Some people have brought up a couple issues :
1) Someone asked for enabling BUY_BLUEPRINTS_WITH_CREDITS
2) There have been criticisms about the current accuracy/range settings.
My viewpoints on those issues are the following :
1) I'd rather have players use shipyards (or manual building) rather than directly buy ships, but if it's something that many people want and nobody is against I'm not completely against it either.
2) From what I gathered some people consider range and/or accuracy too low. I however don't think the server would benefit from increasing range.
My point being that among the currently 3 kinds of "usable weapons":
- projectile weapons (cannons/dumbfired missiles)
- homing projectile weapons (smart missiles, ie MB/MP)
- beams
Only the last two kinds really benefit from a range increase as the first one is inherently limited by the delay between the moment the shot was fired and the hit (even with "infinite" accuracy, the AI/player can't completely predict how their opponent will move). In other words, I don't think a cannon round shot further than 2km away has a reasonable chance of touching any moving object, even if fired by a turret and regardless of the AI accuracy setting [edit: maybe somewhere where big slow-as-hell turtle-ships are common, but I don't think it's the case on Minimade].
Therefore, increasing the range would really buff homing projectiles and beams only. Since the "homing projectile king" is Missile/Beam and it already has an extremely good range, while beams have quite a bad base range (0.5~1.5 RU, cannons have 1~3RU, missiles 1.6~4.8RU, RU stand for "range unit" currently 2km), I'm afraid that increasing the "range unit" would buff missile/beam too much (doubling the "range unit" would make it possible for ships to send missiles from more than ~15km away while any other weapon wouldn't be able to hit its target more than ~2km away, set aside beam/beam maybe and its 6km range).
Another solution would be to change the vanilla range ratios, but I'd prefer to only touch the range unit for now (to be fair though, the point of not straying too far away from vanilla is to preserve the vanilla balance/meta, modifying the "range unit" is already a change which breaks the balance/meta).
Concerning AI accuracy, I think 750 is already pretty darn good… but maybe still not enough? I'm however unsure increasing it even further will make that much of a difference.
Maybe I've just misunderstood the criticisms and the problem lies somewhere else though. In any case, I might be the server admin, but that doesn't mean I'm right.
Of course, you're welcome to discuss on those matters.
On another note, Iskir has recently been acting really weird. They tend to pile up inactive ships near players' homebases. Nobody knows what they really are up to. War? Mourning the recent departure of their beloved creator? Planning for world domination? Just trolling and screwing with players? Everything at once?
…anyway, this really is annoying and I regularly have to despawn their ships (hurray for /despawn_sector and /despawn_all). To be honest, I've considered downright deleting the faction.
