Would pretty much eliminate the whole "chokepoint" ideology... Not to mention would be crazy hard to implement on multiple star systems.

All of these suggestions were tried, pretty sure, by the devs. They chose agaisnt them due to the micromanagement they would create.

I can't agree with this. The OPs idea is in fact intriguing, but I doubt the devs opted against it for UI simplicity. I doubt they never thought of adding the options, either.

My guess would be that it was programming-wise not feasible or after playtesting was found to just not work to an ideal state (even if it was toggleable).

For these reasons I also believe that the gravity wells do not operate in geosyncronous fashion (with orbital platforms rotating with the planet). It would be TECHNICALLY difficult to implement, and doing it on a world basis would probably also add to the technical confusion.

From a gameplay standpoint, I believe it would be an interesting challange to have proper orbits and the such, and would indeed invoke more micromanagement and timing skill, but also should be an option, not a pure feature. Unfortunately, I wonder if it is technically feasible, and that might be why the devs opted out of the option at all.

Evil not all of us wish for a large amount of thinking with our games, thats the reason for an EASY mode in the AI. While it would be awesome for YOU to synchronise your fleet movements with the movements of planets most of us do not want that level of deepness. It WOULD add to micromanagement because of the variables that would be added. Especially on large maps with multiple orbits. (more than one star).

So you are saying that you feel than an OPTION would negate your enjoyment of the game? I am sorry, but this idea was never intended to be a fixed aspect of the game, rather another tactical improvement for those of us who look for cool strategic differences in our games, adding to our personal enjoyment.

Options are great, especially in 4x games, and even better when they are applied to a game like Sins (pretty much alone in that regard but I digress). So while you may want to play a simpler, static map, the option to turn on solar orbits that shift the phase lines would be pretty sweet to people like the OP and myself.

Your argument of simplicity doesn't provide enough reasonable support behind the dissmisal of the mechanic. What I fear is that the creation of such a feature was most likely attempted/thought of, but the logistics of CREATING it and having it work fluidly in the engine were probably the death of its implementation. For the same reason I am sure the orbital platforms we construct are NOT geo-syncronous, or non-static moons. Maybe when Sins 2 comes out .

But of course, maybe it is possible, and it would be a great additional feature.

By the way, in the course of a week or so, I have become hopelessly addicted to this game. I can not wait to see what the mod community comes up with, not only reskins but total conversions and mechanics.

This old thread from one of the beta's pretty much sums up my opinion on the above quote and perhaps gives you guys some insight into the problem with more options:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/158527


In regards to orbits, I remember an official response saying it took too much processing power to make it feasible, or maybe just feasible for low end pcs (although there are too many posts about this topic already so I'm not going to bother going hunting for the exact one I saw this in).

The problem with space being open is that it's REALLY, REALLY open. Without chokepoints, players can attack from any direction at any time they want - the only logistical issue becomes timing the arrival of your ships to maximize the impact of your attacks.

In a gaming model where a player has a very large number of individual planets that can be reached and assaulted by easily bypassing all the forces that are in between (like, say, by using the Z-axis to fly up and over enemy forces), playing becomes a micromanagement nightmare. At any time, an enemy player can simply send twenty small fleets off to way behind your lines, and there's no way you can effectively respond to so many individual threats, and you have to spend enormous amounts on defense everywhere to prevent getting steamrollered from behind. Putting in some mechanic like a large-area travel inhibitor is one way to get around that, but that's just a fancier kind of chokepoint.

A compromise that might work is that players automatically exit "hyperspace" and engage in "zoom-in" combat whenever their ships get within a certain range of each other - but that still leaves a huge frontier to cover.

====================================

On-topic: When people are talking about orbits, do they mean that every planet stays the same distance from each other all the time, or do they mean that inner planets orbit faster and thus would be on the other side of the sun from distant planets half the time and closer the other half (like our own real solar system does)?

This distinction is really really important, because the latter model means phase lanes have to break and un-break to avoid becoming incredibly long and taking a huge amount of travel time.

Say you have two planets, eptune and

luto, and Pluto orbits about half the speed that Neptune does. Here's an ascii model of our solar system when a 'game' starts. Neptune and Pluto are right next to each other, so they have a phase lane.

.......... .......... ..........SUN.......... .......... .....N---P

Almost one full orbit of Neptune later, look at how long your phase lane is. A ship going to Pluto is going to be trapped in hyperspace a very long time.

P--------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ---------- -----N....
.......... .......... ..........SUN.......... .......... ..........


So, change the model so the phaselane breaks and reforms only when it's close enough. Now you have the following problem: moving entry/exit points.

Here's our little model at one game's start:

.......... .......... ........... ........... .......... .......N..
.......... .......... ..........SUN.......... .......... ........\.
.......... .......... ........... ........... .......... .........P

and here it is a few minutes later.

.......... .......... ........... ........... .......... .........P
.......... .......... ..........SUN.......... .......... ......../.
.......... .......... ........... ........... .......... .......N..


Your phase-lane entry point has changed by ninety degrees! This makes fixed-emplacements like turret defenses that cover phase lanes to be much less useful. They might not be that great in MP anyway, but they're critical in holding off pirates and AI attacks in SP until you can get there to back them up, and I think strategic placement of them is a big part of the game.

-- Retro

Ahh I was hoping, seriously hoping, that none of you would force me to do this. The fact is that you assume that I care about the option at all. I was merely pointing out that the developers are trying to make a game that is fun for MOST of the target audience. So far I dont see this being lobbied for by the majority. That does not mean that I am arrogant enough to feel that even the option would negate the game from my "perfect" view.

Theres a space RTS coming out plans to do the whole orbiting planets thing , I think its called Shattered Suns (might be wrong though). However its an integral part of their game and its on a much smaller scale (just single solar systems) so it may well work for them.

I cannot see it working with Sins. Theres always a temptation to add realistic features to games, but unfortunately more realism is not equal to more fun. I dont need to repeat whats already been said but you'd fundamentally change the way the game had to be played in my opinion. And its not like Sins is broken strategy-wise that it needs such a influential change to the game.

I think what would be nice is if the "orbiting planets around a star" feature was only graphical, and had not other combat/economy impact on the game, that would be sufficient to make Sins an even better game to play.

Of course, it will have a small impact on gameplay: players might get a little disoriented when searching for a particular planet

From a sheer coolness factor, this is a valuable suggestion. Maybe difficult to implement, but still very interesting.

The planets that orbit our sun tend to have exponentially larger orbits. Lets take for example Earth, Mars and Jupiter. Earth is 1AU from the sun. Mars is 1.5AU and Jupiter is 5.2AU. Earth is always closer to Mars no matter what orbit scenario you create. For example, if Earth was on the opposite side of the sun from Mars but on the closest orbit to Jupiter, Mars would still be 1.7AU closer to Earth than Jupiter ((5.2 - 1) - (1 + 1.5)).

The point is, it is probably better to model these sort of distances and relationships by the current static game board than to try and introduce orbits.

I'm always a bit hesitant to inject realism into these types of discussions because the game is a real-time strategy, and in the 6 hours it takes to complete a fairly long game, the "real" Earth only moves about a quarter of a degree around the sun.

The point about ice planets being further away generally and molten planets being closer generally might be a basis for some interesting maps, though. Consider:
- Close to the sun, the phase lanes are generally shorter and more strategically important from a defense/chokepoint perspective, even if the molten planets there don't generate many taxes.
- The best crystal sources are further out and more difficult to reach quickly.

So the player would have to decide what direction to expand in - inward to grab the metal, outward to grab the crystal, or along the orbit to grab the taxable population.

-- Retro

The problem with that example is that time in any RTS is always significantly compressed. Just as an example, look at the Kol. Imagine it takes as long to build in reality, as a Nimitz Carrier. The Nimitz took 8 years, from conception to commission. A Kol is built in 45 seconds. That means that the Earth would actually orbit the sun (in game terms) once every 5.6 seconds!

Now this is obviously unreasonable. I'd propose that game time is actually super compressed for the game's sake, so that things actually end up getting done on a reasonable time frame. If we were to say, triple all build times then shrink "real time" equivalents (I'd justify it as a technological advance, shortening both communication as well as construction time), it may play out more reasonably. I would actually be in favor of this in general, since it certainly makes the game play more ala turn based strategy, where infrastructure is king (that second, third, or fourth frigate factory will be REALLY important now...), and small combat elements must be used to full effect simply because it takes way too long to amass the typical endgame fleet seen in vanilla sins.

In any event, like Das123 points out, the actual phase connections wouldn't change much, except between bodies very close to the sun. The only real difference on the whole would be the occasional "cutoff" from a gravity well intersecting a phase line.

More on realism in games, I really enjoy sins the way it is. It's fun, it's absorbing, it's engaging. But I always long for an option or mod that allows me to perform a "what if" in my games. I like being able to simulate reality as closely as possible just to get a glimpse at what possibilities exist, out of reach. This is why I love really hardcore tactical shooters (OFP, upcoming Ground Branch) as well. I love to try to get as close as possible to how it works, how it feels, without actually having to be there (or have a medic pull 5.56 fragments from my sucking chest wound from an unfortunate blue on blue incident...).
I'm looking at getting Falcon 4.0 now... I've only played one really good flight sim, but it was a chopper one.