I have to say that I'm generally in the opposite camp. In most RTS's, units move so quickly across the map that unit positioning becomes much less important. In other words, if you keep a blob of forces near the middle of the map, you can usually respond to any threat with little trouble.

Sins isn't like that. If you're blindsided by an enemy fleet and you don't have forces within a jump or two, you're going to lose the planet under attack. I love this.

I do admit that there is a lot of "hurry up and wait," and it would be very nice for overall game speed to be adjustable during the game.

well yes, but theres a difference between "wee! my units got from China to the US in 2:38:52 !!! and "gah, half my force has been wipped out, but at least I have reinforcements"

in the current system it is almost impossible to get reinforcements from even a couple planets away before two equally sized forces finish up combat, let alone a sizeable force against a smaller one.

That was one of the sugesstions put out there, as well as smaller (circle) angle increments like 45 degress, 30 degrees, and 15 degrees. The thought to make the circle angle adjustable via research was also suggested.

I expect this topic to heat up again after Beta 2 gets out.

Honestly, that hasn't been my experience in the RTS genre, although you may have had a different one. With fast and varying movement speeds relative to general game speed, the factor of unit mobility becomes an important one and adds to the gameplay. In many RTS games that I've played, a weaker but quicker unit can be more useful than a slower and more powerful unit. This is because the difference in mobility that the units have causes a significant difference in reaction times to events occurring in other parts of the map. In Sins, it seemed to me like there was no such factor, as all of the units have equally slow reaction times.

"major pirate incursion"

*faints*

Positioning your fleets and defenses is a key element of strategy when you're dealing with a large Empire.  You have to make choices about where you place your forces, to optimize protection and the ability to react.  It's also a danger for anyone who spreads out too far too quickly, you can only effectively protect so much space before you start to leave gaps that can be exploited.

Remember, space is big... really big.  And capital ships are big too.  It takes time to traverse any large distance, even more if you're a huge ship that requires a lot more power to get moving.  And more time again if you're moving through the very strong gravity well of a star.  Sins is a game that at the grand scale, is a lot like an empire builder, which moves at a slower pace, but at the tactical level is an RTS where you're manaing your ships in quick combat. 

Will speeds of larger ships be tweaked?  Maybe, if it's decided that they need balancing.  Will larger ships move as fast as smaller ships so you can quickly react to a battle going on  4 jumps away in time to dramatically shift the battle before it reaches its conclusion?  My guess is no. 

I defend my front line planets with medium fleets and lots of defensive buildings.  Generally speaking, my larger fleets are no more than two, maybe 3 jumps away from any border world, so I can quickly shift things around if I'm being threatened.  Sometimes you just can't get to a battle in time, maybe it's because you over-extended yourself, or maybe it's because the enemy was just that much stronger.  But if you have your main fleet on the other side of the galaxy, and your homeworld gets wiped out because you had all of your ships 10 jumps away, that's your own fault.

The reaction times for reinforcements were significantly impacted by the "have to be at the lane to jump" change in version 66. It now has a great dependency on where in the neighboring grav well you station reinforcements and their composition. A force heavy with cap ships is pretty slow to get anywhere unless you make sure they are near the jump lane and have all of their fighters docked ahead of time.

Group Jumping (particularly across more than 1 grav well) also takes a lot longer than just sending the ships, so a decision needs to made whether the risk of defeat in detail outweighs the need for quick arrivals.

... or you could start at the other end and make battles last a bit longer. if two rougly equal fleets meet one another I am think it should take at least a few minutes for the battle to actually resolve itself. I'm not sure what it is like now and if prolonging battles for example by increasing general unit health wouldn't break the game at a tactical level. I mean don't forget that in the past battles did often last a long time. land based battles could go on even for weeks (ok, bad example to compare to space combat), but I believe larger sea battles which are somewhat comparable did also last some time (up to a few days iirc).

Personally I have not found slow speed in a gravity well to be much of a deterrent to rapid response times. My system guard fleets were always positioned on the edge of grav well sitting right on top of the phase lane leading towards the nearest "theater of operations". That way home fleets were on standby to reinforce the fronteer worlds if needed ,as well as being right on the spot if an enemy managed to break through the front lines.
Overall, the pace of the game seemed to be pretty well balanced - it gave you enough time to attend to building/manuvering/combat in multipple systems without turning it into a hectic mess.

Technically although sea battles may have lasted several days the actual damage done was inflicted in several minutes (or an hour at most). Take the Battle of Midway. Yes, it took place over several days. But, in terms of ships sunk the Japanese lost 4 carriers in less than 30 minutes of fighting.

Midway is also an excellent example of how the pace of modern warfare has exceeded the ability of fleets to reinforce each other. The Japanese battleship force was 300 miles behind the carrier force. That meant they could reinforce each other in about 12 hours if both task forces decided to head directly towards each other.

However, dive bomber planes travel at 185 mph and the time from start of the dive to releasing the bomb to flying away is a matter of minutes. Which means a carrier strike can hit and fly away before any reinforcements could even arrive.

What does this mean for the gameplay concept of reinforcement using fleets 1 planet away? If you use real life as an example I'd say you can't reinforce in time. If anything you have to emulate real-life doctrine and station small groups of ships as a "picket line" and keep a large reserve that will probably arrive after the "picket line" is destroyed.

Its basically the same function that destroyers serve now in large carrier task forces. They patrol far away from the carrier to look for incoming threats. But its also so that THEY get hit first. Thus, they sacrifice their ship to protect the carrier and let the task force know that danger is approaching.

we still need to improve pathing for the ships. they are still bumper cars.

also if a large ship is sitting still wouldn't it just use it's thrusters to turn toward the direction of travel instead of moving to turn. I hope that made sense.

turning around would be faster than moving 100,000 miles to do the same job at least i think it would be



and this is just a stupid question but where in the grav well would the moon be at the blue line. or the yellow line ie where you can build things inside of

I want moons.....

ok that is it lets string him up

anyone got a rope