And possibly besides "artificial buffs" and poor defensive armament placement nobody has given a reason needed for formations. Why should I just not be able to move around your fleet? Because it's sitting "in formation"?

For formations to be meaningful, arcs of fire need to be meaningful. For that to happen combat needs maneuvering. Without it I am going to rush to your weakest ship and/or most efficient kill.

With the present engine and amount of ships at this scale,artificial buffs are the only way fleets will have meaning and be used.Fleets should be constructed similar to what modern naval task forces are, with screening ships,command,etc.I'm afraid without a big design change the game amounts to who can build the most wins and that will get boring fast.The devs should look at the Carriers at war game for reference.

thats only because the AI sucks. Even so, you can beat the same force with less ships if you're smart about positioning and ability use.

That's true the AI isn't exactly clever in it's ship positioning , like It'll ignore my armada and go straight for the planet or an entire legion of ships will go for my colony ship waiting on the outer edge of the map.

I'm not sure what multiplayer will bring to be honest, We might simply not be seeing much tactical fleet use as there's no need for it against weak enemies. It'll be interesting anyway.

oh oh oh! rush with the cap ships! they are far more effective in rushes anyway

actually it works with basically any target the AI is focusing on, if they are REALLY stubborn you can cheat and have them tail a guy around for ages while you pepper them from behind with your vastly supperior force!

I'm on charon's side here, make it make sense.

but the truth of the matter is that formation really has nothing to do with these, and adding in fancy buffs and saying "this is why" is rarely a substitute for actually showing a decent change in gameplay

what you suggest would merely ahve a spammer putting his ships in formation and then outclassing a non-spammer because there isnt a way around it. so in effect you irritate the problem, not fix it.

having a couple standard formations would be nice though, rather than the current super-microing.

the thing about formations are not that they are a tradeoff between defense with power and mobility with power as you guys suggest, they are just tradeoffs between defense and offense against mobility. every time you break a formation its because you want to be more mobile, not because you want to trade in your defense buff for an attack buff.

ashberry, I'm sorry to say that you're missing quite a bit of tactical manuvering that goes into the game, 9/10 its about making your enemy move and not your own units, but the tactics are there, even if they do need some serious amplifying.

and false buffs are NOT the way to go, varying up the attack ranges, the way in which each weapon is used (missiles low fire rate but powerful and long range, autocannons in fast powerful bursts, lasers as a constant stream of fire etc.) and the manipulation of the auto-target system of the AI is the ONLY way to make an effective tactic aspect to the game. beyond that it feels like you're dancing around saying "poof! magic! my ships are more powerful". and not to mention it will in NO way deter spamming, as the spammer will still be able to put HIS ships in formation and only get more benefit out of the fake buffs than the combined-armser.

I'm thinking that it isn't so much an artificial buff, more as a recognition of what C&C provides for a fleet... I had the David Weber/Honor Harrington space fleet engagements in mind, where each ship had various point defenses that could effectively ward a ship from limited numbers of attacking missiles. Smaller ships had fewer defensive options, larger ships had more.

The formation of a fleet with linked C&C puts smaller frigates into slots which relieve from straining smaller local C&C suites in personal point-defense to sharing or concentrating on an assigned small defensive zone, trusting other ships in the fleet to ward all other directions as assigned... which in essence multiplies the effectiveness of each ship -alone, the ship has to protect itself by scanning all directions, but in fleet the same ship is able to narrow focus to a smaller area to help protect itself and companion ships in formation. So it isn't an artificial buff, but the power of networked processing and assigned task focus/load sharing.

Small frigates would have smaller C&C suites compared to large capitol ships, so another advantage is immediately realized when the frigates and other small ships reap the benefit of comparatively higher fleet C&C modes.

The physical formations may also provide depth of defense or concentration of firepower, depending if it is formed as a defensive sphere or as an offensive wall of battle -again, pretty standard type concepts from military sci-fi scenarios.

If enemies also utilize C&C technology plus fleet forms, then the advantages diminish unless superior ECW (ECM) are used to jam their scanning, targeting and C&C coordination abilities.

It may be too much detailing to implement tactical concepts like that, but it would be nice to see! The biggest difference from the Sins armaments and the Weber sci-fi concepts were that missiles were the standard type weapons in the stories, which were vulnerable to point defense counter-weapons.

Food for thought!

  

Homeworld is a good example of a 3D space game where formations are useful. Their usefulness is a function of speed, resilience, firepower and weapons range. Currently in Sins, ships are fast and weapons have relatively short ranges, with little variation. At the same time, weapons do little damage compared to how much damage a ship can take. If ships become slower, weapons have longer range and ships (at least frigates) die faster, such a rush becomes a good deal more expensive.



Beginning skirmishes, with the flagship and a few frigates, seem fine, but when warping in a fleet with 5-6 cap ships and lots of support to a heavily defended planet, everything falls apart.



I do not feel this to be true. I just want a bit more structure to combat, instead of the current messy feeling of larger fights.



I completely agree: Larger gravwells, and also slower ship speeds, with more Homeworld-like movement (not the current style of ships turning in wide arcs for no good reason). Needs some solution to avoid drastically increased travel times, but that should be doable.


EDIT:

I concur with this as well.

Im sorry even in conventional navies missle defence (what amounts of point defence) IS an important consideration in fleet formation, so how is it nothing to do with fighting in formation? i r confused

And I'd love to know what it i was suggesting that would just promote spamming my post was replying to what I THOUGHT Charonsuch had said about Neskonliths post, and in fact I got that wrong because Charonsuch was talking about something else I didnt make any gameplay suggestions at all as far as im aware.

I'd also like to add that Im a little confused by your defence of the current in game tactics! In other threads youve got a really good, positive "if its not broken, lets tell the devs how to make it great!" attitude, but here you seem content to let what is in my view CLEARLY the weakest point of the game get by with very little criticism . You claim there is a lot of room in the game for tactical manouvering, Im willing to believe you but all im going to say is that myself, and I think quote a few more besides from what other people are saying, are having a really hard time finding it!

I dont consider myself particularly bad at the game and if i find the only tactic is just to fly into a system with more ships than the enemy than I really think something is wrong and needs to be addressed :

What I think it means is the engine, the game as it currently is has potential for tactical movement but it's not being used or needed currently.

I mean It's all there, and it's all possible it's just not useful. I don't think it would require a major overhaul to put a bit more tactics into it.

And I do think letting your fleet loose against a player who's organised his forces and is carefully planning the battle would get you decimated, as he has the control - just right now we're against AI and AI can never compare to humans.

They should just make the advantages alot more obvious, Like people have suggested diversifying ranges a bit more, making some ships slower or with less armour and such would make the use of formations and positioning a bit more useful.

I still like the idea of positional damage, but I doubt we'd ever see it. Formations would be another step towards making it easier to control and perform.

I'd still like a system where you can't just send your forces magically through the enemy fleet, yea it's space you can fly round but right now it's just Zippp right past that capitol ship and fleet of frigates, with taking relativly little damage. Makes it easy to ignore a battle line and simply spam away at your planet.

you will never get a bullet up to that speed using explosives, and even if you did the counter force would tear a nice hole through YOUR armada.

easily explained:
the TEC empire is an ancient one, all of their military ships are rotted pieces of crap. YES they COULD make lots of big-ass lasers like on the kol and put them on up-to-date ships, but they could never manufacture enough quickly enough to hold them off. as a result they create the cheaper, easier to manufacture solid-state weaponry and distribute those to drafted merchants to equip their vessels with. tada, my explanation is beautiful

hold on a blasted second, you cannot reflect streams of electrons one way or another, thats an electron stream, not a photon stream. but, ignoring your fallacy there:
true, true, true, false.

if you created a gravitational field powerful enough to change the course of photons within a few thousand mile radius (note how kind I'm being to you) even a few meters you would create massive tidal forces that would, indeed, tear anything within that area appart.
best to stick with shields and hull plating, they wont stop it forever but they'll hold it for a while.

and if you were actually talking about eS lasers: you can easily shield against those, they will burn through armor eventually, but when they get through they pack a much more powerful punch in taking down a ship.


in the end though lasers are more effective than standard bullets, but need longer recharge and fire in a sustained stream rather than a burst (like bullets)

to be clear:
electron stream lasers ARE chemical weapons by definition. photon stream weapons are not chemical.

I site my own rant about how you would not be able to accelerate weapons to that speed. this makes the arguement null

try to check the facts a bit next time.

they will, god knows its easy to adjust.

true that.

Every kind of formation can be made manually. It would be nice if they include pre-made and custom templates for formations. They said they may...but right now with enough micro, you can build formations n set to weapon range. The problem that is only thus far being talked about is stat boosts. Makes no sense to me. Maybe I under stand aim bonuses, but does a cap or cruiser already perform the function?

Yes, I want to be able to have my #1 fleet to form a defensive line with caps and cobalts in front of my LRMs and carriers. But my opponent SHOULD flank and hit the weak ships from the side. Think about what benefits one gains from formations alone? Sitting ducks in pretty rows.

I want my (carrier n lrm, especially) ships to be evasive when taking a beating. Moreover, if fleet #2 consists of 20 cobalts, I want to be able to choose an aggressive (gravity well) engagement stance in which once in attack range, half of my cobalts will flank right and start to create a 2 sided attack. Yes I can already do this manually, but once again I am trying to discuss the need and BENEFITS of formations and maneuvers. Right now I could manually flank, but why should I?

I thought Ironclad said there were going to be fleet formations in one of their interviews.

I seriously suspect it's already been planned and will be in at release, but as it's beta it seems to be more focused on getting the right balance between logistics and such .

, very good idea , and from Yarlen none-the-less!

I have my moments.

Yes, they are good ideas, but how can we implement these ideas, without requiring extreme micro management / fleet maintaining, i.e. click fest.

Though formations alone won't matter. Movement is needed!

Wouldn't it make the most sense to attach fleet formations to the capital ships abilities? As your capitals level you get new fleet formations - and it's not even really formations that are important here, it's the logic of a certain number of defensive ships need to stick with a certain ratio of offensive ships. Carriers and capitals stick to the center, fighter/bombers can either be in offensive or screen mode. Give most of the ships more countermeasures, put some flak and point defense on everything. Give the cobalts some seriously powerful close range weapons to make the "i'll just fly right through your formation" argument a very bad idea. Yeah, I think that's what I see as really missing, a decent screening ship that can effectively build a "wall" around the long range and tactically important ships.