUARD or PEACE mode would only apply to any
unarmed ships that you might see.

     Is this at all interesting to you?  What it does is change
the fundamental nature of alliances.  It does not chance the
alliances together, because you could still team up on someone
in a DOGPILE, but it would be one race against another one
planet at a time.  So instead of three races combining forces
at one planet, the three of them would take out three planets
(perhaps) in the same turn.

     For a spur of the moment idea (probably in my subconscious
for a Long time as I have been trying to solve this problem for
a _while_), what do you think?

     Actually, now that I have written it down, I think I like
it.  Is it clear to you, or am I just rambling incoherently again?

John

[Howard's note: Sounds like an interesting idea to explore. Someone want to 
code it up?]

+++
More from John:

>      What do you think of being able to build things at a lower
> tech than max?  For instance then, you could have shiny *high*
> techs that you could _always_ keep in your back pocket, by
> building probes with tech levels of 1, while your drive tech
> might actually be three...  This is real blue sky stuff, and
> probably a bitch and a half to actually include, but considering
> that the Aussies are (hopefully) going down for the count almost
> exclusively because of their _abnormally_ high techs, it might
> be nice to hide this sort of investment until you need it/want
> to show it... Naturally the reduced cost would be at a loss so
> that producting a probe with drive tech 1 while your current
> drive tech was 2 would cost not 50% but more like 66% or some
> such...
>

I can't see any reason not to have teh ability to do this. Coding
would be a pain, error checking/syntax is going to be a nightmare...
THough:
Have the cost be like the upgrade code in reverse?

        fudge factor *
        10 * ((ship-drive-tech/current-drive-tech) * ship-drive-mass +
             (ship-weapons-tech/current-weapons-tech) * ship-weapons-mass +
              (ship-shields-tech/current-shields-tech) * ship-shields-mass +
              (ship-cargo-tech/current-cargo-tech) * ship-cargo-mass)



+++
From Glenn Ellingson:

You know what would be a nice feature for the galaxy program?  The
ability to specify that names only print to the first N characters.
I print my turn reports in 2 columns, 6-point text, so I can only fit
79 columns of text. So, when I have ships at an alien planet w/ a long
name, or I have just settled but not yet renamed a planet, my turn
report is a pain.




From several sources:
  Do away with incoming reports?
[Note: This is trivial to do- 2 #ifdefs and it is done]

++++
From Joe Slater <joe@zikzak.apana.org.au>

> Silly variants:
> Dying suns. Systems of size 0 cease to exist. All other systems decrease
> in size by 20 a turn. This means that the endgame is a fight for the last
> few islands.
>
> Collapsing galaxy. An arbitrary point is declared to be galactic centre,
> and all systems move towards it each turn, based on some simple-ish formula.
>
> System engineers. You can move systems. Treat them, for instance, as
> though they were the cargo of any drive-only groups present on them.  Two
> variants: either they stop moving each turn, or they continue to buiuld
> up velocity, which leads to -
>
> Blazing cannons. Fire your systems at those of others. Systems within 1
> unit of eachother go nova. To make it fairer, treat it like an attack
> with the firepower and shield being the system's size.
>


Still more from John:

From:    johnk@beowulf.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (John Kehrbaum)
Subject: Re: Blind Galaxy Code Improvements....
To:      bampton@cs.utk.edu
Date:    Thu, 24 Mar 1994 13:44:02 PST
Replied: Tue, 29 Mar 1994 23:35:53 -0500
Replied: johnk@beowulf.jpl.nasa.gov (John Kehrbaum)

     I'm assuming that you are maintaining a list of the suggestions/
things that you want to do to the code, and wanted to add these to,
slash,
just make sure that they were on (the bottom of?) the list.

     Also, something that Chuck Cohen just posted pinged an idea
active
that I had a _while_ ago:

     4) CAPTURES: If a ship has no chance of winning, and *no* chance
        of surviving a battle, then the ship surrenders.
             The victor then has a new ship (or ships) design, and
        gets some more ships with which to play around with.

             Note that these ships might actually have techs that are
        higher than their racial maximum, which is just dandy, but
        it is only nice.  They can't upgrade their own ships to this
        new tech, until their racial techs are that high.

     I think that this would add a nice wrinkle to the game.  If you
think about it, if you have a freighter with col that runs into a warship,
it will surrender rather than be destroyed.  Note that COL should then
be turned into MAT.

     Sort of adds piracy as almost a viable option...

     5) PLANET CAPTURES?
        Haven't decided on this.  Probably would be nice, but have
        not figured out any mechanics on how to implement it, as
        opposed to the ship captures.

     Note on the ship captures, you need both conditions (i.e. that is
an unavoidable ending) for the ships to surrender/be captured. two
1 1 1 97 0 against each other will just sit there with nothing happening...

     This will need a check at the end of every round of battle to see
if both conditions are met.  Continuing the above example, if one of the
( 1 1 1 97 0 ) showed up with tons of ( 1 1 1 1 0 ) as support, the
battle would continue as the logic condition would never be met for this
battle as on side a, although the 1 1 1 1 0 will be absolutely destroyed,
the 1 1 1 97 0 could not be destroyed, so the one half of the logic
condition can never be met for side a, and all the fodder would be destroyed.

    Letting Freighters carry _anything_

     This would be best implemented with a 'linked-list' approach for what
was in the freighter.  The freighter design then has two extra numbers

        Drive Attacks Strength Shields CargoBays Size_of_Bay

     That is my personal favorite.  Because of the following:

     In the first round of battle, the Carrier deploys the first
(CargoBays) objects in the linked list.  Note that since it is a 'linked
list' you can select the way in which your cargo (fighters?) get
deployed.

     Total Cargo volume = CargoBays * Size_of_Bay

        EXAMPLES:

        D A S S 10 10

        Well, if you load this with 100 (0 1 1 0 0), then each round
        of battle, 10 of these would get spit out, not fire on the
        turn they get spit out, and then act normally in battle from
        then on out...

        Or if you load this with 10 (0 1 5 5 0), all 10 would get spit
        out at the end of the first round...

       Finally, since the Cargo capacity is 100, you could load a
        ship in there that is up to mass 100 (if you wanted to!), but
        since it would be too big for a size 10 launch tube, it stays
        in the cargo hold until the end of the battle, when there is
        enough peace and quiet that you can unhinge the big back doors
        and unload this big cargo...)

        Side note, if you load a mass > 10 ship in the freighter, when
        it comes up in the linked list, it will not launch, and then
        will 'jam' up this launch tube.

        This is easy, as you just go through the first '10' items in the
        linked list, and if mass < '10' then it gets launched, otherwise
        you go to the next link.  Either all first '10' links are of
        mass > 10, and nothing gets launched, or you finally reach the
        end of the linked list...

     I don't know if this could be the basis for a workable addition to
the game....


 Olivier Rigaud <rigaud@hparc.eurocontrol.fr>

 
> Following the same thread, I agree with you that blind galaxy could
> provide some difficulties to exchange data between races, and I had this
> idea : one could create a new technologie, "Communication", and the ability
> to communicate would increase with the development of this technology.
> Another idea could be to assign a race type at the beginning to each player
> (such as : ant-like beings, humanoid, berserker, etc...), with a
> communication probability matrix between each of them (berserker would have
> the lowest value in this scheme :). Each kind of races would have also
> different abilities in each of the possible technologies...
>

