drek wrote:That's how it works in hw2; it works out fine. By now, it should be possible to find hw2 in the bargin bin. It's well worth checking out, esp. for the multiplayer.
I played HW1 to death, never did get HW2 as it just looked like more of the same to me. IIRC HW2 doesnt have a strategic map. It may have the look and feel that you want for space combat, but its building model isnt necessarily one to follow.
Like i say, i think the idea of grouping ships in combat is great - but youve already got a mechanism for moving ships around on the galaxy map - fleets. Why place artificial constraints on what can be moved between fleets? I dont see a problem that needs fixing, tbh.
Similarly w.r.t. build queues - i dont see a problem with being able to order 1x, 2x 5x or 10x of something. Why limit it to a fixed number?
Above limit X, units are sent to the reserves and do not pop out until some of your other unit have died.
Since small ships are grouped into units, it's still a viable strategy to use small ships. Otherwise, (as with most games with ships caps) big ships rule the roost.
Note, there *must be* an limit X, even if it's quite large. The engine obviously can't account for infinite ships.
Exactly, the grouping thing will work very well up to a point, but there will still be a limit to what you want in battle at one time.
Sounds like youre in favour of a reinforcements approach - which sounds good to me. The key issue though, is to design it in *properly* from the start. i.e. give the player a way to manage their reinforcements. In the total war games, reinforcements were obviously tacked on as an afterthought, because the there was no way to for the player to manage them until the latest version, and even that could do with some improvements (i.e. you still have to determine the order in which they arrive before battle even starts, because there is no mechanism for picking which unit to use in the combat engine, so if you really really needed some archers, but a unit of spears turns up instead, its VERY annoying).
This happens with almost every 4x game i have ever played. The designers always seem to assume "oh, players will hardly *ever* use reinforcements, so we wont worry about it too much". In practice, in almost every game i have ever played, players regularly exceed the designers upper limits by a very large factor. Even in Moo1, where you could have 32000 ships in a stack, its not uncommon to see players (or even the AI) put too many ships in and have the numbers wrap around to -1 ships.
So have goals w.r.t scale of combat, but *expect* players to ignore them. Defensive design.