Lets Ships Move While They Fight!

You can order them to move during a fight if you wish, and I often do to gain a certain advantage. For example, I move my Kol in close to maximize his near 360 degrees of firing (and he can take a beating) or I will queue up a flanking manuover with my fast lights to get in behind and take out his carriers. Fighters will continue to move about but large ships will not do unless they need to get in range or rotate to bring their best weapons to bear or you give them the order to move while fighting. Its just too frustrating for them to do unneccessary movement without your explicit orders regardless of how good you may think it will look, which I would also disagree with because it tends to create a chaotic mess. When we tried it we always just ended up hitting 'hold position'. Even Homeworld doesn't have its large ships move around without your orders during combat, only the small fighters and corvettes (of which the second class we don't have).

Finally, I really don't think Sins is short on strategy or tactics - I actually believe there maybe too much and it might be scaring people away. I hope that isn't the case because I am very interested in adding more in future releases.

blair do you think that ships would "all stop" in space to fight? Or so you think battle lines would cross?
Then their is the honour harrington series where their is a battle line style stand off, and its hard to even see the enemy ships.
I need to go think about whether I would tell my fleet to fire thrusters and come to a full stop to engage or not.

BTW: Battles usually are a chaotic mess. Its the truth!
But seriously, it just does not look right.

In homeworld their was "fire while moving" and homeworld ships, you are right come to a full stop, but homeworld probably due to the Z axis, did not look like the commader said STOP all ships, prepare to fire. I think it may also look un-natural because without gravity you don't expect things to ever be at a full stop. Usually one side would be maneovering his whole fleet to escape or get a a better defense going, thus making all other ships move. Thats the nature of battle, I doubt if the sitting duck tactic would be used against an enemy fleet... he would just maneover to your flank too easily and outgun you. shielding himself with your own ships. Thus the need for 3D movement. etc etc

The jury is out for me on this one. Looks un-natural somehow not to be moving. If we had formations it may look a tad better. And I think when fleet menus come into it it may look better. Then we will have ships ,mixed together a bit more organised looking.

random chaotic thoughts really.

1. Sins has firing while moving, from multiple banks at multiple targets.
2. Sins does have Z-movement, automatic use of it and user controlled use of it. Argue all you want on the tactical usefulness of user controlled z-movement but it is there and regardless its tactical usefulness its quite useful for formations and pathfinding.
3. Sins ships will move when they need to get in range or rotate to bring better weapons to bear.
4. Sins ships do not have to stop to shoot. They will fire from any weapon in any bank at any time if there is a ship in a valid firing solution (unless ofcourse you have autoattack off or your weapons are somehow disabled).
5. And this is the one that really confuses me since it keeps coming up. Homeworld's ships in combat behave effectively identical to those in Sins. Just to make sure I wasn't crazy, I loaded up a few of save games from HW2 (and believe me we know how they behave in HW:Cataclysm) and fought a couple battles making sure I had ships of the Fighter, Corvette, Frigate and Capital Classes. The homeworld fighters behaved just like Sins fighters in that they both borrow the Star Wars model of dogfighting and constant movement. We don't have corvettes, so hard to match up there. Sins does have Frigates and Capitals and they both behaved the exact same way they do in Homeworld in that they only move in combat to get in range or rotate.

Regardless of HW, Star Wars or any other game we made the choice that was best for this game and we think the battles look pretty damn amazing. Speaking of which I came across this again today, it's kind of an older video with obsolete graphics but still pretty cool: http://youtube.com/watch?v=KQ9yWrFzk9w.

 

The ships holding still in a battle isn't so bad, but when the target ship is running away, and your ships have to stop to shoot, then catch up again, just to stop and shoot again, or when you order your fleet to move somewhere, they don't bother to fire at passing enemy ships. If those enemy ships are also on thier way to somewhere, they generally won't fire either...

Aside from that, the only thing I can't stand is the flashing screen after a couple hours of play. Otherwise, Sins is awesome..

Ships don't have to stop and shoot though they may have in one of the early betas.

Yeah, but you can't give an order to move and shoot at the same time... Which makes chasing a retreating unit a pain: the chasers will always stop the instant they get in weapons range and fire... they start moving again, but they loose a lot of headway with that sillyness.

unfortuneatly the guy spinning the camera and the bomber moving through the formation is what give the sense of movement here
But it does look cool

I did not say I hated it, just that its not ideal to have ships full stop in a nice line.

I have not played a game in a while now actually. Will have to go play beta4 to refresh my memory

Yes, now that is annoying. I'll see if I can fix it.

once again good support from Blair.

Remember the scene in Star Wars in Return of the jedi where the star destroyers are told not to attack. You see a whole fleet arrayed in all their vastness. I guess this is similar to what I imagine a static space ship line would be like.

I cannot wait to see the full release as I am sure it all looks great now, with the fleet manager and other options in.

I'll stop talking now and actually refresh my memory....

hey do ships slow down before or after getting into range ? cos in BFG ships never actuly stop so if i had the deceleration time realy high would that mean that they would keep floating sloly past each other or would they start slowing down as soon as i told them to attack?

Have you seen EaW trick for ship movement yet , where ships move , but very slowly towards the target. Nothing fast that would make the ship bump into the target , but enough so that when your sightseeing from a fixed view , you can just notice the ships all moving.

Homeworld 2 trick for movement is for frigates to strafe slightly up down left right. It doesnt make a difference to anything but atleast from a sightseeing point of view it looks pretty cool.

Some ships in Sins have designs which would work for that. One is the Vasari Skirmisher which looks like a nice strafing type of ship. The cobalt might work...

Well I read all this pretty well, and I get what some people are saying but;

Ships in space will have retro rockets, corrective engines that will allow them to stop and stay in position, this would have a lot of advantages, being closer together to keep bombers and smaller ships from easily maneuvering though your lines, keeping ally ships closer to recover jettisoned squishies, er people, making it easier to fire at the enemy from a stationary position etc.. Even if it makes them an easier target, it also makes it so they don't have to fight the momentum of their previous heading to turn!

Fighters and smaller craft are all I see needing to move, but being able to move and shoot after a running enemy, thats just common sense! hehe.

I can definately see why the Dev's never really included combat movement; in large battles near heavily fortified planets, it would be very possible for your invading fleet to slowly manoeuvre into range of the enemy's Gauss Cannons, or your defending fleet to fly out of range of their support.
That said, some residual velocity would go a long way towards making the battles seem more natural. Anything like Homeworld's level of tactical manoeuvring, however, will constantly require fleets to retreat through the enemy fleet to get back to base.

BTW, I have an idea on that subject...

When you give an order to (for example) a Kol to attack four targets (spread around it in a circle), it will focus all its weapons on target A, and any that can't bear on target A will simply find their own targets -- ignoring the attack order queued up for ship B that is in their firing arc, because its queued, not active. So make weapons check the entire attack list -- even though the stuff at the bottom isn't active, so the ship won't move or use powers based on it, it could at least focus its "off-weapons" firepower on the appropriate list-based targets.

*huggles*

BTW, to rephrase my above idea better:

Every time a weapon is signaled as ready to fire, the engine checks to see if it can target the first target in the assault list; if yes then fire on it, otherwise check next target. Repeat this until you run out of targets to check, then hand it over to auto-targeting AI.

Its a huge waste of fuel to stop and then have to move again, apart from making yourself an easy target, you then have to use more fuel accelerating again.
Things moving in space are very hard to hit especially at distance, in ww2 i remember ships speeding up and slowing down at random to avoid being easy targets for primitive torps.
Now if weapons were more advanced... i.e. all had auto tracking and could not be scrambled or fooled, we could sit their and assume we would get hit anyway if we did not move.
I always thought space battles would be all about speeding past the enemy fleet and then turning to approach from a different vector, much like a great white shark would do. You could subscribe to the line of battle theory though, which paints a trafalgar style static line all ready to broadside at a massive distance.
Or we could do as the game does now, two fleet race to each other and stop in front of each other firing at short range until the other fleet is dead, much like napoleonic tactics of the 19c. To me it looks like two guys with knives, both run to contact and then just stab at each other without maneuover or scuffle.

Anyways like I said, don't think its gonna be a game killer, just looks un-natural and irrational. I guess at longer ranges it would look kinda normal.

I agree that something should be done for chase combat. The stopping as soon as you are close enough to fire is not good. If the renge they stop at was closer it might help.

Example if your shooting range is 50k you should start shooting at 50k but continue to close to 25k before you stop moving. Your ship should try to stay within 25k of the ship you are attacking. That way you would always keep shooting even if they start moving again, since that will naturally keep them in your 50k range.

One other thing is it seems that you can only fire infront of your ships (cobalt). Should be able to shoot 360 degree IMO. I hate that a single ship can just run past your whole fleet of frigs with no worries until you get turned arround. Mainly since turning is so slow.

Been having fun though good game IMO.

Maybe make it so they must maintain a 95% distance to the target at all times, so if the enemy does start to move they can catch up and remain firing ... Faster ships of course will still get away...

Maybe a 'pursue' option for all ships can be added?

BTW, thanks for that sweet link...

The problem with moving into half-range is that support ships will become completely worthless. In order to actually use their healing or support abilities, they'd have to be well within range of enemy guns and would be prioritized and utterly slaughtered. People will stop building them because they have a life expectency of roughly 10 seconds in a battle and a large number of ships will go completely unused. A rather steep price for a movement effect.

The slow turning exists to make flanking a more effective tactic in normal battle, IIRC. You should have ample warning of a manouvering fleet (whether in-system or coming from outside) so it's entirely your fault if you failed to turn some ships around to face the new threat. Enabling ships to turn on a dime discourages flanking manouvers, by making them drastically less effective.

I agree that slow turning should be left in. If its a big ship with small maneover thrusters its gonna take time.

This should be fixed. If the target is running away a ship won't stop to shoot.

"should be"
I *really* hate it when you guys use that phrase, it always comes back to haunt you.

so it will chase it now till the ship running away stops, then the ship chasing it will stop once in weapons range and begin shooting again?