aww why not im sure we could find a way to make everything use fighter pathing i personaly wouldent do it for caps cos i think caps are right in not moving their that big they can take it and probbly couldent avoid it anyway so lots of frigs dogfighting could be cool. on a slightly related note can you build things that are squaded at the factorys?

Even though it would look real great if all ships tried to move and never stopped during combat I don't think it would really work in the long if you wanted to micro your ships during a battle. I am allready struggling trying to mark my bombers or fighters and get them to attack a more important target. Atleast when it comes to getting fighters chase after bombers.

This doesn't mean that moving ships in combat isn't important though. I have several times found myself move ships into a better posistion to deal with a incomming fleet. Getting Missile Frigates "standing" at the correct spot to quickly swap targets to deal with potensial threats. Move the Siege Frigates around so the can approach the planet from a un-defended side.

rhats why doing it in a mod is a good idea because then you dont always have to have it on... also they wont be moving as fast as fighters and you can always zoom out and bandbox

I have to agree with the OP, it looks way better when the ship reposition themselves for best coverage. Think of the Dervish in Homeworld: Cataclysm. It constantly moves in order to bring its many ion cannons to bear.

It looks kinda stupid in Sins where ships are either moving constantly (small fighters and such) or they're frozen in space (anything bigger pretty much). It just isn't very awesome.

I'm comming from EAW and one thing is sure eventhough I like RTS genre and all nice animations I really don't like how this automated movement was implemented in EAW. I was often struggleing with my units not to go on thier own. Often they moved closer to the space station and they were wiped out. Not to mention figters charging corvets on their own and being wiped out.

Therefor I think that the dev team headed the right way. When I enter the battle and I order my ships as fleet commander to stop well guess what I want them to stop and hold the line no matter what unless I order retreat. It will be a little bit "ugly" but it opens doors to some new strategies and tactics.

In other words imagine Napoleonic wars and armies manoeuvering on the battlefieled. For our US fellows imagin the battlefieled during the war against Mexico and during the civil war. This is how the things should be fought in sins.

The ships, at least when in fleets, do move around a bit more than before in the internal builds. It takes a bit of getting used to...

Regarding the previous page about micromanagement and the game.

I believe there should be plenty of micro. Now if you want to have little kids around 12 playing this and enjoying it you may want to make all this micro being handled for them. I say create an automanage micromanagement button for those who dont like to mess around with the little things. But in any circumstance you should make the overall game simpler. More options, makes a more complicated game creating a huge number of ways to achieve victory and thats what makes a game stick around more than some other shitty ones.

agreed. I want my ships to do what I bloody tell them. That means they shouldn't go run circles around the enemy, exposing their flanks and entering fields of fire they shouldn't.

You'll be happy to know that there is an automated option for most action buttons in the game

I just want fighters visible from further away, it would create greater feeling of movement

I think the only practical method of adding a lot of movement to fights would be reinventing frigates so they fly more like fighters. But that would be rather confusing and hard to control.

So, can we get any word from the devs as to whether this much wanted feature will be added into the game. (without having to mod it in ourselves)

Yes but if every ship is moving wont this put extra unneeded strain on your system

The extra strain is negligable.

I would think that the size (in terms of targeting) and mass (in terms of inertia) would make evasive maneuvers for most if not all of the non-fighter ships in this game impractical.

Yup. A "mere" cobalt is 500 meters long. Half a click -- call it a quarter of a mile.

small is pretty big out here, isn't it? ./yogi berra

It may be possible to mod in fighter like movement for all ships. What i am afraid of is the ships bumping into each other, and getting stuck on each other. Like they do on asteroids.

Frigates do move around more now than in the Betas. It would probably be comical to mod in fighter movements to them...can't imagine the pathfinding resolution on that one.   

Its not really evasive meanuvres that I want , its just small aesthetic movements of the ships , like a little bit of drifting or strafing. Ships feel very static atm ,the problem is aesthetics . Just doesnt feel right and many others have also this same inkling , especially coming from games such as homeworld , homeworld cata , homeworld 2 , Empire at war .

P5y, I have been watching and rewatching the Xplay video a lot lately, and there does seem to be some drift in the Gamma version. Ships slightly jostling for position and whatnot.

I agree wth you a little, at least in regards to cap ships, I wouldn't mind seeing their side guns given a smaller firing arc to encourage the AI to use more "broadsiding" sorts of movement, but not if it means fleet formations go to hell.

Actually you may be right about the gamma, who knows? I havent studied the video that closely. If ships are in fleet formations they might have a little bit of movement.

Ok ppl lets replace it in the Newtonian context. In space there is no drag force (matter of fact there is and it is called universel gravitation but in case of sublight speed there is no impact).

So let's assume that you want to move your ship forward. All you have to do is to give it a little impulsion and the ship will start to move in the opposit direction of the impulsion. Unless you fire up retro thrusters it will continue to move indefinetly in same direction. So you are a captain of the ship and you reached designated coordinates givenn by admiral.

What do you do ????

You order all machines stop and therefor you fire up your retro thrusters just enough to compansate inertia creadted by previous movement.

You are not going to drift because that will mean that you are breaking up from your position in formation.

Now if you judge by Navy Battles on Earth you can tell me : "But ships during those battles are in constant movement"

That is true but it is true for another reason. Water offers some pretty high resistence and in order words for a 56 000 metric tone ship to defeated such resistence an enormous quantity of energy is needed. However you all know that ship's fuel storage is quite limited unless it uses nuclear powerplant as main propulsion. So playing it with stop and go would have depleated its fuel pretty quick.

Another reason why modern navy ships are not immobile during engagement is because of force composition. Since 1942 a new era has seen the day in naval warfare. It is an advent of task forces. Before 1942 everything was centred around battleships but now everything is constructed around carriers.

A typical task force in the US Nay is composed of destroyers, frigates, missle cruisers and submarines with the carrier in the middle. In orderd for carrier to launch and receive airplanes it has to change its course and go into wind. An entire task force is moving with it because an entire taskforce is there just to protect the carrier. Carrier doesn't stop they don't stop.
Aegis defense system was developped to defend taskforce from attacks because it is impossible to apply evasive manoeuvers to such force and even if it was possible anti-ship missiles are travelling at almost twice the speed of sound.

I have come to realize (after also being dismayed initially about sitting ships) that it is a scale issue, not a mobility issue. As has been said a few times, the frigates in games like HW don't move either. The problem then is scale. The capital ship scale compared to the frigates in this game is much more pronounced, and visually we have come to expect ships that are so much smaller than the largest ships to be movers. Visually, we expect ships that are say "half" the size of the largest ship to also sit around while firing. The scale difference makes it hard for us to visually recognize what is classified in this game as frigate as corropsonding to a "frigate" static-firing class. The easiest remedy to this would be to simply make the frigates larger, and then I'd wager that people would instantly stop complaining about mobility; they would think "a ship this size isn't supposed to move." But because of the size difference, we associate the ship with units such as a HM "corvette" and not a "frigate", and thus expect it to be moving around similarly.

My two cents. But unfortuntely, the bank of ideas has stopped collecting money.

But if the scale of frigates and cruisers is increased, then the capitals become comparatively smaller, and lose their "Hey, this really is a big ship" feel, too.

eh...I decided to move this post, but then lost the ability to edit this one to "moved." I apologize for the double post, it was not intended.

Annatar,

I do agree. I am not suggesting that change can or should be made, simply that players are having a difficult time reconciling the fact that they have come to expect “frigates don’t move” and “frigates are medium sized ships”. In sins, “frigates don’t move” and “frigates are small sized ships.” Thus, watching them sit still is confusing.