StK wrote:
No in my opinion every ship in a fleet would need it and it should take up 33%-50% of every hull no matter the size.

I'd go one further and give the drive a huge size, making it usable only on the biggest ships.



Hmm...

Or the other way around, that the warp drive is only capable of moving n mass, making it usable for only small ships, while still taking a large amount of tonnage. Would fit better with your raider/blockade suggestion.

Solitas wrote:
Inderdictor-class ships?

Yeah that would be an experiment I would like to see!

You seem to be under the impression the procedural map generator is fair... SotS fans had a name for the randomness done by the game. They called it the sodorandomizer, because it was damn sadistic sometimes (not giving important techs, not giving good planets early on). Welcome to your first experience with the sodorandomizer. ;]

@liq3 now lets take a better look: My Homesystem is Fydis (indicated by the crown above). The System that is just a little below it has no normal connection to my empire and is only reachable through a wormhole.. i simply couldnt get there in time before the Cravers(orange) got it. And with the warpdrive thats just a stupidly short jump into my Home(!)system.

About Oentho: Whats the alternative? not colonizing it means I give the Cravers a starlane invasion route right to my home System. Also not really an option. The other connections you are talking about are only existing because of the permanent war i'm fighting against everybody because the ai just wont make peace.

My empire initially ended at: Ykima, Faijis and Gundus which are all protected by Wormhole connections.

So another problem with the Warpdrive would have resulted because of the close proximity of Fajis and Maikal to Tekal which belonged to the UE(pink, starting system Aldebaran) before the war started.



Before you judge you should take a closer look how this might have started. Its not really difficult to see the pattern.

The way that SOTS handled the mobility of each species was balanced and quite interesting. I think that the developers of Endless Space should try to emulate that.

StK wrote:


To everybody who says "The Warp drive is okay" I just say:

Look at the screenshot i posted and tell me that wouldn't end up in utter chaos if the AI was doing it right and i don't even want to think what would happen in a multiplayer game.

Ok I just looked at it. I see a horrible defensive position, where you're surrounded on 3 sides, by 3 different races, with 6-7 NON-warp travel choke point systems. That's a terrible position warp drives or not. And maybe you shouldn't be colonizing planets like Oentho if you can't defend them.



The issue isn't warp drives, but your terrible choice in systems.

SOTS had a different mode of travel for every single race. One teleports, one gets speed boosts in deep space and inertia-less ships, one gets a speed boost for number of ships in a fleet, one travels on predefined "nodes," one makes their own nodes (that later collapse), one has the warp drive. It's a balanced game. Oh, and the map's 3D.



Having different drive systems really spices the game up, and makes it so that you have to adapt your tactics as technologies change.



Seriously people, if you have created an indefensible empire, that's a result of your play strategy. You can blame yourself for the poor position. If you spawned in the middle, learn to improvise and compensate for it. It's called a strategy game.

Sebmono wrote:
Maybe another tech to add would be a "warp inhibitor" that would prevent access to certain systems using warp drives (system improvement)?

Inderdictor-class ships?

I like the warning messages idea, particularly for blockades. Right now sneaky pirates sometimes generate and blockade my systems without me even knowing it, little buggers....

Anywho, I think an option as yet undiscussed regarding limiting warp drive effectiveness would be range limitations. Only allow the warp drive to take you so far. That would limit the deep strike ability it currently provides, while still making it a worthwhile investment. That way you can bypass points being choked by stacks of doom (i.e. multiple enemy fleets) but don't have access to any point in the opposing empire. Maybe another tech to add would be a "warp inhibitor" that would prevent access to certain systems using warp drives (system improvement)?

liq3 wrote:
I think it's fine. There's several ways to counter it.



There's a tech that lets you see what ships (and their weapons/defense) are in a fleet if they get into sensor range. This combined with several sensor range techs can let you see an incoming enemy fleet 2-3 turns out, what is in (letting you pick a fleet to counter it perfectly) and still have time to respond. Also consider it takes about 4-5 turns to invade a system, even with invasion subsystems (even longer if you have defense... some systems can even be unassailable without a very strong fleet). So all up you could have 6-8 turns to bring a fleet in and stop their fleet.



Also SOTS had "unrestrained" travel and worked fine. Both Zuul and Humans had restricted space lanes, yet they could still keep up with Morrigi, Liir and Tarkas, none of which had space lane restrictions. (And honestly, Zuul and Humans were usually on the offensive, since they faster travel from space lanes let them expand much more quickly, and reach their opponents systems faster).

I dunno. Once you have a massive empire, especially if you are in a central location in the galaxy, it becomes really easy for an AI to simply warp into one of your core systems and start invading. The issue is that you're forced to leave your outer systems open to direct assault via space lanes to make sure you have a core defense fleet or three. It makes fighting a defensive war much more difficult, especially if you're someone like the Sophons. The AI refuses to make peace unless you beat it into submission, so your attempt at a science victory gets sidetracked when you are forced into an arms race.



I think that the warp tech should have it's radius limited to a couple of star systems. It would nice to have a global minimap with different view options (military for fleet locations, economic for trade routes, etc) There also need to be more warning messages like "This star-system is now being invaded!', "Pirates Spotted!", and of course, "Incoming warp signature, hostile configuration!"

LokiJortunn wrote:
Warp drive as many people have stated above seems to unbalance mid/end game to me this is increased by not being able to attack fleets that aren't in orbit. Being able to intercept a fleet of ships striking in to the heart of your territory would be a huge help, this brings me on to a second issue (pre warp drive) that I have been having with the combat system and that is the AI can attack my ships as they pass through their systems on the way to another system while as a player they seem to skip through mine even with a fleet in orbit ready to attack them. It feels like there should a pop up offering to engage them.

That second one is a known bug, and will get fixed.

Warp drive as many people have stated above seems to unbalance mid/end game to me this is increased by not being able to attack fleets that aren't in orbit. Being able to intercept a fleet of ships striking in to the heart of your territory would be a huge help, this brings me on to a second issue (pre warp drive) that I have been having with the combat system and that is the AI can attack my ships as they pass through their systems on the way to another system while as a player they seem to skip through mine even with a fleet in orbit ready to attack them. It feels like there should a pop up offering to engage them.

@Soltias I really like that suggestion with only small ships being able to use it



@ArrowLance Did you take a look at the screenshot? Those things happen to me regularly. That my systems are far closer to the enemy then to my own ones.. and the enemy can jump too several differnt systems in my territory at a moments notice... In small-medium Galaxies this isnt something to bother about. But on large or huge ones where you have borders to several different enemies it will get really annoying ..



Its also not so troublesome if you fight only 1 war at the time... But wars with more fronts do happen and in that case its good to have chokepoints where i can bottle the enemy up until my mainfleet isn't busy anymore

Warp Drive is only necessary if there is the possiblity to blockade a system that the incomming enemy is forced to fight your defending ships.

At the moment even the AI cant stop my fleets from "frontline invading" if i had scouts in the systems to know the routes. So the feature "warp drive" is a bit...unfinished.



The only point where u can stop and forcefight an invading Fleet at the moment is at/after a wormhole passage.

Which is not such bad idea of Devs? So its in your intrest to exapnd over a part of the galaxy and protect the wormholes.

Being mobile yourself and increasing your sight radius in order to detect their movements makes this completely acceptable in my eyes.

Forum friends,



I'm a old-school strategy gamer and love large-scale tactics and maneuvering. I wanted to ask for your opinions and reassurances concerning the "Warp Drive" technology in this game.



Currently, I'm unsure of how to feel about the "Warp Drive" technology and it's impact on the mid-late game. First, I don't really understand what the constraints are...if any...on where you can warp to once you unlock this technology. First, I thought you could only warp within a certain radius of systems you owned (which made sense and seemed balanced). This doesn't seem to be true. Right now warp activation is tied to the shortest pathing...which is weird? Let's ignore that for a second, because I'm not sure that will remain as a requirement in the final game. Let me tell you WHY the Warp Drive worries me, and maybe you can help play devil's advocate to allay my fears.



1. Obsolescence of strategic placement. If an enemy can approach nearly any system from anywhere, strategic blockades and fleet placement lose a lot of their importance. Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be. I don't mind a few mechanisms to allow the enemy to bypass critical junctions...but not to this extent. It seems like it will detract from much of the strategy when I have to keep fleets scattered amongst my empire just in case a full stack comes barreling into some random, undefended corner.



2. Poor Detection. Currently, I might only have 1 or 2 turns notice that an enemy fleet is jumping towards one of my star systems because of the limited influence and detection radius. I have no indicator that they are about to land on my system except for my own two eyes being able to pick out the fleet coming from outside star lanes.



3. No Counter. How can I prevent this from happening? The solution shouldn't be "MOAR FLEETS". Sure, I can increase fleet mobility to allow for quicker response to threats, but unrestrained travel on an otherwise restricted, turn-based game tends towards absolute chaos. Again, maybe this is intended.



Personally, I would prefer some implementation of the Warp Drive that largely preserves macro-scale strategy and doesn't require constant micromanagement to counter. I feel like this is important and different for this game because movement is largely restricted to lanes and wormholes (unlike GalCiv2, which was free movement from the beginning, but their are zone control radii to help with this). SoaSE allowed for some ways to bypass...wormholes, or the vasari superweapon, but they were very specific and counter-able with proper strategic foresight and planning.



What are your thoughts? Also for the dev's, any clarification on how the "Warp Drive" is expected to be used in the final game? Maybe it's main purpose is to speed travel within your empire, not outside of it.

No in my opinion every ship in a fleet would need it and it should take up 33%-50% of every hull no matter the size.

In that way you would still have deepstriking forces but they would be raiders (blockading important systems, distractions when they are equipped with ground assault stuff, maybe even take out smaller reinforcement fleets) and not full-force-battlefleets to which you have to answer in kind.



To everybody who says "The Warp drive is okay" I just say:

Look at the screenshot i posted and tell me that wouldn't end up in utter chaos if the AI was doing it right and i don't even want to think what would happen in a multiplayer game.

Solitas wrote:
In my opinion warp drives should be removed entirely or at the very least have its speed reduced significantly.

For those of you that say that you should just add sensors, are you aware that you can easily get warp speed of 20+? By technology only you can get 24, add 3 for engines, then add any other movement bonuses. All in all the enemy can zoom past all your defences and in essence attack you from behind; if you don't have warp tech, it will take some time for you to move your fleets back from the front, then leaving the front undefended.



At the very least warp drives should, like StK said, be made as high mass engines, taking at least half the tonnage of a dreadnought.

What as a FTL ship for fleets?



and i agree with them being removed.

In my opinion warp drives should be removed entirely or at the very least have its speed reduced significantly.

For those of you that say that you should just add sensors, are you aware that you can easily get warp speed of 20+? By technology only you can get 24, add 3 for engines, then add any other movement bonuses. All in all the enemy can zoom past all your defences and in essence attack you from behind; if you don't have warp tech, it will take some time for you to move your fleets back from the front, then leaving the front undefended.



At the very least warp drives should, like StK said, be made as high mass engines, taking at least half the tonnage of a dreadnought.

I've found the (special event) warp drive to be of only limited usefulness. It helps in a few key situations where you have system chains that bend back on themselves, allowing you to take a shortcut. But it can also backfire, as it did for me in a game today: I was trying to move a fleet from A to B (sort of a horseshoe chain of my systems) and instead it took a shortcut by warping to an enemy system that was roughly between (and a bit below) the two 'prongs' of the horseshoe. Said fleet was promptly wiped out. To avoid that happening again, I had to manually route fleets to the 'top' of the horseshoe and then down the far side. So to date, I haven't found it terribly unbalancing. ..fritz..

I think it's fine. There's several ways to counter it.



There's a tech that lets you see what ships (and their weapons/defense) are in a fleet if they get into sensor range. This combined with several sensor range techs can let you see an incoming enemy fleet 2-3 turns out, what is in (letting you pick a fleet to counter it perfectly) and still have time to respond. Also consider it takes about 4-5 turns to invade a system, even with invasion subsystems (even longer if you have defense... some systems can even be unassailable without a very strong fleet). So all up you could have 6-8 turns to bring a fleet in and stop their fleet.



Also SOTS had "unrestrained" travel and worked fine. Both Zuul and Humans had restricted space lanes, yet they could still keep up with Morrigi, Liir and Tarkas, none of which had space lane restrictions. (And honestly, Zuul and Humans were usually on the offensive, since they faster travel from space lanes let them expand much more quickly, and reach their opponents systems faster).

Warp availability is only one of several possible imbalances in the tech tree now. As it is, the tech tree feels like it is progressing too fast for my taste. I presume it is going to get tuned before release.

I had an idea that could balance the warp drive:

- make it a tonnage heavy engine (like really tonnage heavy and i think the tonnage should be percentage based on the model size (so that it would be more expansive the bigger the ships gets) that way you could have deep strikers but at the cost of lot of fighting power

Yeah, imagine going up against another human player who is using Warp Drive! It would be pretty difficult, and might boil the game down to sheer numbers advantage.



Platescale, good idea on the scout ships, I forgot about that possibility.



That map above would be an absolute nightmare with AI Warp Drive usage! Wow. The more I think about it, the more Warp Drive worries me. I don't know if we can really tell its effect on the game until multiplayer gets released...

I too think there should be limitations to the warp drive.

It is fine in the smaller Galaxies but in the bigger ones its just pure Chaos.

The only thing that keeps the game from getting out of hand is that the AI isn't using it properly.



Maybe a picture illustrates it better:



This would be undefendable if the AI was doing it right. (Yes it is a very weird situation but as you can see this stuff happens, and no I can't push orange because he is the only one that rivals my fleet when I try to be offensive there and I'm fighting against everybody because it seems the AI wont let you make peace right now)

Whoa, warp drives aren't THAT powerful. I find they mostly let you bypass constellation edges. They reduce the value of wormholes. I'm pretty sure warp drives are slower than string drives even at the end game. If you're worried about angle of attack considerations, there are structures you can build to enhance the sensor ranges of your systems - but even more cost-effective than that is just to station scout ships around your fringe. Scout ships have a huge sensor radius and they're not expensive. Finally, if you really hate the influence of warp drives, try going into the map settings and set wormholes to high and string density to high. Since that dramatically increases the mobility of ordinary drives, warp drives won't make much difference anymore.

There is a game event that increase your detection radius of +100% in addition to what you can achieve with technology level, but it basically just show ships that are 3-4 clicks away max from a planet with max sensor.

So yes the warp system is challenging. Should it be remove? Not sure yet, or not at all, i'm in a mid-game like yourself, havent seen yet how AI is using it in full.



edit : typo

Interesting point. Warp drive could be restricted so that it allows warp travelling only inside your own system. Pretend that there are 4 suns. A, B, C and D. If the player owns them all he can travel from A to D. Warp drive could allow the player to change fleet posture quickly. After warp drive, all the movement points could be consumed, so that would restrict the ability to use it as a surprise attack.. No matter the distance travelled. And so the players fleet would appear on his/her starsystem closest to the borders and enemies could be aware of the presence before it is crucial.

I agree, I think it's too easy to get and is way too powerful. If you get it before your enemy you can just jump over and start attacking them without any fear of them trying to take a planet in retaliation. There should be some downside to using warp drive, if you couldn't attack for a turn after using it, it might give people some time to prepare a retaliation before they do too much damage, and it will make the decision to use it harder - instead of it just being a super go anywhere upgrade. The only problem is there's no way at the moment to tell ships whether to use it or not.