@P5y

that kind of "strategy" can only be considered strategy for the first few games you play, after counters are well known they become unoriginal and automatic, like rock paper scissors

gentlemen there is a way to form a fleet now

you choose a group of frigates or whatever and then right click on the ship that you want them to escort

they do fight as a fleet and except for jumping the move as a fleet

here is a pic of one with my flagship this is 5 scouts and 15 flax

when moving you can only click on the main ship or you lose your escort status

I guess you are reffering to his "one ship spam". This automatism, unoriginality and rock... you speak about is only true when the game encourages "one ship spam". Meaning that somebody who is completely specialized in one ship and it's abilities can prevail. If there is a way for the other players to punish such a spam, every player is forced into a combined arms (I've written more in my previous post on page 2). And P5y can't disagree that this is a military reality.

An aircraft carrier CAN NOT survive for long in a war on it's own. A single sub (or a fast torpedo boat) is going to sink it pretty fast. We don't need to go into such extremes as one-shot-one-capital_death because it would ruin the gameplay but I do want some game system (other than numbered limits) to punish the "one ship spam". This prevents what P5y is longing for without limiting him with numbered caps.

Agree voyager.


Games like Age of Empires II, where you build foot soldiers, archers, and pike men to counter act different units does get monotonous.

A game where a carrier can stand toe to toe with a battleship, but in the end the battleship usually wins, makes things exciting. The carrier fires missiles and flack while launching its bomber wings to attack the battleship, while the battleship fires it's main batteries to take on the carrier.

When one ship can take on multiple ships it's more useful, but when it's something like in a game where an archer can take out a tank, that's when things get really repetitive.

I feel the game needs

1. FLEET MANAGEMENT: Manage and assemble a massive fleet and control it effectively. Rather then the current ragtag fleet assemblage we have now, where fighter sand bombers are all over the place, with carriers, battleships, and scout frigates kind of wandering around unsure of themselves. They should cohesively move as one.

2. MORE SHIP MOVEMENT ORDERS: Right now, you have the ability to move ships as a group. Sometimes it works...sometimes it doesn't. You can also order ships to guard another ship. Ok. Still good. Is it just me or does it feel like some commands are missing? Maybe they are in the game and I just don't know how to access them. I'd like to have the ability to order my ships to orbit a planet for two reasons. A. It's way awesome to watch a fleet move around a planet in orbit, kind of easier to pick them out of a crowd too when they move around my planet in a circle. B. So that they are never in one place and when an enemy fleet comes out of one of five phase lanes my ships will probably be passing by that phase line. Another movement command that is absent is patrol. I would really just like to order my ships to patrol through multiple sectors of space constantly going about and engaging enemy ships they encounter at random.

3. MORE TACTICAL OPTIONS: Right now, it feels like I have a fleet go to a system, then I select all of the ships, I order them to attack 1 enemy unit be it the planet, or a shield generator or a frigate, then all of my ships engage that enemy. Occasionally I select a ship and use it's special ability, but more often then not the ability has already been used so I have nothing to do. I know I can switch that off, but then the ability ends up never being use. It's a catch-22. Lately, I just let my fleets sit there and duke it out and all I really do is select my bombers and give them various locations to bomb. Feels like there could at least be something else I could do. Manage formations. Emergency retreats. Selecting strategic targets for nuclear annihilation. Something.

What I don't like in space games, or real time strategic games in general, is that battles are usually to the death. Normally a battle is then decided when one side is more or less annihilated. Which means that fallbacks are seldom done and necessary and that the winner of a battle is often then not only a tactical but also a strategical winner, since he then has a overall supreme number of units (given equal production capabilities).

This means that to recover from a failed battle your only possibility is to build a new fleet. Because of that, the time to build ships is often quite short to make it possible to amass a new fleet quite fast, or else one battle lost would mean game over. This sometimes goes to to extremes like in supreme commander, where you don't care when you lose an army, since you can just build a new one in seconds.

I would love it if there was something which would prevent this and could make a retreat necessary (or "losing" a battle possible from other reasons then just because your fleet is destroyed).

In my opinion, the norm should be that ships are disabled, i.e. unable to battle further, instead of being just destroyed.

For example: In a battle with about equal forces on each side, after one side win, there should on the losing side perhaps be about 3/10 destroyed, 5/10 disabled and 2/10 still in fighting shape, while the winner has about 1/10 destroyed 4/10 disabled and still 5/10 in fighting shape.
The loser then would have to retreat to regroup, rearm and repair while the winner has some time to advance.
On the next encounter the winning side has an advantage, but if far into enemy territory the loser could reinforce faster so the next battle could be again quite a close match without the need of rebuilding entire fleets.

For this to be possible there would need to be quite some changes in the game (which would make it quite unlikely to be included into the game ).


First, some definitions:
-Ships are defined in battle when in a certain (not to small) area around them fighting is going on.
-Ships are disabled when their morale, fitness, damage to certain subsystems is under a certain threshold (or over it at damage).
-Morale and fitness is on a per ship basis.
-Disabled ships are unable to fire weapons and use offensive special abilities.
-Disabled ships can still be forced to fight further, but that would have catastrophic effects like accidents, friendly fire, etc.
-Ships in battle constantly lose fitness.
-Ships firing lose fitness per shot (Proportional to weapon size and rate of fire).
-Ships being damaged lose medium morale and lot of fitness (for emergency repair, wounded).
-When a ship is destroyed, other ships in battle lose some morale. (Proportional on overall fleet size and size of the ship destroyed.)
-Enemy ships destroyed, increases some of the moral of other ships in battle. (Again proportional.)
-Ships being disabled slightly decrease the moral of other ships in battle. (Again proportional.)
-Ships morale and fitness increases when not in battle.
-The effectiveness of weapons decrease proportional to a decrease in fitness and to a lesser decree to a decrease in morale.


The effects of this should be the following:
A long drawn out battle can result in a draw since the fitness of both sides is so low that most of their ships are unable to battle further. While both sides my still have most of their forces hardly damaged, further fighting would be useless. (Because of this fitness and morale are separated, since in a draw morale tends to be stable while fitness decreases continually.)

One side has to retreat since their morale is low because of losses and damages to individual ships which makes lot of their ships disabled.

Reinforcing ones fleet in battle with new fresh ships gives a great advantage since they haven't lost morale and fitness and fight with full effectiveness.

This means that it can be beneficial not to form all ships in one big fleet, but instead making two fleets where one joins the fight later, when the enemy is already broken-down from fitness losses while only half of your forces are affected.

You could stop an enemy advance by doing a rearguard action until the enemies fitness is low enough and then counterattack, with albeit a smaller force then the enemy has they can be fresh and with high fitness and morale be effective enough to halt his advance and perhaps even defeat his fleet.

Encircle some small part of the enemy forces and destroy them. The large morale hit the enemy will take should make it impossible for him to fight for the moment. Even though his forces may numerically be superior to yours he has lost this battle since his forces are unable to fight further.

Etc. etc.


To make retreats possible there need to be a mechanism so that the retreating disabled ships aren't destroyed by the advancing enemy. An easy way to this could be the following: Ships with low morale are faster, then ships with higher morale. (Running away from sure death gives quite a lot of motivation.) Disabled ships are again a bit faster, since they can use all their energy for the engines since they wont be shooting anything anymore.

A mode to move your ships backwards should also help.

Lastly ships which follow a retreating enemy should take higher damage (because of the added speed to projectile and rockets due to the acceleration of the follower and evader) and the evader should take a bit less damage (because of the lower speed of the enemy projectile and rockets and because of the dispersion of laser weapons since they would need to cover a larger distance to catch up to the evader).

Other options can be added to make retreats feasible.


Lastly damage to subsystems:

Imho 6 subsystems are enough. Weapons, Shields, Bridge, Crew, Structure and Engines.
Any time a ship is damage with a tenth of it's total hit points, or it has less then half of its hit points left, there is a chance of (total lost hit points / total hit points) that one of the subsystems is damaged. A damaged subsystem can't be used until it is repaired (which just needs some time). If two or more subsystems are damaged, the ship is disabled.

Damage to : effect
weapons : ship can't fire
shields : no shield/mitigation
bridge : no special abilities usable, high morale loss
crew : half effectiveness in all areas, high fitness loss
structure : ship takes double damage
engines : ship moves with half speed

All numbers are of course just guesses to illustrate an are to be tested.

Eventually the rate of ship building has to be slowed down, so that losing ships hurts, the AI has to be able to cope with those things and battle should be quite slow, so that ships aren't destroyed in seconds, so that there is time to react.

The overall goal of my idea is to make ships valuable, ship losses hurting, prevent battles to the death and open up new strategic possibilities without adding too much micromanagement.

i think modifying ships' effectiveness against other ships is a dangerous road to go down, make a solid game and you won't need fake modifications like that to patch up weak points in the strategy

@Van - a most excellent and hardcore micro post. I'm with you 120% brother. However the reality of the situation for the market is that the type fleet dynamics you and I both want is considered small (I highly disagree however). As you appropriately stated in your post SC and its ilk are inherently designed to be polar opposites and given the sales numbers are high for those games it ultimately becomes a self perpetuating cycle; a popular marketing word for it "formula" design. It takes a company with a strong vision and high risk tolerance to "break the mold" so to speak and alter the formula.

@Van
i don't agree 100% with your entire post, but it's the most intriguing set of suggestions i've heard yet

the reason i agree is when i picture a battle in space b/n very large ships (and if you think of these caps compared to a human... ya, they're supposed to be massive right?) i think of something like this (from a "real life" standpoint):

say 2 caps square off against 2 caps, it's not gonna take much (once fire starts penetrating the shields and piercing the hull) to disable the ship, air breaches the hull and large portions of the ship are sealed off and lost, if you hit the engine or most/all of the weapons systems the cap is basically useless in combat, HOWEVER, it it's got to be like a mile long ship and is FAR from being space dust, there may be some large holes in the hull rendering the delicate stucture (delicate because it's in outer space and we have such devastating weapons) inert, but the ship as a whole would most likely look pretty healthy (maybe a few fires, some blacked out portions of the ship), now the enemy cap isn't going to keep firing at your disabled cap until it is ashes, no way, it would move on and take on your other ships

so i agree, after a battle involving large ships, the "dead" ones should probably be salvageable unless they have been mutilated beyond recognition (which the enemy could easily do if they had the time)

on the other hand, there are dozens of great ideas that apply to real battles that might screw over gameplay, keep in mind this is a fictional game and im hoping to overall goal is to make a good strategy game, not necessarily one real to physics in all areas, that said, sticking close to real physics is probably a good rule of thumb

@Shadowhal

Basically, yes - Space Empires gives that flexibility.
You can then pause the battle and micro manage if you wish, or just let it play out - your choice. Like SOASE, the combat is realtime, with the option to pause anytime.
Also, to those following the thread, in my hurry to complete my original note, I said SEIV - it should have been SEV (the latest iteration of the game).
The ships in the SE series also have components that can be damaged in a battle and must then be repaired. So if a ships engines are damaged - it limps home on it's own, or slows the fleet.
SEV also includes realtime ground battles using the same concept as ship battles.
This is turning into a very interesting thread and I hope we are giving the devs some useful information and ideas. Being a mainframe developer, there is nothing worse than completing software for a user to have them say "that's not quite what I thought it was going to do!!" Although in this case, they are creating the game under their own specs and rules with some input from us. My hope is that they can brainstorm some of the ideas into amalgams and produce a great game (without causing copyright issues).

ok..this is my point made clearer. Im not against combined fleets! Just interpreting and appreciating the need for combined fleets differently

Specialisation/Combination progression battle dynamics


Combined fleet dynamics should encourage single type specialisation (heh) to make the actual "COMBINING" with another unit type a very serious decision as you may only have the resource to specialise two units at that stage in the game. Further into the game you can specialise another unit to make 3 , then 4 units later on . Fleets therefore gets more and more combined as the game goes on , reflecting the need for more types of strategic options to open up . Other rts , like Dawn of War use tiers to achieve this. However for you, you pretty much choose which unit you want as "tier1" and what unit you want to spam next to supplement the first spam as "tier 2".

Saying this , one can however combine earlier with the result that ships arent as specialised in what they do. Otherwise one can just SPAM , and totally specialise in one unit with the disadvantage of obvious counters. They are free to do whichever or follow a middleroad.

Now as to how much resource you have to specialise is subject to balance. Maybe you can have a 2 combinations to start with , moving to 4 then 6 then 8..who knows..

People have quoted AoE ..this is how it works. First a clubman spam , then you supplement with arrows OR horsies. As the game progress you might goto slow phalanx or catapult , sometimes you may ditch your first specialisation. In any case ..its bullshit that armies are mixed in this game. Ive always taken pride that this game gives you toughchoices .You cant research everything at once nor build the factories for every unit , but one thing you do know is that your army gets more and more combined as the game progresses. Its really a sight to behold in AoE ,as a strategist when you see your army of bowman/phalanx/horsie ,comes up against chariot/catapult/pikeman and you really interested to see how such combinations pan out vs each other and what your 4th unit will be. ps- this is the part where megaships become oh so awesome.

Combining should be a privilage for the strategist

This is a radical suggestion, but I've got to make it in light of Van's excellent post.

To make your battles exciting, go with fewer ships and lots more detail. You can implement something desperately lacking in many, many RTS games, an element absent from the genre since the days of Dune and Command and Conquer: Unpredictability.

The excitement of an RTS game currently lies in not knowing whether you will win or lose, and each player strives to marshal his resources and units to achieve that goal. But within each RTS lies a predictable set of unit interactions - I know that 12 marines will always defeat 12 zerglings, or that a flamethrower tank will chew through X rifelmen, or that my Ion frigate will beat an assault frigate.

We should take a hint from modern warfare - or even a board game like Axis and Allies - and understand that the outcome of a single battle becomes intensely interesting if we don't know the outcome in advance because we simply ran the numbers through our heads.

For unpredictable and interesting battles, you need unpredictable and interesting combat mechanics.

If 20 bombers attack a carrier, are they going to kill it? If two battleships gang up on one, is the one ship doomed? The answers to these and nearly every other combat question should be "maybe".

Does a T-72 tank stand a chance against an M1 Abrams? Generally, no. But during the first Iraq war, in the confusion of a night battle, an Iraqi T-72 found itself with a perfect side-shot on an Abrams at less than 100 yards. It fired and killed the tank (the crew survived - the M1 is a magnificent tank), but it demonstrates that even in modern war the unpredictability of warfare can have unexpecetd outcomes. In practically every other encounter between the T-72 and the M1, the T-72 was destroyed (including the one mentioned above, by a different M1).

The more detail you put into combat mechanics, the more opportunity there is to make the battles interesting and to introduce elements of unpredictability. Minor or major weaknesses, design flaws in the ships, critical hits, morale, ammunition, fuel, subsystems, realistic space movement, boarding actions, collisions, radiation, trans-dimensional weaponry, warp core breaches...

Naturally, all that is too much detail. There's a line to be drawn somewhere, because all of that gets too complex. But incorporating something better than the basic hitpoint system, something with a bit more detail and a bit less 'I can predict this fight with my calculator', would be a welcome addition.

When the soldiers of our wars are done fighting, we tell stories of their achievements. I urge those of you not familiar with Taffy 3 to read one such story now: The Battle off Samar

There are some rare but truly amazing games that can simulate this sort of thing - Combat Mission comes to mind. I had one lone Tiger turn the tide of battle by taking on several Pershings(!) and Firefly shermans and emerging victorious, saving a company of German troops. I can tell you how he hid behind buildings, emerging carefully to take them on one at a time, the commander bravely daring small arms fire to peer out of the tank and spot the enemy better until he was shot, leaving his crew to carry on without him.

I remember that Tiger. I can't recall anything too special that my Command and Conquer tanks did - but what could they do? Two of the standard tanks from one side would always kill one of the standard tanks of the other side.

When great battleships conflict in space, give me something that reads like the Hood and the Prince of Wales bearing down on the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. Or Taffy 3 against Center Force.

Right now, tabletop games like StarFleet battles and Battletech have better and more interesting battle mechanics and damage models than RTS games. We've got the processing power to do at least as much as we can do with pencil and paper, so let's use it.

@P5y - your update or clarification post reads much more like a real strategy gamer is behind it and not some Jolt drinking, caffeine snorting mutant WarCraft preteen on a crack binge aching for a twitch fest encounter.

@Com - your comments are not radical at all. The substance of what you are supporting is what several of us are pushing for from different angels. Have you eve played...

[quiet moment of reverence]

Close Combat (CC) or any of its iterations?

If not you should try it out. Even though the title is over 10 years old it is still in a class by itself and nothing has come close as far as I know. Now a system like that implemented in Sins with crits and subs as well as the other stuff I and some others are advocating would surely produce a genera defining title.

Note: The CC First to Fight title does not count. It is obvious someone was on drugs or forced at gunpoint to use the name to cash in on the franchise brand.

I'm a happy veteran of Close Combat II, III and IV. Those were all great games superceded only by Combat Mission.

And since we got on the subject, it looks like they're developing a different Combat Mission games since I last checked. We should probably continue this in PM if you're interested in learning more.

I think the biggest issue with coming up with a "good" battle mechanic is somehow getting around the limitations of the hitpoint model. Hitpoints have a large number of inherant flaws that make them an almost uniquely poor choice to model combat.

For example; you only very rarely see 'concentration of fire' used in any sort of real battle the way one would use it in an RTS. The reason why it is used in most RTSs is because of the hitpoint model; units go from full functionality to zero functionality only after they sustain some "x" amount of damage. This of course makes it so that concentrating your fire on exactly one target is nearly always the optimal solution to every problem, and as such it robs the player of a whole wealth of tactics.

The other thing that generally has a major influence on battles is the supply train. One of the major irritations I had during the game was that 1) fuel was used for travel, but not required for travel, and 2) it was irritating to have to wait in a home sector for your fuel to slowly fill back up. I think a more elegant solution would be having some sort of tanker vessel that acts much like the science vessel, but instead of resupplying shields, it resupplys fuel. The other choice would be to reduce the amount of fuel required for travel, but still make travel require fuel.

What would the goal of these solutions be?

1) make it more expensive for an opponent to try simply bypassing outer worlds by jumping past them.

2) Allow ships to escape without the enemy simply chasing after them and destroying them. If a weakened ship jumps out, the enemy has to think long and hard about whether or not he has enough fuel to jump in, finish it off, then jump out.

[/quote]In my opinion, we need more ships in the game.[/quote]

As long as one is careful not to
1- Make the game easy to approach while at the same time...
2- Bring a mess of ships of all super-duper-specialized kinds


I saw simple games with something like 3 or 4 units balancing each other. One example... might be Rise of Nations which has a few units really, but this same unit gets more advanced over time with its little particularities (I loved RoN's military system: combined arms in its best style).

GalCiv2 gets this right in its way: 3 types of weapons. A look at both RoN and GalCiv2 might be instructive for something most adapted here. Many ships, unlike GalCiv? Sure, why not. But as elegantly simple as the rest of the game, ideally.

@Com - cool! Please feel free to send me the information. I would really appreciate it.

@Prot - yes I completely agree. That is why I'm advocating subsystems and criticals as well as morale and commanders. On the issues of the supply model, since I do not have access to the full working copy I cant comment on it. I can assume given my experience with the TEC faction that supply is not modeled.

"Fleets should work together as a single combined arms fighting force"


What gives if... we have three types of units (say fighters, support, big-mamma) and each gives a maximal bonus +20% to others by its presence. If one is a quarter or more of the forces, it gives full 20%.

That's just some crappy example. But would it permit more easily to just throw in the whole thing with less concern for micro and more macro?

I've had some time to think about this, and I have come up with a few more ideas on how damage modeling might work. First off, I am going to assume that the general 'feel' of combat will be staying, in the sense that we aren't likely to see a dramatic increase in weapon damage. Furthermore, I am also going to assume that the way armor works is not going to change. Unfortunately, the combination of these two factors makes RoF a nearly inconsequential statistic (Assuming of course a static DPS.)

However, if a critical hit system was implemented, we could still use the hitpoint model as a rough indicator of structural integrity. The chance of a critical hit would be proportional to the damage done in a single shot, however, as a single more powerful attack would pierce farther into the ship, making for a greater chance of hitting an important structural feature. /This/ could be the difference between two weapons of the same DPS and differing RoF. Everything else being equal, a higher RoF weapon would have a smaller chance of inflicting critical hits, and would therefore be less useful for destroying larger capitol ships and the like. Of course, this has the side effect of making lower RoF always better than a higher RoF, but it does, at the very least, make RoF an important statistic.

@pro

Yea , Id also like to see RoF being useful. And thats a good idea.

I think logically speaking , if you have a shield. Would you prefer blocking 20 stones 1 kg each thrown at you one after another or would you prefer to block 1 Rock weighing 20kg.

@com
i just pray that there is never introduced any randomness, to an extent i believe strategy is about "running the numbers through your head", more detail - yay - any sort of "roll the dice" action - boo

@Wraith - That my friend is the magic of the universe. It can be sufficiently articulated in the old adage "The best laid plans of mice and men.."

Personally I like the element of randomness simply because it can account for any number of variables in a model that have been left out for what ever reasons. Moreover it has been directly responsible for turning the tide of numerous battles and wars throughout human history. Try to think of it as an ultra simple quantification of the human equation component in life.

We have an expression in the military that tries to address this factor as well. It has a few variations but it generally goes something like this: "The right solider in the right place at the right time can win the war."

You've got to have randomness - otherwise, you're playing space chess. It might still be a good game, but once one side gets an advantage, the battle becomes predictable. To keep a battle - and indeed, an entire game - interesting, the losing side still has to have a chance to turn the fight around for most of the game. Randomness helps grant that chance, as does the inclusion of other strategic elements. Chess is a good example of a game where that is still possible for the losing side, but between two masters of the game, once either side gets the advantage they need, the game is over. In a game with randomness, like Axis and Allies, the game may be tilted in one side's favor, but the luck of the dice can betray the winning side, and the tides of war can shift between two equally skilled players.

There's a reason that one of two chessmaters will lay down their king after fewer than half the pieces on the board have been taken. I'd rather Sins be a game that's exciting up until the end. In World War II, both the Germans and the Japanese resorted to desperate attacks to save their nations as the end drew near. Both arguably had at least a slim a chance of succeeding (and thankfully did not). But encouraging hope for the losing side is a great way to encourage players to continue fighting to the bitter end.

A funny ideal here ... but if you guys really prefer randomness then I think a dice roll system in D&D works quite well, it pretty much have everything you guys are talking about ... and backed by logic.

Weapon have a hit range and threat range (critical range), this helps the weapon will work the way they're supposed to. Randomness is good, but they're needed to have certain limit and properly control. You talk about luck, but too much luck can result in illogical infuriating in games. I really don't want to see something like a lucky crash from a X-wing managed to blow up a Star Destroyer or a lucky torpedo run spelled the doom of the Bismarck.



About withdrawing force from battles. Honestly that's something I always want to do, add more immersion to the game. But for the most part that doesn't happen because there is little reason to. I don't think a 4X game will have a limited resource model so unlike real life, you don't have to worry about running out of resource. There is a way to add some incentive for the player to fight sparingly is to apply a veterancy system and "make it actually worth it!!". The reason I emphasised the last part because veterancy is not something rare or new in gaming, but most of the time they're too insignificant for the players to care. If anything, I expect a system at least similar to how the C&C series handle veterancy, especially the one that just come out - where Veterancy does make a difference.

actually it was two lucky torpedo runs that spelled the doom of the bismarck

first one cut off one of its fuel tank, the full one

secound one took out the rudder

so if luck can happen in real life one not in games


it also had something to do with the british navy not trusting aircraft at sea