Ophiuchus wrote: ↑Sun Aug 26, 2018 6:48 pm
Vezzra wrote: ↑Sun Aug 26, 2018 12:21 pmSo, if you want to have a more detailed/sophisticated simulation for target selection and firing, please also come up with something that provides an equally detailed/sophisticated simulation of the movement/maneuvering part.
I dont think this reasoning is logically sound.
Why?
But if you like to think so in the current implementation movement/maneuvering is as important as choosing your target. Its probabalistic skewing the randomness in direction of an intended goal, so the ships are moved in a position trying to hit the right kind of target.
As long as the probabilistic skewing effect isn't too strong, that's a reasonable approach. That of course excludes any form of deterministic mechanics, as have been suggested by others. Your original proposal didn't include those anyway, so I think that is something we can work with.
The main problem with the proposed changes so far is that they are strictly weapon based. However, a ship can have very different types of weapons, and when looking at the "maneuvering into optimal position" aspect a ship with very different weapon systems in theory couldn't optimize it's tactical maneuvering for all it's different weapons equally, but would have to prioritize. Simple (extreme) example: consider a ship with a Spinal Antimatter Cannon (to take out big capital ships and planets) and a couple of flaks (to fend off enemy fighters). In a battle attacking an enemy planet, should it try to go after enemy fighters or try to get into position to fire at the planet? It could only optimize one goal. The currently proposed implementation however determines targets on a per weapon basis (if I understand correctly). Which doesn't fit too well with the fluff explanation.
That said, the current combat system isn't any way less crude in the way it abstracts/simulates/approximates things, so your approach is still an improvement, or at least not worse in that specific regard, so that's not really a problem. Also, I don't see how it could be improved without making things a
lot more complicated, and if I understand correctly, the purpose here is to improve the current stop-gap solution without going overboard, so to speak.
Also I dont know who will implement the final system, and if there was a real discussion about the vision for that I think I missed the thread.
Who will implement the final system is easy to answer: anyone who feels like picking it up, as always.
TheSilentOne has developed some ideas, but I don't know if or how much experimental coding he did. There have been plenty discussions about tactical combat of course over the years, Oberlus linked to the most recent ones
in this thread (I think).
The original vision has been a full-fledged 3D tatical combat, a partial implementation already existed (before the guy working on it dropped out). That plan has been abandoned though, for various reasons. See the discussions Oberlus linked in the thread I mentioned above about the current status quo.
Reading between the lines I guess people had expressed preference for a space soap naval combat system
I'd say that is pretty much a given. Practically all space games I know (where space combat is a thing of course) base their mechanics on the idea of "space soap naval combat". Anything even remotely "realistic" would be completely useless for a space game I think, considering how space combat in reality would work.