I think I found a good option: players have influence for battle, but they don't need to control fleet like in RTS game.

So, at the beginning we divide fleet for smaller groups, then we make them to fly in a specific direction and follow some types of behavior, like ,,tank'', ,,kite'' ,,attack from distance''. In battle, we can only order ships to fly another way. But what they do, who they attack, it's controlled by AI. And another suggestion: if fleet has an admiral, he/she/it should stay on a certain ship or appear with his/her/its own, and be controllable as normal unit (like in EL).

Mithrill wrote:
I think I found a good option: players have influence for battle, but they don't need to control fleet like in RTS game.

So, at the beginning we divide fleet for smaller groups, then we make them to fly in a specific direction and follow some types of behavior, like ,,tank'', ,,kite'' ,,attack from distance''. In battle, we can only order ships to fly another way. But what they do, who they attack, it's controlled by AI. And another suggestion: if fleet has an admiral, he/she/it should stay on a certain ship or appear with his/her/its own, and be controllable as normal unit (like in EL).

Isn't that(Except maybe the Admiral Ship thing) literally how they plan to do it anyway?

Wow, I am liking what's planned for the combat here. I was hoping there was going to be more strategy implemented. I also like the fact it's not being totally user controlled like an RTS title.

Some of my favorite strategy games utilize what's basically the "god mode". You give your troops/ships general orders to follow, and they take care of the rest.

Glad to see that it won't be like typical RTS games; prefer to enjoy the adventure to the unknown and managing the empire.

Possibility wrote:
The whole pretending to be an emperor or president thing makes no sense, you have far more power than that. Since when has a US president ordered a million people to move to a new state (or migrate to a new planet), or ordered a company to build a new factory, or personally designed a new battle ship. Presidents cant do any of that stuff, not even congress, at best they create new policies or tax incentives or issue request for bids from the private industrial war machine to submit new designs. The president spends his day to day dealing with congress and political issues and trying to get re-elected, none of which you will find in this game or would even be enjoyable. Its quite obvious the player has the role of a god in which he can manipulate individual people, businesses, and entire fleets of war ships to do his exact biding with no repercussions from the Judiciary, Congress, the military, or the American people that would revolt and have civil war against the government if they tried to be so intrusive in their lives.



So if you are clearly some kind of human being controlling god for the whole strategic portion, why for the battles are you limited to being an admiral sitting back at the pentagon (not even on the battle field). There is a big difference from playing as an all powerful god, to a mere desk-jockey admiral, and that transition is jarring and ruins the game.

The short answer is: It is a crutch to save dev time. I can reasonably understand this. Making a decent real time tactical combat is like a separate game in and of itself.



The whole argument of you're an emperor so you shouldn't do X or Y is weak and silly. In Sword of the Stars, the manual simply states that when you rule from the strategic portion of the game, you play the emperor. Making decisions at that level. When you engage in combat, you play a fleet captain. Why you can only play a single role in a game as expansive as a 4x is beyond me. In fact, if you pay attention in Sword of the Stars, what you are called by the in-game voice- overs differs depending on what you're doing. In the research screen, the humans refer to you as 'Director', in tactical combat (and when you move fleets in the strategic view), you are referred to as 'Captain'.



The sad fact is that very few developers can do tactical RT combat in a 4x well. The SotS developers are themselves Homeworld/Homeworld 2 veterans. SotS has NO dicerolls in its combat, everything is physics based. I'm still hoping that someday we see another SotS without a publisher crapping all over it.

Romeo wrote:
I would also further add that if you do want that kind of gameplay, you should give Sins of a Solar Empire a try. The empire aspect isn't TBS, but you can manually toggle the speed of the game in singleplayer to make it like that. It's had a few expansions and quite a helping of mod support.

I love Sins of a Solar Empire. But it must be said that its tactical combat has very little to do with actual "tactics". It is still a macro game and microing is limited to things like abilities. While flanking and attacking from the rear provides some advantage in the sense of avoiding some weapons' arc of fire, truth be told that Sins battles end up mostly being a slugging match between 2 huge fleets with hundreds of ships.



It is misleading, to me, to call it "tactical combat." It is still fun, mind you, but I do not find a place for it in ES2, which imo should be focused almost entirely on empire management.

To be fair, I've always preferred macro-RTS games (Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Command & Conquer, the first Dawn of War) to micro-RTS games (Starcraft II, Dawn of War II). That said, I always considered SoaSE to straddle that line. Yes, you can be somewhat macro reliant, but if you go up against a guy kiting you, taking over key ships, using abilities at key times, he'll absolutely murder your fleet.



I also agree with your second paragraph: An RTS game within has no place in Endless Space. This isn't Homeworld, the focus should always be on maintaining your empire.

SoaSE could be kinda-sorta classified as a RT4X game, and is a great game - too bad the game engine is an aging 32-bit single-threaded device; it was the right call for development at the time, but does not scale to modern hardware.

That's one more game I eagerly await for a second iteration, which is still not in the horizon unfortunately.



There is microing potential to exploit in the battles, given that it is RT, but those wouldn't quite fit ES2 IMO.



A game i would like to highlight as having an interesting model, more closely relatable:



GRATUITOUS SPACE BATTLES.



It is all about pre-combat setup.



You spend a huge time selecting your fleet, and weapons and equipment loaded in each ship.

You can select weapons better against shields, or hull, or armor.

You can set up Point-Defense Systems to take down incoming missiles.

You can even set up decoy missiles to reduce PDS effectiveness.

The player must generate enough energy to power all weapons, systems and engines.

The player can load the ships full of armor, but the ships will slow down A LOT.

The player can set rules of engagement to try to keep a defined distance from the other ships, resulting in beautiful dances.



On extreme scenarios some battles can be deadlocked and result in a draw, or having the defense just right against the enemy can result in a gratifying obliteration of an enemy incapable of denting your defense.



Speaking of which, one thing I would love to see in ES2 is the ability of having ships swap equipment without the all-or nothing 'retrofit'.



The player should be able to have more than one e.g. weapon and systems loadout and pick one prior to battle, to be able to skew the odds to his favor.



There is a lot, lot, lot of possible micromanagement pre-battle on GSB, but the battle is completely hands-off.



While ES2 might not go so far as 'completely hands off', the amount of exposed options in GSB is nice source of inspiration to what the player should be able to do pre-battle, with only 'tactics cards' playable during the battle.

What we need for earth battles is just a little overview of the armies on both side and then they just rush toward each other in a little animation. (you can use this gif I made it myself and check out my deviant art page i'm gonna make more of thoose http://psychotubbies.deviantart.com/)

Brazilian_Joe wrote:
...Speaking of which, one thing I would love to see in ES2 is the ability of having ships swap equipment without the all-or nothing 'retrofit'.



The player should be able to have more than one e.g. weapon and systems loadout and pick one prior to battle, to be able to skew the odds to his favor.



There is a lot, lot, lot of possible micromanagement pre-battle on GSB, but the battle is completely hands-off.



While ES2 might not go so far as 'completely hands off', the amount of exposed options in GSB is nice source of inspiration to what the player should be able to do pre-battle, with only 'tactics cards' playable during the battle.

An interesting idea in this vein would be to choose your ammunition or different buffs for defense prior to battle. So a missile ship would still fire only missile but you could choose different type of missiles for each phase. This way you'd avoid the retrofit issue, but still be able to somewhat customize your attack and defense.

Different Missiles, also means you have different kinetic projectiles (Solid vs Sandcaster rounds etc.). Beam weapons would take massive retrofitting.

In theory, a beam weapon could simply use different optics and discharge rates to affect its output. In fact, I'd argue it'd be the most logically possible of the three to change. I like the idea though, would be a nifty little addition to the battle system.

Honestly layout swapping sounds like a really cool idea for an affinity, but changing warheads/shells/emitters would be really cool. Lots of potential diversity and immersion to be had with that in my opinion.

This all sounds like great changes, I liked the card style system, I wish there was a bit more depth to it, but I was never bogged down with spending ages in each fight.

I worry if the new system takes too long, I will spend forever in each battle slowing the game play down greatly. I for one like feeling like an empire leader controlling how my race grows, to me I don't want to feel like a battle commander each time a fight goes on.

"oh look two scout ships found each other! I will command this great battle personally"

Frogsquadron wrote:
Coming from Endless Space, there are of course some lessons we’ve carried on. One of those lessons are the idea of how scale and context of battles are very important. This means that the ships will follow a completely different scale from Endless Space. Going between each ship size will feature an around 3 times increase in size. This means several hundred fighters could fit inside a large ship! Not that we will be able to put that many fighters in any one battle considering the graphical upgrade.

Looking forward to this. Most space games have totally no respect towards scale. Even popular top rated space games like Gal Civ or even Homeworld, regardless of 4x, RTS, space sim have no idea whatsoever on the subject of scale.



Theres only 2 games i've seen that managed to showcase the true meaning of scale, X3 and Sword of the Stars I/II.



A fighter is tiny, 10m long while a destroyer is literally 10-20 times that length. A carrier which houses 20-50 fighters is 700m long because it needs to be that long to house that much fighters. Lots of games just don't get it. Yea it may just be a small detail but to me scale is probably one of the most crucial aspects of space battles and its not just about size, its also about turret counts, crew capacity, module count etc. How can you have a big ass 500m Destroyer or Heavy Cruiser that carries 1-2 heavy turrets/spinal mounts and 3-4 small turrets for PD. What? That much armaments is not gonna save the ship, so many blind spots, too little PD etc.



Sword of the Stars is the perfect example. Their Cruisers(smallest ships) can mount 5-10 turrets, their Dreadnoughts(1 class up) are 3 times bigger and mounts 30-40 turrets, while their Leviathans(biggest class) are 3-5 times bigger than a Dreadnought or 9-15 times bigger than a Cruiser and can deploy a whopping 70-120 turrets. Each turret able to track targets independently including missiles, fighters and bigger ships in addition to realistic projectile/beam physics, yes, projectiles from mass drivers can miss or graze, beams can "miss" and sweep across the ship instead of focusing to punch through the armor when the opponent does evasive maneuvers. Their Leviathan Carriers can carry 40-50 Battle Riders(i.e Fighters)or maybe more iirc.



Their definition of scale is pretty much epic and realistic.



Green Box = Cruiser

Blue Box = Dreadnought

Red Box = Leviathan(well, its slanted in the screenshot so it looks smaller)

Battle Riders(Fighters) = LOL, too small to indicate but point is, you can fit 50-100 fighters together with crew & equipment in a carrier, realistically.





Turrets, theres more underneath and on starboard side of the ship too.

Red Box = Heavy Turret

Green Box = Medium Turret

Orange Box = Light Turret(mainly for Point Defense)





Sots battles. How space battles are supposed to look like, syfy style.

deathcoy wrote:
Looking forward to this. Most space games have totally no respect towards scale. Even popular top rated space games like Gal Civ or even Homeworld, regardless of 4x, RTS, space sim have no idea whatsoever on the subject of scale.



Theres only 2 games i've seen that managed to showcase the true meaning of scale, X3 and Sword of the Stars I/II.



A fighter is tiny, 10m long while a destroyer is literally 10-20 times that length. A carrier which houses 20-50 fighters is 700m long because it needs to be that long to house that much fighters. Lots of games just don't get it. Yea it may just be a small detail but to me scale is probably one of the most crucial aspects of space battles and its not just about size, its also about turret counts, crew capacity, module count etc. How can you have a big ass 500m Destroyer or Heavy Cruiser that carries 1-2 heavy turrets/spinal mounts and 3-4 small turrets for PD. What? That much armaments is not gonna save the ship, so many blind spots, too little PD etc.



Sword of the Stars is the perfect example. Their Cruisers(smallest ships) can mount 5-10 turrets, their Dreadnoughts(1 class up) are 3 times bigger and mounts 30-40 turrets, while their Leviathans(biggest class) are 3-5 times bigger than a Dreadnought or 9-15 times bigger than a Cruiser and can deploy a whopping 70-120 turrets. Each turret able to track targets independently including missiles, fighters and bigger ships in addition to realistic projectile/beam physics, yes, projectiles from mass drivers can miss or graze, beams can "miss" and sweep across the ship instead of focusing to punch through the armor when the opponent does evasive maneuvers. Their Leviathan Carriers can carry 40-50 Battle Riders(i.e Fighters)or maybe more iirc.



Their definition of scale is pretty much epic and realistic.



Green Box = Cruiser

Blue Box = Dreadnought

Red Box = Leviathan(well, its slanted in the screenshot so it looks smaller)

Battle Riders(Fighters) = LOL, too small to indicate but point is, you can fit 50-100 fighters together with crew & equipment in a carrier, realistically.





Turrets, theres more underneath and on starboard side of the ship too.

Red Box = Heavy Turret

Green Box = Medium Turret

Orange Box = Light Turret(mainly for Point Defense)





Sots battles. How space battles are supposed to look like, syfy style.

Scale and Appropraite Turretage(Not that there where really turrets in ES1, but as seen in that video, there will be in ES2) would be really nice, maybe if Fighters/Bombers would make a returns they should require more weight and also have a hard size based limit that makes more sense than special modules where you could have 2 squadrons of fighters on a tiny destroyer, though too powerful capital ships would potentially make smaller ships underpowered again later, and also the battle in your last picture looks like a total mess making my eyes hurt, though that may just be poor beam/explosions/other effect design, but anyway, the real question is, what is that space lazor kraken in your first example picture?

Sinnaj63 wrote:
Scale and Appropraite Turretage(Not that there where really turrets in ES1, but as seen in that video, there will be in ES2) would be really nice, maybe if Fighters/Bombers would make a returns they should require more weight and also have a hard size based limit that makes more sense than special modules where you could have 2 squadrons of fighters on a tiny destroyer, though too powerful capital ships would potentially make smaller ships underpowered again later, and also the battle in your last picture looks like a total mess making my eyes hurt, though that may just be poor beam/explosions/other effect design, but anyway, the real question is, what is that space lazor kraken in your first example picture?

Smaller ships can remain relevant if they introduce the correct mechanics. In Sots for example, there is a late-game tech/research that unlocks spinal mounts for Cruisers and Battle Riders(Fighters) that can equip anti-capital weaponry, trade off being these spinal mounts are fixed and not turreted thus engagement tactics is crucial too since they have poor focus accuracy and need a lot of maneuvering. The game also has command points mechanics per fleet so player can't spam millions of Dreadnoughts. For the same command points, 9-12 Cruisers with anti-capital spinal mounts can destroy 3 Dreadnoughts equipped with their own fighter compliments. Another alternative is targeting subsystems, in Sots you can target the turrets, certain weaponry and ships are good for destroying the enemy turrets and PD, strip the Capital ship and take your time to finish him off after.



Last pic has loads of fighters and missiles, so the PD is triggering like mad. If you zoom out it'll look much more tame and its using the sweetfx mod so the beams and projectiles are more defined.



That Kraken thingy is a Suulka. Its Leviathan class, part organic and part mechanical. Players fondly call them space whales. They're basically an offshoot ancient, powerful and titanic race that woke up from hibernation and bent on galactic annihilation. If you play as the Zuul race who are actually bio-engineered by Suulka to serve them, you can summon these Krakens. They're like a Kraken wearing an Armor or Battlesuit, flesh on the inside while their "Battlesuit" has tons of turrets for defence manned by their Zuul underlings and they have tentacles, broadside tentacles are used to smash/grab ships while frontal tentacles houses anti-capital beams. They also have psionic abilities like creating a temporary phalanx shield that blocks all missiles/projectiles, limited teleportation, life drain on a ship killing its crew thus leaving the hull intact and etc. Though the drawback is that these abilities consume resources and said resources are actually the lives of your population, every so often you'll have to sacrifice an entire planet to feed the Suulka and recover their "mana". There are only 5-8 Suulka available to summon and each has their own set of abilities as well as own unique design so they look very different from one another, some Suulka are 1.5x bigger than the smallest of them.







Suulka upclose with the fighters/drones, again the sense of scale is there...

Yea, scaling is very important and given how that worked in real life with actual Dreadnoughts / Ships of the Line the bigger they are the better they should be able to mount more effective amounts of turrets/calibers.

In these large engagements in this "exchange fire" SciFi approach we actually do need these huge behemoths for they are naturally the best pick for this scenario under all circumstances. This is not saying other ships will have no chance yet they are simply not the perfect pick for that role.

ES does not portray space combat like it is used in "The lost Fleet" or "Antares" Novel series for example where it is all about the huge distance of space, velocity, acceleration and the weapon/mass/armament ratio and where each engagement of passing fleets is so short that the only way to hit the target is less than a second where fire control does its job. We are talking about space after all.

ES goes with the cinematic SciFi approach and hence we do have to stick with the anachronistic approach where smaller ships should rightfully be outclassed according to actual scale that matters.

For scaling to be realistic, realistically ships would become mere dust specks in the blackness of space, occasionally disrupting the shine of a star. So there is a level of practicality which must be considered.



So we need some way to identify them. One option is to make the ship vision to be less of a cinematic view, and more of a general's strategic view of the battlefield. ships would have 'locks' of sorts, circular, square or some other shape around them, with an icon to identify which ship type it is, and allegiance, perhaps even a 'badge' to identify its name/fleet, hp, current action and such, in an immersive way.



Another option is to conclude that realistic proportions are not so fun after all and fake sizes for the sake of visibility.



I like the 'General's diegetic UI' way, but either can work.

Fake sizes all the way.



Listen, I understand that the logistics and sheer amount of "stuff" that would be required to get something larger than most cities built in a gravitational environment both assembled, and launched, without destroying itself or the planet. But I don't care, it's silly fun. Fake sizing ALL THE WAY.