Shuma said:
Uh, not to derail the fun-train here, but the statement about Magic mechanics is totally wrong. Either the people you were playing against misunderstood how the stack actually works, or they conned you into believing something to gain a tiny temporary advantage.
Once you pay a cost in Magic, that effect happens even if the source of the effect is removed (not true for the target of the effect. In that case, it "fizzles"). So big deal, his effect happens first and he kills your Tim. Your ability STILL FIRES and you kill his (or whatever else you were shooting at, as long as it wasn't the Tim itself, then it would fizzle.
I know I'm totally missing the point of what you were saying, but uhh, well let's just say I know the rules of Magic pretty well.
I simply recalled 'first in-last out' wrong, we're referring to something that happened 12 years ago. You're right, both of our tim's died. I had just forgotten that the damage 'floats around' on the stack' in the moment I was telling that story. I still thought it was stupid that even though I acted first my card got removed at the same time. Then again, I was 13 or some shit.
There isn't even a stack anymore is there?
Raapys said:
What exactly is so good about the war-stuff in it anyway? I'm pretty sure both MoO and SpaceEmpires have more tactical weapons, systems and defenses. Is it the artificial ship limit in combat and fixed ship roles that people get all excited over?
Don't get me wrong, I thought the combat was fine. But it's not as if it really did anything particularly great.
I would say that for me, it's the vast number of ways that you can manage your battleplan. It's kind of hard to explain in concrete terms w/o getting long-winded, but what the fuck I'll get long-winded.
For instance, a common strategy in the early game is to put a weapon called an 'emitter' on a destroyer class ship. Emitters do a pretty good amount of damage vs hulls,
never miss, and have an extremely short range. Their fire rate is not impressive but not slow as Christmas either. What's cool about that is that not only do they work well for their intended function of close-range brawling, but they actually make a decent auxillary point defense due to the fact that they never miss, and if you have a full array of emitters on a DE, there will only be a very small span where it's not able to fire on incoming weapons. So, the emitter is an extremely good early game weapon in spite of it's humble stats on paper.
Beyond the fact that there is a nice 'backdoor use' for almost every weapon in the game like that, you have the way that different weapon systems interact with each other. The complex ordnance launchers in particular allow you to really direct the way that the battle turns out, and really force your opponent to come up with good ideas to get things on their terms.
One of my very favorite strategies is to run two point defense hard-points on every droneship destroyer, then give them a UV beamer as a main weapon . Then two COLs(which also double as point defense cruisers), two heavy laser cruisers running no point defense at all, and a flagship(usually a shielded missile cruiser outfitted with corrosive missiles(if I had the RNG that let me research them at least) on the big hardpoints). Now, from the very get-go, this gives me a lot of drones that are immediately harassing the enemy and pushing them toward me. At the same time I'm going to be deploying mines remotely with the COLs, but the key is that I'll deploy them close enough that I can shoot past them with heavy combat lasers, which have a narrow line of fire, long range, extremely slow firing rate, and pretty much unbeatable damage. Using a strategy like this obviously helps you mitigate those disadvantages by forcing the enemy player to take big damage through the minefield or work their way around and get hit by the HCL several times, which is usually even worse.
Essnetially, what I am getting at by that example, is that there is a pretty sophisticated game of measures and countermeasures that come up. You also aren't looking at the individual stats of any particular weapon so much as you are looking at how those weapons will serve in a fleet. I think this gives the game an almost endless level of playability if you have a few friends who have the time to sit around and play it with you. Things are always a little different every game, and everybody tries to stay one step ahead of what they think you are going to do as a result of what happened last time.