I am trying to catch up on this thread!
I don't like the siphon ship idea! The objection to one of my suggestions was the difficulty of how ship classes required so much programing.
At least it should show up on the board computer along with piracy. Provided that up-grade has been made.
From the technological point of view- to fire an ion cannon should use E also and not just U.
On this siphon ship idea- keep in mind the liabilities it can create if it is used against you!
Concerning making planets green- how will the programing work for a warp disrupter? I don't think greens can be detected with a probe, near-by detectors do not find them!
I know I am a stick in the mud on some proposals- I just think we might create a problem in the long run!

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"Is not easily provoked"
Translated:
It is not good to wake a sleeping bear

I agree with you Tom, all major changes may have unforeseen consequences. They also may force players to alter their current gameplay.

I personally don't see what is wrong with making green planets probe able. If anything it would slow down the rate of them being found / used and would give probing more of an incentive

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The night is dark and full of terrors

Alright, now my thread is being hijacked, keep green stuff on my green topic...

Turrets have already been nerfed by the last exp boost. Making sure you would need to clean turrets before leeching would raise their value again.

I can see a number of exploits by using this system.

build massive fleet of low volume leech ships, leech on one planet = proffit. afraid of losing ships or getting pirated? np just throw a ship shield (we need pages on the trade and attack ships page )

Transport piracy requires activity for proffit, plus they can be attacked, this rewards activity and so it is nice to see it rewarded.

I like the idea behind leeching i'm just afraid that it will be implemented in a way that it will hurt more than it would help.

Leeching is a sneaky tactic, it is a target of oportunity.

To implement this i would do this:

New upgrade to allow probes to detect ships 50 range.
Leech ship is invisible, it drains Energy/Troops at the production rate of the planet per tick a.k.a. 15 minutes rate ( a x30 hw would lose equivalent of x30pp ).
After being probed the ship loses invisibility until hyper-flight is used (should be the same for the other invisible one).
Ship has no def or attack value, can be pirated/attacked.
Planet intrusion range reworked. It now detects hyperjumps within it's range indicating destination.
Only one leech/planet.(this includes other players, fight for resources! )
Leech ship has a substancial cost as a way to not make this massivelly used or the other invisible ship obsolete.
Leech ship has hyperdrive max volume of 100k.

Tom: at present my first task is to lay a foundation for future code changes. I am not where I'd like to be (I'd like to be done ), but when I am I might be willing to consider adding a ship class. I'd prefer to avoid feature requests until I'm done with that though, so I can focus on rebuilding the code.

This leech ship is one of dozens of idle thoughts I've had kicking around. I can say with certainty that introducing it would change gameplay - if I didn't think it would, I won't write the code.

I agree that having it used against you would be rather annoying.

Arcanix: There are no x30 pp planets. The highest are x20. Shields don't count as pp. Your x30 idea sounds way overpowered to me; my intent was to permit active players sufficient time to check for them without serious loss - making a single ship 30 times stronger would instead encourage raids. I'd rather the player has to pay for and move 30 of them for the same gain; many many times more expensive than the single raid ship could be.

I agree fighter shields would work very well with leach ships; I'm not convinced that it changes the dynamic against an active player's homeworld significantly however, as the defender has much shorter supply lines.

Fighter shields are one of those mechanics which I'm seriously thinking about getting rid of, in spite of having strategic value - I might have to replace them with something if I do. Maybe carriers; they'd have a use that way.

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SkyLords Head Programmer

Spelled: I I R I (not irii, irri, or iri).

Force of nature.

Yeah, having a lot of weaker ships makes it so it requires more effort to set up, so it is a bonus to active players that are willing to take the time... and I had thought about throwing a shield up, but even good shields aren't indestructible, yes they can be costly to take out, but it isn't impossible...

Having anything used against you is annoying, losing planets, getting pirated, having your ship killed...

I like shields for some protection, especially if you are running solo on an HW attack, but a carrier could help negate their strength, if you could get plenty of fighters to an area quickly by using carriers (something that can transport a number of fighters through hyperflight) then you could possibly take the shield out.

I wasn't clear . I'd eliminate the fighter shield by finally putting a pager on the relevant pages. My thought was that if I needed to replicate the functionality, I'd add a ship container in space and call it a carrier . Give it some attack and defense and its comparable to a fighter shield.

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SkyLords Head Programmer

Spelled: I I R I (not irii, irri, or iri).

Force of nature.

I figured you meant adding pages in, but I still like shields, and good ones are tranny shields now What do you mean replicate the functionality? Assuming mean recreate purpose of a shield then I'm not sure how making a carrier would do that.

In order to get the meaty goodness you need to first crack the shell - the more fighters shielding, the more force required to get through.

To replicate the functionality of a fighter shield, a ship container would have a configurable (as fighters/transports now) attack and defense, and take a comparable amount of resources to build and to destroy. The ships it shielded would be invisible until after the container was destroyed, as with current fighter shield mechanics.

Anyway, that's just the first thought I had about how I might replicate it if needed after adding a pager . I labeled it "carrier" because I've had requests for a ship of that name for years (due to the flash animation), and it seemed a plausible name for a "ship container" .

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SkyLords Head Programmer

Spelled: I I R I (not irii, irri, or iri).

Force of nature.