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).
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I 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.
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.
Above limit X, units are sent to the reserves and do not pop out until some of your other unit have died.
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.
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.
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.
There are also things that small ships can do other than just directly fighting the big ships. Cutting of supply lines or hit-and-run attacks could be employed.
...the actual number of ships is fluff as far as the strategic side of the game is concerned.
The fluff is the whole point of the question with regard to rough typical # of ships in battles.
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.
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.
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.
No objection. Task forces as subdivisions of control within a fleet are fine. It's being forced to build in groups that bothers me.
And 20 things is too much to keep track of?! We're talking effectively turn based (phased time) combat here. 20 units in easy to keep track of.
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.
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.
Daveybaby wrote: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.
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.
Agree with Davebaby.
As far as I can see, there's no benefit to making groups of ships work as a single unit. I have no problem with getting a discount for orders multiple copies of the same ship at the same time, but anything involving magically repairing ships that were destroyed seems silly. Similarly, not being able to split up a group of ships to do separate things is annoying. Maybe I want to explore two places this turn, and use half of the 10 ships I built to explore to each... but I can't? Maybe I have two fleets that need some scanner ships, but all I have is a group of 10, so I can't split them up? That sucks!
Obviously this type of argument can be declared to be based on realism, and ignored, but it seems to be the most relevant point to me, since I don't see any benefits on the other side to outweight it.
drek wrote:*shrug*
The entire premise of moo (and hw for that matter) is cartoonishly unrealistic.
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)
utilae wrote:...what do people think of the idea of phased real time combat that combines both 2d and 3d.
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...?
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.