A quick note,

Using the commands already in the game can get a lot of that.

Turn off Auto Attack and ships won't move on their own. They will still fire weapons.

Defend Local Area is somewhat buggy, but works so that your ships don't go haring off across the gravity well. A nice combo I find is setting a frigate screen to Defend Local Area and capital ships have auto attack off.

(Fighters and flak frigates already target enemy bombers/fighters quite adequately.)

thats what i meant by if they refuse, im sure they are taking our feedback seriously, but they can't remake the entire game before august, they also have their core ideas of what the game is and i doubt they'll want to change it too drastically or it would be a different game entirely

im terrible at communicating my thoughts ill admit, so ill try once more:

the kind of game i want is not a chess game (not entirely i mean), in my own terminology chess is 100% strategy and no tactics, what i was hoping to see ever since soase was hinted at long ago was a replacement to my beloved Cataclysm (and by replacement im not asking for a replica, just a game appealing enough to my own tastes that i would spend my time on soase rather than cata)

a formation or two (wall, sphere) would be great additions, yes, tactical stances (aggy, neutral, evasive) i could care less about, subsystems (atm) im not too worried about subsystems (though again, they might be a good addition), what i want is basically two things: precise control over my ships, and more varied classes of ships (ie not just slow large caps/frigs that fire the typical ion/autocannon turrets)

i really wish caps were more rare (ie harder to obtain, so 20 caps would be quite a sight) and perhaps fighters/vettes/frigs were the most common, one person suggested bombers firing a large payload upfront then hacing to dock before they could bomb again - looking back i now think thats a great idea, i wish frigs had more varied weapons than simple line-of-sight rail guns/ions (eg the multibeam, hive, and ramming frigates in HW:C) where each ship has a strength against a certain class (multibeams are good against fighters, hives are good against other frigates, rammers have their own unique usage) and the strength isn't faked (faked would be having the multibeam actually do more damage to a fighter than another frigate or cap ship, thats lame, en masse multibeams are nice against caps)

I think on the early website shiplists one of the advent ships had an ability to do just what you mentioned to buff your fleet up. However the present way sins works i do not see it being any more effective than manually concentrating your fire.

I do like some of the ideas being put across, but others i do not. However we all agree to disagree on these things.

The Macroers need a better AI plain, and simple. An AI that gets its target priorities straight. If there is a Kol battleship in the enemys fleet the AI should send your kol, and siege frigs after it, and not go after a small scout 1st. If you have flak frigs, and fighters the AI should target bombers as a priority. Also the AI should learn to switch targets as a situation changes. You can bring your fleet to an undefended planet but when AI reenforcement's show up your fleet continues to attack the planets structures insted of switching attention to the new fleet that just jumped in. It is just a matter of what is the worst threat. AI buff's in these areas would make a world of difference. 2 AI's fighting it out should both be primary-ing capitol ships 1st then moving down the list from worst to least threat. Flaks should stay in the fleet formations, and not move off on their own to chase fighters.

The Microers need to feel like they are in total control. If its a frantic clickfest they want then give it to them. The problem is balancing that out with the macro AI. I am not sure if it can be done. Right now you can switch off the auto ability's, and upgrades. You can pretty much order each ship to move/attack as you wish. The only thing that is missing is coherent formations. Like i mentioned above id love to see x, wall and delta formations. Not that it would make any difference in combat, but it might make a difference in movement. Right now we have "group jump". Would it be too difficult to make "group move" within the gravity well? Fleets right now have a very bad habit of splitting up "group move" should fix that. Group jump defaults to a wall formation. Problem with the current wall formation is the ships bunch up too close together delaying movement. Hence why i proposed the other 2 formations. We need to find a way to make better use of the Z axis. It is there. lets use it. Is there a way to make the gravity well a "sphere" instead of a disk? and ships jumping in can jump in at a random spot from the direction they came from on the sphere (early game). Then with research jumps can be more precise. You can combine it with the jump range so you dont have to add more research slots. Structures should be able to be placed on the Z axis anywhere within the sphere as well. That should make for somewhat of a better tactical challenge during a siege, and make some microers very happy.

Also for the fun of it id like to be able to just sit back, and watch the AI's fight without having to be in the game. Yes i know there is a replay function, but there are times i dont feel like, or have time to play thru an entire game.

Hello, first post

Love the game but couldn't help but respond to this thread.

The first thing i'd like to see is smaller fleets. It simply doesn't make sense to have fleets of thousands of ships fighting under one command(unless you are just swarming). I'd rather see a command and control ship like in Sword of the Stars. Which allows you to have a certain amount of ships in a fleet. Now I'm not saying limit the amount of ships in a battle, bring three, four or fifty fleets if you want, just make the player have a command and control requirement. This would also make battles more tactically interesting, especially if there was a fog of war(also on the wish list), do you make smaller nimbler fleets able to react to the enemy, or do you make stronger larger fleets to make the enemy react to you?

Secondly the capital ships seem too similar, what i mean is there's no progression. I want to have to research my way up the capital ship tree, like in homeworld. Start off with destroyers, go to cruisers, carriers all the way up to dreadnaughts. Make each one have progressivly higher costs, but in return higher armor, hp and damage. This would make more sense than the current buy as many cap ships of each kind. Imagine if you had destroyers which were good angainst frigates. Cruisers which had general purpose roles. Carriers which actually held a lot of fighters. And uber-expensive but deadly battleships.

What do you guys think?

Ok back to the OP Frogboy, I like to put foward an idea...

Combining arms is poop. If you have an army where you have a few of every type of ship , forget that you think wow im strategically uber because ive just selected a great combination of ships , you will Look at your army and think WTF , how am I suppose to micro this fleet properly if theres too many different ships requiring different ways to use . You basically just watch and hope.

In a way combining arms is good on paper. I think so too , but what is required in this game is a greater emphasis on tiers of ships.

Allow players to combine arms WITHIN a tier of ships. But ALLOW player to single spam a CLASS of ship , that requires very similar micro types.

A player should single spam a class , but combine arms within that class. - This creates a fleet with a certain way to micro , but has a combination of ships within that class to suit the stategy.

No one class should be better then another class also!. for example a frig shud really be half the price , half the power of a cap etc.

Each capital ship is used for a different thing. It's the special abilitys that do that not just that they are each used to counter a different class of ship. Remember, this is also part strategy, it's not just tactical, which is what it sounds like some of the above posters are asking for, and is what will make this game just another HW.

And P5y, most of the microing should be able to be done by the AI once the game actually comes out if your so against microing.

I firmly disagree with the ideas postured by P5y. Such a game would be far better as an ant wars simulation. The tactical and strategic variables and are in effect negated in such a system. It simply becomes a grinder model and such a system takes away any of the fun at least for me. I would be hard pressed to call such an incarnation of a game strategic, tactical or even a simulation.

i second spartan's last post

and for the love of pete, formations are not gonna change anything here (except for maybe fighters), we do not yet have any kind of significant control over the ships (tell one of your caps to retreat and watch it take 5 minutes as it runs in the opposite direction first)

Seems we have two types of players with competing interests:

Micromanagers and Macromanager. The Microers want a system friendly to them wherein they can spam a type of attack and manually control where that attack is being directed in various parts. The Macroers want combined arms with intelligent formation/management options, but to do this effectively, the system needs alot of prebuilt formations, AI oversight, and inherent system checks and balances that favor requiring combined arms/tactics.


My personal opinion, Ive done the micro thing a bazillion times and am not terribly interested in sitting there assigning 1/3 of the fleet (generic dmg attk) to attakc this, 1/3 to attk that, etc yet again. On the other hand, we dont want macro hell whereby all the player is in charge of is building planets and fleets up; eg, taking out all the tactical decisions and leaving the player with only top level strategy.

Balance out the system so its friendly to combined arms and is unfriendly to focused fire; that means going the subsystem route instead of generic hp dmg. This will up the CPU reqs considerably unless I miss my guess though; I would say you have alot of leeway in this regard given how low end youc an go with SoSE atm.

Give us a true command and control console to manage large fleets via targeting/movement controls for different "lines" of ships. As an example, in Total War, you can order your skirmish line to do X, your main line to do Y, your ranged line to do Z, with just 3 mouse clicks. In SoSE, the current way to do this is to stack the ships on the left menu and click all ships of a type to do X. Howerver, while that gives access to generic attk and move controls, it does not give the ability to actually program those ships beyond a 1 move or 1 attk order. Eg, let me prgram my flaks to hang out in front of my caps and shootdown fighters/bombers via a Guard/Target Ftr/Bmbrs order. Let me prgram my Dreads to hang out in the back and use long range weps on other cap ships and clusters of frigates.
The basic functionality is in game, you just need write additional code to program the fleet manager and a lil UI to replace the current console box (I dont think we are using the elft side of the console box for anyhting in ship mode).

Re: setting up for a 3d, you could but the AI and virtually the entire game is programmed on a 2d map atm (set to the mid plane of the gravity well); rarely does the AI use the z axis altho I know it is there and Ive sent my ships into + and - z points throughout the gravity well. Right now its acting as a 2d map with a 3d backdrop; I dunno if you really want to go beyond that as I have yet to see a good interface for genuine 3d displays thats not clumsy as all hell. Thats one thing that would leave me eyes spinning in TIE Fighter was the 3d tactical grids on the map screen. Until of course, we get a true holo monitor for our computers...but we arent there yet . Other RTS dont have the issue as they tend to focus on land which is funadmentally 2d with a 3rd plane for planes and helos.

I guess I want a top level tactical perspective, something that has been missing in every RTS I can think of since the gnere was invented. My idea of entertaining micro is to manage the aspects of a fleet of specialty ships not managing chunks of the fleet that do generic dmg. THe difference is that in the generic dmg model, you build a mass of ships and go pound on something using pure focused fire; with the specialty setup, if you lose one dimension of the battle, and hold your own elsewhere, you are in trouble. Imagine in Star Wars the Empire losing at the fighter level and not having any fighter/bombers left to fend off the alliance; the Xwings/Bwings etc would dismember the imperial fleet one ship at a time even if that imperial fleet was doing well in the cap on cap engagements.

This creates depth, lots of it. Spamming dmg that can take out all types of ships is the antithesis of that.

Hmmm.... I'm a micro person but I'm advocating what you classify as a macro position as well as other micro people as far as I understand things right now. The macro people want the spamfest not us micro people.

We [the micros] want combined arms, critical systems, coherent tactical control, comprehensive strategic development and planning options, unit/object configuration, a robust set of formations, group and task force options, more custom game setup variables, advanced unit management, as well as free intrasystem travel, advanced independent diplomacy, trade, black market and pirate systems, and enhanced ally commands/orders just to name a few - but hay who is keeping track anyway.

a little question: do you get a bonus at the moment for attacking from the side or behind? I have no idea how realistic it would be, but from a gameplay point of view it would encourage attacking from a different angle, flanking, using different forces / fleets in one engagement and so on ...

Yeah, macromanagement usually refers to people who excel in production and construction, while micromangement is the people who use more precise control over their units.

From what I hear, the object that the developers are shooting for is actually micromanagement of fleet production and macromanagement of fleet deployment. Your work goes in to building a fleet, then you send it off to do its work, and the computer deals with the nitty gritty of actual fighting. I'm totally cool with that, I get it, and it has me excited. But, either the AI has to be top notch, the controls have to be top notch, or both. Otherwise, no matter how well you design the system in theory, it is going to fall flat.

Hmmm... this is starting to sound too focused on AI, but AI and control are essentially the tactics of the strategy being used to deliver the fun.

about the 3d stuff: i dont care whether the AI uses the 3rd dimension or not, i dont ever plan on playing the AI once the multiplayer comes online

seriously guys, (other than for fighters) what use are formations?? if they make it so i have control over my ships (we don't right now), then formations will never be used by skilled players: i'll move my ships precisely where i want them to be, not in a lame wall or X which serve no purpose but to make your fleet look pretty, the only argument you can have for formating caps/frigs is "i want to keep them together" and you will be able to do that with more precision if we are ever given control of them individually

personally, i like micro-managing battles production and research, but i want simple systems (i think they have done a decent job at that so far), i'd prefer the majority of my time and effort to go into the fighting, or don't call it a combat RTS

also, i've heard this one too many times: micro-management is not key spamming or rapid mouse clicking, whoever says this is just too dense to understand tactics or too lazy to want to put that much brainpower into a game (the latter is understandable) and so they make lame accusations, micro-management is quick-decision making, seeing weakenesses/strengths and exploiting them with adeptness, it's not chess where you've got 15 minutes to decide on a move, it's street racing

i wanted to add, if i sound a bit terse or hostile: if this is the road everyone (devs and players) decide to take, then go for it, im cool with it, ill just be playing a different game, but until it comes out, ima try to make my preferences known

@wraith
Well I think formations adds a lot to a game. and looks darn cool to and if you dont want to use formations, then simply dont use them.

Formations are only practical in as much as there is a clear and present benefit from employing them on a tactical level. If there are no screening or enhanced firepower and targeting bonuses then they are nothing more then eye candy.

We dont want that do we?

I respect your opinion ,but this incarnation is actually called Homeworld 2 , and this is exactly the game battle dynamics that comes from it, when played at a very expert level. Because in homeworld 2 , you cant research everything nor have factories for everything due to low resources, people HAD to choose a class of ship to specialise in and maximise the productivity and research for that specific class. Often or not , players could supplement the first class with a second class later on as part of the adaptation phase of the game . What this did for replayability was remarkable. One game I could decide to be fighter swarmer , the next a heavy caps guy. If sins is just the same "combined group" for every game...it gets dull.

I want to be able to spam Kols only , and if I know how to micro Kols efficienly to adapt then I should do well. I then want to change the unit I make based on the reaction of the enemy to a Kol Spam. He will probably think of this too , and might change to a unit that reacts to my reaction. This is really challenging the decisions as to what to make. Rather then the..just make 3 of each ship and keep on doing it.


Oh and just a bit on aggression and defence formations. What about aggressive behaviour at different levels.. , Id like to see aggressive mean that ships will go all out and wont stop firing till they are dead , and defensive to have ships automatically move away if they are dying

@P5y - no worries brother. We all have different tastes.

In my opinion a game inherently designed to promote spamming as the core strategy for victory, is short changing itself; unless the developers are trying to target the 8 - 15 year old consumer market.

A few quotes from Frogboy's " A Guided Tour of the Sins Beta! "

" Sins of a Solar Empire is designed for the strategy gamer. It's not about who can click the fastest, it's about who can put together the most coherent strategy that requires the player to research new technologies, capture critical resources, and build the right mixture of ships that they can put at the right place at the right time. "

" One of the mantras you'll hear us state over and over is that our goal is to keep micro-management to a minimum. It's not about cranking out stuff the fastest or swarming players with units or tactically fighting out the battles (even though you can do this) but rather having the right units in the right place at the right time. "

I think they are rather pertinent to the latest turn in this discussion.

Perhaps I should give it a rest though. Without having access to the beta, maybe I'm just blowing a lot of hot air with my " observations " on some of the conceptual issues behind the game.

I was just curious about the fleets. May I suggest (if you can't already) that fleets can be named? I feel it would be easier to remember which fleets are where if they had names.

In a way I can't help myself but to agree with P5y in a way. I don't like numbered caps or preventing a player to build only one type of ships. If he wants to specialize on one type and ability only, I don't see a problem...

COUNTERMEASURES should prevent a player to do so. Each special ability should have a countermeasure ready to be researched. So that a player's fleet can become far less efficient if he only chooses one type of ships and his oponent researches a countermeasure. Naturally researching all countermeasures should be time and resources demanding so having all countermasures would not pay itself, but one is always feasible and a good prevention for one-ship-spam. Also I believe this would represent the military reality in the highest degree.

Various thoughts on swarming and anti-swarming incentives:


1. NUKES: I know nukes are already in the game. You can drop them on planets, and there is a special ability to zap a ship with a nuke and disable it. I suggest they add a real ship that launches REAL nukes. Or make it an option to build a certain number of nukes per ship. For example, a carrier could hold 3 nukes. You could order it to fire a nuke that would fly towards an enemy fleet and take out tons of enemy ships. That way the person that tries to have swarms of ships will quickly lose them due to 1 nuke. It could also have tons of collateral damage or various other things to keep it in keep. Super expensive to build nukes, nukes could be shot down by fighters, long build time, etc. You could even do low yield vs. high yield nuclear weapons. Larger explosion radius with weaker damage vs. a small explosive radius but devastating focused damage.


2. MINEFIELDS: I'm not sure how minefields aren't already a part of the game. You could just add them as something that is built by the constructor. Place them on the screen in various locations. You could allow them to be researchable and the higher up the tree the more powerful the mines could become. Low level mines kind of lightly damage enemy ships, each level making them increasingly destructive. For kicks, you could even add in a variety of mines, including ones that disable enemy ships, or ones that target fighters/bombers exclusive. Perhaps even a special mine, a nuclear one, sort of a last ditch attempt mine that is hugely explosive and takes out tons of ships, but is expensive to build.

3. COST: There are numerous ways to lower swarmed ship tactics just by changing the way you buy them/build them etc. You could put a limit cap per ship ala Homeworld, so you can only have 30 frigates maximum. Or, for every frigate you build, you could increase the cost of the next frigate built, ala Age of Empires. Frigate 1, cost 100 credits, frigate 2, 110 credits. You could even add in a new mini resource, antimatter. Like a type of fuel that limits how many ships you can have in game period. You could have factories that just produce antimatter or harvest it in some way etc. Unlike credits, crystals and minerals, I don't imagine antimatter ever exceeding 1,000. Early in the game fuel would be hard to come by, but later in the game you'd have more of it. For frigates it would only take say 5 antimatter but a cruiser would require 30 or something, on average you'd have very little antimatter. Maybe even depending on how many ships you had they would spend antimatter and you'd lose it over time.

4. SHIP CLASSES: More variety amongst capital ships. Frigate and capital ships are two distinctions, but there should be several more. Scouts, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battleships, carriers. Each class should have a couple of ships under that subcategory, making ships more varied and purposeful rather then generic and mass produced, the way they feel in Supreme Commander. By adding ship classes you create more of the need for a fleet, with small, medium, large, extra large, and massive ships there is a variety of sized ships, with varying ease of destruction and cost creating a more varied feeling. A massive ship could take on three extra large, six large, or thirty small easily.

Well, if you want to discourage clumping, that should be done through capital ship abilities, right? Just with the selection we have now, the Marza Dreadnought seems to specialize in this.

Hi gang,

While we don't have time to respond to every post, please know that we're reading them. Please keep up with the great suggestions.

Going back to Assumption #3...

First of all, are there not ships in Sins that have more than one type of weapon? Ships don't have accuracy, weapons do (unless of course you are ramming, but that is a whole different ball game).

How complex do you think you could make accuracy and still have it be easy to understand?

Really, whether a weapon is going to hit or not has quite a few factors which can interact in different ways depending on the type of weapon and the type of ship. You have gunnery skill, piloting skill, weapon turning speed, weapon projectile speed, attack effect size, target size, ship speed, ship maneuverability and weapon tracking.

Radiation based weapons (lasers and neutron guns) have pretty much instantaneous delivery, whereas projectile weapons (mass drivers and plasma) do not, making them harder to hit with. Missiles have tracking, which negates many factors. Some weapons are stationary are require the whole ship to move to obtain a firing solution.

Having only one value to denote all of that seems to be an oversimplification that actually removes some of the intuitiveness. At the very least, I think you should also have a score for how good a ship is at evading attacks, called, err... evasiveness.

With the exception of tracking weapons like missiles, when you attack you are really attacking a point in space, not a ship. So, it isn't really accurate to say a ship has an accuracy of X and an evasiveness of Y without taking into account the profile of a target. It is a hell of a lot easier to hit the broad side of a ship that it is to hit it head on. So, when a ship fires it is going to select the point in space that gives it the greatest probability of hitting something, even with an innacurate shot. Accuracy and evasiveness are just descriptions of how likely one is to hit a precise point.

I suppose I am probably just doing some more baseless ranting, but something about the idea of even a fixed probability to hit a ship based only on accuracy and size seemed a little odd to me.

I think when you boil it down, part of this is that there should be no hidden modifiers in the equation. If you can't describe a how a mechanic functions in its entirety, then you should change it so that you can. Otherwise, you replace intuitiveness with assumption and guesswork, which are bad.