Hey Geon, thanks for this great post! And for all your kind words.
Mike (Strobel) did an awesome job with this game, and we're trying to continue his legacy.
Yes, now that the Dominion's playstyle was changed, we don't have a financial powerhouse civ in the game anymore (though the Federation kind of is one).
I'd be happy to lend any help I can in this regard.
Oooh, those are magic words! Whenever possible, I have included the Ferengi's versions alongside the other civs' - soundfx, UI and stuff. Whatever you can contribute for them and any other civ, anything, is most welcome! We need more people to work on everything that is still needed for the game. This is a team effort, and the more the merrier!
As to the 'problems with the native quadrants', I don't see that as really a problem. The Ferengi were seen as great travelers in the various TV series, getting to the Alpha Quandrant fairly early in ST Ent, the Delta Quadrant in ST Voy and the Gamma Quadrant in St DS9. The home systems of the Ferengi could therefore be located practically anywhere on the map, but perhaps somewhere not too far from DS9 (since the Federation was able to reach Ferenginar fairly easily in ST DS9, to propose an alliance against the Dominion). An area near the centre of the map staddling the borders of thel Gamma and Delta Quadrants would be ideal, since these quadrants in the game fewer player empires.
Yes, the closest thing to a canon location would probably be the Gamma Quadrant, since they're the closest AQ civ to that Q.
If this doesn't bother you, being a purist, then I don't see a problem adding them.
This is only a problem when playing with Canon homesystems; when set to Random, it's not an issue - if the Borg are included in the game, it actually places 2 empires per quadrant, which is nice.
2) While I appreciate that a given number of ship slots need to be filled, it still annoys me that many non canon designs are finding their way into this game.(hey that's just me. I'm a purist!). I realise that some races need to be fleshed out since their onscreen navies had few designs during certain eras, but at least with the Federation this excuse should not be used. The plethora of designs, from freighters, transports to cruisers, dreadnauts and explorers from the 'Enterprise' era to Nemesis should be more than adequate fill in all the Federation ship lots in the game. Perhaps one solution is to decrease the number ship slots?
The shiplist can be reviewed at any time, but that implies new models, new descriptions, etc.
This is a topic where a consensus will never be reached, I guess.
Would you like to start a new thread about this, with your suggestions? It could be interesting to discuss this.
3) Maybe it's just me but I find that Supremacy doesn't flow as smoothly in gameplay as the original Birth of the Federation. What I mean by this is that in BOTF building structures and ships and moving ships on the map seemed to have less steps involved and gameplay was quicker. Maybe this is a consequence of having many more structures to build in Supremacy, and more steps involved in ship construction (in BOTF you chose the ship you wanted to build, pressed a button and the shipyard did the rest. In Supremacy, you have to pick a shipyard, pick the ship type you want, confirm your choice and click to build. Having more than one shipyard in some systems will also slow down the production time.
You sould have seen the list of Buildings before I axed half of them...
Anyways, having a build queue for the shipyard is in the ToDo list, and there is one proposal to make ship selection similar to BotF (single click instead of double click). These should help a bit with some of those issues.
Re moving ships on the map, what do you mean? What do you find to be different, or more time consuming?
The flow problems you mention, is it just a UI thing, or also related to mechanics?
How do you find the research rate/pace?
4) I like the fact that ships from the earliest to the latest eras are present in Supremacy. BOTF was essentially TNG era due to licence restrictions. BOTF could have this also, but only by modding, and the number of ship types was limited by the original game engine. So, bravo Supremacy! I would like to see a feature where games could be limited to a certain era or range of eras. By this I mean that you could have an Enterprise era game where technology development stopped after reaching that era but gameplay continued. Instead of waiting for a specific Enterprise era or TOS era mod for BOTF, you could now have an Enterprise era or TOS era specific game anytime in Supremacy. Possible choices for eras could be Enterprise, early Federation,TOS, Movie era, TNG.
This can be easily achieved by editing the tech level thresholds. Just increase those numbers for the other eras to absurd values.
ENT 1~3
TOS 4~6
TNG 7~9
VOY 10~12
So to have a game strictly on ENT era, just edit the ResearchMatrix.xaml file and change the threshold for TL4 in all fields to max int. Notice though that research will then become useless.
A couple of years ago I tried to look into how mods work in Supremacy, but I haven't managed to fully grasp it. Modding could be a very useful tool in testing all of this - Ferengi, shiplists, era specific scenarios, etc.
Thanks, mate! Keep it coming.