So if the AI was better, you wouldn't really have anything to do?   

Well, it could still make me coffee...


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Seriously, this is a problem a lot of turn based games would also have if they were real time. But since they aren't, you can go as fast or as slow as necessary. Turns when nothing much happens need only to last seconds, while turns where lots of stuff happens can take up to a quarter of an hour or even more.

The problem (well, you can't really call it a problem somehow) is that Sins interface is so fast and slick, that there isn't much left to do in the end. Sending a fleet to the farthest reach of your empire? Some clicks. Fully upgrading a planet complete with orbitals and defenses? Some clicks and everything is queued.

What is there to do between the times when you have action going on? Not much, honestly. Yeah, build some orbitals, upgrade some planets. Well, I can give orders to fully upgrade 10 planets in like 2 minutes. Even less when I don't care about orbital positioning. Ships have auto-orders to merge with fleets.

At least, that's how I see the whole game speed thing.

Good thing you added the smiley, before I saw it the post gave me the creeps.

But YES, you are correct and this illustrates the issue quite nicely. The battles were supposed to be simultaneous etc., so the AI should be so good one could concentrate on other things and only participate in the battles he has particular interest in. As it is some want to see and lead ALL the battles ALL of the time. And as you said - if the AI was smarter you wouldn't have anything to do. Meaning no strategy to think about and manage. That is what the game seems to be leaning to.

I'd really like to be able to send my fleet on a mission of lesser importance and forget about it. I'd go and check if the mission is done when I have everything under control and no bigger issue arises. If not, I'd check why not and if neccessary send another fleet and forget about it.

That's epic in my book. Untill a game surpasses it and my expectations rise.

Space Voyager makes some good points. The game is meant to be sort of a compromise between traditional RTS and 4x games. It will never please everyone, there'll always be someone for whom games are too long or too short. The goal, I think, should be to stay true to the original concept and scope of the game, because that's why most of us became interested in it!

It's always a fine balance. You don't want to make the game in a way that the player is required to micromanage every little detail (like instead of just clicking an aspect of the planet to upgrade, you'd have to place various structures on the planet's surface in the right places, yadda yadda), but you do want to make it have the same relative depth of various stages of upgrades and differences between planets. Just as an example.

I'll repeat what I said before, though. Traditional fast paced RTS games have a different scope. They are all about building ONE base, and attacking the other guy, there's no more to it than that. Sins is about building an EMPIRE among dozens of planets and several solar systems (depending on the map, obviously). You cannot successfully cram that into a gaming session as short as traditional RTS ones can be and still be able to have any sort of depth.

This is sadly not possible anymore this late in the game... but what would have helped allot is instead of building 1 ship at a time, ship yards built an entire coherent 'fleet' of X ammount of all needed ships.

Tell the fleet to go attack a place and it goes and does it just fine, using all the right elements, but the best part would be its a fleet and acts coherently, and you order it as one unit. Then you save allot of time worrying about enough money to build 20 frigates (and quing it) and having enough of this or that. It would reduce tactics slightly by automating it into the build, but would allow you to quicken the pace of movement dramatically.

Let me put it a different way: The problem is scale, right now we are using a RTS scale in commands and construction, but a chopped up 4X time scale, research scale, and map scale. These need to match closer, and it seems to me that we could actually speed the game up quite a bit, and give the 4X player the much vaunted strategy by dumbing down tactics a little.

Making sure your flak frigs don't go too far ahead is wasting the 4Xers time, and isn't of much value to the RTS player either. In the big fleet = unit system, you never worry about making sure you build enough, fleets have basically prescribed ammounts, or can be tailored by having 'fleet types' that your purchase.

This means you don't need to spend soooo much attention to a battle, which means you could quicken the entire pace of the game including research and resources. If it took me only 3 minutes of build time to assemble a fully capable battle fleet and send it to assault a system. Then the game could be only 2 hours on a medium galaxy with multiple stars (say 4?) and I wouldn't be harried for time. Small games could be an hour easier this way too.

So what is the loss for this time? Instead of losing 4X elements (you now have much more time for these) you are automating allot of basic RTS strategies, but not the more valuable ones; IE have 2 fleets, one does X, the other Y, assaulting systems from different directions, baiting and timing, etc. As opposed to focusing on 'targeting' and making sure that stupid siege frigate stays behind!

Perhaps you don't need the fleet as a unit, if the AI gets thouroughly improved. Notably the 'admirals' from Conquest Frontier Wars, basically managed fleets intelligently, often splitting it up in system to destroy targets more efficiently...



So Lets pray to god that at least we get competent AI, the biggest problem holding up speeding up the game is we can't handle much faster battles competently because they require constant Baby Sitting!

thought of a more susinct way to put this, and it does hit on what others of said

1. Real Time is slowing us down because battles take so much attention, and therefore speeding up the resources or the travel would make it un-manageable.

2. 4X elements are so weak that the half 4X time frame is annoying and painful. Also the lack of 4X elements means that simplifying the RTS makes the game shallow making it drift strongly against shortening the management time of battles.

3. Solve this by making 4X elements like peaceful conquest strategies, better Diplomacy, exploration, and random events with choices, a priority. Making time spent not battling more enjoyable, and vastly improve Unit and Fleet AI so that less time is needed managing battles. This allows you to shorten the game legnth/time significantly and manage multiple fronts better.

We're definitely working on #3, but you won't really see this until Beta 4.

then I should shut up and wait for beta 4 then   

actually, you should get on IRC/ICO and play a game w/ me

Cost = choices to make. Please don't take that element away from the game.

To speed up a game (for the RTS twitch crowd) provide a sliding scale speedometer that impacts building, mining and raking in the $.

having skimed over idk if this idea was posed already....  

what some games have done is have 4 diff options, start from a certain teir with X # of ships or resources and fight it out or a "battle of the G-ds"    in which the techs are all researched and you have to build up you fleet buildings and such and go fight...

this way offeres many options and i like the slider idea as a way to bring customization into the game, also a "expected end time calculator" would allow people to decide if they really have enough time to play or not   

hmmm.....

baring adding anything between battles, and taking stuff out of battles....

one quick idea I had (wich would actully be kinda stupid, but is still brainstorming)


battles require too many actions, between battles too few, so have time go faster between battles, and slow down during a battle

that would be kinda wierd, but a real mix between RTS and 4X, again I don't take the idea seriously myself.






Once again, I want to go with variable speed and cost (maby not so much cost, mostly speed)

becouse each person can custimize the game to what they want.
I know this might take to long to get players to agree what type of game they want, it may split community in two, but I think these can be reconciled in other ways.





here is anouther wierd idea, if you don't want sliders in the final release, put sliders in a beta, and once a game is made, it sends what the sliders where postined at back to a server, which takes the average of what everyone likes the speed to be set at. This would find the optimal game play by trial-and-error

essentully a large scale vote on the game speed.

Scaling cost seems... silly. To make game pace faster, I would scale tax income instead. The modifiers mean that your capital will outproduce the rest of your empire early on. It's really the start that's a problem for multiplayer after all. That drooling income rate before you have a large trade network is impressively slow. Later on, things are already fairly inexpensive and easy to mass produce. There's really no benefit to the late game that I can see. It already paces fairly well from the production aspects, it's the glacial pace with nothing to do between transits that bites it then.

Scaled research would be nice of course, independent of pace concerns. Of course, I don't like the research system to start with, feels contrived. I'd prefer research stations contributed to a research rate and there were no requirements to research this or that technology, just time. The way it is now allows for no long term research choices unless you have the space to research far up the tree. If you're going past the 7 needed for the command cruiser and 5 for the trade networks on a small galaxy, you're either mentally retarded or like spending another six hours while the income you could have boosted crawls along.

Some of you seem to be labeling anything to do with game pace as a twitch gaming rts desire. It's not exactly fair. The game is boring, this is completely independent of how combat works. If it is dumbed down twitch rts contraption, micromanaging every battle would be the best way to win, that happens to be the case now. If income came in at a much faster pace and you couldn't physically micromanage every battle you ran into, that wouldn't be the case. As such, a substantial increase in the pace of combat will move in the opposite direction of a micro whore game. There simply isn't anything else to do right now, so the only thing there is to do is micromanage your combats. I'd like a real time version of master of orion, I'd also like to be able to stay awake while I played without needing something else to do, like write this post. The depth as a whole needs to increase, a lot. This includes but is in no way limited to the frequency of combats. If you do happen to think slow enough that you wont be able to think and play a faster paced game at the same time, well...

Other than the time it takes to fly through grav wells, the frequency of battles is determined solely by the players and is in no way a fault with the game. And decreasing the amount of time it takes to get through a grav well for the next jump is in no way guaranteed to increase that frequency.

People will play how they play. Some will try to have one massive fleet that will take ages to move around the map, some will have several smaller fleets doing hit and run attacks. Some will make sure they have maxed out defenses on their choke point worlds before ever venturing out with their fleet to harass the enemy. Others will forego most defenses and focus on keeping pressure on the enemy and force him into defensive.

As is with most complaints on this issue, the problem lies with the way people choose to play, not the game limiting choices of forcing players into one path or the other.



Which actually works out quite well, it means on smaller maps people won't be compelled to stay turtled up for ages waiting for that top tier research to complete. That would surely make games much slower. While on one hand it's a 'weird' system to limit research options based on the number of available facilities, it allows for early decisions players make to have a large impact on the game, and it prevents the games from dragging out even longer than they do already.



It is, if all you do is sit around waiting for credits to build up to research something

You can get involved in combat early, and you can keep it frequent. Yes, it takes some time to set up the necessary economy to support that play style, but it's not only doable but is the case in virtually all RTS games. Yes, some have 'rush' strategies available, but so does Sins. It's not a rush-in-5-minutes type, but still a rush.

I like this a lot. Others have made good points for not eliminating the other resource costs for research but maybe this idea could replace the hard # of research stations requirement. Instead of needing a fixed number of research stations to research topics on each tier, you would only be required to have enough research points. This way you could, in theory, research a tier 5 tech with only 2 research stations but because you only have 2 it would take a long time to amass enough research points to afford it. With 5 or 6 stations that time would be considerably shorter.

This is kinda similar to the Homeworld 1 system where research doesn't cost any RUs, but does take valuable time. You can invest in more research ships to research things faster. In Sins the time it takes to actually research a given topic is fairly trivial but that isn't necessarily the case for the time required to amass the necessary resources.

The thing I don't like about the current tier-based system is that if you are only interested in a very select few research topics you are still required to build a ton of research stations to reach the higher tiers which can seriously curtail your other efforts both in terms of the logistics slots that they take up and the resources spent on building them. With a point based system you would be able to pick and choose (a smaller number of) research topics that are relevant to your strategy without going crazy building research stations. This allows a research-lite strategy to be possible. And people going for a research-heavy strategy would have something to gain by building more research stations in that they would amass these research points much more quickly and thus be able to do a lot more research in the same amount of time giving them superior ships, economy, culture, etc.

The research points granted by each additional research station might even be on an increasing scale where each additional station gives you more additional points than the last. This would help encourage you to build more without actually forcing you to. - but that's an issue for the balance team to work out.

6.8 per second. It takes several minutes just to be able to start trade up, and skipping it is a non-starter. Just a few ports will be more income than a dozen planets, most of which is coming from your capital. It's a very slow start.

One cobolt in a little under a minute is not a choice of the player, it's as fast as you can build them with your starting income. If you sent them five at a time, they couldn't kill a single gauss platform. Ten at a time you might drop one as long as there isn't a repair platform. You wont even wear down the defenses of an unimproved planet with that, just use their repair energy fixing the three gauss turrets. You're already up to 7 minutes for just ten of the basic unit, not enough to kill half their cost in defensive structures.

Some of us don't want to watch paint dry for the first half hour, it's glacial. Ten minutes before you can even begin launching small scale attacks every few minutes is painful. The scope of the game is across solar systems, the production levels fit single planet empires better.

psy, try not restricting yourself to cobalts then -- two military research stations plus a little research gets you LRM ships; three stations plus some research gets you carriers.

You're adding more money to the cost of your first attacks. I'm not arguing that it's impossible to kill things, I'm saying it needlessly takes forever because the incomes are piddling. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, it adds up pretty quick. Annatar seems to think it's a personal preference that I'm spending half an hour to build a small conquest fleet consisting of ten cobalts, four siege frigates, four carriers, and my flag ship.

I've been playing my current game for four hours now, a nice little 5v1. Between my casualties from the pirates and the enemy ai fleets I've managed to get up to 387 fleet points so far. I've only built about twice that the whole game. It's slow, very very slow. Otherwise I'd have lost because I keep typing posts instead of playing.

There is a really good point in there. The research limit being tied to the number of research stations means you're stuck and stalemated if you can't expand. You can't research your way out of the hole so you're really stuck just grinding it out.

In my current medium sized game I've been blocked from expanding very far and thus my research is extremely limited. I'll never get out of this hole by grinding, but if research was opened up, I might have a chance.

If stations gave research points and there was no artificial limit based on the number of stations, it would open up the game to having small but technologically advanced factions.

I think this would greatly enhance the game.

I like this idea too, but I also like the current model... perhaps if you could circumvent the requirement up to 1 or 2 stations... so a civ with one military research station simply can never get insurgency but could get tier 2 or 3 just at more expense AND time.

Well, all of my posts take into assumption that the game will be sped up a bit without drastic changes. And actually, the current production model fits 'across solar systems' much more than single planet empires. Because if you have one planet, one source of income you'll produce much slower than if you have several planets with a trade network. If you drastically speed up the start of the game, that does a pretty decent job of trivializing expansions because you could be very viable with just your home planet, and that shunts the game into the generic RTS category more than it should.

Like I said, it's a fine balance. Yes, it takes some time to set up the economy, and that could be sped up a bit without overhauling the research system (and it sounds like the devs are already looking into ways of doing this), and that's fine by me. But overhauling the research system would change more than just the pace of the game, just like any other drastic change to game mechanics.

I give up the idea of adjustible reasech cost.



I now LOVE the idea of reasech points


right now you can't have a real reserch stratigy, where you try to out-reserch the other person

simply becouse no matter what you do, each individual reserch thing takes a certain amount of time and no less.



With reaserch points, more stations, faster you can reserch, and it makes it possibel to create a "reasech based civialzation" one which gets credits from selling reaserch points


this simple Idea opens up tons of awsome ideas.