Why not use what GC2 has...each ship has an operating range and speed!

Then we can build some outposts/stations in deep space as key installations to boost range or be an early warning sensory system!




I thought this game was to break down pre-conceptions of how space RTS games could and should be like.

Well its the old Airfix Vs Lego problem isnt it? You could also look at it as RPG v RTS, do you have a premade kit that turns out the same every time, or do you supply the building blocks and allow players to operate them to produce emergeant strategies?

I am a lego man myself, when it comes to games.

Well if traveling via phase space took antimater at a rate of let's say 1 per second, this might be good limitation. Then you would have to build refueling stations at your outposts so your fleet coudl tavel further. This in essence would create same effect as phase lanes because you owuld have to come out of phase space to refuel

I think that in arguing for or against space lanes, you have to look at what other games have done. Comparing SOASE to past games it's evident that it isn't necessarily an original idea, but you can definitely see the potential for it to either work or fail.


Cases against random hyperspace:


Rebellion: The game had it's pluses...and it's negatives. Fleets would pop up in a system, destroy everything on the planet, and then disappear to another system before you could respond. Ships were going willy nilly everywhere. You had a warning that an enemy fleet was in bound. Sometimes it would say 1 Star Destroyer was heading towards your planet, you have your small force waiting, and bam, twenty Star Destroyers show up. Or none. It was all really random. You also had anywhere bewteen 150-250 planets to work with, and of those 150-250 usually half of them were useless since they were on the outer rim of the galaxy, uninhabited and a pain to make useful. In on game a launched a massive attack on the Empire's main planet, Coruscant.
I sent my two largest fleets, huge massive fleets with tons of ships, fighters, troop transports. They were the fleets I had hopping around protecting my two main planetary systems. Problem was, one left from one planet, and the other left from a different planet. Due to speed and distance yada yada, the two fleets arrived at seperate times, one of them was annihilated, but took out a chunk of the enemy, and the other one arrived ONE day later, and finished off the rest of the empire. I was ticked, especially since there was no way to order the ships to pause/retreat/wait.

Reach for the Stars: Blah, another appalling game. Once again, you build ships from your homeworld and they hyperspace to other planets to colonize them. The same trouble popped up. When your ships entered hyerspace they were locked into place, and you couldn't stop them to turn around, so while you would send your ships on a long journey and your homeworld came under attack there was no way to turn them around. Enemy fleets appeared quicker then you could dispatch ships to attack them. It had tons of other flaws, but the hyperspace was a real pain.


Cases for locked hyperspace:

Hegemonia:

A great game, with some flaws. You started on one planet, in a solar system with five or more other planets all orbiting a sun. I don't remember if it was a full orbit, it might have just been a pseudo orbit, with the planets kind of moving slowly. The planets varied from ice, to Mars like and Earth like, as well as moons orbiting the planets. There would be a wormhole somewhere on the map that would lead to another map like the one you started on, with planets and asteroid fields and other things you could colonize or exploit. Planets could be terraformed, admirals and captains could be assigned to ships, cloakable spies could be sent out, tons of fun little things like that. The games greatest downfall in my opinion, was that the controls were kind of confusing and you were limited in how many ships you could build. Usually the end of the game consisted of you having build six, that's right, just SIX of the largest space ships available to you and sending them against the AI's six largest ships. Which, were each equally matched in weapons fire. You couldn't capture planets with transports either, so if you attacked a planet you nuked it from orbit and then sent a ship to colonize it, which usually resulted in games where nuking/colonizing just went back and forth. In the end the game was always a stalemate, with your planets producing ships just as quickly as the enemy and a stalemate would ensue.



Conquest:Frontier Wars:

In my opinion, this game was a classic. It was like Starcraft, in space. You start on just one planet placing buildings around the planet forming a loop. You collected three resources and built ships to spread out and build your infrastructure on more planets. Each map had planets, nebulaes, asteroids etc for you to harvest. There would be one wormhole which connected you to another map, which had planets and resources etc for you to gather. All of your ships required supplies, if one of your ships ran out of supplies you couldn't use special powers on the ships or even fire you weapons, so you had to have constant supply routes established. In order to establish a supply route, you built a gate around a wormhole, providing resources to the next system connected via wormholes. The gates also locked the wormhole, preventing enemy ships from entering a system until they destroyed the gate on the other side. Also, traveling through a wormhole was near instantaneous. Games played out like Island hopping in WW2. Epic naval battles set in space.


My opinion:

I think there is a case for and against the space lanes traveling routes. I think that the game would most benefit from adopting methods used in previous games. A free for all hop anywhere on the map game would drive me nuts, having to constantly defend/build defenses in all of my solar systems would drive me nuts. By limiting traveling you can create choke holds to make sure large enemy forces don't get to your secure strong holds.

If systems were composed of a star with some planets around it, not necessarily orbiting but just scattered around the star, and there was just 1 wormhole entering the system. Each planet could have a gravity well around it. Buildings could only be built
within the gravity well. Defenses would have to be close to the planet, the only thing that could destroy an escaping fleet would be another space fleet. Imagine this, your fleet is sitting there at one of your planets being repaired by your ship docks. An enemy fleet enters the system at a wormhole in the center of the system. The ships are traveling at normal speed. The enemy flies towards one of your planets, gravity accelerating them towards your defenses. Your fleet gets to your planet, the enemy fleet attempts to leave and the gravity well slows them down. Kind of like how when going from one star to another, when you first leave a system your ships travel painfully slow, but then eventually they pick up speed, then slow down again upon reaching the next star. So all of these solar systems would be connected via worm holes, fleets could sit around the wormholes defending them. Enemy weaponry could be fired through the wormholes, probes could enter the wormhole or scouts to check out the enemy locations. Yada yada etc etc. It's a thought, perhaps there is a chance it could be implemented. Or considered.

I don't necessarily mind the "phase lane" concept in SoaSE. I think if you had the ability to warp between any two gravity wells, we'd quickly be asking for larger grav wells or slower jump speed or some other mechanism to slow movement. Otherwise we'd get the exact problem startrekdork was talking about in Rebellion / Reach for the Stars. We'd just end up chasing enemy fleets around the map or building local defense forces in every well.

What I don't particularly like about the current system is that you always appear at the same spot when jumping to a new system. It gives us (humans) a huge advantage against the computers. I had, in my last game, a blocker fleet that would hang out about halfway between the grav well and the build limit ring next to the jump line. It would work over any computer fleet that would try to jump in. The game became a topological problem (how can I expand and yet keep only n connections to the enemy open if I have n blockers).

I'd like to see a way to emerge from jump somewhere within an arc centered on the current jump line. It'd give some uncertainty to the current "stack everything HERE" approach I end up using.

Ronald Palmer hit the nail on the head with the problem for the current system. As I have said in a few of my prior posts I stomp the AI with a wall of guns and hangers. I wait for the big fleet to jump in then focus fire power on the capitals subsequently waste them then mop up. Shortly after I send my token fleet of maybe 10 capital ships and 20 or so escorts back along the same path to the AI planet and utterly trash it because the AI gun placement is random and it does not cover the entry points one iota.

Under the current system which I try to look at as worm holes the AI is massively handicapped when it comes to planning a defense as well as offensive maneuvers. For example in every game I had the AI send three to five ships to my system nearly every turn and it often tried to continue on to my other systems. Sadly enough the ships only made it to the second jump or for the lucky ones the third planet before death. This is so because I would take a chunk out of then at every point. The AI never seems to learn. Now that might be because this is still a beta but if it is not it will quickly become the failure point of this title methinks.

I think a good compromise would be free travel between planets with an occasional wormhole for near immediate travel between two planets in the same system and lanes between stars due to the super gravity of the stars -etc... I would also like to see the lanes "turn off and on" due to space anomalies and what not randomly for five minutes or so just to add more challenge.

Thanks for reading my post!

Let me clarify, a solar system would be set up just like the current planets with gravity wells. Ships would literally have to use their engines to fly towards another planet and attack the enemy. FTL drives would spin up when you used a phase lane to travel to other solar systems.

What I would like to see is a test demo. Some galaxies or settings that let us try out some of the different ideas and see how bad they are.


I agree with you Ronald that it feels as if you can set up a fleet of ships and just sit there destroying enemy vessels as they come flying in. It's rather anticlimactic.

The phaselane is for protecting the AIs. Currently they are unable to take advantage of it, as Ronald pointed out, but I'd bet that will change drastically at a later stage of development. Think about it: if we all can jump freely, do you honestly believe AIs would have any chance to fight off our human brains without cheating in the game?

With phaselane limitation, Ironclad is more likely to come up with some AI strategies that will be more effective.

Hehe, it is kind of funny that anyone who posts that they prefer the Phase Lane concept ALWAYS add that they want it changed in some serious way.

As for the problems Rebellion had, this game would not apply. The early warning sensors that detect incoming ships would be accurate, unlike in Rebellion. And the ships move slowly enough through Phase Space that you should have enough time to send a closer fleet to intercept.

I do recognize the problems that an open map would have with AI. But the problem right now in the beta is that a human defender simply massacres the AI (as they would another human player). All you need to do is build 20 Defense Hangars with bombers in a choke point (with a warp inhibitor), and nothing will touch you.

If the developers decide against fully open map games, then they will have to figure out a way for attackers to get around defender strongholds. An open map is an easy way to do it.

That's not what I meant...I believe phaselane is more like a fundamental layout, the improvement will be most likely be built into the ways it's utilized by the AIs. That's very different from expecting the whole phaselane thingie to be eradicated.

Openmap games will always be harder to implement a competent AI than the more limited map.

Admittedly, currently the AI in SOASE is simply brain dead. I can't imagine how much worse it could be if they diss the whole phaselane idea and choose the openmap route. Ironclad should and would certainly adjust and improve the balance of each element along the beta progress, and hopefully base on what they already have.

It seems to me that most of you guys against the phaselane concept are the ones that prefer to play it online (and/or with MODs). Personally, I have zero interest in the online gaming part in this game, and I don't think SP MODs is practical, so I prefer a better single player game design based on what's already in there.

I think the exact opposite. An open map would be easier for the AI defensively because it would only have to consider local targets for each planet and can prioritize high value objects on a planet by planet bases. This should allow for it to defend more appropriately. It can also evaluate firing arcs and service radius from the center point of the planet. This would allow for interlocking fields of fire and 360* coverage. The current system simply does not seem to do this at all.

Moreover doing something like that would allow for AI defense templates to be implemented by the designers with some random variant elements tossed in for good measure and it can all be done on a value basis. This would make the AI exponentially more challenging I think. In my opinion something like this is a win-win situation.

Additionally I'm pretty much a solo type of player. I have almost never played games online. So to me the stronger the AI can be without cheating the better the game.

As much as I would prefer an open connection map for the basic game, Blair Fraser indicated that Ironclad is leaning in the Phase Lane direction for a more controlled and less frantic gaming experience. Of course, this could always change. Just don't count on it.

Ironclad thinks that a open connection map might turn off a lot of potential buyers. They may very well be right. I really want to see this game achieve financial success and so empathize Ironclad's position.

Still, for the other gamers like me, don't lose hope on the open connection concept yet. You see, Ironclad is now very much aware that there is AT LEAST 50% of us who want open connection maps. The percentage would probably be closer to 100% for those of us who would like to see some choice in matter for the game's multi player and modding components. My suspicion is that SoaSE will be easily modded to run an open connection map. Ironclad might even allow it as a multi player choice when setting up the game.

This way, Ironclad is enticing more gameplay gamers to buy, but still covering the hardcore SciFi gamers/modders = Win/Win for us all.

Sure, that will mean that the game engine will need to be able to run open connections. The good news is that the game engine was originally made to run open connections and should be easy to leave intact for modding and maybe even as a special multi player option.

Also, any open connection games will need to use a moddable separate research tree related to open jumps. As you can see in the beta, most of this is already part of the game. The developers just need to hide it for standard games and make it available for modders and possibly as a hardcore multi players option.

Anyway, I've made a lot of recommendations on what we will need for open connection map mods/multi player games. Check them out in this forum post, as well as the Gameplay Feedback and Star Wars Mod posts.

I like the phase lanes in space... So make that number 49%

I think the phase lane concept (meaning you can only get to a certain grav well from a set of other grav wells) is good. I wouldn't want to play a fully-connected map game. It'd be too frantic for me.

But I don't like the current movement method that places 1-4 known points on the grav well that are "important." I think that any AI improvement on defense will mean they do the same thing we're doing right now, and parking their defenses in-range of the phase lane end points.

I can see some unit ideas that will help negate this tactic, like a warp-capable (and cheap!) missile pod to clear out the campers (and yes, I just stole from David Weber if you've read him).

I'd just like to see a way to enter the grav well within some radial distance of the current endpoint (like around 30 degrees to either side). I'd give attackers time to deploy small craft and get into some sort of formation before the fleet clash.

This would also (probably) have the effect that people would pull the gun platforms back from the build limit, since trying to build a wall around 1/6 the edge of the system will be too expensive. Putting the gun platforms closer to the planet means you protect more of the straight-line distance from the warp endpoint to the planet.

yeah, this needs to be remedied. its simply too easy to sit on a single phaseline and sit your ass down for good.

maybe making the known points random?

yeah, ships arrive en-shotgun style.
actually that leaves room for a great set of technologies, precision of arrival. although the accuracy of the arriving ships should remain completely random, so that you cannot camp on one spot.

shotgun style sorta messes with the formations idea, if formations are to be implemented... unless as soon as they arrive they get into formation then attack...

Hey lordkosc, I like the open connected map concept. So make that 50% again!

I like it too, make that 51% for free open maps.

nooooo

Haha, I prefer it as well, so that is now 52% in favor of open connection maps.

Don't worry Lordkosc, from what Blair said, I am pretty sure the standard game will be Phase Lanes with special open connection options for modders. That will be enough to satisfy me.

Still open for me so its 53%. I'll compromise with lanes from stars to other stars however.

Open for me too.

If GC2 can be open with so called best AI ever in the universe omg I'm gonna explode.

And plenty of other real time games have had openings with some on occasion 'natural' barriers with good AI. It has to be possible here!

GC2 best A.I ever is helped because it has such a simple and weak military side to the game.