Tactical games of starship combat

[Tweed]

Battlecruiser 3000 AD

Sounds like what you want is naval battles, but painted in space colors. Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is an arcade version of that with a slight twist of Mount and Blade, not sure if it truly fits your bill though. Independence War loosely follows that too as I recall.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

what about this game?



it claims to have the most 'realistic' space combat.

 

[Narushima]

Flotilla is a lighter version of that Battlestar Galactica game.

 

[KateMicucci]

Battlecruiser 3000 AD

 

[KateMicucci]

This is the "my franchise can kick your franchise's ass" sizequeen syndrome. When you see ships like that, you realize writers have no sense of scale, and this is very apparent if they were to put an aircraft carrier up there for scale. Do you know how big an aircraft carrier is? Yeah, they're huge. These things are just huge for the sake of pretentiousness and there's no clear reason for why they're so huge or what's in them to make them so huge. They're just huge to be huge. Consider, for a moment, how violently a 2-5km long ship has to accelerate to turn in a timespan that isn't measured in minutes. The movie's going to be over by the time that thing finishes turning around.

You say this while talking about spaceships that behave like 17th century man of wars. And in-universe it is explained why they're so huge. The huge guns and huge armies they carry. Warhams spaceships are expected to be able to both destroy a planet from orbit and to launch a planetary invasion. An aircraft carrier can't do that.

Agreed. While we are on the topic, do you know any good modern military science fiction that gets this stuff right?

The only book I've read with spaceship battles that weren't boats in space was The Forever War. The spaceships zip around very quickly, making complex maneuvers to avoid enemy fire. The crew must pack themselves into G-resistant tubes before battle or else be crushed by the violence of the aerobatics. All of the actual flying and shooting is left to the ship computer.

For obvious reasons this style of combat is not popular in fiction.

 

[NecroLord]

Length: 19 kilometers
Full Complement: 279,144 Crewmen, 1,590 Gunners
Minimum Crew: 50,000 Crewmen
Fighter Complement: 144 TIE-Fighters
Passangers: 38,000 Infantry, 40 AT-STs, 30 AT-ATs, 200 Support Craft, 3 Prefabricated Bases

Yeah, so you cram 300K people into a place that's 20km long. It's either frikken empty, or a lot of that space is being taken up by fuel. Why is it so large? What is it carrying that warrants it being so large? Because ironically, it's still too small to actually carry a meaningful amount of troops to invade anything with, but it's way too large for any of the space combat jobs it would find itself in.

Star Wars is particularly noteworthy for making pretentiously oversized things. That's why this piece of mockery exists.

Fighters are usually just in science fiction because the author loves aviation. That's it. I've got no problem with Star Wars, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica doing their thing, but you are right; they wouldn't seem to make much sense. You could argue they have low mass, for quick Newtonian maneuvering, but then a drone, not as vulernerable to G-forces, would serve that purpose far better.

It's not mass, but mass ratio, that matters, though. And a larger unit will have a more favorable mass ratio because some parts can only get so small. Pipes and hoses can only be so thin before they fail. The only thing that would tilt the mass ratio back in favor of carried craft is for a starship to carry a large amount of combat deadweight, like an FTL drive that is cumbersome and contributes nothing to the fight. This mass penalty would thus be worth shedding by launching attack craft instead. The other item you need to justify the existence of fighters is that some component valuable enough not to be treated as expendable. This will probably be some kind of magic STL drive, good enough to outperform rockets, that thus justifies the use of the fighter to deliver ordnance. Otherwise you just make a one-way trip and save yourself a lot of mass by having your delivery vehicle go boom on arrival. Whether the fighters are manned or not is immaterial: That's just audience appeal, who would rather hear about the adventures of Ace Rocketman, Space Pilot, than Drone Fighter 8142. You can easily get around this by making the fighters drones, but operated by an actual pilot on the mothership, if you wanted. It's not actually materially relevant. If anything, it is more in line with the way these things behave in games, where the fighters all stop working the moment you blow up the carrier....which would make sense if the pilots are actually there.

Oh, yeah. Star Wars has absolutely no sense of scale, very much like 40k in this regard.

I would also recommend Star Trek: Bridge Commander. It's a lot of fun.

 

[KateMicucci]

It is common in fiction involving very large spaceships, especially 40k fiction, to have parts of the spaceships forgotten or taken over by mutineers or other non-crew, so that part of the parody image is a fail.

 

[Endemic]

What's the point of having a ship of 19km's length to carry only 144 fighters? It could accommodate thousands.

This is what I mean by the writers having no sense of scale, yes. If the Nimitz were scaled up to that size, it would be 190K times (19000/330)^3 as massive and if it carried a proportional fighter complement to its size, would be carrying millions of fighters. Thousands is very much an understatement.

There is the much smaller "escort carrier" in the expanded universe that carries a more realistic number of fighters for its size, although still too few if you just extrapolate from Earth vessels.

I don't know if the Executor was supposed to have an "official" carrying complement in the films, it was never stated outright (though I haven't read the novelizations). I take the numbers quoted from secondary sources to be a bare minimum, so if anything it's the expanded universe authors or Totally Games that didn't appreciate the scale properly.

Based on what is visible in ESB and ROTJ, the engines take up a significant portion of the ship's length. And considering that the regular 1.6km-long destroyers from that era are supposedly able to glass planets, then the energy output from onboard reactors must be immense.

 

[Norfleet]

There is the much smaller "escort carrier" in the expanded universe that carries a more realistic number of fighters for its size, although still too few if you just extrapolate from Earth vessels.

The thing is that even if you scale up from things which are NOT carriers, like a Yamato, the sheer enormity of some of the Star Wars ships lends itself to an absolutely ludicrous number, because square-cube effects mean that just increasing the dimensions of something causes it to get ridonkulously huge, fast. Compare, say, a Galaxy-class starship of Star Trek, and its scale-up factor would suggest that, if you scaled from a non-carrier (Yamato again), it would, based on its size, have about 30 planes. Does it? Turns out, yes, that's pretty much the complement of shuttles it has. Once you keep scaling beyond that, the numbers quickly start to balloon to sillier values.

I don't know if the Executor was supposed to have an "official" carrying complement in the films, it was never stated outright (though I haven't read the novelizations). I take the numbers quoted from secondary sources to be a bare minimum, so if anything it's the expanded universe authors or Totally Games that didn't appreciate the scale properly.

They really, really don't.

Based on what is visible in ESB and ROTJ, the engines take up a significant portion of the ship's length. And considering that the regular 1.6km-long destroyers from that era are supposedly able to glass planets, then the energy output from onboard reactors must be immense.

At the scale we're talking about, even if you assume that an additional 90% of that mass is engines/fuel and doesn't count, the numbers are still outlandish. As carriers, you're still talking complements in the millions. As non-carriers, that's still tens of thousands. The comparison doesn't get any better, either, if you just dispense with the false-airplane equivalencies and just compare it against the ship's longboats. The sheer imbalance of the ship's gargantuan size with its woefully inadequate complement of longboats would mean that the process of embarking the crew and supplies would take years, if not more, simply because there are inadequate numbers of longboats to ferry all this shit. Things we do not see: The gargantuan fleet of tankers and transport responsible for filling up the battlegroup of these things with fuel, blaster coolant, missiles, replacement parts, and whatnot, and the tugs and shuttles that accomplish this transfer in deep space.

 

[Endemic]

The thing is that even if you scale up from things which are NOT carriers, like a Yamato, the sheer enormity of some of the Star Wars ships lends itself to an absolutely ludicrous number, because square-cube effects mean that just increasing the dimensions of something causes it to get ridonkulously huge, fast. Compare, say, a Galaxy-class starship of Star Trek, and its scale-up factor would suggest that, if you scaled from a non-carrier (Yamato again), it would, based on its size, have about 30 planes. Does it? Turns out, yes, that's pretty much the complement of shuttles it has. Once you keep scaling beyond that, the numbers quickly start to balloon to sillier values.

The Galaxy-class in TNG has all kinds of luxuries that don't exist on current year military vessels, too. IIRC later in the timeline around the Dominion War, they dispense with the niceties and improve the weapons\shields while keeping the volume the same.

At the scale we're talking about, even if you assume that an additional 90% of that mass is engines/fuel and doesn't count, the numbers are still outlandish. As carriers, you're still talking complements in the millions. As non-carriers, that's still tens of thousands. The comparison doesn't get any better, either, if you just dispense with the false-airplane equivalencies and just compare it against the ship's longboats. The sheer imbalance of the ship's gargantuan size with its woefully inadequate complement of longboats would mean that the process of embarking the crew and supplies would take years, if not more, simply because there are inadequate numbers of longboats to ferry all this shit. Things we do not see: The gargantuan fleet of tankers and transport responsible for filling up the battlegroup of these things with fuel, blaster coolant, missiles, replacement parts, and whatnot, and the tugs and shuttles that accomplish this transfer in deep space.

You've just named some of the items that would occupy a decent volume in a space-faring warship. I also don't know of too many real life ships that function as battleships, destroyers, carriers and landing craft simultaneously, which is what the Imperial Deuces do in Star Wars. Executor also had things like a room with a meditation chamber which would be a considered a waste of space in a modern military.

This scene of Palpatine arriving at the Death Star II actually does a good job of showing its scale vs the support vessels and escorts (also implying there are many hangars on the exterior).

 

[ValeVelKal]

Trivia : Tactical Space Combat is one of the oldest genres of video games, and can be traced back to the Mainframe Computer, specifically Star Trek, also called "Trek73"... in 1973.

OF course, because it is all ASCII, a LOT of options are available :

How many games allow you to jettison part of the ship, to play dead or to bluff that you are going to blow up your own ship ?

The other side does not play fair either, though it depends on the race encountered - below the Gorns. Also, a typo done in 1973 !

Very quickly, there were hundreds of Trek73 versions (power of shared computer + BASIC coding). Trek73 and another more strategic Star Trek (called STTR) were everywhere until the mid-80s. Here is an Atari version of Trek73 :

Leaving the pure Trek73-clones behind, being able to build your own ship also arrived very quickly. First one was Starfleet Orion (1978, two players only, nothing visual I can show), then its sequel Invasion Orion (1979, solitaire, still no art). Those two were huge games which launched Automated Simulations, later more well-known for the genre-defining cRPG : Temple of Apshai (1979 - so before Akalabeth). It was arguably the first cRPG with any depth.
Anyway, first Tactical Space Combat game where you can build your own ship and with some art I could track : Space Ace 21 (1981) on TRS-80 :

I build the ship on the left. Yes, not pretty. As the ship accumulates damage, the damage are allocated to specific subparts of your ship. That same game also had both straight combats and blockade run (or defence) missions.

SSI of gold-box fame jumped into the fray very early too : 1981, with the Warp Factor. They managed to ignore 2 licences at the same time: Star Trek and Star Fleet Battles. It caused them issues later.

Here is the "Alliance Dreadnought" for the first edition :

And the one in the second edition, after the lawyers called :

Of course, they also change the box. Guess which one is the first edition below .

Again, lots of systems to break, though some were unused - either cut content or "data disks", as SSI already did back then.

The game was successful enough that they had a sequel, except they did not call it "the Warp Factor" for obvious reasons : "The Cosmic Balance" (1982)

You could build your own ships (had to !). Here is one of mine, with annotations

And my ship in combat against 3 smaller ships, plus a planet that looks exactly like a ship because 1983.

Again, massive success. Biggest non-sport game success of SSI thus far if I remember well. They added a "strategic" layer, a game called "Cosmic Balance II" (1983). NOT a sequel, you had to have both.

Cosmic Balance II was the first space 4X in history, beating the genre-defining Reach for the Stars to the punch by a few months.

Interestingly, just as discussed just above by other posters, the game forced you to keep a gargantuan fleet of tankers, merchant ships and what-not to keep your fleets supplied, and an even large fleet for what the game called "commercial nets". One-third of the ship-types were supply / transport / whatever :

Generally speaking, a player's non-combat fleet was equal if not above in tonnage and value to the player combat fleet (excluding minor planetary defence ships). The best way to cripple the enemy fleet was to attack those non-combat ships, so they could either not be supplied anymore (if destroying the supply) or not be maintained (if destroying the commerce nets = revenue).

It did not make for a very good game - probably because building & managing a bazillion of freighters, traders and whatnot (+ allocating escorts for all the non-combat missions every turn, plus counting beans to make sure there is enough supply in every single system you owed) is realistic, but not fun. People did not know what was fun in 1983 ^^.

Anyway, I was too long already. I found that interesting.

 

[J1M]

Would love to see a resurgence of the capital ship combat genre. I find a lot of modern games get too focused on showing 3D models in front of nebulas and miss the aspect of a contest of wits seen in related fiction.

 

[L'ennui]

https://www.starfleetproject.com/

Free remake/update of an old Star Trek ship combat simulator, pretty cool for what it is.

 

[KateMicucci]

Are there any recent tactical spaceship games that are 3D? It seems we've reverted back to 2d.

 

[Norfleet]

An interesting quirk I've noticed is that when you go 3D, the end result tends to end up being more 1D. With 2D, there's enough space to maneuver, but not so much that it's infeasible to control it. But with 3D, the amount of space becomes that much larger, such that it becomes incredibly difficult to "control" space with anything less than an overwhelming force (which means you've mostly already won). Consider: To hem in an opposing unit, you tend to need about 2-3 units in 2D. To do the same in 3D, you're looking at maybe 5+ units. But at a 5:1 advantage, you no longer need to engage in this subtlefuge and run the risk of being outmaneuvered and defeated in detail, and your opponent will likely begin running away, turning it into a simple chase. And if you don't have the numbers to do it, then you simply can't, so there's no reason to try. On top of that, space is noteworthy for its lack of terrain. While it is possible to still impose a semblance of terrain features in 2D, this becomes impractical in 3D where any logical terrain no longer occupies sufficient volume of the battlefield to be relevant. The result is a consistent trend towards linear encounters and direct attack rather than maneuver.

This paradox of choice is very similar to what happens in character building. If you have a few ways to build a character, there will might be about 4-6 distinct builds that matter. If you have a bajillion ways to build a character, there will be about 2-3 builds that matter. Exploding the number of options decreases the number of meaningful choices. We see this same effect in 2D vs. 3D. When you're in 2D, you have a fair number of options. In 3D, the sheer number of options has caused these options to eat each other and give you fewer actual options. Sure, you can run this way, or that way, or that other way, but in the end, the only effect which matters is whether you're moving closer to me or farther away, because you can't cover that immense volume of space faster than I can reduce the effect of your choices down to range.

 

[L'ennui]

I believe certain games make 3D approaches valuable by implementing weapon arcs and facing-specific armor values, but the point above is generally valid.

 

[KateMicucci]

I believe certain games make 3D approaches valuable by implementing weapon arcs and facing-specific armor values, but the point above is generally valid.

Sword of the Stars did this. Different races had different weapon layouts and movement types. Some races wanted to build a big wall formation with lots of forward-firing weapons. Some favored a long line of ships doing broadsides. A couple were covered with weapons on all sides and had high acceleration but low maneuverability so they did drive-bys.

SOTS really deserved a decent sequel.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Are there any recent tactical spaceship games that are 3D? It seems we've reverted back to 2d.

Where are you seeing that trend?

Nebulous: Fleet Command is probably the top of the current heap.

 

[Norfleet]

I believe certain games make 3D approaches valuable by implementing weapon arcs and facing-specific armor values, but the point above is generally valid.

This already happens in 2D, though. Expanding it into 3D results in there now being too MUCH space, making it much easier to keep your preferred facing on target while pointing an unpreferred facing into empty space. Imagine, for instance, I have a ship with a strong front, moderate sides, weak top/bottom/rear. In full 3D, I can essentially negate the top/bottom weakness by rolling the ship, a move which costs far less than it costs you to circle around to those sides, so the orientation space reduces back to 2D, because no matter how you try to circle to that side, you can't manage to outflank faster than I can roll. You can try to force me to expose that side, but now you need at least 3 units to engage with, because I can point my strongest facing at one unit, roll the ship to point the next best side at any second unit, and only the third unit is able to finally hit my weakest. You need a 3:1 advantage to even try. At a 3:1 advantage, though, I'm probably unwilling to fight directly anyway, and will therefore evade battle...and I will have plenty of open space to evade into, as you will need a lot more units to cut me off in 3D space.

So the only battles that are capitalizing on the full 3D space are ones in which one side enjoys an overwhelming numerical advantage and has already effectively won.

Sword of the Stars did this. Different races had different weapon layouts and movement types. Some races wanted to build a big wall formation with lots of forward-firing weapons. Some favored a long line of ships doing broadsides. A couple were covered with weapons on all sides and had high acceleration but low maneuverability so they did drive-bys.

SOTS was also...mostly 2D. There was a vertical plane, but you had no direct ability to give orders in it, and it certainly wasn't 6DOF. While it was possible for some units to achieve involuntary verticality through being hit with large enough repels at an angle, you could not voluntarily order extreme vertical movement, nor adjust the ship's attitude arbitrarily. The lizard dudes didn't even put guns on the bottom side of the ship, but you were unable to exploit this except with planetary missiles, as they couldn't effectively shoot down the one coming from "below". And, of course, they couldn't roll the ship to counter, either. We had this joke that if they did, all the turrets would fall off the ship like a navy battleship.

 

[ind33d]

Are there any recent tactical spaceship games that are 3D? It seems we've reverted back to 2d.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Trivia : Tactical Space Combat is one of the oldest genres of video games, and can be traced back to the Mainframe Computer, specifically Star Trek, also called "Trek73"... in 1973.

OF course, because it is all ASCII, a LOT of options are available :

How many games allow you to jettison part of the ship, to play dead or to bluff that you are going to blow up your own ship ?

The other side does not play fair either, though it depends on the race encountered - below the Gorns. Also, a typo done in 1973 !

Very quickly, there were hundreds of Trek73 versions (power of shared computer + BASIC coding). Trek73 and another more strategic Star Trek (called STTR) were everywhere until the mid-80s. Here is an Atari version of Trek73 :

Leaving the pure Trek73-clones behind, being able to build your own ship also arrived very quickly. First one was Starfleet Orion (1978, two players only, nothing visual I can show), then its sequel Invasion Orion (1979, solitaire, still no art). Those two were huge games which launched Automated Simulations, later more well-known for the genre-defining cRPG : Temple of Apshai (1979 - so before Akalabeth). It was arguably the first cRPG with any depth.
Anyway, first Tactical Space Combat game where you can build your own ship and with some art I could track : Space Ace 21 (1981) on TRS-80 :

I build the ship on the left. Yes, not pretty. As the ship accumulates damage, the damage are allocated to specific subparts of your ship. That same game also had both straight combats and blockade run (or defence) missions.

SSI of gold-box fame jumped into the fray very early too : 1981, with the Warp Factor. They managed to ignore 2 licences at the same time: Star Trek and Star Fleet Battles. It caused them issues later.

Here is the "Alliance Dreadnought" for the first edition :

And the one in the second edition, after the lawyers called :

Of course, they also change the box. Guess which one is the first edition below .

Again, lots of systems to break, though some were unused - either cut content or "data disks", as SSI already did back then.

The game was successful enough that they had a sequel, except they did not call it "the Warp Factor" for obvious reasons : "The Cosmic Balance" (1982)

You could build your own ships (had to !). Here is one of mine, with annotations

And my ship in combat against 3 smaller ships, plus a planet that looks exactly like a ship because 1983.

Again, massive success. Biggest non-sport game success of SSI thus far if I remember well. They added a "strategic" layer, a game called "Cosmic Balance II" (1983). NOT a sequel, you had to have both.

Cosmic Balance II was the first space 4X in history, beating the genre-defining Reach for the Stars to the punch by a few months.

Interestingly, just as discussed just above by other posters, the game forced you to keep a gargantuan fleet of tankers, merchant ships and what-not to keep your fleets supplied, and an even large fleet for what the game called "commercial nets". One-third of the ship-types were supply / transport / whatever :

Generally speaking, a player's non-combat fleet was equal if not above in tonnage and value to the player combat fleet (excluding minor planetary defence ships). The best way to cripple the enemy fleet was to attack those non-combat ships, so they could either not be supplied anymore (if destroying the supply) or not be maintained (if destroying the commerce nets = revenue).

It did not make for a very good game - probably because building & managing a bazillion of freighters, traders and whatnot (+ allocating escorts for all the non-combat missions every turn, plus counting beans to make sure there is enough supply in every single system you owed) is realistic, but not fun. People did not know what was fun in 1983 ^^.

Anyway, I was too long already. I found that interesting.

I had both those games back in the day, amazingly I was able figure out how to play them and also the board war game 'star fleet battles' which the games were trying to emulate. I was only like 12. I say amazing because I literally don't think I could figure out how to play the board game (Star Fleet Battles) again today if I already had not done so back then...my brain has been fried and my attention span can no longer do what I used to be able to do when I was just a kid. Its pretty sad, I totally blame modern technology and using things like google maps to get around and never having time just to be 'bored' or silent. It actually really bothers me, I should not be dumber now than I was 40 years ago, but I think maybe I am..lol

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Are there any recent tactical spaceship games that are 3D? It seems we've reverted back to 2d.

the battlestar galactica game has 3D, I would definitely wait for a sale, but its a pretty fun game, at least for awhile....



its an upgraded version of the star-hammer engine that somebody linked earlier I think

 

[Norfleet]

How 3D?

Is it like 2.5D where everything is actually 2D even while the graphical representation is 3D, but some or all classes of units can overfly each other as needed or forced, but you have little or no ability to directly command this (SOTS, various 3D RTSes with planes)? 2.75D where there's a clear plane of "ground", but units can have altitude and be given specific orders to change said altitude (like Homeworld or airplane-style games)? Or true 6DOF 3D where there is no arbitrary ground plane and units can freely rotate and move in 3D space (games like Descent, Freespace, etc)?

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

How 3D?

Is it like 2.5D where everything is actually 2D even while the graphical representation is 3D, but some or all classes of units can overfly each other as needed or forced, but you have little or no ability to directly command this (SOTS, various 3D RTSes with planes)? 2.75D where there's a clear plane of "ground", but units can have altitude and be given specific orders to change said altitude (like Homeworld or airplane-style games)? Or true 6DOF 3D where there is no arbitrary ground plane and units can freely rotate and move in 3D space (games like Descent, Freespace, etc)?

yes, I think u are right, but honestly i am not sure how much true 3d actually contributes to a game...just saying it a game has true 3d is not enough, honestly I don't even care. I fine with a space game being 2d as long as the game play is there...

 

[Norfleet]

Well, like I said, I've observed the following effects of making the game 3D:

1. Visualization of anything becomes VERY difficullt. There aren't really good ways to visually represent 3D space on a 2D display without heavy restrictions on viewport and loss of information. It gets to the point where I actually find it preferrable to read a text readout with no visual and just render it my head. However, most people cope VERY BADLY with trying to do this, as was my experience with this during the MUD days.

2. The actual tactical doctrines that result do not actually capitalize on 3D. Between the fact that most players will be suffering from information overload or information starvation (see above), you will most likely only understand that the enemy is "somewhat thataways", with possibly more precision in range (due to a range box that tells you how far away they are). Given that it takes at least 4 units in play before you get ANY 3D-ness (because 3 points define a plane, so anything with < 4 units in play cannot ever be 3D, since they will always define a plane). So, as mentioned in previous: You will need to meet two conditions to have a 3D fight: 1. An opposing force that is willing to split and attempt to engage from multiple directions. 2. A defending force that feels confident about these odds being so against them to stand and fight rather than backpedal and prevent being flanked. You...aren't going to see this often. The most common result is just two deathballs slamming towards each other head-on.