I am nothing more then a code monkey. I can't even do half of what these guys do. I do give it to Goa though as he has more experience.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/450023/get;3483841

It comes down to how powerful the Titans are compared to the capitals and frigates. Titans are essentially the Supreme Commander of Experimentals. They can be game enders under some circumstances, although they are not without their weak points.

If Titans are like super capitals, we could even have multiple Titans on the largest of maps.

A really controversial proposition is what if Titans are more powerful than they are now in Sins 1, relative to the capital ships and frigates? I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Personally, I think what is needed is a game options slider like for fleet size. Like where you have large fleets or small ones, we could have a "super capital but cheaper option", an option of as powerful as Sins 1, or a "uber Titan option".

For once we find ourselves in agreement Sinkillr. Strange days indeed...

Although.... technically it isn't a slider if you want to be picky...

Yeah, I've never liked how easily Titans counter Frigates.  The concept is ok... but the abilities and what they affect, not so much.

I've read through the thread and I'd just like to mention what I think about some of the ideas:

The type of the game: I've read about the option of making Sins 2 a TBS (don't know how you all feel about it now or if it's even in the picture at the moment, but still). It's a bad idea. When you make a game series, you should make the game type always the same. For Sins players, a sequel should be very familiar to them.

This is a mistake they made with SupCom -> SupCom 2. The second game had nothing that resembled a grand scale strategy anymore. It was more like an RTT and while the game itself wasn't bad, the name should have been "moderately important commander" as opposed to "Supreme Commander".

Additional units or additional factions: it's always nice to get carried away with the idea of an additional unit or faction, but when you introduce something new you always have the chance of it being not useful at all, actually bringing nothing to the game or making something else obsolete. I haven't got much problems with units that become obsolete over game-time (I really don't mind the SupCom setup, there your units also don't survive longer than five minutes) that would not be smart here. The size and many aspects of Sins can already be overwhelming without having to actively refresh your entire fleet at a certain time.

So: every unit in Sins should have its purpose. When you make a base set (5 Frigates, 5 Cruisers, 5 CapShips) for the first release, all 15 units over all 3 factions must be able to do something unique. Then you can plan ahead, in an expansion you could try to add a 4th faction, the challenge of adding another 15 units that are not OP compared to their faction-counterparts is so much that it's better to first establish what the balance is between the first 3 factions. I'm all for a 4th faction, but the time it takes to give all factions their own aspect is enormous. When Forged Alliance was added to SupCom, the 4th faction was a nice addition and it had its own aspect, but only when Forged Alliance Forever came along, the bigger imbalances were rooted out (FA suffered mostly from the lack of support from THQ, not the implementation of a 4th faction).

What you need for these two things to work for a Sins 2 game, is to start from scratch, but still look at what Sins 1 has given you. Then you can find out what the type and the style of the game must be and you can continuously look at where you are when you design the new units. It's nice to get carried away sometimes, but you have to be careful when you want to design a balanced game.

Some things I really want to see in Sins 2: a proper UI. The current Sins UI is clumsy and slow. Then again, I'm used to SupCom, where I can have the intel rings on all the time, where idle build units and idle factories are always given (ok, in Sins you will have idle factories at some point) and where the zooming system is also better. The two games are different and so the UI must be different too, if it gets to be efficient but the idea of how the SupCom UI works can help here: what about being able to give the nearest frigate factory a build order? Now you have to find the factory, select it and give the order. Similarly, it might help to be able to go to the fighter/bomber management menu without having to select your group of carriers. Simply order the ratio that you should have (2:1) and all carriers in the same gravity well will act together to achieve that ratio. This idea has to be worked out of course, if a carrier gets destroyed in a big battle, the others shouldn't just decide to rearrange their fighters and bombers for the sake of a ratio: they should wait until the battle is over.

Juist some UI things to think about.

Finally, I've read about a different intel system in Sins 2. My question is: how to implement it? If you want a sensor and a visual system working together, do you (1) let every gravity well you are in grant full visual intel to you and will sensors on a nearby gravity well give you sensor intel? Or (2) should ships and buildings and planets all have their own range of sensors and vision, so that gravity wells are not always fully covered? This idea is similar to the SupCom idea, because there you have a radar with a maximum range, that can not always cover the full battleground. If you look at it that way, every planet is a battleground and they're all linked by phase lines. I'm for system 1 for Sins, because otherwise, the intel ranges are just too small.

Titans are almost a hard-counter to frigates, though.  That's not the way to go, because the presence of one on a battlefield sometimes means you might as well withdraw your frigate fleet or risk merely feeding the Titan.

Also, balance =/= lore.

@Plasma_Wolf_4X,

Thanks for your input.  I especially like the fighter/bomber management suggestion.  I'd like to see similar, too, for actual fleet compositions (and seems this is a suggestion thread on SoaSE 2... https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/433718/page/1/)

Fleet Management Window

Similar in concept to the Research or Diplomacy windows, only for management of your fleets.

Note: By "fleet", I don't mean just formed fleets, but even independent ships grouped by gravity well.

Purpose?

• Reduce micromanagement of general fleet maintenance through seeing general fleet stats quickly and easily, and auto-queuing/building/dispatching of ships.

What would it do?

• Would allow quick view of fleet ship composition and Hull/Shield HP %ages similar to mousing over the fleet strength indicator bar next to a world when you're zoomed out, only for all your fleets simultaneously.
• Would allow for virtual fleet building similar in concept to a fleet calculator.  Would also allow for saving/naming of these virtually built fleets (and current).
• Would allow for (toggleable on/off) auto-queuing/building/dispatching of ships based on current or saved virtual fleets.  When a ship is lost in a fleet, it will automatically select the "closest" appropriate factory based on build/queue/travel time (basically whatever results in the ship getting to its destination the fastest, even if it is being queued on a factory that already has several other ships in line) to rebuild the lost ship and automatically have the ship plot a course for the fleet it belongs to, or a set rally point.

Note: When I'm referring to the ships being queued up for being built, this should be some sort of internal queue to the Fleet Manager itself, not the actual factory in case new factories are built or the auto-queue of some fleets are toggled on/off.

It would also be possible, through alternate windows/views in this one (similar to the different research techs (offensive/defensive/civilian/etc) or diplomacy window showing the different players) for it to become a viable replacement to the Empire Tree, allowing the Empire Tree to then serve the purpose of "critical monitoring" and the functionalities of the Fleet Management window could be extended to incorporate the structures around the various planets.

Something I'd like to see from the SupCom series in the next Sins release is an autobuild feature; a system that enables you to select how many of what units you want and when some are destroyed in battle you don't have to manually replace them.

The way I envisioned it is this:

When you own a planet, you have full visual coverage. So you can see everything (that isn't cloaked assuming cloaking is available)

then, one phase jump away from your owned planet you get sensor coverage. Either you get this by default, or there could be a structure or a technology that gives it. Tech could perhaps be available to expand the range to 2 grav wells.
Or potentially you could make it ranged based, but I think one jump away is better for gameplay.

When your ships are in a hostile or neutral grav well, you have sensor coverage, but only visual LOS from your ships.
So enemy ships on the other side of the planet for example, would appear as sensor contacts, but you wouldn't see what type of ships they are until you have line of sight.

You could potentially make the 'sensor contacts' scale in sized based on class. So fighter contacts are small, frigate contacts bit bigger, then cruiser, capital and lastly titans.

Then certain grav wells might also disrupt sensors say like magnetic storms and plasma storms meaning you would have to be in the grav well to see any enemies (also allowing for ambushes)

The regrettabl.e part about getting excited for a sequel and a new race that skins like may not happen is you start desperately wishing to play as that race..

Lol no.

Dang it..  After Tachyon, this thread just seems sad...  Maybe it's just that I grew too attached to my vision of the Chasers...  I guess I could always mod them...  But if I did that, I'd feel guilty if I didn't use Buff Builder which means I'd need to finish that, but I'm probably not gonna finish that unless I get absurdly and bizarrely motivated, Sins rebounds (maybe Tachyon magically makes Sins more lively), or I get help.

Dang it.