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Learn from past space game mistakes!

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Learn from past space game mistakes!

Learn from history, Ironclad!

from Sins Forums
Hi. I consider myself to be a big 4E genre player. I play them for considerable amounts of time and I think i got a fair taste of what its all about. What i'm struggling with is what they are screwing up that past games already screwed up on in the first place!

1. Everything is stationary.

Every 4E game i've played kept the planets and stars in the same place. Now i'm not asking for much, I just want each planet and asteroid to orbit. I know that if they are at different speeds it would mortally screw up the fast travel system (i've discused this in other posts) so all i'm asking is to slooowly rotate the entire solar system... just a little. Slow enough to not be bothered by but fast enough to notice when you zoom out.

2. Moons and other space junk.

Star Wars: Empire at War did a great job of interactive environments (asteroid debris, gas clouds, starship wreckage, etc.) and don't mark it down just because its a star wars game. It was made brilliantly. It's also an RTS but much more slow paced and paused to paly each battle. In Sins your lucky if you get debris from destroyed research stations. Plus, you can shoot through pretty much everything. Fighters and bombers can even fly STRAIGHT through a planet (try it, I double clicked on the guys and zoomed in, its pretty funny). Throw in a solid Moon where you can hide behind from enemy fire. Ship debris should at least be avoided. I know its a game, but make it a little more realistic.

3. Stop and go spaceship battles.

I hate it when you move in a group of 20 kodiak cruisers and they just but on the brakes and stare at gauss cannons (don't worry, they fire). I want to see some evasive maneuvers! Missed shots! At least can you just make em' motorboat around, NOT looking like the engine guys took a coffee break? And how the hell do you decelerate in space with no reverse thrusters?!? Think about it.

4. Individuality of planets.

In Sins, if you've seen one asteroid, you've seen em all. Dead or no, they're boring and all the same. Learn from Star Wars, make each region have just a tweak of uniquness. Mkae the gravity ring in this planet have increased speed because of chemicals in the atmosphere! Make an asteroid have a lot of debris lowering your shield regeneration!

5. MORE TYPES OF PLANETS

Six types of regions just ain't enough. Throw in a gas giant, where population is low but high logistics and tactical. Hell, put in a few dust rings around it like Saturn. Im not talking little differences. No, that would be a pain in the a**. Just make a little more variety. Make a giant ocean planet like in Freelancer or dark planets (like muck and swamps, I guess). Sure, the artwork and detail on the planets are beautiful but I want a little more.

6. Detail the ships.

The kodiak is my weapon of choice. It's powerful, quick, and easy to upgrade. But if you zoom in, it's uuugly. Boring colors, 3 liitle cannons, and a whimpy dim glowing engine. Make the ships more bada** and exiting. You did great on captiols and fighters but don't neglect the backbone of your space fleets.

Well, that's basicly a rough outline of it. Hopefully they'll catch these before they release the legit version of the game. So far it's one of the most thrilling 4E i've played and it's only in Beta. I'm just putting in some history.

28,337 views 119 replies
Reply #51 from Sins Forums Top
Way to bring up Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy Ron. That series gets progressivly gets worse as you read each book but it starts ok.




it may get worse but you can't stop reading it.
Reply #52 from Sins Forums Top
Way to bring up Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy Ron. That series gets progressivly gets worse as you read each book but it starts ok.


LIES!!! LIES AND DECIET!!! BURN HIM!!!
The Political Machine 2024
Reply #53 from Sins Forums Top
lol its true I got to the third book and when I heard of restaurant calculations I was like "f*** it, i'm gonna play Sins."
Reply #54 from Sins Forums Top
YARLEY!!!!! HES BEING MEANNNNNN!!!!

DISABLE HIS BETA KEY!
Reply #55 from Sins Forums Top
and the homor stomach eats shibfilet and grows to the size of a house. feed me.
Reply #56 from Sins Forums Top
  
Reply #57 from Sins Forums Top
What in gods name is going on here........
Reply #58 from Sins Forums Top
I think this conversation has pretty much gone off the deep end and should be locked.
Reply #59 from Sins Forums Top
I am going to be a very bad boy and do exactly the opposite of what people here are asked to do, list the things I liked about other space games. oh, well, maybe list pros and cons.

Star Trek Armada:

Pros:

- did have an array of terrain features that provided visual variety AND had an effect on gameplay. black holes destroyed stuff, nebulas could impair vision, weapons, life support, etc.
- cool damage system. I think I mentioned this before. it would certainly be interesting for larger ships, aka cruiser and capships. basically, every ship has 4 subsystems (weapons, shields, life support, engines, sensors) that would each receive some damage when the ship was hit and substantially more if shields were depleted. that way, before actual destruction some functions of a ship could be offline. that was just cool.
- some good special weapons.
- (good use of franchise)

cons:
- basic race layout essenitally the same except for special weapons.

Conquest: (beware, only played the demo here. would buy it now though if I found it in a shop by chance)

pros:

- supply system: each ship has some supply for weapons, to keep up the supply, special supply ships were needed.
- multiple star systems. well, essentially already included here, but still, the first workable approach I had seen until then for an rts.
- admirals, you could train and assign admiral personalities to fleets.

cons:

again, races basically too similar, too little variety.

I deliberately left out for example homeworld, as its so popular here I guess (and I could be wrong, but do some of the hw people work on this title actually?) there is no point discussing it yet another time. so, just my two cents.
Reply #60 from Sins Forums Top

What in gods name is going on here........


I don't think it has anything to do with gods name. At least, not any god you'd wanna worship.
as its so popular here I guess


Not all of us have had a chance to play homeworld. And with finances being what they are, those individuals may not be able to afford it for a while. Ya 'know, cause college just started back up.

Erm, not that I have to worry about that!
Reply #61 from Sins Forums Top
Some of us haven't played homeworld???? We need to root these people out and destroy them....well, maybe not destroy, but something awful.

For those of you who haven't played any of the Homeworld series, I would recomend Homeworld 2. It is a great game AND there are a few awesome mods for it (the Star Wars Warlords mod by EvilleJedi and the PDS mod are 2 great examples).
Reply #62 from Sins Forums Top
and I could be wrong, but do some of the hw people work on this title actually?


Some of the IC folks worked on Cataclysm, yes.
Reply #63 from Sins Forums Top
Don't be soft, root them out and cull their infestation, but offer them the chance to see you play before we execute them.

I like your pro and con system shadow hal so I'm going to imitate it.

______________________________________________________________________________________
-Conquest Frontier Wars- I played it very extensively.

Pros:
Supply System (needed to be said again!)

Cons:
Buggy Multiplayer
______________________________________________________________________________________
-Star Trek Birth of the Federation

Pros:
Up to 30 minor races to bribe and conquer. This could be implemented as a few neutral planets and systems with their defensive pirate fleets. You could perhaps bribe them to join, giving you random developments already on the planet.

Cons:
Horrible Horrible slowdown with every passing turn, that even affected the cursor.
______________________________________________________________________________________
-Ascendency

Pros:
Great tech tree, really funny developments, useful to Sins, the ability to find planets with ruins that you could explore and find useful techs from. Which they have essentially implemented, though a few floating derelict anomalies would also be good, ala Galactic Civ II.

Orbiting worlds. Over each turn each orbiting planet moved roughly 1/8th of a revolution, sometimes faster sometimes slower. This made for great tactical options. This could be implemented for Moons in Sins, that orbit the planet, thus not interfering with the global map. Moons could be tactically important in that you could perhaps install missile or fighter bases on them, thus timing an attack so the moon is far away could be essential.

Cons:
Atrociously bad AI
______________________________________________________________________________________
Off World Resource Base (ORB)

Pros:
Realistic orbiting/moving objects, providing fascinating battles as your resources which were once safe now flew into the enemy territory.

Excellent game setup values which allowed you to scale the relative power of ship classes, thus fighter matches could exist or only big ships being useful it was a matter of flavor.

Cons:
Terribly prohibitive and slow tech tree and resourcing. Not enough units.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Homeworld II

Pros:
Sub-systems that could be targetted and destroyed. Instead of having this be a controllable factor, it would just be cool as mentioned before if larger ships sometimes when heavily dammaged lost a weapon system or engine power.

Cons:
Lack of official support, very buggy multiplayer.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Okay thats it for me.
Reply #64 from Sins Forums Top

Cons:
Horrible Horrible slowdown with every passing turn, that even affected the cursor.


Yeah, BOTF had a nasty memory leak. You can improve performance by manually de-compressing all the data files, though. (As well as restarting the program from time to time).
Reply #65 from Sins Forums Top
Oh I know... I certainly had to make it to 10,000 turns...
Reply #66 from Sins Forums Top
Has anyone played Startopia? Its probably the most addicting space game i've ever played. Its based in those circular space stations you see in cheesy space movies. You know, the one that looks like a donut and it spins? Well, they took that factor and made it so you build your own space station. You can trade, grow produce, or even fight for control of the space station. It gives you tons of freedoms and even the campaign is fun after all the playing.

And homeworld 2 has the most difficult missons.... I've struggled on all of them (beginning on mission 4).
Reply #67 from Sins Forums Top
Its based in those circular space stations you see in cheesy space movies. You know, the one that looks like a donut and it spins?


I don't know about cheesy space movies, but its far from a cheesy design. In fact, its a cheap and (relatively easy) design to give you artificial gravity!

Oh, and are you sure it looks like a donut, not more like a bicycle wheel? (Spokes heading out from a center docking port...)
Reply #68 from Sins Forums Top

Oh, and are you sure it looks like a donut, not more like a bicycle wheel? (Spokes heading out from a center docking port...)


ron, you need to eat more doughnuts, then you would see what he means
Reply #69 from Sins Forums Top
And homeworld 2 has the most difficult missons.... I've struggled on all of them (beginning on mission 4).

Are you certain about homeworld 2 being difficult than homeworld 1? Took me forever to get to mission 14 and couldn't beat it even with kadesh multi-ion frigates(about 8 of them)/all cap maxed out helping me.

However it only took me a week to arrive to the conclusion of homeworld 2. The most difficult mission in homeworld 2 for me would be the one where you had to hide inside the clouds to not alert the enemy.
Reply #70 from Sins Forums Top

ron, you need to eat more doughnuts, then you would see what he means


... I know what a donut is.

Its a great big circle. Which makes sense as a design for a space station. But I would expect such stations to be more like bicycle wheels so ships can dock in the near-0 G section, avoiding a little bit of the problems you could have otherwise.
Reply #71 from Sins Forums Top
... I know what a donut is.

Its a great big circle.


no... it is so much more than that... poor ron, hes prolly never eaten a good doughnut before... :::::::
Reply #72 from Sins Forums Top


no... it is so much more than that... poor ron, hes prolly never eaten a good doughnut before...


Oh puh-lease. So you can add different flavors to the dough, and they get covered in various things ranging from nothing, to sugar, to powdered sugar, to a chocolate / maple frosting, to having nuts, chocolate chips, sprinkles, to anything else on top.
Reply #73 from Sins Forums Top
Doughnuts are the fatty lump of fiery goodness. The God's feast on them all the time!

In general, I don't eat them that often... Too fatty.


Anyone who does not like HGttG shall be burned. End of Line.
Reply #74 from Sins Forums Top
<3 donuts
Reply #75 from Sins Forums Top
shibfilet,
I agree with pretty much everything you're saying. Especially the need for ships to keep moving around once they've engaged. In addition they need to remove or at least greatly increase the speed cap so that you can see the effect of acceleration more profoundly. In addition a higher speed cap would allow for larger gravity wells. Your acceleration wouldn't be much different from what it currently is but you could keep accelerating and accelerating and accelerating... In addition, I would hope... I don't know about this... that the devs aren't having ship engines still firing when the ship is no longer accelerating. That is the ship is traveling at a fixed speed under no counter acceleration force such as gravity...


Something that's always bothered me in space games is using my engines to keep burning when I'm not speeding up or fighting the pull of anything.


it's space people... a vacuum... so why do I have to burn my engines like I'm fighting air resistance? Also some maneuvering should be all but impossible. Hard banks and turns for example are impossible in space unless you have some VERY powerful maneuvering engines or you just happen to turn your ship more deeply into the turn... almost reversing the ship's trajectory...


These space craft are not in air or water... so they should should respond like masses in vacuum and freefall. An example of the difference is that if I throw a feather at an object in freefall... in a vacuum... the feather will first fly right at it as if I threw a pebble at the object... and second no matter how big that object is it will acquire some of the momentum from that feather. It might be almost nothing but it will register. Throw a feather a ship in water or on the ground and first the feather won't make it being overcome by air resistance... and if for whatever reason it did make it the surface resistance between the object and whatever it's sitting on or in... would nullify that momentum entirely. The distinction is important and having somewhat realistic space physics in the game I think is important at this point in gaming.

Just as cutting edge 3d graphics are basically required for any game to even be considered in most circles realistic physics is also quickly becoming very important.