Battles in Rebellion - A Touch More Realism?

Welcome, welcome! 

This is a good idea.  I have never thought about the ships moving during combat.  This would be a cool addition, but you must think about the devs, and whether it would mess up the rest of the gameplay.

Would the devs be able to do something like this, and can our computers even handle it?

It sounds to me like it would mess with micro-managing the fleet as it battles.

While this would certainly look nice it would make late game fleet battles utter chaos in terms of actually keeping track of where everything is for intelligent use of AoEs, holding formation and the like.

It would be beautiful, but would IMO cut down on the strategic depth of the combat for anyone who lacks the perfect combination of genius an insanity to keep track of everything while it zips around the battlefield in large 100+ ship fleet battles.

Though I could see it being a nifty optional game setting.

While it would be chaos for managing, it would truly emphasize the use of the empire/fleet management pane on the left of the screen. It would also make use of the hotkeys more frequently. 

An optional game-setting would be awesome. 

If you have played SimCity, having such actions would be a form of pathfinding. Pathfinding is intensive on the CPU. With the majority of the people out there now sporting i5 2500k's, that would not be an issue because, lets face it, those CPU's are beasts! 

By all means though, SimCity games continue to stress modern CPU cores still. They have to concurrently process the movements of MILLIONS of individuals at any one second. Having ships as one big entity, and a fleet of 100+, well, that'd only be 100+ things to process rather than millions. 

AOE's is an issue as well, yes. There should be a button or two in the ships panel to tell them to follow a certain group of targets. Or, if a ship passes into the AOE and out of it, the effects could linger for a few seconds after the run and they'd slowly get weaker and weaker the further away the get from the AoE. That way, there wouldn't be a strict AOE limitation where its you are either in it or out of it. The further away you are from it, the weaker it is. 

Indeed having the devs implement something like this would be challenging, but for people who love realism and eyecandies... It'd be greatness! The programming required for ships to dodge things like asteroids and planets would add additional bulk, while ships pass one another in gravity wells. 

I think it is quite possible. If you have played Sword of the Stars, something similar goes on in that game... But those battles are limited to 5 ships at most on each side. 

As a personal note, I should add though that I am a micromanagement wh0re. Anything relating with it... It will consume me until I master the techniques (or economy). 

A couple of mods have tried this, but the biggest problem with it is that Sins doesn't really do hit chance calculation. You chance of hitting a target only matter on what type of "armor" it has, not how fast its moving. The perverse result of this is that units standing still take just as much damage as those moving, yet can focus their firepower much more easily.

You do have a point. 

I was thinking the research to dodge shots should actually reduce damage, like adding armour or shields. The enemy can counter that by having targeting tech of their own and it'll correct all the loss of damage up to but maybe a 1 - 3% basis. 

In a sense, there would be 3 damage reducing things. Shields, armour and "dodging tech."  

And with tech there to boost damage, it could still remain balanced, albeit with said management issues of actively moving fleets. It would defs add more challenges to the game! I for one am down for challenges. Playing World in Conflict a lot makes anyone transferring from that game to any other RTS/RTT, etc... wanting a challenge. 

Then TEC capital ship?the one that colonieses but also adds a passive buff to nearby ships with chance to hit target and increases range,does it give some sort of armor penetration to increase "chance to hit" or what,i always assumed it was meant for moving or escaping targets?

I think they adhere to a thing where the percentage "to hit" is actually additional damage added.

If it turns out that it is on a per-chance basis, then either that completely shatters this wish, or makes it even more possible! 

i like this and think it will be rly cool but it might end up slowing down the game alot and it would be hard to mirco but i like a good challenge

Maybe you could test it out with corvettes, make it so moving targets are harder to hit.  If it works, move to bigger ships.

You could almost think of it like Star Wars battles.  The Star Destroyers kinda sit still, while the TIE fighters move around and are much harder to hit.  Something like that.

Now on combat in Space. I have my own Sci-Fi Story that besides, FTL, shields and Energy weapons(Kintic bolts) and anti Grav and gravity, Realism is an important focus. Fights in space with any shields means you have to get around, bring them down, or force an over load in the system. That means just staying back at thousands of miles is point less. Lazors can just be reflected of a shield's if you make it a like a mirror. That means getting in closer range to use Kintic energy bolts and missiles is a must. Now I can go on and on my universe's space combat rules but lets just say Iron Clad went the unrealistic route because relisim is not worth your time in games. Gameplay is.

Yup. At first Sins was a lot more realistic. Orbiting planets for example sound good on paper, until you realize its a pain to keep track of everything and isn't very fun. And its resource intensify to boot!

There is no way to do realistic space battles because we, as a species, have never had real ones.  WWI and later... we've got lots of 'realistic' movies and games, but we aren't getting the epic Farscape or Serenity fleet battle endings or even EVE.

An older RTS game - star trek armada had both it had an option called directors cut which would make ships stay in motion the whole time or like sins where the ships would stay stationary. 

Actually, there is abundance of realistic space battles in hard science-fiction literature. They just don't translate very well into games or movies.

The ships (even within formation) are bound do be very far from each other (thousands of kilometers at least) and the battles are also inevitably visually very confusing, because ship movements are rather counterintuitive (Newton's laws seem simple enough, but orbital mechanics are rather complex matter) and are fully in 3D, which our brains don't process very well.

I can see ships-of-the-line standing still to slug it out, but certainly smaller ships should be moving around more to dodge incoming fire. The problem is that all that movement adds performance penalties and makes clicking on units difficult, not to mention it would be time-consuming to implement. The gameplay benefits, if there even are any, probably don't outweigh the costs involved and because Sins aims to be fun, and not realistic, it probably won't occur for realism's sake either.

In my Universe Its a balancing act between close range overwhelm fire power or long range lazor that don't do much. My shield's which are what allows FTL to be possible but they fuck up lazor and nukes abities to be deadly weapons. It seems(for my story) that light is an asymptote of the forth dimension is you just hop into the Fifth and pot right out at two times the speed of light to get around it. Though if you don't have these shield you die instantly to small space rocks and the rule that nothing should be on the other side of light barrier which causes the unshielded ship mass to covert into energy almost the moment you come out of the Fifth dimension. Its the reason the inventor of FTL almost got banned when his unmanned probe became the biggest man made explosion ever.... and sorry I went self promoting. I like tech explications too much.

Anyone played Sword of the Stars?

Battles in that game too, the ships move nonstop unless you tell them to stop... However, the battles there are limited to 5 ships each side. But with that noted, you can do A LOT more with those 5 ships in battle. 

With respect, as some have said, it has been done before. But it could be down to a limitation of the games engine itself. Only Stardock/Ironclad truly know. But as the looks of things, the in-game setting to allow that would be best. With that said too, the game setting should also list positives and drawbacks once you enable it. 

And EmpReb, you say you have your own universe? You a writer? If so, I am too and I have my own universe. PM me if you wish to discuss it all! 

If anyone wants to know how space battles should be look up the series "the lost fleet" it takes into account how hard it is to hit something when traveling at extreme velocity when your oppont is traveling at the same speed towards you, you ain't gonna hit at normal human reflexes

Forever War had some realistic space-battles, but wouldn't translate well to a game.

I like it the way it is just fine.