Capital ship combat

[Cael]

You know, I've been kicking the Space problem around for awhile and I'm starting to think that "Space", "Multiplayer", and "Realistic Sense of Scale" are a pick-at-most-2 situation.

The problem with the third one is that an invisible dot somewhere on the screen makes for poor cinematics.

 

[Norfleet]

That also, but on the other hand, people play submarine games, and you absolutely cannot see shit in a submarine. Although admittedly, never actually being able to physically see your opponent DOES keep the graphics budget down.

 

[Magitex]

That also, but on the other hand, people play submarine games, and you absolutely cannot see shit in a submarine. Although admittedly, never actually being able to physically see your opponent DOES keep the graphics budget down.

Eve Online does alright with the player seeing relatively nothing at ranges, as well as any submarine/flight sim. Realism quite the blessing in these respects, although in lieu of said graphics you need solid gameplay.

 

[Norfleet]

My understanding is that Eve's combat is really boring, though. Not much in the way of player involvement once the actual fighting starts.

 

[Magitex]

My understanding is that Eve's combat is really boring, though. Not much in the way of player involvement once the actual fighting starts.

Yeah that's not the case, Eve has more interesting space combat than nearly every other space game I can think of. Although the further you progress up the scale the less movement matters, a lot of Eve is about being prepared and anticipating your enemy for sure.

 

[Norfleet]

From what I've heard from talking to actual Eve players, most of Eve's combat is decided before the fight ever starts, so the moment you throw two ships against each other, the winner is pretty much already known. That's...not what I'd consider the most interesting combat scenario.

 

[Magitex]

From what I've heard from talking to actual Eve players, most of Eve's combat is decided before the fight ever starts, so the moment you throw two ships against each other, the winner is pretty much already known. That's...not what I'd consider the most interesting combat scenario.

I played for years and don't share that opinion, but it can easily happen if you let it. It's a huge theater for combat featuring a wide variety of scale and tactics, if you pit your fighter against a battleship, you won't typically be able to destroy it (not impossible), but you can intercept it for another ship class to engage. There's never a single way you can win every engagement and that is one of the strengths of Eve.

You can always distill Eve's combat formula down to mashing F1 through F8 because that's the minimum engagement with the game, but there's a great deal of finesse to battles once you understand combat mechanics, and it's particularly good in small fleet engagements.
If you don't find the meta, depth as well as the breadth of engagements interesting that's fine, but I don't know of many games that are equally thought provoking as Eve Online is for its combat.

It's not the perfect space combat simulator by any means (fluid based physics for a start) but it certainly qualifies for interesting in my opinion.

 

[Norfleet]

This is not the testimony I got from several other players, who take the position that combat outcomes are pretty much entirely decided by your build and only extreme acts of glue-huffing can alter the outcome of the fight after that point. There is apparently a lot of stuff that goes into making such builds, but that all occurs BEFORE the combat. The actual act of engaging in combat is apparently not so engaging.

 

[Ninjerk]

You could try the abandonware Klingon game. I looked at trying to play it for a bit but got bored with trying to make it work right on a modern system.

 

[Galdred]

You know, I've been kicking the Space problem around for awhile and I'm starting to think that "Space", "Multiplayer", and "Realistic Sense of Scale" are a pick-at-most-2 situation.

You could abstract the "realistic sense of scale" by having the "tactical display" show magnified views of ships. That would basically make the tactical space look like your usual "Age of Sail range" space game, with a reasonable justification for it. Of course, it only works without manual aiming, but this has no place in a capital ship game anyway.
That way, you can have range and speed still make sense, while looking good (and it would make sense for the crew too, to have something they can see on the tactical display).

 

[Norfleet]

The sense of scale really has less to do with how it is visually displayed and more to do with the ranges relative to speeds.

Like when you're in an era where ships are capable of moving around 5 knots (~2.5m/s) and you can cannon each other from an effective range of a few hundred meters (let's call it 500), you're looking at ranges around the 3-4 minute range. So, that's our combat with pirate ships. Let's look at Dreadnought-era combat: speeds on the the order of 30 knots (~15 m/s), ranges on the order of 10-20 kilometers. Crunching this, we get combat ranges of about 20 minutes. Movement is starting to lose a bit of shine here. Now in the modern day, when your ships are capable of moving around 30 knots (ships aren't really getting yugely faster) and and you can shoot missiles at each other from an effective range of ~500km, your combat range is about 10 hours. As we can see, the role of tactical movement is not particularly high here already. Space ranges are probably going to be in days, weeks, or even more.

So FTL isn't exactly wrong to just straight up remove tactical movement from the game. You're going to need to be giving ships magic engines if you want to bring combat ranges down to something where movement matters. So, Starfleet Command, then? That would give us our "space", "multiplayer" (I mean, it wasn't common, but it's technically there), but our realism angle has largely been chucked into the trash can. Like I said: Pick-at-most-2.

 

[Galdred]

The sense of scale really has less to do with how it is visually displayed and more to do with the ranges relative to speeds.

Like when you're in an era where ships are capable of moving around 5 knots (~2.5m/s) and you can cannon each other from an effective range of a few hundred meters (let's call it 500), you're looking at ranges around the 3-4 minute range. So, that's our combat with pirate ships. Let's look at Dreadnought-era combat: speeds on the the order of 30 knots (~15 m/s), ranges on the order of 10-20 kilometers. Crunching this, we get combat ranges of about 20 minutes. Movement is starting to lose a bit of shine here. Now in the modern day, when your ships are capable of moving around 30 knots (ships aren't really getting yugely faster) and and you can shoot missiles at each other from an effective range of ~500km, your combat range is about 10 hours. As we can see, the role of tactical movement is not particularly high here already. Space ranges are probably going to be in days, weeks, or even more.

So FTL isn't exactly wrong to just straight up remove tactical movement from the game. You're going to need to be giving ships magic engines if you want to bring combat ranges down to something where movement matters. So, Starfleet Command, then? That would give us our "space", "multiplayer" (I mean, it wasn't common, but it's technically there), but our realism angle has largely been chucked into the trash can. Like I said: Pick-at-most-2.

Indeed, but harpoon/Command : Modern Operations could be a good framework then (granted, without any stealth, that would still be quite different, but nohing prevent you from having tons of decoy drones masquerading as capital ships).
Then, it would more be an exercice of getting your real ships and decoys in position, while trying to get the enemy ship to fire at your decoys to reveal which one of the enemy blips are the real ships.

If we take a look at the "stealth in space" part of the COADE blog

• Decoys are only really viable on really short time scales, such as in combat. Over the long term, study of a decoy’s signature over time will reveal it’s true nature. It would need a power source and engine identical to the ship it’s trying to conceal, as well identical mass, otherwise the exhaust plume will behave differently. This means your decoy needs to be the same mass, same power, same engine as your real ship, so at that point, why not just build a real ship instead?

I don't think mass and engine are the most expensive elements on a warship (as compared to weapons, targeting & communication, defense system, armor, and damage control system) :
A cargo or civilian ship is order of magnitude cheaper than a modern warship of the same tonage. Why would it be that different in space?
Fielding civilian or outdated ships retrofitted to have the same signature would be worthwile if it is the only way to get some kind of stealth.

A container ship is much heavier than a modern CV, and I bet it costs much less (I checked, and it seems to be:
105 M$ for a 12.000 TEU container ship, and 3 billions for a CV of the same tonnage, so yes, it is still much lower).

There is also the assumption that both sides could pre-position detectors where it matters, but it really sounds like the defending side would have a huge advantage in this field. Also, the probes would need to communicate with their defense network so that would make them a big point of vulnerability. After all, one side having access to the opponent's communication system has happened several times in the past (WW1 with Russia vs Germany, WW2 after Enigma got cracked, ...), so it could still happen, and be catastrophic for one side.

• Even with engines cold, the heat from radiators attached to life support will be detectable at tens of millions of km away, which is still far too large to get any sort of surprise.

As he points out, life support being a vulnerability, strong AI would sense, and is probably feasible in a near future (I would be surprised it wouldn't arrive before space travel becoming any efficient).
I'm totally OK with roleplaying an AI, or a human brain copied into a machine :D

The thing is, we are ready to lose a ton of efficiency to have submarines instead of proper warship, or to make stealthy aircraft, so I'm pretty sure neutralizing the enemy detection abilities, and anything that would make detection harder would be used, even if it is costly.

 

[Norfleet]

So, "decoys" essentially means the space equivalent of flares and chaff, useful as forms of defensive countermeasure against incoming attack, but not something that changes the fundamental realities of movement vs. distance, or the location of an enemy force.

I don't think mass and engine are the most expensive elements on a warship (as compared to weapons, targeting & communication, defense system, armor, and damage control system) :
A cargo or civilian ship is order of magnitude cheaper than a modern warship of the same tonage. Why would it be that different in space?
Fielding civilian or outdated ships retrofitted to have the same signature would be worthwile if it is the only way to get some kind of stealth.

Cost assumptions can't really be meaningfully assessed without a determination of the setting's rules, but one big difference between a civilian freighter and a warship is the huge gap in acceleration performance required to go somewhere at a relatively leisurely pace vs. to go to war. Ultimately, perhaps the biggest distinction between the two might just be what percentage of your cargo is rocket fuel.

There is also the assumption that both sides could pre-position detectors where it matters, but it really sounds like the defending side would have a huge advantage in this field. Also, the probes would need to communicate with their defense network so that would make them a big point of vulnerability. After all, one side having access to the opponent's communication system has happened several times in the past (WW1 with Russia vs Germany, WW2 after Enigma got cracked, ...), so it could still happen, and be catastrophic for one side.

As we've seen in the real world where this is Happening Right Now, it's rarely "both sides". It's two combatant sides, and interested-but-not-directly-involved third parties. Therefore, you cannot just shoot all of the prying eyes. Russia cannot stop Ukraine from seeing things because Ukraine's eyes belong to NATO, and Russia doesn't want to open fire on NATO assets. There's no reason to believe such situations will not grow ever more messy in SPESS, so you've got all sorts of prying eyes all around the area, and they don't belong to your opponent so you can't shoot them, but your opponent can probably access this data.

As he points out, life support being a vulnerability, strong AI would sense, and is probably feasible in a near future (I would be surprised it wouldn't arrive before space travel becoming any efficient).
I'm totally OK with roleplaying an AI, or a human brain copied into a machine :D

Well, not having humans does eliminate the need to have any kind of space magic for protection from unhealthy acceleration or providing gravity, for sure.

The thing is, we are ready to lose a ton of efficiency to have submarines instead of proper warship, or to make stealthy aircraft, so I'm pretty sure neutralizing the enemy detection abilities, and anything that would make detection harder would be used, even if it is costly.

And as we're seeing, apparently proper warships fare very poorly in an environment where your enemy can see you, even today, and "neutralizing enemy detection abilities" has a cost of "armageddon".

 

[Galdred]

So, "decoys" essentially means the space equivalent of flares and chaff, useful as forms of defensive countermeasure against incoming attack, but not something that changes the fundamental realities of movement vs. distance, or the location of an enemy force.

I don't think mass and engine are the most expensive elements on a warship (as compared to weapons, targeting & communication, defense system, armor, and damage control system) :
A cargo or civilian ship is order of magnitude cheaper than a modern warship of the same tonage. Why would it be that different in space?
Fielding civilian or outdated ships retrofitted to have the same signature would be worthwile if it is the only way to get some kind of stealth.

Cost assumptions can't really be meaningfully assessed without a determination of the setting's rules, but one big difference between a civilian freighter and a warship is the huge gap in acceleration performance required to go somewhere at a relatively leisurely pace vs. to go to war. Ultimately, perhaps the biggest distinction between the two might just be what percentage of your cargo is rocket fuel.

That is the point You can make the setting rules allow for "fake fleet" without stretching reality too far.
You could still use decoys as "fake enemy fleets" if you need though. As I said, as long as you find a convincing reason for ship cost being mostly because of something else than mass, it would work. Even the engine argument they use is somewhat flawed: You could limit the "real ships" engine outputd during the approach phase.
Also, if acceleration is required, that means that movement (compared to range) is not totally meaningless.

There is also the assumption that both sides could pre-position detectors where it matters, but it really sounds like the defending side would have a huge advantage in this field. Also, the probes would need to communicate with their defense network so that would make them a big point of vulnerability. After all, one side having access to the opponent's communication system has happened several times in the past (WW1 with Russia vs Germany, WW2 after Enigma got cracked, ...), so it could still happen, and be catastrophic for one side.

As we've seen in the real world where this is Happening Right Now, it's rarely "both sides". It's two combatant sides, and interested-but-not-directly-involved third parties. Therefore, you cannot just shoot all of the prying eyes. Russia cannot stop Ukraine from seeing things because Ukraine's eyes belong to NATO, and Russia doesn't want to open fire on NATO assets. There's no reason to believe such situations will not grow ever more messy in SPESS, so you've got all sorts of prying eyes all around the area, and they don't belong to your opponent so you can't shoot them, but your opponent can probably access this data.

Indeed, but that means you can work with any of these situations, and justify them in settings: ie, pick the one you prefer : only the opponent has detection, only the player has detection, both side has partial detection network. I agree that the situation where both mutually destroyed their detection network would be harder to justify, but it could still be done: The superior side used to have a mostly full detection network, but the losing side used spies to get the location of a significant part of it and take it down.
I think partial detection could be the most interesting scenario.
QUOTE="Norfleet, post: 7916719, member: 3692"]

The thing is, we are ready to lose a ton of efficiency to have submarines instead of proper warship, or to make stealthy aircraft, so I'm pretty sure neutralizing the enemy detection abilities, and anything that would make detection harder would be used, even if it is costly.

And as we're seeing, apparently proper warships fare very poorly in an environment where your enemy can see you, even today, and "neutralizing enemy detection abilities" has a cost of "armageddon".[/QUOTE]

Indeed, but post-space-armageddon is a good game settings

 

[Norfleet]

You could still use decoys as "fake enemy fleets" if you need though. As I said, as long as you find a convincing reason for ship cost being mostly because of something else than mass, it would work. Even the engine argument they use is somewhat flawed: You could limit the "real ships" engine outputd during the approach phase.

Also, if acceleration is required, that means that movement (compared to range) is not totally meaningless.

Strategic mobility is always relevant: If you can't move enough to actually engage the enemy, there will not be a fight, at least not on your terms. With battlefields of immense size, though, once you've gotten to the fight, it may not matter anymore since nothing you do will move you anywhere else enough to matter in the time the battle will take.

Indeed, but post-space-armageddon is a good game settings

Well, Post-Apocalyptic where Earth has somehow been largely removed from play certainly works, but mutual annihilation in the game isn't a good ending in the game, for sure.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Men.

Pulsar: Lost Colony is on sale right now.

 

[Galdred]

Men.

Pulsar: Lost Colony is on sale right now.

I liked the space phases, but walking around stations was very tedious, with huges corridors of nothing to cross. Has it improved? Is it any good in SP (I'm not sure I can get my friends to go back to it)?

 

[Ranselknulf]

Men.

Pulsar: Lost Colony is on sale right now.

I liked the space phases, but walking around stations was very tedious, with huges corridors of nothing to cross. Has it improved? Is it any good in SP (I'm not sure I can get my friends to go back to it)?

I'm not sure yet. It was on my wishlist and I saw it on sale.

I picked it up but I won't be able to try it until June.

 

[DraQ]

You know, I've been kicking the Space problem around for awhile and I'm starting to think that "Space", "Multiplayer", and "Realistic Sense of Scale" are a pick-at-most-2 situation.

The problem with the third one is that an invisible dot somewhere on the screen makes for poor cinematics.

That's actually easy enough to fix with just presentation, but the main problem is that space is big and getting places takes a lot of time.
So, with realistic scale, multiplayer can only work if you can get all players to time compress in sync.

That means most of possible game concepts are simply out.

Ironically, you could get something like COADE to work in 1-on-1 duels.