So, we can safely assume that with future ES2 expansions outsourced, Amplitude has moved onto their next thing. Seems like a good time to discuss the aspect of these games that tend to pose a real challenge to the devs: the combat.

EL's XCOM battles were ambitious, at times excellent and at times awful. For all the potential depth and PvP potential they offered, the implementation was clearly a compromise between gameplay and practicality, and the result was a counter-intuitive control setup that turns off new players. The unit AI being completely bonkers if not controlled REALLY thoroughly compounded this, and if your connection is bad in an online game you'll be unable to do much while your archers run past the tank-line to shoot in melee range. Worse yet, the combat is superceded by the main game, so it's harder to engage with both because most of the time one side will be strong enough to just steamroll the other with no effort, and engagement with the combat system is harder when you get maybe one good battle for every 20 minutes of 4x gameplay. When I want to play XCOM I just sit down and play XCOM, you know? I love so many parts of this system, but it's easy to see why where was no attempt to replicate it in ES2 even though it would have made sense for the ground battles.

ES2's approach is actually what I'd consider a reasonable solution to the issues that the genre poses. Unfortunately, it's unnecessarily arcane so there isn't nearly as much engagement with the design decisions as there could be, and furthermore a portion of the community seems to really hate this hands-off style of combat. In the end, despite the mechanics clearly being very nuanced, there's very little in the way of outplaying and everyone just bulldozes each other with higher numbers. It really says something that ES2, whose combat is almost ENTIRELY based on preparing a cohesive fleet, has considerably less interesting choices in this area than EL. In EL, you could invest research or assimilation slots to get a particular type of unit that wasn't necessarily stronger, but cost the same to build and added meaningful power just by the utility that unit offered in combat. Or you could go for strategic weapons/armor (not an interesting choice in and of itself, but as a contrast to researching another unit type it created fascinating decisions). Maybe people who really understand the combat will disagree, but I just can't say this about ES2.

In short, there are a ton of requirements on how this system needs to work. Battles should run quickly and relatively on autopilot, so that multiplayer games aren't unplayable. Due to connectivity issues, the number of moves needed should be minimal, and latency shouldn't be a big deal. The process of creating and outfitting the army should be strategic and interesting, since this is where the bulk of the gameplay is going to be if the battles themselves are autopilot enough for this genre. Terrain should matter, for replayability (the special nodes in ES2 are actually a great idea, but I've never actually seen them matter. There are solutions to this, though). The mechanics should be simple enough to be accessible, but not so simple that everyone just spams the same regressive uncounterable strategy (the 4x aspect of the game actually helps mitigate this to some extent thankfully, incentive to cut costs). Perhaps least importantly, the combat shouldn't snowball so much that it's boring if the empires are even slightly mismatched.

With all that in mind, I propose a hybrid system of ES2's automatic combat, EL's unit system, and autochess. You set up your army/fleet with the usual Endless UI, and the battle plays out automatically on a hex grid EL-style. Many aspects are heavily simplified; the grid is the same size as EL's at most, effects are powerful and discrete, numbers are smaller than they usually are in Endless games. All of this is to increase our engagement with the meaningful tactical aspects. Each unit type has it's own AI that behaves in a consistent way (attack X unit type, etc), and has the Combat Modes from EL; for each unit there are 3 types of behaviour you can choose between, but this is all the control you get over them. IE a cavalry-type might have the following:

Offensive: Rush the backline, prioritizes ranged then support

Defensive: Idle until an enemy is in range, then rush that enemy, -100% init (ie you wait for an enemy to get out of position, then go in, low init because having cavalry waste their turns while trying to do this in EL is annoying)

Hold Position: Exactly like EL, comes with a particular targeting algorithm for each unit, such as "least defense", "least HP", "most attack", etc.

Initial unit positioning works like the cards in EL; you predefine them outside of battle (can make them anything, but you're only allowed to define N cards, so you can't react on the fly with positioning). The cards set the initial AI mode for each unit, and then you choose a secondary card that changes their AI modes for the second half of the battle (you predefine all of this in the military screen as well, it's defined by unit type so you don't have to micro the cards every time you add a new unit to an army, there are sensible defaults). The unit placement works as follows:

-Given your half of the grid, select a unit type, select a series of tiles, they become Ranged 1, Ranged 2, Infantry 1, Infantry 2, etc, and then in an actual battle units fill these spots in order based on type.

-An "advanced mode" can be enabled to put multiple markers on the same tile (so that it's not left empty if you don't have enough of that unit type), priorities can be set, all that stuff. Not a terribly hard UI challenge, to make it as versatile as players will want it to be.

-Many units have a secondary class for filling purposes, ie ranged supports will take ranged slots once all the supports are gone and there are no more ranged units.

Heroes are a slight exception to this; each battle you can manually change their initial position, and predefine their AI modes externally to the cards. This is to make handling different hero types in your strategies not an absolute nightmare.

This is, best as I can reckon, the ideal compromise to have a tactical combat system really work in a 4x game. If you have any improvements for this system, feel free to let me know down below.

I feel like a big part of the combat, though quite hodden from us visually, is the phases which would be somewhat removed in this system.  Any thoughts on how to reincorporate them?

Also, without an overhaul to the fleet building and card systems to allow for more customization and improved utilization of differing specialized attacks and defense, it would simply become more infuriating of a combat system IMO.

but i love the idea of this overhaul, it could be much more interesting indeed!!

The basic notion of the combat system in ES2 is fine, I think - just the implementation has a number of glaring issues. Weapon types, modules etc. need a good balance pass to force some interesting decisions to be made by the player, and the 'flottilla' design needs to be much more transparent in its behaviour. How can you plan when the behaviour is such an unknown?

I personally like the EL combat system, its the right amount of being involved while not completely dominating the gameplay in my opinion. I think it mainly needs some tweaks like a better AI (it is a prime candidate for machine learning actually), and maybe some more interesting abilities (something like "allow two move orders per turn", or active ones like "force nearby units to use their attack on you").

As for low initiative not being "fun": The issue is, there should be more playstyles, that make low initiative actually a good thing to have in terms of strategy. EL already has something like that: sweep strike back. We need more capacities like these.

videovillain wrote:

I feel like a big part of the combat, though quite hodden from us visually, is the phases which would be somewhat removed in this system.  Any thoughts on how to reincorporate them?

Battles could be divided into phases at the point where the next tactic card comes into play. ie first your cards are defensive, and then after 3 turns of execution, both sides activate their second card, perhaps you chose an offensive one. Two such phases seems like a good number to me, maybe 3/3 turns, with the option to tech into 2/2/2 turns in the endgame.

Some more thoughts on this:

Card "economy" should be a big focus individually and PvP-wise. You spend some time designing your cards, and then you're only able to change them at set global intervals that are clear to all players, similar to elections in ES2. With only 2 or 3 card options in the earlygame, it can be quite possible to figure out what cards your opponent has access to and then play around that. There should be no "buyout" on card modification for this reason. If you need to adapt on the fly, you change your unit composition to generate different results from the same cards.

A regular small hex grid probably isn't workable because of unit blocking. I'm playing with the idea of scaling the grid so that units take up more than one tile, allied units can step on each others toes a bit but enemies cannot, this works visually somewhat if you've got a squad of archers or a bunch of small ships, but this is a bit of a nightmare with a hex grid. Another solution may be to allow unit stacking on the same tile, with AoE effects in the game to punish this.

ES2 combat is fine in general, but have one big downside - cross flotilia firing. It is inconsistent as hell and often leads to one of the flotilias being unable to fire back because of weapon arcs. Either movement patterns should be fixedf, or weapon arks removed, or just disable cross flotilia engagements at all and make it fighter exclusive.

vampatori wrote:

I'm a big fan of Eve's tracking speed for turrets system which means that bigger isn't always better - a battleship that's unsupported can be slowly taken out by a pack of small ships at a fraction of the cost.  It leads to diverse and interesting fleet compositions, and ship designs built around those fleet compositions.

Going Forward

So I could actually see something kind of "in the middle" that could become the sort of "Endless Combat System" that works for both games.  Where it's phase-based orders, with real-time execution of those orders, on a scale more towards of Total War/Sins of a Solar Empire.

It would give the player much more investment in the battles if you were able to turn the fight to your advantage by adjusting tactics/focus/etc. throughout a battle, while at the same time keeping you very much the General/Admiral by issuing orders at the flotilla/platoon level and not micro-managing every unit.

It would also keep things moving along, as however important battles are in these games - they're not war games, they're 4X games.  I find games like Endless Legend, Total War, Age of Wonders, and so on can really start to get bogged down by the battles, to the point that I quickly start auto-resolving and even actively avoiding some encounters - which is a shame.

We'll just have to wait and see what they do though!

Yes, an "Endless Combat System" (love the name) that gave you a bit more control and lots of different variations (especially in regards to CP and ship sizes as you mentioned) would be amazing.  And the idea about CP and ship sizes having bigger impacts on the game rather than bigger is always better is spot on.

If they could actually make it feel "Endless" it its customizations, then it could really go far!

• New strategies/focuses choosable each phase
• Customizable cards that work phase by phase
• Customizable modules with slots (like being able to choose effects of modules without sacrificing certain strengths) 
• More and differing interactions between different types of ships that take size and speed into account - so a bunch of small attackers can take out large ships that have no support because of speed and targeting capabilities, rather than just getting wiped each time due to CP differences

Those changes would seriously make an Endless Combat System amazing!

It would provide loads of diversity, fun strategies, and real interesting player choices based on a multitude of possibilities!

A rework of the weapons and defenses needs to happen, as well as fixing cross-flotilla firing, but that's more about balance than gameplay mechanics itself and would need to be done anyway with a new system in mind first.