Um, because we want to post here? It is exactly because we have issues with ES1 we don't want to see the very same issues in ES2. Especially when it's still some time until combat mechanics will be finalized and there's still some time for adjustments.

And because I've seen a pattern and I know that this approach will result in an incredebly boring and tedious combat system we saw in ES1 and GalCiv1-3.

Combat is finished three-quarter after researching and shipdesign. And the extraslots are also important.

After thinking about this issue for a while, I've come to the realization that while there's not necessarily anything inherently wrong with an RPS system, it is incompatible with the hands-off combat controls Amplitude used in ES1 and is aiming for in ES2.

When you can not tell your "rocks" to go after the enemy "scissors" or your "paper" to go after the enemy "rock," there is no incentive to specialize ships or use diverse fleets. You are best off with an army of all-purpose ships, unless your tech or your industry massively outpaces your enemy, and you can just overwhelm their defenses (which I guess is akin to using "rock" to punch your opponent in the face rather than sticking to the rules.)

Endless Space is a great game. But its combat system sucked.



I don't mind the rock/paper/scissors system. I don't even mind the hard counters. It does mean that in SP, all my ship designs are jack of all trades and follow the same design, game after game, but then, combat is boring so I always hit "autoresolve". I expect the same thing will be what happens in ES2. Why? Because if they want to cater to MP play, the battle resolution must be quick and not rely on player tactics or further input during the resolution. Otherwise MP play will be a waste of time for the players not resolving a combat.



In a SP game, combat might as well be simple numbers. Battle is actually an area of the game where players will spend so little time of their time, but will be a high troll attraction area. So just simplify it away entirely is my advice to the devs, and tell the players you did it so they can concentrate on being a God Emperor and not a master sergeant getting his fire teams to shoot when he wants and how he wants. Making it all about the numbers will let MP games run faster, and greatly speed up SP play. So everyone would win.

I had never the feeling that there were no counters at working, it is everytime reproducible, but more like an Tensor because the special slots are also important for defensiv. First time i saw the cards , I thought "what.." but the perks are made in Percent and Numbers and for specific weapons, so it doesn´t make sense to push the Laser in a round for which you have Installed your Kinetics.

Romeo wrote:
I agree whole-heartedly. One of the things that could've been a solution is to have dissimilar weapons and defenses. Instead of Beam = Shield, Kinetic = Deflector, would've been interesting to see Shields stop both Beam and Laser, but have a limited amount of absorbsion before failing. Have Kinetic weapons able to attack, or take out missiles (Not both). Just do something interesting! Because the circle of "strong against; weak against" really sucks to play with.



Hopefully the set amount of modules will help work against the hard-counters too (Hoping).

Dissimilar weapons and defenses would definitely solve the issue, while still providing some clear benefits.

For example, if we think about the ES1 battle system, if deflectors offered a percentage of damage absorption while shields stopped a fixed amount of damage each turn, then shields would clearly be better against faster firing weapons like kinetics and to a lesser extent lasers, but not entirely useless against missiles delivering one powerful hit at the end of the phase.

Slashman wrote:
The reason for the 3 attack/3 counter system is basically ease of implementation by the developers. Not more fun. Not more stylish. Just extremely economical from a developer standpoint. It has no direct benefit to the player apart from an easier auto-resolve.



If the whole point of games like these is to let players decide how they want to play, why is a more restrictive system better? As a player I don't want to just choose my ship weapons based on the exact armor/defense type my enemy is using. I want to choose weapons that I think are cool. I want to see some awesome super weapons in the later game. So if I go into energy weapons, sure I'll start with lasers...but I want to finish with neutron beams and anti-matter cannons. I want combat to be fun. Hard counters are not fun. They're just boring.



No matter how cinematic you want to make combat look, if it is just the same 3 weapon and defense types time after time, it will still get stale fast.

I agree whole-heartedly. One of the things that could've been a solution is to have dissimilar weapons and defenses. Instead of Beam = Shield, Kinetic = Deflector, would've been interesting to see Shields stop both Beam and Laser, but have a limited amount of absorbsion before failing. Have Kinetic weapons able to attack, or take out missiles (Not both). Just do something interesting! Because the circle of "strong against; weak against" really sucks to play with.



Hopefully the set amount of modules will help work against the hard-counters too (Hoping).

Romeo wrote:
I also have to say, I don't find that at all either. If anything I found post-Disharmony more complex than Vanilla.



That said, I agree with the desire to see the hard counters tempered somewhat. As it stands in the first game, bringing the wrong weapon-type by chance is basically a defeat waiting to happen.

The reason for the 3 attack/3 counter system is basically ease of implementation by the developers. Not more fun. Not more stylish. Just extremely economical from a developer standpoint. It has no direct benefit to the player apart from an easier auto-resolve.



If the whole point of games like these is to let players decide how they want to play, why is a more restrictive system better? As a player I don't want to just choose my ship weapons based on the exact armor/defense type my enemy is using. I want to choose weapons that I think are cool. I want to see some awesome super weapons in the later game. So if I go into energy weapons, sure I'll start with lasers...but I want to finish with neutron beams and anti-matter cannons. I want combat to be fun. Hard counters are not fun. They're just boring.



No matter how cinematic you want to make combat look, if it is just the same 3 weapon and defense types time after time, it will still get stale fast.

Nasarog wrote:
Yes and no. It had many more, but they were all of the same 3 varieties.

I also have to say, I don't find that at all either. If anything I found post-Disharmony more complex than Vanilla.



That said, I agree with the desire to see the hard counters tempered somewhat. As it stands in the first game, bringing the wrong weapon-type by chance is basically a defeat waiting to happen.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
It did? I'm pretty sure it didn't.

Yes and no. It had many more, but they were all of the same 3 varieties.

Keymaster89 wrote:
And i completely agree... we have to expose our concerns, but after we know the facts...

Why?

Keymaster89 wrote:
People are complaining without knowing how the game will really be, projecting their past frustration of ES on ES2, overriding the devs explanetion that contain similarities on ES with their idea of what ES2 should be...

That's the whole idea of Forums - to express your opinion to the devs, to prevent things you don't like to happen in the next installment, so you can get as much fun and enjoyment from it as possible.

Nasarog wrote:
ES1 pre Disharmony had many more weapons and defenses, but people complained and wanted things streamlined.

It did? I'm pretty sure it didn't.

While I admit that some word choices might not have been perfectly neutral, I think this discussion has been far from gratuitous flaming and ignorance so far, compared to some other heated arguments I've witnessed on the forum, and especially not compared to the internet in general.

Also, I believe this kind of discussion is exactly why Amplitude opened this forum section in the first place. If they didn'T want us to discuss what we'd like to see in ES2, and what we liked or disliked about ES1, they could have simply locked the subsection and only allowed replies to the GDD threads.



As far as the "laziness" of rock-paper-scissors mechanics are concerned: I don't think the rock-paper-scissors mechanics themselves are inherently lazy, but they are often picked as a go-to solution for combat systems, and then often not implemented well. A system like that does not fit all themes, and personally I don't feel like it fits space battles.

It should also be noted that only the battlecards in ES1 were a proper rock-paper-scissors system. The weapons instead presented three separate systems of hard counters.

But as you already said, the GDD already hints that they'll be moving away from that. I'd still like more information on how weapons and defenses work, and I'm hoping those will be addressed in the ship design document.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
If you look at the original post date, this thread was started before the Battle GDD was released.

Furthermore, "wait until we see the complete picture" is exactly the wrong approach to making the devs aware of issues. We need to bring up our concerns as soon as possible, so that the devs can think about them.

And i completely agree... we have to expose our concerns, but after we know the facts... what i mean with "final picture" is the explanetion of the whole system, the ship design GDD, since ship design is one of the 3 layers of this new system devs are putting togheter...

The fact that this post opened even before Battle GDD confirm this even further.

People are complaining without knowing how the game will really be, projecting their past frustration of ES on ES2, overriding the devs explanetion that contain similarities on ES with their idea of what ES2 should be...

I'm not against critics, i'm against gratuitous flaming and ignorance.

Before accuse devs for "laziness" listen to what they have to say... (not talking at you The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales...)

Keymaster89 wrote:
Seriously... why this post is even here?

This is ES2 not ES...

If all of you have issues with how ES designed battles, go to the ES section...

Yes, ES2 will use the rock-paper-scissors mechanic, but at a totally different level, almost marginal...

I don't see what you guys are you worrying about... we have to see the final picture before start criticize.

I like ES battles, they are cool, simple to understand and simple to drive... it focus the player on the long term strategy without leaving you choiceless in battle... Kinda like a real emperor that moves fleets and not ships.

If you look at the original post date, this thread was started before the Battle GDD was released.

Furthermore, "wait until we see the complete picture" is exactly the wrong approach to making the devs aware of issues. We need to bring up our concerns as soon as possible, so that the devs can think about them.

In Endless Legend, the combat system was completely redone just a short time before release, which must have been a massive work load for the devs, and left the balance of the game in a very uncertain state.

I certainly don't want a repeat of that situation.



However, I do like Amplitude's design philosophy of hands-off battles to keep the focus on empire management.

Now, I'll throw in my two cents about player-controlled battles.

I love a well-executed tactical battle system, but I believe there is a time and a place for that. 4X games are not always the time and place for tactical battles, as they can heavily shift the focus away from the actual empire management. If players can minimize casualties and possibly win battles stacked heavily against them, they'll probably spend a lot of time in the battles (especially against AI).

I think of Amplitude's style of battles not as a "butchered tactical battle" but as "4x combat with more player input." And I believe as long as they implement some sort of targeting priorities, then strange weapons with special effects are definitely possible in this system (e.g. Tell the flanking flotilla to focus their fire on the enemy Dreadnoughts to take them out with EMP weapons).



And while I agree with Slashman that StarDrive 2 was a pretty good game (put 50 hours into it), and the battles were good, they were not great, held back by UI problems and bugs, and I ended up playing even the most trivial of battles, because I knew that completely outmatched fleet of ships I could vaporize in one volley would somehow manage to seriously damage or destroy some of my ships if I picked auto-resolve (a problem by no means specific to SD2, as pretty much all 4x games suffer from it).

ES1 had one serious problem with combat system - Rock, Paper, Scissors. Laser-Kinetic-Missile weapons had a hard counter in a way of Shield-Armor-ECM.

In theory it should provide plyers with diverse options to build his fleet and countermeasures to enemy weapon buildup. In practice every war turned into a gamble. You either managed to choose "right" branch of weapons and defenses and deal crushing defeat to the enemy, or suffered the same fate when AI came into battle with hard counters to your weaponry.

That is an age old conflict of "Soft counters" vs "hard counters". Afterseveral parties there were two ways to succeed in war:

1. Check enemy weapons and instantly retrofit your fleet with hard counters.

2. Make Jack-of-all-Trades, Master-of-None kind of fleet.

Random nature of fleet buildup almost eradicated any option to specialize, to have a fleet with the best missiles or lasers and devolved ship building into a mass ofmediocricies or constant retrofits to counter most recent threats. IMO that was a bad design decision as it forced player to adapt their strategies in a wrong way. And by wrong I mean they used one flaws of game mechanic to compensate for another ones. Same fate befell on Galactic Civilizations II and III, with repetitive and boring combat. After lots of parties in ES1 I found that refitting and designing a ship was the most tedious and boring aspect of entire game. Because no matter how well I design my ships in the end the most versalite and effective will be 1 laser 1 rocket 1 kinetic with 1 armor 1 sjield and 1 ecm. So after a while I stopped caring about ships alltogeter and simply pressed automate design and built swarms of expendable vessels. Same happened with my friends as their plays in ES1 progressed.



There is an example of a solution that stood the test of time - Master of Orion II. While decades old it still gave us great option that provided huge variety of ship buildup. One Armor, Many Weapons.

We always had Armor, shield and internal structure(could be counter towards armor most of the time) and lots of weapons. There were ways to add special system to lightly improve or alter armor or shields(like make them recharge faster) but that was not stackable, so it was not possible to have dozens of "shield rechargers" or expensive additional armor platings like you can attach dozens of ECM in ES1; most of the special systems had unique modifiers that altered how existing weapons function.

That way, players had only to check if their ship were up to date, without refitting entire fleet for each combat encounter.

Seriously... why this post is even here?

This is ES2 not ES...

If all of you have issues with how ES designed battles, go to the ES section...

Yes, ES2 will use the rock-paper-scissors mechanic, but at a totally different level, almost marginal...

I don't see what you guys are you worrying about... we have to see the final picture before start criticize.

I like ES battles, they are cool, simple to understand and simple to drive... it focus the player on the long term strategy without leaving you choiceless in battle... Kinda like a real emperor that moves fleets and not ships.

ES1 pre Disharmony had many more weapons and defenses, but people complained and wanted things streamlined.

ojustme wrote:
Well, i guess this rock-paper-scissors thing was what made me drop the game completely. I haven't even finished one game porperly, AFAIR, contrary to the endless legend which i'm 100 hours into.

So i guess this whole battle system should really be driven away from this concept. I don't think i'm the only player, for whom it's a massive joy-breaking factor.

It is a boring as hell system is the real problem for me. Rock-paper-scissors with 3 weapons and 3 defenses represents the same lazy design philosophy that says 'I don't want to spend any time making combat really interesting because auto-resolve.' It's also the limiting factor on having really cool sci-fi weapons in a space game. Why you'd want to do that, I have no idea. It's eerie how proud Stardock are of their boring space combat system in Gal Civ and now we're getting something similar again in ES 2.



It's just sad as hell that the only 2 devs to actually have the testicular fortitude to step outside that boring box are Kerberos Productions and Zero Sum Games (a one-man dev studio who still managed to make a decent 4x with probably 1/20 the budget of Amplitude for ES 2).

Well, i guess this rock-paper-scissors thing was what made me drop the game completely. I haven't even finished one game porperly, AFAIR, contrary to the endless legend which i'm 100 hours into.

So i guess this whole battle system should really be driven away from this concept. I don't think i'm the only player, for whom it's a massive joy-breaking factor.

The problem, in my optinion and experience, is that all three weapon choices result in practically the same result. Combat resolved in a same way no matter what weapon branch you selected. Only protection and, so lesser measure, tactics chosen. With singular protection, be it shield\HP, or only HP, not only weapon type specialization will play bigger role, but smaller ship types will at last play some role. Rule of the thumb in ES1 was build "biggest ships once available". For example smaller "Missile ships" could be useful as long-range supportm, while more armored capital ships that can close in to the foe could utilize kinetic advantage. That is not possible with hard counter system, sadly.

I was thinking that missiles should also be countered be kinetics but be able to launch from the other side of the system or before a battle starts. That way the most expensive have the capacity to project power without putting themselves in danger, but cheaper fleets can still defend themselves, and take out more expensive missile fleets if they can manage to get close. In this way all three weapon types will change the characteristics of the fleets that use them.

Having 5 weapon and defense types would probably end up resulting in fleets blowing each other up all the time, and Big Space Leadthrowers/Lazors/Technobabble Torpedoes work way better than whatever 5 weapon types you'd have. I think having beams/energy blast weapons and shields power dependant while kinetics and missiles are more expensive does sound interesting, maybe all defenses could be power dependant, because Deflectors would need power too and Flak could just as well be crappy point-defense beams(Flak should also defend against Bombers/Fighters anyway, just makes sense).

Also, what if there were 2 Main Weapon Types, Beams and Kinetics, and you had Missiles and Fighters/Bombers to augment them and maybe only start doing real damage once their shields are depleted or something?



I dunno

Personally, I had no issues with it.

I think adding more weapon types will not solve fundamental problem of a hard counters. It still will be the same random gamble on what AI will take just with slightly less options to retrofit your ships. Anyway you will still end up with hard couters to enemy weapon loadout.

I think one thing which may work wonders is to expand it into a rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock, with 5 offensive and defensive options. That makes it less likely to have a slam-dunk happen on either way.

Each weapon/defense system would be optimal against one, pessimal against one, and average against two.



That would make minmaxing a loser's proposition.



Also, one of the defeating stuff in the game is the super-high cost of refitting ships.



It should be possible to have military surplus and repair ships which retool the weapons systems. This way a fleet would be able to adapt itself more easily after a failed encounter. It should still take time and resources, but not as much as the ES1 way, where the player would end up with fleets and fleets which do peewee damage against just the right enemy.



TL;DR: Make the retrofitting system more fluid; cost less and take less time, and possible to do it while the fleet is away from owned systems.

Yeah I don't really like how they balance the weapons, they feel fundamentally similar.



What if lasers and shields were both powered by the ships reactor, the amount of damage dealt and absorbed was based on how much power is diverted to each system (by battle cards). For example an early laser might do 2 damage per mega joule the next level would be 3 per mega joule and the shields also behave in this way. That way you wouldn't have to keep stacking these modules to increase their effect, on the other hand you couldn't do that if you wanted to either. These systems are the easiest way to bring firepower into a fight and they might win you a few battles but if you want more firepower you have to bring more expensive kinetic and missile weapons as well because they aren't constrained by the amount of energy the ship produces.

From the [ES2] GDD 2 - Overview:

SHIP DESIGN



Rationale

The goal is not to expand the time required for ship design, but to make it more interesting and allow for better choices and more personalization. A battle will not be won by ship design, but it will play an important role in the outcome when combined with the ‘play’ tactical system for pre-battle planning.

Seems like that your problem is already addressed

I'd like to throw my voice behind this. I've never liked hard counters in any game, since they are prone to leaving a player with a feeling of "Yup, we're boned" just because he didn't prepare for one specific item in the enemy's arsenal. I much prefer soft counters in which one bonus subtly counteracts another, or one option is simply a more effective defense than another, without completely negating the opponents advantage.

In my experience, hard counters don't allow a lot of flexibility in player choices.