Not that I don't liked MoO2 battles, it was more tactical (each ship and it's design was really important)... but it missed the epic feeling... and having a huge empire and just such "tiny" battles doesn't really demonstrate your empire-power

Moderator: Oberlus
Eeeep. That just seems wrong to me on so many levels - if you see the ship blow up (in a no doubt impressive graphical firework display) then surely the pilots ARE dead, and the ships ARE utterly destroyed. And if 9 out of ten ships are destroyed the unit can be healed, but if all ten go then its all over? - its just one of those things that transcends the realism argument to destroy the sense of believability. A personal preference, i guess.drek wrote:Er, why not? Again, that's how it works in hw2.And i hope youre not suggesting that the stack of corvettes gets magically refilled as it 'heals' (e.g. MoM units)
If the unit's still "alive" then so are the pilots, the repair crews, etc. Ships that are "destoryed" in tactical combat probably aren't utterly incinerated.
I am all for big abstraction here. Having total control is fun at first, but with more ships it gets very tiring (MOO2, SE3/4). And for multiplayer games it is a killer. If we can, we should have two options like in SE4 (as I said many times, let's have the cake and eat it!). If not, I vote for combat abstraction (battle done WITHOUT player being able to interfere in them after they begin) as in Stars!/SE4 simultaneus movement variant.Geoff the Medio wrote: A) Should space combat be abstracted to the point where you merely manourve your fleets on the galaxy map and give them some generalized battle plans, and when you actually engage another fleet, the result is simulated / calculated and displayed, without any player control of the battle?
My thoughts: I assume most people would rather not abstract combat to this degree. That said, it may be beneficial to do so, especially for multiplayer games. A natural conclusion is to have both options, much like Master of Magic. We could then allow players to pick how to resolve each individual battle in single player, resolve all inter-AI battles the quick way, and resolve all multiplayer battles the quick way.
The ideal would be Homworld based 3d pausable system. Since it would be ATM very hard to do, I guess a 2d realtime would be best - aka MOO3 I think. Two notes here:
B) Assuming a non-abstracted combat system, should fleet battles be turn based (eg. Advance Wars), real time (starcraft), or some sort of pausible or discrete time-chunk hybrid of turn based and real-time, perhaps like Baldur's Gate battles?
My thoughts: I'm not keen on purely turn based. Running the simulation for 20 seconds, then pausing for 5 to give orders, then 20 seconds more, etc. might be workable...
In all bigger multiplayers that would be impossible. Imagine an average Stars-number game (10-16 players), one turn per day - how can they observe their battles in the same time?! Once a battle begin, players are hands off. Or there is no multiplayer.C) If battles are semi, or fully real time, how much player control of ships / ship groups / task forces should be allowed / required? Should the player be able to give RTS-style orders, or would they be limited to observing the battle and giving general orders like "flank", "retreat", "protect carriers", "search for subs" and such.
My thoughts: not giving significant player control would probably be frustrating... no strong opinion though.
I'd ask first: how long is a turn? How big part of a turn the battle take? Would the tech we 'invent' resolve the battles in few seconds or few days?D) What is the general "pace" of ship combat? Is the battle a ranging chaotic melee, or a sporadic game of cat and mouse fleet manourvres where actually firing on enemy vessels is only happening for a small fraction of the time? (This mostly applies to non TBS systems)
My thoughts: I find a battle system focused on manourvers rather than details of chaotic fighting appealing. This might be problematic though, in that it would tend to make battles take quite a bit longer... If there aren't as many "special abilities" on ships as, say, Warcraft III units that need player-clickage to activate, a ranging melee might be a better way to go.
Sure, as long as we find a way for it to be logical. For example in SE4 planets were as big as few ships. Rather idiotic, if you ask me.E) Should there be in-battle terrain? Asteroid belts, planets, moons, the star, spatial anomoalies etc. This applies to both RTS and TBS, but is actually more important for a TBS system, imo. This could also include gravity-wells from planets influencing ship movement, and specific locations for starlanes that your ships need to be at to retreat.
Me: I'd like to have terrain... as much of it as possible.
Basically yes, but it would have to be carefuly balanced - and I don't know any 4X game where in the end you didn't have megafleets. Even Moo2 and SE4, where in the begining every ship is a very expensive commodity, due to major PP increases later in the mid-late game allow megafleets. I don't think it is possible to avoid that...F) How many ships in a battle? Someone had a thread about this a while ago... Basically, are fleets composed of dozens or hundreds of ships?
Me: I'd prefer dozens at most. Makes each ship worth something, and combat more understandable.
The bigger the ship, the bigger its weapons. A star destroyer should be able to turn its mirror image into a wreck, and some critical damage should be able to vaporise it - for example when its energy generator is damaged, resulting in anti-matter breakdown and stuff.G) How "solid" do ships feel? Do ships blow up when hit by a few missiles, or do they take a beating and keep on ticking? After a ship is severely damaged, is it basically "dead in the water" (unable to move, fire, aid in the battle, capturable after the battle), or does it blow up?
Me: I'd like ships to be damaged, not destroyed, in most cases. Damage knocks out weapons, shielding, propulsion, sensors, etc, but unless you've got a really huge weapon and are attacking a really tiny ship, the ship shouldn't actually be completely destroyed in most cases. Based ship survivability on size mighit also be reasonable. Consider a star destroyer and an x-wing. The star destroyer is unlikely to be destroyed by weapons fire alone, as it's really huge. Weapons fire can knock out its shields, bridge control, weapons, propulsion, etc, but the superstructure of the ship is essentially undamaged. Conversely, an x-wing (which is a fighter, not a "ship" in the same sense, I know) blows up when shot a few times. This might also depend on whether a ship has armour or shielding / pd, what class of hull (bio, metal, energy...) and such. As well, "mean" races might blow up ships often, whereas "nice" races / empires would more likely disable ships and take prisoners.
The more details the merrier. Of course, if I don't want to see them I shouldn't have. There should be several layers of information, from short note on battle result to the very detailed view with all those detailed and reports available.H) How long should combat take? Should combat from one turn roll over into the next turn if not completed on time? Is combat real-time or compressed-time, so that a minute of combat game time is "really" an hour / day of game-time.
I'd like combat to be as quick as possible for multiplayer, but as not-twitch as possible in general. I'm not keen on combat rolling over between turns... it seems a bit silly, though mainly for realism reasons (combat takes an hour, a turn is a month, why do you only fight an hour a month? No reasonable amount of time compression can avoid this issue). Perhaps combat could be resolved RTS / TBS style for up to a time limit, after which the auto-resolve takes over. This would obviously be frustrating / unfair in some cases, however...
Simple. If a turn is a month, then the combat should be played with no turn limit. The end is when one side is destroyed, surrenders or finds a way to retreat (reasonably, please no 'retread 5 hexes to the battlefield edge and is gone forever' stupidity).
I) How much detail should be involved? Should ships have ammo, numbers of crew, damage to specific systems or general damage, fuel, etc.? Should this information be persistant between battles?
Me: Selected detail is probably a good idea. I like between turn retained ammo numbers (meaning supply routes), and sustained damage to ships.
*shrug*its just one of those things that transcends the realism argument to destroy the sense of believability. A personal preference, i guess.
Using a even a semi-realistic scale will result in an incredibly unwieldy UI. Planet/star sprites probably will be around the same size as ships (or perhaps somewhat larger)...not nothing resembling a realistic scale.For example in SE4 planets were as big as few ships. Rather idiotic, if you ask me.
You should be able to chose if you want to fight near a planet (which assumes its planetary and orbital weapns can target/support you, and you can target it), or not. Such choice should be easy to make (like a question in MOO2, or a fleet position in hex star system as in SE4).drek wrote: Using a even a semi-realistic scale will result in an incredibly unwieldy UI. Planet/star sprites probably will be around the same size as ships (or perhaps somewhat larger)...not nothing resembling a realistic scale.
Is this really a problem? The idea would be to make a smaller number of ships the most cost effective battle force you're able to produce. This doesn't mean we have to prohibit the player from making larger fleets... just that they wouldn't have any reason to do so intentionally most of the time (and varioius reasons not to).Daveybaby wrote:The point is, IF you are going to design a combat engine which is geared towards a certain scale of combat (i.e. above a certain number of ships it becomes unwieldy), then you can guarantee that someone will want to exceed that number (probably by an order of magnitude in some cases).
I'm not saying we shouldn't plan for the eventuality... I'm saying that we could set up the system to favour one situation or the other (lots of ships or few ships). If the other situation happens to occur, then there's no problems... unless we run into memory / processor speed limits, which I don't think are really an issue at this point.Players are going to have FAR more ships around in their empire than you want want to limit them to for the scale of combat which is being discussed.
... unless you are going to try to restrict an empires total fleets to the maximum allowed per combat (which would be ridiculous)
So you HAVE to plan for that eventuality, and pick a way of dealing with it when it happens.
This strikes me as somewhat odd... it appears that the only type of battle-group recognized by the combat system would be ones with all of the same ship in them. Some types of ships work like this (battlecruisers maybe), but most ships work better in mixed groups with a few ships designed for each role. IMO the in-battle UI groupings should (at least be able to) reflect this.So if you have 1 carrier, 12 frigates, 6 destroyers and 4 battleships, the game has a think and decides something like:
1 group of 1 carrier
4 groups of 3 frigates
3 groups of 2 destroyers
2 groups of 2 battleships
= 10 groups
We could also balance things so that a fully built up planet would be used to make your battleships, carriers etc, while your smaller planets (systems?) would produce the lower-cost destroyers, subs, scanners etc.drek wrote:If a unit of small ships costs the same to produce as a single capital ship, then we can balance things so that a fully built up industial planet is only able to produce a single unit (or two) at a time of the present tech level.
Please no "reserves". Ships are built at a specific location, so should appear at that location. If you want to limit how many ships are in play to be tracked and such, then just limit how many ships can be built. This has the same effect with respect to hardware limitations, but doesn't have the various issues to deal with regarding reserves and problems with them.Above limit X, units are sent to the reserves and do not pop out until some of your other unit have died.
Making using small ships a viable strategy is not dependent on using groups. The cap on number of ships you have just shouldn't be based on number of ships (or groups thereof). Instead, it should be based on ship cost or something similar, so you'd still want to build a few smaller ships even when limited by the cap.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.
The fluff is the whole point of the question with regard to rough typical # of ships in battles....the actual number of ships is fluff as far as the strategic side of the game is concerned.
Again, "useful" doesn't always mean just blowing stuff up. You don't need a battleship to carry a sensor array or to catch a supply ship.I'm saying one Unit of corvettes ought to be about as useful as one Unit of frigates, which ought to be as useful as one Unit of Capital ships.
No objection. Task forces as subdivisions of control within a fleet are fine. It's being forced to build in groups that bothers me.emrys wrote:I'd personally say 20+ ships is more than the player is going to be reasonably able to cope with, no matter how well designed the game interface, since twenty separate objects is just too many to mentally track. The vast majority of players would just lump those together in some way (e.g. battle line=4Battleships, screen = 3 destroyers + 2 sensors, rear= 5 carriers+ C&C, flank attack = 1battleship+2 destroyers, pickets = 3 sensors,others= 2 special ships, ie. 6 groups. I think it's not a bad idea to design the combat system such that it supports and encourages this kind of thing.
Not necessarily. The cost of building a tiny ship could be more than even a homeworld can do several times over simultaneously at the start of a game. Industry tech could later change this. Alternatively, the starting shipyard's capacity might be very very small, so you can't spend the whole production of the homeworld on ships. We probably shouldn't have the homeworld able to build more than one ship at a time at the start, as this would mean that you could explore everywhere at once.drek wrote:In FO, the homeworld is dramtically better than other colonies, at least at the start of the game. This is intentional, so that the player can afford our big buildings at the start of the game. Incidently, it also means that empires will be able to afford to build a big ship at the start of the game.
Agree with Davebaby.Daveybaby wrote:Eeeep. That just seems wrong to me on so many levels - if you see the ship blow up (in a no doubt impressive graphical firework display) then surely the pilots ARE dead, and the ships ARE utterly destroyed. And if 9 out of ten ships are destroyed the unit can be healed, but if all ten go then its all over? - its just one of those things that transcends the realism argument to destroy the sense of believability. A personal preference, i guess.drek wrote:If the unit's still "alive" then so are the pilots, the repair crews, etc. Ships that are "destoryed" in tactical combat probably aren't utterly incinerated.
Internally self consistent is different from "unrealistic". In this case, you have to build ships at shipyards... you can't make a ship in the middle of nowhere by "repairing" empty space. As such, you shouldn't be able to regenerate lost ships of a group by repairing. (yeah they could be only out of commision, not destroyed, etc. that's not the point)drek wrote:*shrug*
The entire premise of moo (and hw for that matter) is cartoonishly unrealistic.
utilae wrote:...what do people think of the idea of phased real time combat that combines both 2d and 3d.
Was at end of page 1, at end of long post... maybe it was missed. Certainly not official in any sense, but that's the impression I got from the replies on page 1.Geoff the Medio wrote:It looks like "pulsed" or "phased" or pausible (or forced-interval pausing) real time combat is popular. Perhaps we should focus on other issues with that in mind...?
Battlefield reserves, like in Total War.Please no "reserves". Ships are built at a specific location, so should appear at that location. If you want to limit how many ships are in play to be tracked and such, then just limit how many ships can be built. This has the same effect with respect to hardware limitations, but doesn't have the various issues to deal with regarding reserves and problems with them.
Both you and davey are failing to understand the premise. Probably my fault for explaining in terms of ship numbers.don't see what the real purpose of these groups is... we already have fleets of ships... and could easily categorize the contents of the fleet by ship roles for display on the galaxy map / fleets window.
Try out hw2 to see how it plays out in practice. There are also movies and screenshots of hw2 gameplay.In battle, I don't expect that multiple smaller ships will always work as a tight team... they'd likely spread out around the big ships / search for enemy fleets as many semiautonomous ships, not as a clumped group of ships. Small ships generally wouldn't be used to fight big ships, unless that's all you had to fight with, in which case an RTS-like control group could be easily made by drag-selecting a bunch of ships and giving them an order all at once.
Don't forget about fragmentation adjustment.emrys wrote:I.e. It's a lot easier to keep a game balanced that has a small ship built in fives costing 5 and taking 5 turns and a large ship costing 6 and taking 6 turns, but having about 6/5th the firepower etc. The balance of the game is unlikely to be utterly critical on exactly how the various aspects of large vs small ships (e.g. survivability, maneuverability, ability to be in multiple places, player's willingness to wait longer for better value) work out.
It's a good idea (i thought about it myself too), but then you must balance a game as if a player always researchs this technology. So it becomes a "denying" tech - if you don't have it, then you can't effectively use small ships. That reduces strategic options of a player so IMHO it's bad.emrys wrote:I think the solution to this is to intelligently 'compress the dynamic range' of ship sizes. As we open up larger ship sizes, and hence increase the range of the balancing act, we should introduce techs that give the player fairly no-brain* options to build smaller ships in squadrons that act and are built as a single unit, thus narrowing the range a bit (and also allowing us to concentrate more on ensuring similar era otions are balanced, rather than trying to balance across the whole span of the game).
*No-brain in the sense that e.g. a squadron of five has the same combat ability as five singles, but costs only 4 times as much and takes 4 times as long, so essentially nobody will build singles anymore.
A) No.Geoff the Medio wrote: Specific Issues:
Of course not! Evil races will take prisoners and tortue them to get technologies and useful information about enemy planets, fleets etc.Geoff the Medio wrote:As well, "mean" races might blow up ships often, whereas "nice" races / empires would more likely disable ships and take prisoners.
So then the last ship is "destroyed" in tactical combat, then all damaged ships in this squad immediately blow up in frustation? Either squad (or a single ship for that matter) must be fully repaired after a victory or it shouldn't be repaired at all.drek wrote:Er, why not? Again, that's how it works in hw2.And i hope youre not suggesting that the stack of corvettes gets magically refilled as it 'heals' (e.g. MoM units)
If the unit's still "alive" then so are the pilots, the repair crews, etc. Ships that are "destoryed" in tactical combat probably aren't utterly incinerated.
When/if ground combat gets into game, will each individual soldier be a game object? Each tank? Each jeep? How about tanks that are the size of a corvette? When these units "heal", where's the extra manpower/tanks/whatever coming from?So then the last ship is "destroyed" in tactical combat, then all damaged ships in this squad immediately blow up in frustation? Either squad (or a single ship for that matter) must be fully repaired after a victory or it shouldn't be repaired at all.
I doubt we'll ever explictly state how many troops are in each ground unit. But 50 is probably off by a factor of 10,000 to 100,000.A marine unit has maybe 50 men, too.
I dislike hassleing the player with no-brain decisions in the name of realism. Fighters (and missles and ammo) should more or less automatically replenish.(I hates it the way MoO3 did it, where there were unlimited fighters on a carrier!!)