Monthly Archives: April 2008

Supernova 2: the crew

I’m working like crazy to be able to finish Supernova 2 by end of this month… and today made another good change to the game rules. I wasn’t satisfied by the role the transports had. In practice, how I could determine if they actually manage to capture a planet or a ship?

Also the whole thing was a bit unrealistic. I know it’s a game so don’t need to be realistic (expecially since it’s sci-fi!), but conquering a whole planet with just a small transport ship was a bit weird 😀

So now I changed the rules a bit: planets are conquered simply when you destroy the enemy ship(s) that are over it (maybe one day I’ll release an add-on that will deal with ground battles). Instead the transport ships can be used to assault and capture any ship in the game!

This means that in theory you can assault an enemy battleship and then use it for the rest of the battle. Pretty cool, isn’t it? 🙂 of course, each ship has a CREW value. The bigger the ship is, the more crew it has. So while in theory is possible to assault a battleship, will require more than 1 transport to do that.

After an assault, the transport is eliminated from the game, and the captured ship can be used only for the rest of the battle (doesn’t remain in your military screen after battle has ended). Even with those limitations, I think the transport will add a nice strategy element to the game, different from the other ships.

Supernova 2: unlockable alien technologies

Today I changed an important option in the Start New Battle menu. I removed the “Technology Race” because I realized would be pointless, since my game is heavily combat-focused, so there aren’t so many technologies to allow a proper technology race (like happens in Civilization games for example).

So I replaced it instead with another cool idea I had: each faction, beside a normal ship blueprint for each ship class, will have also another ship with a unique weapon, that will be available only if you conquer a specific starsystem containing an alien relic (his position will randomly change at beginning of each match to increase variety of gameplay).

This means for example that the Blood Legion will have, as scout ship, the Wildcat ship as the normal regular ship, but also the Fang ship that has the special attack “suicide bomb”, that will be unlocked only if you have conquered the starsystem containing that specific alien technology.

This game is getting really cool, I’m eager to play it myself! 😀