Ship to ship combat

Nope.

Well...poop.

I did try to modify a cap ship to do just that using elements from a fighter but it failed very badly.

In my opinion i think this game does this quite well. Complete 3-D would be a nightmare on a 2-D screen

I've never seen ships move up or down except to enter a fleet configuration, the Strike Craft might do this just a little bit. (From what I've seen) When I say "...utilize the three dimension aspect..." I meant that if ships could have been tweaked to use combat maneuvers, that they also flew above and below the ships rather than just flying around in circles as if they were on an ocean.

i still think tht the ship to ship is to unrealistic

Could you explain what you mean?

When i play i notice ships fly above and beneath each other alot. Planets will also spawn directly above other planets sometimes in random gen maps. Also you can 'stack' your structures....honeslty though I think the 3-D is maxed out as it is...like i said, any more and it would be a nightmare on our primitive 2-D screens. Maybe your game just hates you and refuses to please your lust for eye candy...
Here is a replay on you tube that shows ships moving up and down utilizing all 3 dimensions...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DCv4Hq0mlM

About 3 min in ships are way above the battle and shooting down....  

If you're looking for moving capital ships, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd recommend looking into the Point Defense Systems mod for Homeworld 2.

But go with the 7.x series. 11.x and 12.x are just Harpoon in Space.

Why do ships move? To engage and destroy the enemy.

Why do they have to move? Because the enemy is over there, and they are over here.

Why would the ships start turning or moving at all once the enemy is in range? To bring their most and best weapons to bear on the enemy.

OK, then, once the enemy is in range, their best weapons are hammering away at the enemy, why would they have to move at all? They don't need to at all.

Presently, navies move constantly because they can use the terrain (water) to try and evade their enemies' shots. And moving ship, moving up and down, is harder to hit.

In the lore of Sins. There is no terrain, so unless the ships could move faster than the weapons could track them, then there wouldnt be any need to move at all. A very thick hull and bigger guns would be prefered.

But what about a-la-Star Trek? With ships having many different weapons arks, thus requiring ships to turn both to brings strong weapons arks to bear and exploit the enemy's weak arks? This isn't Star Trek, this is Sins of a Solar Empire. Where ships have very thick armor, most have forward facing guns, and all ships take many hits to be destroyed.

The battles in Sins are more Star Wars like than Star Trek like. That's the big difference. Yes, ships move around a little and you can even command them to move around and they'll keep firing. However, they're happy just bringing their best weapons to bear on the enemy. Now with Trek ships there's cool-downs, energy/power levels, weapon emplacements on every part of a ship, different shield regions, and a whole bunch of other technical things that necessitates the need to fly around in evasive patterns and such. With Sins and Star Wars things are a bit more simplistic for the larger ships and thus the need to move around isn't present. About the only time these ships miss their targets is on small fighters or cloaked ships (which are not present in Sins).

This all pretty much boils down to a matter of technical complexity.

I do agree with Eddison as well, it sucks that it doesn't look realistic b'cuz of no ship movement to actually simulate what a naval engagement would look like in a '0' gravity enviroment. One game that i've tried that does do this automatically upon engagment is EVE online.

'cause orbiting a ship and shooting a "mining laser" at it is JUST what space battles would be like in reality.

if you've ever seen star wars, you'd see that the capital ships/frigates dont move around at all once in firing range, its the fighters that do the moving because they cant withstand more than a few hits

Still, all in all I'm more about the "A safe (Insert whatever it is here) is a moving (Insert whatever it is here)" concept, better to have itty-biddy guns scratch paint on a ship in a bunch of places than have it plink away at one spot and eventually break apart to a humungous hull breach. It just seems like the practical thing to do.

Not that there's itty-biddy guns in this game...but you get the idea.
Plus it would look really nice once the newer visuals are relased.

It would like really nice...unfortunately, it would not look realistic. I really don't understand why people think that 500m long ships dogfighting in space is realistic. I can't see that at all. And when ships using lasers, that is weapons that travel at the speed of light, and use targeting computers to ensure a 99.99% accuracy rating can be dodged just because some huge lumbering ship moved, it somehow seems very unrealistic to me.

im not Einstein but regarding energy dissipation in deep space or in orbit space
combat, how come laser weapons have low range ... a laser is a focused beam of light
of a certain frequency and here on earth we have light from stars a hundred light
years reaching earth .. so why does my laser weapons fire only from a couple of
thousand feets hmmm ..

power requierments....to keep a focused laser at full power at a long range it just takes to much power.....thats why weve had such problems with our damaging lasers. the ones we do have, have a pretty much unlimeted range but to keep them going for more than a few sec. would burn everything up







.......nvm mind i didnt really comprehend what u said untill i reread it sorry...u pose a very good question but i still think it would have somthin to do with power and the ways the beams are focused i guess...i could be wrong but i may be right

Lasers arent perfect there beams widen as they go farther its just hard to notice. But in case you didnt notice the scale in sins is weird so you cant say they are just a few thousand feet away.

But back to the topic. I started a post "fixing capital ships" where i sort of adressed this but my idea is that capital ships sould stay back dealing massive damage to other capital ships or any thing that got to close.Meanwhile packs of cruisers would engage in flanking menuevers to attack capital ships from there side and back where there are less weapons to bear. and they would move because as they went from one side to the other the weapon targetting them would have to change

If any one has played Mass Effect and bother to read what it says about space combat thats my general idea.

The problem was you couldn't even fire them at maximum power output before the weapon itself exploded...

It is possible in Sins but it doesn't work perfectly or at least I haven't been able to get around a few issues last time I tried. One being collisions when you have massive fleets. Too many ships and they bump into each other and can't move. It does look cool when it works though. I will upload a video shortly.

OK, the video quality sucks cause I used free tools. Here it is
WWW Link

LOL, really that made me laugh hard. espcially that part about eve.

People, really, don't use the word "realistic" while talking about a space strategy game, it just makes us all look like dorks. Unless of course you are discussing the physics of movement in space. But not fleet combat.

Deckard666, good question, afaik, lasers do damage by heating/melting, sort of like soldering, with distance the intensity of the beam lowers over very long distances. and like said before, lasers do need a large amount of power. the limit here in game is mostly for game's sake.

What i would really want is for all ships to have more guns, a little more variety of guns mounted on smaller ships also, of course just for looks, dont want to offset the balance

Once I played this galleon fighting game called "Broadsides", and the two galleons would sail around each other firing their cannons. This type of attack was in Starwars 3, Revenge of the Sith, at the beginning, after they "rescued" the future evil emperor, a republic ship went broadsides on the bad guy's main ship, passing close and hammering each other with their big deck guns, and it was really cool to see, so maybe all the ships need to be redesigned to only have side hitting weapons (some USAF planes have side cannons so they can make wide circles on ground targets and keep them in their sites constantly, thus making it imperative to keep the ships moving (of course, in Sins, they just stop and turn sideways oh well

or better yet, put it on the Akkan colony ship so the colonists have to jump off and roll when they hit the surface

I'm fine with how it is now, some 3D movement would be nice, but there is already so much to watch over when your playing that I don't even notice the lack of 3D movement. And to the people who say that 3D movement wouldn't work on 2D screens, have you ever heard of a little game called Homeworld?

Though I do find that sometimes in Sins as battles progress or after a battle, I'll rotate the camera and find ships really high or low in space.