So to begin with, why don't we ask the devs to implement, when the camera is zoomed past a particular point it starts to move subtly, a bit to the left, a bit to right... but SUBTLY; it worked in Homeworld and I can't imagine it being to hard on the computer. This subtle movement would give the impression of drifting ships, rather than sitting ships - Adama's idea, incidentally. At least in the sense of drifting ships, we can compare to HW.

The only ships that I know of in HW2 to move other than fighters, bombers, and corvettes were destroyers, for their broadsides. Nothing else apart from chasing down enemy ships...

Speaking of which... could we ask the devs to implement an attack move system? I know that people have complained that ships don't really fire on the move...

we couldnt have ships maneuvering on their own though as some vasari capital ships have mainly forward facing weaponry, staying still is more damage efficient than moving and having some weapons not firing

Who asked about performance hits? There would be some depending on how many individual units you're dealing with and how robust your PC is. Moving objects increases the complexity of the collision detection among other things, but the biggest hit would come from the AI trying to plot courses around other ships to avoid them. I doubt it would bring the game to a crawl unless you were dealing with thousands of ships though, Sins seems to be designed well enough to handle large battles already.

In modern (well, early '90s) ground combat tactics we used maneuvers to get armor into position or to get out of a bad place. In reality, combat maneuvers are about getting yourself into a position of advantage or out of a position of disadvantage. When you see soldiers diving for cover they're doing that to minimize their disadvantage by getting behind cover or concealment, not to dodge bullets. When you see tanks running at full throttle across an open field they aren't doing that to dodge fire, they're doing that to minimize the amount of time that they are fully exposed which was more of an issue of not giving your enemy time to shoot at you than it was a matter of making yourself harder to hit. And, incidentally, even with 20th century technology it was pretty easy to hit a moving target while you were moving yourself. In all of these cases you have an element that is almost completely absent in space, you have terrain. With the absense of terrain tactical maneuving would be completely different, more like aerial combat than anything else just without the altitude and gravity based maneuvering. Since I have no real experience in naval tactics I can't comment on what they do beyond what I've seen and read, but again my impression in most cases (save very small craft) is that they're moving to get into firing position and minimize exposure of key vessels.

Now if the cinematics are important, just track a fighter or bomber and zoom in, those things dance all over the place in a big fight and should give you plenty of motion to watch

Personally, I never really noticed it myself since I'm always moving the camera around (or tracking bombers) anyway. I think that any sort of uncontrolled camera motion would be more annoying that anything else. Moving for position is already handled by the game, with the absense of 'tactical' features in the battlefield they're left with the only tactical concern being range. I'm pretty sure I've watched my capships with forward firing weapons turn to face opponents so the game already has that aspect covered.

Hi there Seven05

Thanks for the time you took to createthe
detailed post helps allot very informative aswell  

Seems to me that the model the devs used in the game is pretty accurate then


  

Wrong:
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, but yes even in Nexus they don't have to move.

Do you know the word "immersion" ?
Sometimes there a things in games just to add to the immersion, but have barely a effect to the actual gameplay, but it helps many players to get more into the game, you should understand that, and even respect that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4WXX0VXCR8&feature=related (speed up x2) Just dont asume that Nexus is a arcade game...if you do you are damn wrong. (And just to mention in Nexus you don't have that many Ships in fight actually, it's even slow, but far more immersive and tactical than other Games.)

Sidenote, in Nexus the ships have sometimes to move because you can destroy specific Parts(devices) of the ships, and yes actually in sins it would not matter because there is no such feature, that needs more movement, i agree.

Unless there is capability to target enemy ship systems (e.g. engines), the ability to adjust shield strength geographically, or static weapons there is no point in moving your ship.

The first benefit to seeing ships moving around is that its more visually appealing. This benefits the smaller playing fields more then larger. The drawback is selecting ships across your entire armada, throughout multiple battles.

Who do the ships attack? what systems do they target? How do they configure their shields? You don't have that kind of micromanagement in a RTS or even hybrid RTS game. Should the AI be able to calculate all those things? I dunno I don't program but it seems like you'd need a pretty darn robust AI. The games with a large scope would have you leaning on the AI's decisions and then you've lost the entire point of implementing the system because players are voluntarily reliquishing the control you've provided. The capability of a larger scope is the choice they made over making the game more of a combat sim.

If you believe in weapons that move at light, sublight, or hyperlight speeds. If you believe in computer targeting. Then you probably have a hard time believing a fighter craft, much less a frigate has a prayer to dodge a light or mass attack. Maybe missle in the case of the fighter. A computer calculating trajectory, and the speed of the wepons delivering will go faster then the time it takes to think of a change in direction and then implementing it.

There's also no sound in space, but no one clamors for that.

I hope you are kidding? Hell, Asteroids had moving ships and combat back in the 70s. Did you ever play Star Control? Freespace? Pirates of the Caribbean? And if you look at land-based games, they are rife with fluid combat from the 90s on. Even the most recent Star Wars game has ships moving in space when they fight - not all of them, but most of them. And no realism value? Last time I checked, things had inertia. The closest corollary to space combat would be navy battle and those ships don't ever stand still.

Sins is a great 4X game, but the combat is dreadfully dull and uninspired. It was the first thing that hit me negatively about the game. I build this badass fleet and when it goes into combat, it sits there - combat is static.

But this a 4X game, not a RTS game. So, I chalk that up as an intended game feature to reduce RTS micromanagement and system requirements. Combat, though, is far short of the glorious fluidity I was expecting.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy the game. Everything else is pretty solid. The combat just is not what I was expecting.

Hmm... Visually, yes, it would be more appealing. But it would make micro managing of the battles pretty impossible. I have enough difficulties as it it to cue up attacks on different ships. Picture cuing up 10 different attacks by clicking on 10 different, fast-moving frigates?
I think not.

It would be a pretty cool idea, (since most ships fire forward) to have ships drift backwards abit after firing , and then compensate using their engines (2-3 engine bursts) to move close again.

I would like to see movement in combat also. It just doesn't look right without it. Although there should also be an option to turn it off for people with a slower processor.

some more movement would be nice. :NOTSURE:
I believe ships dont move around much because they are designed to have weapons just at the front (most of them) and no turnable turrets that fire in (almost) any direction. (for balancing?)

It would be nice to have ships with turrets that move around to let them move around in battles. But on the other side it would be harder to target ships and the stats of ships have to change too?

After reading through almost every post in this thread I have two questions.

1) If this was already discussed what was the verdict?

2) Talking about whether or not ship movement is realistic is irrelevant when making a video game. Realism =! fun. That being said we need to ask ourselves this question and I wish the fonts and colors was working so I could make this huge and highlight it red:

Does adding movement to ships make the game more fun?

Yes or no question.

I vote yes.

Everyone who is talking about Homeworld, and all those who have played it extensively, myself included, need to understand that in Homeworld ships did move, though not on their own accord, and had hit locations, and tracking turrets, also you could attempt to have a small frigate move while firing to attempt to move outside of the tracking of the enemy turrets, though I am not sure how effective it ever really was.

Adding movement and tracking speeds/distances and locations would help with fleet tactics as well as adding buttons like someone mentioned with the last resort option (how cool is that).

The question is: Do we want tactics in this game or is it outside the scope of the game's genre/mission statement? Maybe it would make the game more complicated. Managing an empire, and managing tactics, would be a pain in the ass. Its a task I am up for, but other players might not be. Maybe just giving fleets or individual units a few tactical options would suffice. We could add commands like flank (then go so far as to make it directional), draw fire, evade, engage _____ (turrets engines etc), that kind of thing. Maybe give each fleet a separate tactical screen with menu boxes that could assign individual units, or groups of units, engagement priorities and mission profiles. If all this is outside the desired scope of the game then lets end the discussion. Developers RESPOND.

In summary shut up about realism and lets talk: Does it equate to making the game more fun?

Saven05 also had a great point, I just re-read his statement. Without damage based on hit location (rear sides etc) this whole discussion is meaningless without terrain. Frigates dodging incoming fire in space doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless said projective was ballistic in nature... hmmm I think we could have another discussion regarding realism and I don't want to have that. WHAT IS MORE FUN!?

Some ships do move in combat, the Bomber/fighter squadrons that you can get from capital ships/hangers and such. Though they are so tiny that you mostly just see their icons moving about unless you zoom in on and follow them, but they move around and do striking/bombing runs, etc like ships would do in Homeworld.

I think it would nice though, if some of the frigates/cruisers moved a bit, had to face targets differently depending on what they are firing (IE guns on their side vs front, etc) among trying to dodge certain slower moving weapons.

It sorta bugs me too that they just sit there, shooting, until they either kill what they are shooting at or die. However, I'm willing to put up with it, except I really think we should be able to set our ships up with a sort of 'pain threshold' where they automatically retreat if they are getting torn up.

Maybe there is a way to do that already and I just haven't figured it out.

Movement would be nice, but it seems kind of late for it to be patched in. The frigates involved are pretty big, but if they had traversing gun turrets they could still orbit the target. It would case lag and make primarying targets harder, though.

A Button to crash into other ships (suicide) would be nice.
Let's ram our biggest ships in the enemies ships or planets just before they explode!

Can't they implant some sort of hardpoints just like in Universe At War Earth Assault?
Something like this:
A ship is built with different subsystems which control different parts of the ship
example:
1: Navigation subsystem
2: Sensor subsystem
3: engine subsystem
4: Weapons subsystem (would not destroy its weapons but rather make it less accurate while shooting)
This could be adjusted with smaller ships having fewer subsystems and bigger ships having more of them (this is just a rough sketch).
It could open the doorway for loads of different strategies, like taking out the engines of a capital ship to keep it in system, or to take out its weapons system which allows your siege ships to get less damage.
It could all add up to a more tactical picture.
This can also benefit the bombers and fighters making them more useful.

...there should be a shipdesigner to design your ships *dreaming of MoO2* :NOTSURE:

I played Sword of the Stars a few days ago and the battles with the targetable shipsystems were great! you could disable the engines or aim on every turret and other parts of the ship. If you destro the tank of a tanker - there is no fuel for the rest of the fleet. But it's unplayable in multiplayer because its just stuttering the whole time (if the other player has low fps - even with lowest settings available). (:(

No, Star Wars in both the movies and games have all the ships standing still or moving very slowly. Unless chasing a small freighter, Star Destroyers never fly around at top speed shooting up Rebel fleets.

If you want to talk realism show me the videos of NASA and CSA space warships dog fighting in orbit please, and modern navy ships move because they have to worry about torpedoes (which can be dodged unlike most space born weapons), submarines, and keeping stable firing platform, things that don't have an effect in space, espcialy in the years of FTL travel and stellar empires.



I'm sorry, but I have built badass fleets too, and I think the combat looks fine. Do you ever stop to realise what an uncontrollable mess it would be if two large fleets started to fly amongst each over? Ugh.

Oh, and Homeworld's ships do not move by themselves unless you count the fighter's jiggle dance if bad guy comes too close. The player has to at least order an attack.

While not having played much in the way of Sins, I have played quit a bit of HW/HW2. The way I see this debate (perhaps too weak a word) and the way it seems is that in Sins, we are encouraged to keep a mostly hands off approach when it comes to battles. Whereas in HW/HW2 it was very much to your advantage to take a somewhat hands on approach because with some ships if you maneuvered your ships the other ship's main weapon(s) would not have the firing arc to shoot at your ships. Think the Ion Cannon frigates and the like.

From my limited play time, I see Sins as a 3Dish environment, and us players don't seem to be able to directly give movement orders in the Z axis, just the X and Y. I could easily be wrong, if I am someone please enlightenment.

Now the point I think people are getting caught up on is this is a Strategy game, not a large scale Tactical game which most of HW/HW2 maps were. Granted, some of them were pretty large, but for the most part it was tactics, and not strategy that took precedence. With Sins the way I see it is all about building and managing the support structure, and moving the ships to the right place, and then letting the local commanders (aka unit/fleet AIs) manage the battle with minimal input from the players.


My .02 dollars worth.

I forget the exact key (~ ?) but you can control the Z axis.

There is no reason to allow individual ship movement in combat other than axis rotation (i.e. for broadsides...but as has been brought up, the majority of ships seem to have most weaponry mounted in the fore sections). We've reached the point where accuracy is such that even with modern weapons, we have very good accuracy levels on ground, sea, and air targets...maneuvering is no longer done to directly to avoid fire, but rather to obtain tactical positions of superiority (i.e. cover or higher ground, etc.). In space, there is very few situations where one location would have a much greater tactical advantage over another (and those are already covered by Sins with gravity well ship movement speeds).

Now, fleet movements based around fleet formations, a la Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series would be an improvement to Sin's combat system, but then again Sins would have to be expanded to accommodate greater ship speeds, and somehow incorporate time-lag into orders/responses, and I don't see that being too much fun in a video game.

Also, to the couple of people that feel the need to throw out the "LOL Realism? We don't fight in space, so it's already not realistic, lulz!!!", honestly, go shove it. Just because something doesn't occur in real life doesn't mean it can't behave realistically, which is what the major argument in this thread (and all of the previous ones about movement...) is about: whether it makes sense to have caps running in and strafing each other pell mell when there is zero tactical sense in doing so considering the environment they are fighting in, or whether the current system is good enough (since I certainly can't see a system style like Campbell's working in a video game, even if I think it's the most realistic naval/space combat system I've read about).

I think there are a few reasons the ships in Sins appear so static.

One is the scale; even though the frigates are supposed to be fairly large they feel small in game. They feel small because the only objects that are smaller are the fighters, and they are the smallest user build-able ships. Homeworld had corvettes in between the fighters and frigates.

The designs of many of the frigates make them appear as if they should be moving around while in combat (im thinking of the Cobalt). It has a couple of forward facing weapons which makes it seem like it would need to maneuver more to fight properly.

Also, the size that frigates are 'supposed' to be makes them seem like they would have turrets instead of (essentially) fixed guns. If the ships were basically stationary but had turrets moving it would make a lot more sense. (sorry to bring that up again)

When a ship is facing one way but you give an order for it to move in the other direction, instead of rotating or making a small arc, the ships will move forward at full speed making an extremely wide arc. It seems like it would look nicer to have the ships rotate since there is no gravity.

I think all the ships would benefit from a very slight random drift when stationary.

All that said, I think the large battles look really great. If you made the frigates pursue each other or move too much the battles would be incomprehensible. It only looks slightly boring in the very early stages of the game where you have relatively few ships.

is there no NAVY EXPERT in this forum   

PLEAAASSSSEEEEE as im loosssing my mind

ps all those that would like moving ships seem to base their opinion on the old styl of navel watrfair BEFORE they had jets (game dos have jet equivalent) i may be wrong abouth this though

so im despratly looking for a modern day navel expert pls pls pls pls