Multiple Player Ships

I think you technically could script a capture the flag scenario.
You'd use some sort of item - lets say, an anomaly. The first ship to get to it now gets a variable of your choice. If the ship is destroyed, it respawns somewhere else and creates an anomaly where it was and loses that variable. If the other ship picks it up, it gains the variable. If either ship makes it to their target location with the variable, they get a point.
That's just theory but I'm sure you could make it work. The problem with it is that both ships would move at warp 4 - so quickly that by the time their engines could be disabled they'd be gone or halfway across the map.

That actually sounds like a fun game. I would play it!

The trick might be spawning the anomaly (or whatever) in the spot where the ship was destroyed. I've never tried that. Does a destroyed ship still have X,Z coordinates? I don't know.

If it doesn't, spawning the anomaly right before it is destroyed might work.
I think I'll give it a shot!
Expect a two player capture the flag game in the next two weeks, assuming I get the anomaly spawned :).
I'm pretty certain I'll find a way :p
If not, I'll post my progress here.

in many computer capture the flag type games, the person with the flag is forced to most at 1/2 to 3/4 the max speed.

This allows the persuer to be able to catch up and fight.

otherwise it is just a race: who ever gets the flag first = wins.

An easy way to do this would be to drain energy/weapons/both from any ship that captures the flag. If grabbing the flag meant losing 500 energy plus all of your torpedoes then you would be restricted to low Warp speeds and pursuing ships could catch up.

I've actually right now made the ship with the flag get a top impulse speed of 0.5, and no warp.
I'm thinking that any other ship that comes within range of the ship with the flag is restricted to warp 1, just for balance. Should I remove weapons capabilities?
Or energy, so warping is still enabled but comes at too high a cost?

Half impulse is, I think, way too slow to get anywhere before an enemy ship appears and applies the smackdown. Warp 1 is a better limit--slow enough to be caught, but fast enough to make some progress toward your goal, to defend yourself, or to reach a nebula and hide.

Secondly, all the best games of this type that I've played limited either a carrier's speed or his fighting capability--never both. Remember that in starship combat, unlike on a playground or in an FPS, other players don't block weapon fire, so it's more difficult to protect an ally from a determined enemy. If the ship with the ball is too easy to catch and kill, the ball just goes back and forth between the teams and the game never ends.

I don't believe that top speed .5 is the same as half impulse. The topspeed is just a coefficient that gets multiplied by the power that Engineering allocates to Impulse. The default vesseldata.xml has Artemis's top speed set to .6. A mission script that sets it to .5 is reducing impulse speed by 17%, but the engineer can still dump a lot of power into impulse and make the ship go faster.