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Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:08 pm
by iamrobk
MisterMerf wrote:Can we please both camps?

I, for instance, want to see indescribably massive armadas. I want the might of a thousand systems to appear MIGHTY, dammit!

Others want to invest their energy in a single ship of a single group and see them fight their noble way across the galaxy.

I can only see both of these being possible by scaling the size of the galaxy.
Can we have both 50-star galaxies and 500-star galaxies and still have decent gameplay in both?
Ok, two things I see seriously wrong with your post. Your first idea seems to be 1000's of ships.....thats just stupid. I mean, just think about it. As for your second idea, no one wants to control just 1 or 2 ships, but we don't want like dozens or hundreds of the most powerful ship types in one battle.

Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 11:25 pm
by guiguibaah
Ranos wrote:So you didn't build new ships, but every time you refit those ships, you had to design a new ship. Frmo your list, you always designed a different one for each ship so you still did a lot of designing. That is my point. To get diversity with a few ships, you have to do a lot of designing for only a couple of ships.
That conclusion is incorrect. The amount of designing you do depends on the total maximum amount of different ship design slots you have, multiplied by the frequency you refit your ships.

The number of ships you have in one ship design slot is not a factor.

Having only one ship design out a total of 5 ship design slots, with 100 ships in that design slot (such as in Moo1) can be refitted just as many times as 1 ship in 1 design slot, because they are mutually exclusive. (Moo2's sytem allowed for old versions and obsolete ships, something I found annoying).

- - -

You can still have as much varierty (if not more so) with smaller amounts of ships than with large amounts of ships, as long as you design them differently and the roles they play are different between them.

With lots of ships, the diversity between different styles is lessened somewhat, as the rules of quantity and tactics start to take into play.

Therefore, I would suggest a system that keeps this rule in mind.

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 12:09 am
by MisterMerf
iamrobk wrote:
MisterMerf wrote:Can we please both camps?

I, for instance, want to see indescribably massive armadas. I want the might of a thousand systems to appear MIGHTY, dammit!

Others want to invest their energy in a single ship of a single group and see them fight their noble way across the galaxy.

I can only see both of these being possible by scaling the size of the galaxy.
Can we have both 50-star galaxies and 500-star galaxies and still have decent gameplay in both?
Ok, two things I see seriously wrong with your post. Your first idea seems to be 1000's of ships.....thats just stupid. I mean, just think about it. As for your second idea, no one wants to control just 1 or 2 ships, but we don't want like dozens or hundreds of the most powerful ship types in one battle.
iambrok:
I respectfully submit that you are not addressing the point of my post.
I did not state numbers and my suggestion of a single ship was a typo that was meant to read "a single ship or a single group".

These were extremes. Extremes that I don't expect to see seriously considered. The fact remains that we have essentially two camps: the hundreds and the dozens. Pleasing both may be possibe. That's what I want to see discussed.

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 2:30 am
by Ranos
While scaling the galaxy is one way, another possible way of allowing for both many and few ships is for it to be a choice at the start of the game. You get 3-5 choices of how many ships you want and when you select, a few things would be adjusted in the game.

Costs to build ships and/or materials would have a base number that would be changed depending on which setting was chosen. If you wanted lots of ships, the base number is what would be used. If you only wanted a few ships, then the base numbers would be increased so it costs more or takes more materials to build a ship.

In addition to this, there should be a way to set the max number of ships, possibly using a MOO2 style control method or by using some kind of support or maintainance system. All you do is increase the support or maintainance costs per ship to lower the maximum number of ships allowed for the empire.

Lastly, and something I'm really not in favor of, is to cap the max number of ships/TFs allowed per battle. I hated this in MOO3. It could work as long as ships/TFs that were not allowed to participate in the battle due to max numbers being reached would not be allowed to progress through the system or be allowed to explore the unexplored system. Another possible way is to limit the number of ships/TFs that can be moved at one time, but I really don't know how that would be able to work.

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 3:41 am
by MisterMerf
Ranos wrote:Costs to build ships and/or materials would have a base number that would be changed depending on which setting was chosen. If you wanted lots of ships, the base number is what would be used. If you only wanted a few ships, then the base numbers would be increased so it costs more or takes more materials to build a ship.
I suspect that if we took this path, there would only be a few sets of values that created a fun, balanced game (making it difficult to set the base cost well).
I could be wrong, though. At least everyone would have the same experience.

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 4:16 am
by Ranos
I read Merf's post on the last page, clicked reply and got distracted for a while so I didn't notice Rob's or Gui's posts.

Merf already made a good response to Rob's post.

@ Gui

I wasn't talking about the ammount of designing specifically, but the ammount of designing compaired to what you get out of that design. When you design five new ships and only build 2 of each, you got small return on your effort. When you take that same five designs and build 100 of each ship, you go a lot of return for your work.

So when attempting to get the same diversity with few ships you are always designing and buildng/refitting in aproximately equal quantities while with many ships, you design a little and build a lot.

If you are allowed only 10 ships, to get ten designs you can only have one ship per design and that is a lot of work compaired to what you get out of it. If you are allowed 100 ships, you get 10 ships for each design which makes multiple designs more worth it.

That was the point I was trying to make. Some people would find it fun to design a new ship every time you wanted to build/refit a ship. Others would call it lots of work for almost nothing.

I'm not trying to say that one way is better or worse than the other, I'm just trying to say one is, using the comparisons, more owrk than the other. If I was allowed only 10 ships, I would make one general design that was well balanced and call it good.

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 7:01 am
by Bastian-Bux
Merf and Ranos: Nope, we can't please both. Why?

GUI and graphics reasons.

A system that would allow thousands of ships MUST have a very good interface to allow to command all those ships. Thats fine.

Downside: The controlls for thousands of ships (meanng taskforces and such) is not going to be suited for smaller groups of ships. It has to cut down on flexibility of the single ship to allow for flexibility of the many ships. If it doesnt, it becomes utterly complicated.

A system that would allow thousands of ships MUST downsize the graphics for each ship. Its just that easy: your screen is not offering enough space to show thousands of high-res ships. And neither is the usual $50 graphic card strong enough. It might still look nifty if thousands of small colorfull blobs squish over your screen.

But it doesn't look good anymore if you decide to play with a lower amount. Then you have a few ugly pixelated blobs.


I aint saying that we should go with just a few ships. But I stay to my suggestion:

I'll assume for the description that ships are "pixel graphics". I know its wrong, but it shows the numbers ^^.

PS: I increased the size of the deathstars to please those that thought my 64 is to small ^^.

Up to 1024 "fighters" of size 1 (= 16*16) -> 1024
or
Up to 4 deadstars of size 256 (= 256*256) -> 1024
or
a mix of ships with sizes 1-256 summing up to 1024


I think this is graphically feasible and is already an high ammount.

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 8:34 am
by noelte
Ranos wrote:... another possible way of allowing for both many and few ships is for it to be a choice at the start of the game. You get 3-5 choices of how many ships you want and when you select, a few things would be adjusted in the game.
IMO, that's a clear nono! We should end up with a ONE combat system whether we want few or many ships! Noone is going to implement more than one combat system until 1.0!

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 5:43 pm
by Prokonsul Piotrus
noelte: 'There can be many systems (say 500) with each up to ten planets. So i guess we will have at least one capital ship per system' - can you say MM hell? I hope that I don't have more then 50 planets in the late game. I have played some large Stars! game when in the late game I had more then a hundred planets - and let me tell you that: in the Stars! players commnunity, majority of the players prefer NOT to play on any map over medium Guess why. Same as with the ships: the fewer, the merrier.

There is a solution to our dilemma - as MisterMerf says, scalable galaxy should in theory please everybody. I would prefer small galaxies with few planets and ships, but if MisterMerf wants to play in a galaxy 100 hundreds times of mine - all I have to say is 'have fun and call me in a decade' ;p Of course, this would require designing some UI tools like stacks/subfleets to allow players to controll those 1000 in a playable manner as well. And here is when Bastian-Bux pulls the cable out - yeah, UI matters a lot (see MOO3 if you don't believe me). If making a fewer ship game is better for our software design team, that is a very desive argument for me.

I don't like game-set caps on number of ships though. The idea of scalable costs is great and should fix it (when starting new game, use a slider/pull down menu/whatever to select how expensive ships are and see an average amount you will get for early/mid/late game).

Ranos: I definetly don't think we need hundreds of ships for 'epic battles'. I read/played games where we had decisive battles with less then 50 ships (total) and they were 'epic'. It all depends on the game engine: if we can field 50000000 ships or 50 per empire, our scales of 'what is epic' will change as well.

Almost all games I can think of had some 'stacks' for small units, especially fighters. Perhaps we should allow player to make those stacks - as in 'create subfleets (or subTFs) in fleets', and in battle those subfleets (i.e. 10 fighters, 3 corvettes, 2 destroyers) could move using the same set of orders. This could be scalable - to save time, players could create 'order stacks' of bigger unites as well.

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 1:31 am
by iamrobk
I definately don't think just capping the # of ships per battle is a solution to this. I mean, that doesn't fix the problem, at elast to me. My concern is building tons of ships everywehre, really, so that every ship has a certain value to the player. This just adds new strategy to the game IMO, as every ship will count, and players will have to think more strategically. Allowing a player to have even hundreds of ships is just stupid, unrealistic, and makes this game much too arcadey.

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 2:05 am
by Ranos
@ Bastian

Its actually a very simple problem. First, when using hundreds of ships, they are in TFs and when using a couple dozen, they are controlled individually. How does this get handled? Control is control no matter what the specifics of it. How do you think ships will get controlled in the eraly game using the TF controls? A TF can be made up of a single ship. So when you have the game set to hundreds of ships, you are allowed, lets say for the sake of example, 50 ships max per TF or maybe even no max. When the game is set to dozens of ships, the TF max is set to 1.

On the graphics, you answered that problem yourself, scalable graphics. When set to few ships, the graphics can be large and detailed. When se to many ships, the graphics can be scaled down so there is little or no detail.

@ noelte

I never said anything about multiple combat systems. I was talking about the limit on the number of ships, whether that be a cost increase, maintainance increase, a cap on the number of ships allowed or some other method. A single combat system can be used. Everthing just gets scaled down on the control level and scaled up on the graphics level.

@ Piotrus

That depends on your definition of 'epic.' I think 200-300 ships per side is what it takes for an epic battle. You think less than 50 ships total is epic. Somebody else might think it is 10,000 ships per side. It's all about each persons perception and preferance.

@ Rob

Different people prefer different ways. You want each ship to have a personality and be individual. Somebody else wants there to be so many ships that you can't tell one from the other. If we make it scalable, that solves the problem.

hundreds of ships are stupid to you, but maybe not to others. I'm really not sure what you mean by arcadey since arcade games aren't nearly as complex as a 4x game. Mabye you mean its cheesey, I don't know. As for your unrealistic comment, check out the number of ships the US had in the Pacific during WWII:

http://www.ww2pacific.com/shipcount.html

For those who don't want to go to the linked site, here are the numbers:

BATTLESHIPS : 24
CARRIERS : 97
CRUISERS : 78
DESTROYERS : 725
SUBMARINES : 188

This doesn't include one of the categories listed on the site and the site goes into detail on the class of each type. That right there is over 1000 ships used over the course of 4 years and only in the Pacific. If that is the ammount of ships used during a war on a single planet, in a single ocean, then think of what will be used in the future.

NOTE: This is not a realism arguement for why we should have hundreds or thousands of ships per side, this was just showing Rob how his unrealistic comment was incorrect.

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 4:18 am
by Bastian-Bux
@Ranos Scalable graphics sounds fun, till you have to do them. Ask our graphics department first if they are willing to make severall skins for each ship. Else your "epic" battles will have to fight with the high res skins of the ships.

About the GUI: look at MOO3 for what happens if you have more ambitions then common sense.

And to be honest, I don't want TFs forced on me. What you basically are saying is: lets make a game that supports thousands of ships, and those that want less have to live with it. They can still use the small TFs, using a GUI that was developed for much larger units, always having the "feeling" that something is amiss.

Its like driving a german car in the USA. German cars are build to drive 100-200 km/h (60-120 mph) easily. Isn't it a real bad feeling, seeing that tachometer showing that your car could go 120 mph, and you are confined to 55?

So what I ask for is to come to a clean compromise, that doesn't shoot for the stars but leaves many people in the woods.

Lets come up with a number of ships, maybe scaled as I explained but with definite caps. We don't need a F-1 bolide to drive to the next supermarket. Heck, I don't wanna pay that gas bill, and actually I doubt that it has enough space for all that nifty stuff I wanna put into it (like different armaments beeing distinctly visible on the ship).

Actually you gave the numbers yourself. One of the major naval powers of WW2 had ard 1200 ships in the pacific. Only 20% of them major combatants. Lets assume the same number in the atlantic and other oceans. 2.5K ships.

I'm aware that you gotta add airplanes and such. Still we aint talking bout tens of thousands of major combatants. Nope, a few hundred.

I have a real problem understanding why some ppl need quantity over quality, but maybe thats the real question in this?

Do we want highly customizable ships, each having its own value, history, experience and pretty graphics? Then no way to have more then a tens few ships per side.

Or do we want tons and tons of ships, churned out by a mighty industrial behemot. but what if someone wants to play Psilons, and not just insectoid races?

Or do we want a compromise (remember, compromise, not a "downscaled" version of the megalomanic approach), allowing for controlled battles with a nice number of ships, each having some individualities according to its size?

I'd go for the compromise. I don't need to know the name of each fighterpilot. But neither do I want to have ten thousand anonymous blobs floating over my screen, doing anything except my bidding.

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 6:30 am
by Ranos
Epic battle to me is along the lines of the Star Trek: DS9 series finale. Each side had between 100-200 ships, I don't know for sure because I never counted but this is around what I would like to see. This is of course in the mid to late game. If a game lasts for around 800 turns, this number of ships should start showing up between turns 400 and 500. That is the numbers I would like to see. I could of course live with less like maybe a minimum of 50 ships per battle in the time frame I gave above. Any less would seem ridiculously low to me.
Isn't it a real bad feeling, seeing that tachometer showing that your car could go 120 mph, and you are confined to 55?
Not really since I enjoy living more than I enjoy going fast. But that's just me.

The main thing I would like to see in space combat is a combination of dynamic and static combat. If you don't know what those terms mean, dynamic means the ships manuever around and attempt to dodge incoming fire and static means the ships sit still and shoot.

I think there should be four levels of ship. Those would be fighters, small ships, medium ships and large ships. Categories will hopefully be different but thats the basics. Fighters and small ships would fight dynamically, weaving between ships, firing as they go. Fighters would be faster and more manueverable of course. Medium and large ships fight statically with minimal to no movement. Medium ships are fast and more manueverable than large ships.

Doing all of that would make more of a difference between sizes instead of just the ammount of damage they can deal and take.

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 10:06 am
by Bastian-Bux
Ranos, finally :). The numbers you just gave are feasible IMHO.

Sorry it might have been a missunderstanding. Some people talked about thousands or even tens of thousands of ships.

I see no problem in having such a number of ships in real decisive battles. I just get some stomach pains imagining a battle between severall thousand deathstars. It just feels like driving too fast ^^.

OK, lets crunch down on numbers.

You said 100-200 ships. Iirc the last battle in DS9 was between the Dominion Alliance (Dominion + client races + Breen) and the Alpha Quadranters (Fed + Klingon + Romulan + parts of Cardassians).

So it came down to one 1st rank power + one 3rd rank power vs. 3 2nd rank powers and one 3rd rank.

So I'd assume each major Alpha power was able to muster between 50 and 100 major combatants. Not death stars, only your usual battleship and cruiser´(as there seems to be a lack of carriers in ST).

I think thats nice numbers to work with. Some soldiers of WW2 can still recall the names of all US-american battleships, and I think we should strive for such an involvement.

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 1:30 pm
by iamrobk
I don't get exactly what you mean by scalable. I think that we really have to make the game one way or the other, unless the programmers and graphics artists want to program and make graphics for battles with thousands of ships (which I still think is just stupid IMO), and for battles with only dozens of ships, too. I liek the most recent ideas. If we use the large ship, medium ship, small ship, fighter thing, here are my dieas for the most a race should be realistically able to build by the end of the game(note that this is NOT the number per battle):
Large ship: 25-50
Medium ship: 100-150
Small ship: 200-400
Fighters: 700-1000

However, I don't think we should have fighters. Maybe when a player builds a carrier, than it automatically comes with X number of fighters (maybe 50 or so for the largest kind, idk). Also, will we have starbases and such? If so, do we limit the number per system? I can understand a player wanting more than 1 starbase in their home system, a border colony, or just a very important system. But where do we draw the line? My suggestion is basically the same as what I envision for the ships: make them expensive. Probably the most expensive items in the game, though. I think that if we make starships and starbases and all very expensive in general, than people can mdo the game if they want, and make them cheaper.