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Fleet vision affects battles

Space BattlesShip DesignHeroes

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7 years ago
Nov 25, 2017, 6:13:36 PM

Fleet vision is nice enough when you're exploring, but provides little benefit in combat. (So if a hero is leading a fleet but not exploring, there's little point in giving that hero vision-increasing skills, and there's no real debate over whether the Sophon Free Move would be better for a combat ship than even more powerful engines.) But if one fleet has better sensors than the other, it would be able to get the drop on the other in combat. A fleet with a higher vision radius should have the element of surprise, which should probably involve being able to fire off a first, unanswered salvo, and might also involve additional wrinkles:


  • A beam weapon arrives faster than a kinetic weapon, and in an obvious line, so a surprise beam attack might cause additional damage but allow the enemy to start firing back faster.
  • Torpedos appear to be slower and bigger than the other weapons, so the ship they're aimed at could see them coming; at the same time, they can maneuver after firing, so the fleet they're aimed at might not be able to figure out where they were fired from. A surprise torpedo attack might cause normal torpedo damage, but the fleet with vision advantage might be able to fire more torpedo salvos before the other side can start firing back.
  • Maybe a fleet with greater vision range that's traveling past one system on the way to another would be able to avoid a blockade of that system (and one with lower vision range wouldn't be able to).
Updated a month ago.
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7 years ago
Nov 26, 2017, 1:26:48 AM

Good vision already gives you battle benefits by letting you see enemy fleets earlier and allowing you to either avoid or set up for them

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7 years ago
Nov 26, 2017, 10:30:00 AM

That's a benefit to be sure, but I think you only may be able to avoid battle if your sensors happen to be good enough (if you're already in the middle of a move when your sensors reveal that you're going to run into a blockade, you're out of luck). I think that if you can actually detect the enemy before they can detect you, you ought to be able to land a significant blow. As an analogy, the point of stealth planes isn't to wait until the air force is sure of an advantage, but to create an advantage by striking before the other side can react to the presence of the aircraft.

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