tiagocc0 said:
Shemar said:
The game is way too old for me to remember details but what I would want to see:
- Power management between speed-maneuvering/shields and weapons (also applies to ship building considerations)
Could you please elaborate more?
I can see it like you would change your power from weapons to shield or engines or any possible combination of the three.
The basic concept is that each ship has one or more power units (think generators) and one or more energy storage units (think batteries). Then each action of manouvering, firing, or absorbing hits with the shields costs power. At the start of a fight ships have fully charged storage units so they are very effective, but if the battle draws long, and they use power faster than they produce it, they run out of stored energy and have to use whatever their power unit is able to produce each turn. That also opens up the game to tactics of cooperating ships covering each other, one saving energy the other going all out, kind of like a tank/striker combo. Also ship designs could be either for quick engagements (small energy production and storage, high weapons) or more adept at longer fights (better energy units, less weapons).
If done right it also fixes the long battles problem as ships will not have power to keep their shields up! They would have to start taking serious damage or disengage.
Yes, I plan on avoiding this approach as this kills micromanagement, maybe at the later part of the game, after researching an expensive technology you would be able to form fleets were they would stack together to represent a very organized group of ships, but I'm still thinking about it.
This would help in the case where you have hundreds of ships and you have to control everyone of them.
I would say avoid the situation where there is a battle with 200 (or 20 for that matter) battleships/carriers. Scale the resource costs to where naval engagements are on the scale of WWI/WWII fleet sizes, where hight value units like battleships and carriers are really high value and not something that you produce 10 of each turn.
Smaller units like fighters can be grouped into flights of 4-12, since the damage model for them would be one hit-one kill (uneccesary complication to model more detailed damage on that level). That shoudl keep things quite manageable.
Shemar said:
No problem, I like this concept, but I don't like games where you have to build a ship to improve the fleet overall shield performance, then one ship to improve the speed, then one ship to do something else. This becomes boring very fast.
If there are several types of ships that vary in size and type they will all be used for combat purposes.
That is also what I had in mind. See above my note on fleet sizes and HVUs. You don't want your carriers to be exposed, you want them screened by smaller ships that are not only better at intercepting incoming small craft attacks but also a lot less painfuil to lose. The same way a modern navy would be near uselss if all it had was carriers and battleships, I would like to see that kind if balance in the game also.
I was thinking, maybe I could skip some steps in the development process and try to create what would be the tactical combat for ships. I could make a ship editor, a weapon editor and a component editor, all very simple, so we could use them in a simple application were we would test the tactical combat.
I would just need to define the basic aspects like engine, shield and weapons, then movement and attack. After that we would just tweak the values.
As we test it we could go on and try to implement more things like marines and ways to capture a ship, ways to fire at a chosen component of a ship and so on.
What do you think, would you like to test it?
That would shift the game a lot closer to where it would be a dream come true. A space naval battles tactical game that will be eventually expanded to a space empire building game. I would definitely be willing to beta test and consult on the combat system and I think an approcah of get to a playable fight the simplest possible way and then start adding features from there is the best.