See, a 3x3 "grid" order system would improve things if you had discrete orders within that grid, and there was a wide enough vocabulary of options on a per order basis. I'll give a quick conceptual layout of how a potential mid game battle layout would look -

3 Flotillas - Flotilla "A" - Sniper config with lots of Torpedoes, Flotilla "B" - Laser+gun boat with shields, Flotilla "C" - Defensive ships with guns

Phase 1 (Long) - Flotilla A - Hold Distance (Gains 20% damage to modules on any ship hit) , Flotilla B - Hook left (Gains 20% damage to Flotilla B and C), Flotilla C - Screen (Gains +50% Flak Defence from guns)

Phase 2 (Medium) - Flotilla A - Drift (Gains 20% evasion against lasers and missiles), Flotilla B - Flank left (Gains 40% damage to Flotilla B and C, takes additional 20% damage from flotilla B and C), Flotilla C - Blockade (Redirects 33% of incoming fire from all flotillas, takes 10% less damage overall)

Phase 3 (Short) - Flotilla A - Evade (Gains 33% evasion against all fire, rate of fire reduced by 20%), Flotilla B - Cross (+15% damage to flotilla A and C), Flotilla C - All in (+50% to weapons damage, +33% to damage received)

These completed multi-phase order setups could be saved in a "playbook" for custom fleets and then used for specific fleet comps, but the idea that I'm driving at should be clear, this would allow for a much wider degree of expression in the planning phase, and allow for a much greater degree of customisation and tuning before the battle begins, as well as more dynamic outcomes during the battles themselves.

I agree with the most ideas here, but why isn't this thread in the "game design" part of the forum?

Bracus wrote:

There are already roles for ships. 1 def and 1 att ship from the small and med classes. For the def ships you can put more def and sup modules on them.

Yeah but all that really does is change the layout and possibly the ship hull buffs. What he's suggesting is that they have unique targeting priorities. Though if that was automated that would be not so good, put that with automated flotilla distribution and the like and you'd have a real mess of a system where you'd have to constantly micromanage your fleets.

There are already roles for ships. 1 def and 1 att ship from the small and med classes. For the def ships you can put more def and sup modules on them.

I mean, most counter systems are going to seem like RPS, are they not? But I propose taking this from a different angle.

Rather then having the weapons define a ships purpose, you could have a ships purpose tag define what it's role is suppose to be on the battlefield.

So the current ship listing is:

2 small ships, 2 medium ships and 1 large ship.

Now I don't own the early access, so I can't speak to their currently designated roles but I'm guessing they aren't very distinctive.

What we could have:

Large ship: Space superiority

Attacks the enemies largest ships first.

Medium ship 1: Counter artillery

Attacks the enemies most damaging ships first.

Medium ship 2: Guardian

Attacks any ship that attacks other ships in it's flotilla.

Small ship 1: Flak screen

Attacks any ship that attacks with missiles and fighters, shooting down craft and missiles as it goes.

Small ship 2: Bomber

Attacks the enemies with the most defence first.

This is a basic system, and more of an adaptation of the current set up but it could be the idea of a system where ship roles are determined by the ships themselves, letting the player modify this role by equipping them with a number of weapons.

I'll try to come up with somthing more comprehensive a little later.

To that I'm going to say, it's not too late, people need to fill this thread with thoughts, ideas, commentary and votes, this needs to be the place where everyone makes their voice heard on where the combat system could go. Where it needs to go. If we're going to get Amplitude to listen to reason on this one, putting our heads together and coming up with useful ideas and suggestions here would be a great start.

I wish I had seen this thread sooner and that it had more attention given to it. There are a lot of excelent ideeas here for creating an actual decent and strategicaly satisfying combat system that still demands minimal to no micro from the player. Shame really that the lastest dev post made it obvious they are sticking to their oversimpliefied rock paper scissors countering system with no real input from the player. Alas, perhaps it's not too late for things to change? Because the curent combat system suffers greatly.

And to tulip: we have autoresolve for multy player scenarios, and we have a deeep combat system for single player. There has to be something for the single player that fills in the void the presence of other living players and the greater focus on overall campaign and backstabing create compared to the multy player component.

mezmorki wrote:

vahouth wrote:

My suggestions to improve the combat system are:

• Choice of battlefield especially for the attacker.
• Different plans for each group in the fleet, not a single one for all (for example group A is medium range, group B is sniper, group C is short range). 
• The player should be able to assign ships in each group, or divide groups based on range of engagement, role etc.
• Manual fleet placement mainly when we have more than 1 fleet group.
• Manual placement of reinforcements (rear or flanks of the enemy), as well as time of deployment. 
• Battle plans for reinforcements (sniper, hammer & anvil etc).

Pretty close to my suggestions - all of this would be great.

I'd love the idea for multiple fleets in the same system being able to become reinforcements so that we actually get big large battles with more than 10 ships on a side.  

Add that to my idea concerning ship maneuver orders and we'd get to a point where Ship Micro would be pretty decent. These ideas definitely would add a great deal. For choice of battlefield, an extra button what offers a set of three visual choices to the attacker along with some minor buffs / debuffs as to what they'd be fighting in would be pretty much ideal.

I have actually on multiple occasions cared more about the card bonus than the optimizations, but its usually when I expect to have to fight more than one battle and am looking for the "heal my ships after battle" card

vahouth wrote:

My suggestions to improve the combat system are:

• Choice of battlefield especially for the attacker.
• Different plans for each group in the fleet, not a single one for all (for example group A is medium range, group B is sniper, group C is short range). 
• The player should be able to assign ships in each group, or divide groups based on range of engagement, role etc.
• Manual fleet placement mainly when we have more than 1 fleet group.
• Manual placement of reinforcements (rear or flanks of the enemy), as well as time of deployment. 
• Battle plans for reinforcements (sniper, hammer & anvil etc).

Pretty close to my suggestions - all of this would be great.

I'd love the idea for multiple fleets in the same system being able to become reinforcements so that we actually get big large battles with more than 10 ships on a side.  

My suggestions to improve the combat system are:

• Choice of battlefield especially for the attacker.
• Different plans for each group in the fleet, not a single one for all (for example group A is medium range, group B is sniper, group C is short range). 
• The player should be able to assign ships in each group, or divide groups based on range of engagement, role etc.
• Manual fleet placement mainly when we have more than 1 fleet group.
• Manual placement of reinforcements (rear or flanks of the enemy), as well as time of deployment. 
• Battle plans for reinforcements (sniper, hammer & anvil etc).

Stalker0 wrote:

As the OP mentioned, I think a key issue is that the range decision right now is not a decision at all. You always want your ships to engage at their optimal range, regardless of the secondary bonus of the card. So I think that is the wrong decision. I think the decision should be similar to Lo_fabre's idea, but even simpler: 

1) Hold Back: All ships stay together at the longest optimal range for some of the ships.

2) Optimal Range: All ships move to their optimal ranges and stay there as best they can.

3) Charge In: All ships stay together and move towards short range.

Now since Optimal Range is likely the best tactic in general, you could then give the other tactics some secondary benefit....or simply make that one more tactical choice the player selects.

Not a problem to me, but not sure if everyone will be comfortable with this 3 choices system (look what's happening with actual system).

Lots of good ideas all, thanks for the comments.

I agree that a full blown Dominions's style combat is overkill - and that wasn't what I was advocating for.  Something closer to Gratuitous Space Battles makes a bit more sense to me.  

Given that, according to the GDD, combat is already structured around three phases, I like what Hobbesian is working towards (now that I understand it better).  Essentially, the are three phases and three movement orders to assign to each phase.  Rather than call them "short, medium, long", I'd simply call them "Early, Mid, and Late" stage, or "Opening, Middle, Closure" phase or something like that.  This would really help. 

Then maybe the bonuses could likewise be attached as a second layer to the phase orders.  

This would also make heroes more worthwhile. They could have unique tactics or options they can do with a fleet... would make battles more interresting, and have some visible impact rather than just buff stats. 

As it is now it is basically just rock paper scissors and the guy with the better tech wins. No choice you make or amount of crew xp you have over your enemies really matter. This makes for boring repetitive gameplay that does not offer anything. I really do think this is sad considering the fact that the visuals are really quite beautiful to watch. 

Even with the camera system working, the fact that the battle system offers so little vocabulary for expression in the battle space means that there's no point actually -watching- the battle, you're better off simulating it and then parsing (when that becomes available) the data. If they want to make the actual viewable combat meaningful they -need- to increase the complexity of language that's offered in the battlespace, which means improving Ship Micro massively.

Either that or disposing of Ship Micro altogether and focusing on Empire Macro, but they need to make their decision now.

Let's think about attention and time budgeting.  By "attention budget" i mean that a person's mental capacity and focus is limited and should be directed towards what the vision of the writer/director/designer views as the core and most interesting parts of the experience i.e. we can only do so much. By "time budget" I refer to the proper time expenditure of actually sitting through the designed experience i.e. we only have so much time.

A significant strength of Endless Legend in its current iteration is that my friends and I can fire up an MP game on fast and credibly complete it in one sitting, two if we want to call it an early night. However, this is only really possible if we generally agree on not manually fighting out the majority of battles. Even with EL's relatively cut down 6 phase TBT system, each manual combat resolution justifies a minor break for all non-involved players, and constitutes a minor frustration just by occurring. You can see that not only does manual combat resolution interfere with our time budgetting, it also interferes with our attention budgeting, because attention spent on tactics is attention not spent on critical tasks like making sure the building and technology queues match up, that our diplomacy is being engaged, that our timing on empire plans work, etc.

I can't speak to Starbase Orion, but I can to Dominions, and a competitive turn of Dominions can take as long as a competitive match of Endless Legend. Dominions' scripting and spell system are so arcane that individual battles can involve hours of scripting. I do not think that a Dominions level complexity is in keeping with Amplitude's vision for any of its games, which are all designed at a deep level to be limited and tight. Endless Legend has a more complex vocabulary of tactics than its main competitor (Civilization), but much less so than Dominions. Dungeon of the Endless has a much more complex vocabulary than, say, DoomRL, but much less so than NetHack or Angband. Contra the name, Endless games are designed to end on a scale that fits into a busy person's life (after all, the Endless are the fools of the series). 

All that said, ES2's system is currently much too simple. Even a simple EL-looking map interface where you manually place blocking ships and whatnot would be a massive improvement, or even a return to Disharmony's card-pick system. Such design must be made with attention to the player's budgets of time and brainpower.

I do think OP's insights about the camera and feedback system are spot-on. Currently I feel like i have no idea which parts of my fleets are working well and which parts are mistakes.

As the OP mentioned, I think a key issue is that the range decision right now is not a decision at all. You always want your ships to engage at their optimal range, regardless of the secondary bonus of the card. So I think that is the wrong decision. I think the decision should be similar to Lo_fabre's idea, but even simpler: 

1) Hold Back: All ships stay together at the longest optimal range for some of the ships.

2) Optimal Range: All ships move to their optimal ranges and stay there as best they can.

3) Charge In: All ships stay together and move towards short range.

Now since Optimal Range is likely the best tactic in general, you could then give the other tactics some secondary benefit....or simply make that one more tactical choice the player selects.

At least, I would like to have the possibility to split my fleet into groups and assign different combat stance to each of them. I know they don't want us to micromanage the battles but I don't think it's that difficult to implement. It would be more satisfying to give combat orders this way in my opinion. 

The combat of ES1 is more satisfying and complex than the one we are getting in ES2. A major step backwards :(

And herein lies the beginning of the problem with the current iteration of the combat system and where it relates to Ship Micro.

There's no dynamism. Even at the higher tiers, you're given a battle plan, you'll be able to drop your ships into flotillas and... that's it?

That's the -least engaging- approach to combat I could imaginably conceive, it's one step above pure auto-simulation and the only incentive it provides is to either stack for specific battle plans or punish lapses in concentration if you brain fart and engage the wrong battle plan. It actually makes ES1's auto simulation a better idea because at least THERE you could just have it deal with "default" and not worry about the idea of accidentally setting your fleet to engage at long when they're all rigged with short range weapons (not sure if you can -entirely- skip the planning phase and just tell it to self optimise but that would be the logical conclusion).

For what you're suggesting or what I'm suggesting there would need to be a significant retooling of the combat system, your idea would require state triggers to be present and for the player to have access to them, that would vastly increase the battle space vocabulary but would entail giving players something akin to a simplified "scripting language" made up of lego style blocks or cards that could be played as part of the battle plan. My idea would require retooling of the battle plan phase itself with a much deeper level of planning required and the ability to save custom plans and then apply them to specific fleet comps. Both of these are significant undertakings, but both of them would allow the player a much greater level of agency in the battle space.

Either option would be a good start, but I'd not want to be the fly on the wall for the meeting that says "We're going to have to go into the combat system and revamp it"

I agree with basically everything in the OP. Dominions pre-battle order system is a great example of how you can have battles with strategic depth and still eat your auto-resolve cake too, and most of its systems would translate pretty well into this game.

You just made me realize how amazing Dominions battle scenes would be with some quality art direction like we have in ES2 would be though and now I'm dreaming of a game that will never exist.

Good stuff here.

I think they can make a card system like ES with pre-made strategies, like:

• Pincer: Split in two to try to flank enemies.
• Surround: Your big ships stay in front and long range, while your small ship tries to get close and take enemy's rear.
• Sniper: Your long range ships lead the battle, while short range stays in front and try to stop any charge.
• Charge!: just run to short range everyone.

Of course there may be lots of more tactics unlocked by techs (maybe each hull unlocks specific maneuver, while each military tech unlocks another, and of course heroes has special moves).

I think it partially fixes the loss of tactics, and at same time maintains the simplicity.

Indeed I thought it will be this way when I see the "Xenorian pincer" in one of first images released.

That's only half of the issue, you'd also need to have separate maneuvering orders for "Long" "Medium" and "Short" range optimally, which means for three flotillas you'd want a 3x3 grid of possible orders. At that point then you'd have potentially, a working and interesting system, if you can then -save- those battle plans into a "playbook" which you can then at a glance choose which page from your playbook you'd like to adopt, that suddenly elevates the combat from being a non choice to a set of interesting and discrete choices. Particularly if within that you can set which ships within a flotilla take the lead, and what their designated targeting order happens to be.

Taking -your- suggestion and going at least three steps further, then we get to an interesting and useful system. But it needs to be overhauled, not just tweaked. There needs to be a conceptual rethink in terms of "How do we give the player agency and allow them to create interesting options, how do we allow the player to set up fleets that express unique and diverse options and how to we go about allowing them to achieve that", pre-set battle plans which force players down prescripted routes restrict that, but by separating the phases back out and giving players a wide set of tools at each phase, you can at least improve the vocabulary the player has in terms of what they can -do- with the battle space.