Hey Devs,

you have put so much work into the combat system, that super nice mix of simulation, strategy and poker. It is brilliant (with some rough edges that could need polishing) but anyway the CORE CONCEPT is just totally fitting for a 4x and solves so many problems with 4x (multiplayer, time constraints, micro management, repitition) and mostly keep the strategic and even tactical aspects of 4x combat alive.

Now, nevertheless, NO ONE I have played with, or that recently bought the game has ANY CLUE about the depth of how it works for real. 

Flottillas on 3 lanes, that are matches on short/medium/long, cross-lane combat, firing arcs of turrets, paths chosen, little damage bars next to the gauge in overlay-view, SPACE to enable overlay in free cam etc etc etc

Even if you add just one button to the fleet screen, a big "INFO" button, that opens a totally rudemantary HTML page with pictures, and even if that is a wall of text, you need to put the whole info somewhere. 

Maybe most player won't read it the first time they play. But once they get deeper into the game, maybe 2nd playthough, they will click on it, and take their time to read it properly. 

You waste so much potential. For most people it is just a "visualization" and 3 of 5 player I play with didn't even notice the "range" info on the battle cards and wondered what this means.

ALL the info should be put into that page. Also details like this:

Mysterarts wrote:

Drzewo wrote:

I have question about ranges too - what range is between for example unpaired left flank flotilla and enemy center flotilla or left flank and enemy left flank?

As I said in this topic (among interesting discussion about weapons): in every phase, the paired flotilla is a priority target and is always on the flank, but if the guns (for example on the other flank) cannot see it but can shoot another flotilla, they seize the opportunity to fire based on real distance. To be honest, we're not totally happy with this implementation because it's almost impossible to plan (and thus precisely model) this additional damage. We're thinking about other solutions but none are entirely satisfactory at the moment.

MezzoMax wrote:

Also what happens to long vs medium? Would this be one phase long range and 2 phases medium range?

Or short vs medium? Would this be 2 phases medium and 1 phase short?

Here are the ranges table:

		Short			Medium			Long
	Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3	Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3	Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3
Short	Short	Short	Short	Medium	Short	Short	Long	Medium	Short
Medium	Medium	Short	Short	Medium	Medium	Medium	Long	Medium	Medium
Long	Long	Medium	Short	Long	Medium	Medium	Long	Long	Long

MezzoMax wrote:

And what would happen if you put all your ships in say left flank and the enemy all in right flank?

First of all, we put the constraint to have at least one ship in the middle lane, to avoid completely useless battles and increase slightly the predictability. Also you can note that we now feedback the morale bonus: the damage and accuracy of your fleet are increased when you have more (alive) flotillas than your opponent (from the start or during battle). That gives you more incentive to spread your ships.

And that’s also one of the reasons why we set the 3 intention ranges with the effect on the card. Because you can see this constraint in the “last cards used by your opponent”, you can more easily predict in which flotillas you will see their ships.

I am convinced that you currently totally waste the feature not because it is bad, but because a noob does not really get whats going on, and starts to assume that its all meaningless "fun" to have a bit more "action" in a 3D scene, when it is really so much more going on.

Even if people do not read the all the info, just showing em a big chunk of info on a "wall of text" with images would make em undertsand that this is much deeper than "auto combat" and they will save it as: "Of, friggin complex combat system, I read that later". 

Cheers,