Impaler wrote:a - Terrain will be 99% empty space with "beach ball" objects in it, I am no no expert on pathfinding but it would seem to me this would be rather simple as your going shortest path 99% of the time and need only defiate around these BeachBalls.
I wouldn't call it "empty space" in that there would be various terrain features on the map other than planets, that would have some strategic value (detection, movement speed reduction, functionaly of ship parts) like gas clouds and asteroid fields and such.
However, with regard to the pathfinding issue, the terrain features are a very minimal consideration. They are likely very limited in size (planets), can be easily flown around (gas clouds, planets) without any difficult decisions to make, or can't be avoided at all (asteroid belt that encircles the star that you want to travel through), meaning there's no decision to be made... (you have to go through it).
There was also some worry about the pathfinding and AI in terms of implimenting player orders between order-giving phases. The differences in this respect are rather minimal between system scale and planet scale... and in either case, if the time between order-giving periods was short (5 seconds), then very little AI would be necessary, beyond following simple orders like "stay in formation", "intercept this ship / fleet", "guard X", "move to this spot" and so forth...
There is also the AI issue of higher level tractics and strategy for the AI players, which is independent of the pathfinding / implimenting player (or AI) orders stuff.
I realize AI discussions are frowned upon, but it's come up, so... One major issue I see with combat AI have to do with how it deals with terrain features, which is mostly independent of system-scale vs. planet-scale. If it really is impossible to write a decent AI that can deal with gas clouds and asteroid fields and the like, then we can say that there is no terrain, and treat the planets as combintation Points-Of-Interest for the AI, and/or immobile weapons platforms. The AI would either plan to get past the defences and drop troops or spies as a suicide run, or would just move around like it would in a system-level map, treating the defence satellites and such the same way it treats ships for combat purposes.
Regarding issues of adjustable map scales and minimaps, I still fail to see why things would be significantly easier or better with a planet-scale map. System-scale gas clouds would be represented as appropriately scaled fuzzy blobs on the map. Asteroid fields would be an appropraitely scaled jumbled of small brown rock-shaped objects. Planets would be appropriately scaled textured spheres.
The transition between various zoom levels does not need to be smooth and pretty. If it's the best that can be done, it would be fine to just have fixed zoom levels that can be switched betwe, just like the current galaxy map. That said, I don't think having a smooth transition would be especially difficult compared to moving the camera around in the plane of the map. An I don't see any reason why zoom levels would be more problematic with a system scale map compared to a planet scale. The maximum out zoom doesn't need to show the whole system, so we can limit the zoom to whatever is useful for the sizes of models compared to scale of the system map that we use.
I don't follow what you (drek) mean by "allowing the player to rotate his view around a three or four defined pivot points." IMO the view should translate when the mouse is moved to the side of the screen, or rotate around the centre of the screen when the player right clicks and moves the mouse. (The default controls in the Rome: Total War demo were quite irritating for me. Rotating the view is of much less use than translating, in general.) Other than those, and perhaps "follow unit" autotranslation, and "rotate about selected unit" with the mouse, what other pivot points are necessary?
Regarding planet beachballs hiding ships behind them, spheres are sufficiently rounded (heh) that we can set the view angle to be high enough above the map plane that there are no problems with planets hiding anything behind them.