VieuxChat wrote:
A VATS system couldn't be applied to the multiplayer part of the game. The devs don't want changes between multi and single (only some traits of custom factions have a different effect for AI/human)

Why exactly wouldn't VATS work in multiplayer? Its exactly like the card system in place now. You quickly cycle through each of your ships and tell each to target an enemy ship. Your enemy does the same with their ships. Once the timer for the phase is over you both start shooting at the same time.

I like the idea of streamlined/elegant combat, and I think that ES has a good foundation for fleet combat, but it's not yet a good combat system. Rather, I think it's the weakest part of the game design. First, I just don't feel that there's much strategy. Combat is mostly a guessing game. Second, I feel that my lack of control in fleet battles makes ship design unimportant. Sure, I love the flexibility of the current design system, but there's no reason for me to make use of it, because specialized ships can't be given specialized roles in battle.



Two common ideas from this forum:

)Targeting. Sounds fun, but I just can't see a good way to make it work well.

)Formations. Yes!



I think formations would be a great way to add meaning to ship design and add strategy to combat while still keep combat resolution quick, simple, and elegant.



Try this: Fleet formation could a bit of a Tetris, like SotS, but better. Ships in a fleet could be placed on a square/hex lattice with placement based on ship purpose/specialization, such that they support each other. This is not RTS or TBS, but rather a setup screen somewhere in fleet management. Hopefully, if players are required to do this outside of battle, then battles can still be quickly resolved, s.t. game speed won't be much impacted (even in the forthcoming multiplayer).



Example: Destroyers get a bonus on weapons, but are relatively small and vulnerable. What if you could place a half-ring of destroyers around a support corvette? At the moment, repair modules apply to the ship on which they're placed, and to the fleet as a whole. What if repair modules instead had an area of effect? What if beam-defense and missile defense also had area of effect? An intelligent destroyer/corvette formation could then be as effective as a battleship or dreadnaught. Several people (including me) have felt that the smaller hull sizes become irrelevant in the late game, when larger sizes are unlocked. The formation/area-of-effect mechanic would help to keep all ship sizes relevant throughout the game. This mechanic would also make good ship design more relevant.



Devs? Any thoughts on this thread?

paradiddle wrote:
Why exactly wouldn't VATS work in multiplayer? Its exactly like the card system in place now. You quickly cycle through each of your ships and tell each to target an enemy ship. Your enemy does the same with their ships. Once the timer for the phase is over you both start shooting at the same time.

VATS is a paused system. Not a real-time system.

I think TimBir's idea is awesome.

VATS is a paused system. Not a real-time system.

The card system in place now is hardly real-time, I'd call it "simultaneous turns". The core mechanics are exactly the same as the VATS like system I proposed. You and the enemy are both targeting each other's ships at the same time. Your attacks and the enemy's attacks happen at the same time once the timer is over.

Hum. A bit like Frozen Synapse in fact. Such a good design could be put to good use.

some system like the VATS system would be interesting .... fleet formations should be considered too

good morning, Timbur reiterates & expands upon what would be a really solid addition to the ES system, a robust fleet formation system would do wonders for combat, with a few more additions such as targeting preferences even the RPS system could begin to become an acceptable thing, however I'd still like to see more diverse weapons/defenses/subsystems. I'll be reading more later/throughout the day, just wanted to get a post in.

Basically, the issue with the current combat system is the following: there is a semi-complex ship design aspect to this game, and fleet-based combat instead of single ship-based combat. Yet, the combat system is barely more evolved that Civilization IV's. It suits Civ IV well because the units themselves are simple. But there's an inconsistency in Endless Space's design if the out-of-combat 'unit' management (ship design and fleet composition) are much more complex than the combat itself.

While VATS is cool for Fallout, I'm concerned that it would create too many choices, and really slow things down. It could be cool, but you'd have to be careful not to get bogged down. Would you have one target per fleet? One target per ship in the fleet? And what would you target? Would you target individual ships? Parts of ships? Classes of ships?



What do you folks think is important? What's the simplest/core decision that you'd like to be able to make?

@Railgun: Exactly!

I think one of the divisions is where you want your "game" in your game. I'm firmly on the "4X is the game, combat is a subsystem" camp. One of the comments here basically said "we have to fix the place where we spent more than half of our time" and I think that there is room for improvements, but virtually all of the suggestions would move the bar from "spend more than half of our time" to "spend nearly all of our time". If anything, I want it the other way around: I would prefer to spend *less* time in the combat system, which should depend on my abilities to navigate fleets to the correct places, not how many clicks actions per minute I achieve.



For those who think auto-resolution makes it so you can "skip" the bolted on combat system, I think we can all think of the times when auto-resolution surprised us. In Sword of the Stars the dolphins can't even get close enough to attack a planet properly in the early game (due to their slow-in-gravity-wells drive system)... but if I auto-resolve I can do that nicely and crush planets easily. While that is nice for me (I like the dolphins), my opponents demand full resolution every freaking assault because the timer distorts the battle in their favor.



From what I have seen with the auto resolution in this game, it is basically using the same die rolls that the full resolver uses, minus any card play. I like that and would be saddened to see the board/card game element supplanted because 4X is the focus right now... but that focus could easily be lost.

I think this game should take from birth of the federation in terms of combat, it was turnbased but you told each class of ship what to do, charge, assualt, strafe, retreat, do nothing. Each attack was efficent against another attack, you were able to keep your small ships in the back and the large ones up front, if you had a science vessel you were able to see what your enemy was going to do. I always loved that combat system, seeing it in this game would be amazing because of being able to customize your ships.



Edit: I forgot to mention that they used cinematic sequences for their battles too.

Birth of the Federation did a LOT of things right, I especially hope to see this game learn from the way BOTF handled minor races, but from my understanding of where the Dev's are going with this based on some feedback, there are things they will never do with this game, which includes full tactical combat, with individual ship management. Our focus is therefore best spent, on making what major design decisions have been made and making them more successful rather than mourning over previously made major decisions that we can't change anyhow.

I don't think that the BOTF system is that far from ES's, the battle cards could be adapted to the different attack formations, the BOTF turn based part could be real time with pauses for new orders which is actually what BOTF used.



I do see what people are saying about how far in we are with the development process but I do know some programming and I doubt the combat system would be that hard to remove unless the devs are sloppy coders but I doubt that very much, think about the way Minecraft did it, Minecraft alpha went through major changes to get to were it is today, same with the beta.

/thank you/ @ Errorprone

I think the battle system is fine personally, it's exactly as involved as I want it to be, and very cinematic. Just needs more cards, maybe some race specific cards. Given the low ship numbers involved I think it makes much more sense to do things this way rather than go the IG2 route. I didn't like MOO2's combat, it was too complicated, and always autoresolved it so what do I know.

My only true issues with the combat system as is are:



-Card selection should happen per phase, not all up front. I realize that you can wait to select the cards for the next phase, but the design encourages upfront selection. The other issue I have with cards is that the counter system, while interesting, provides no useful feedback for selecting a card to counter an opponent -- it's largely luck oriented. If there were some way to provide tactical information about what cards your opponent might be using... maybe?

-Camera angles are bad and change too frequently. On lower resolutions, the camera doesn't adjust, which frequently clips the ships out of the viewable area entirely.

-When ships fire a "miss" it looks like they are firing at a ghost, not like they're missing. They fire so wildly off angle that I think they're shooting at something else. I command the execution of those gunners as soon as the battle ends.

-There is of course, no way to prioritize targets. Having different weapon types in the combat tends to feel like it doesn't matter -- it's just one big hodgepodge of bullets going everywhere. Combat feels no different using a variety of weapons than it does using nothing but kinetic guns (a tactic the computer often fails to adapt to)

-Ships fly exclusively in formation, it's easy to tune the cinematics of it this way, but it doesn't look very cool. Maybe the combat could gain depth by introducing a "formation" card?

-Combat music is always the same. It grates on you pretty fast.

-The kinetic guns need a massive psychological kick to them, they don't feel like they have any power, its just a tracer emitting from the ship. I want to feel the gun's kick when the camera is close against a ship, I want the visceral feedback here. I think all the combat effects could be spiced up in this regard. Missiles look cartoony with sudden angle changes and fat wide line tracers.

-Starship VFX sometimes look odd when the ship blows up. Ship destruction also looks too passive, the ship sort of drifts then there's an explosion and it vanishes. Blow those suckers to pieces please, snap them in half.



A couple sidenotes:

-I don't think a total redesign to a turn based combat system is prudent. MOO2 is my favorite game by far in this genre. But it's glaring issue was how tedious combat became when you knew you were going to win (which was usually), and especially once you were fielding a massive fleet. Even MOO2's autobattle could take a torturously long time to execute. MOO2's combat balance was also badly broken in favor of MIRV equipped missile tubes.

There's lots of little tweaks that could be made to the battle system, but I vote a big no to real time combat. I find it neither enjoyable nor strategic to frantically click and micromanage a bunch of ships.

Godeke wrote:
I think one of the divisions is where you want your "game" in your game. I'm firmly on the "4X is the game, combat is a subsystem" camp. One of the comments here basically said "we have to fix the place where we spent more than half of our time" and I think that there is room for improvements, but virtually all of the suggestions would move the bar from "spend more than half of our time" to "spend nearly all of our time". If anything, I want it the other way around: I would prefer to spend *less* time in the combat system, which should depend on my abilities to navigate fleets to the correct places, not how many clicks actions per minute I achieve.



For those who think auto-resolution makes it so you can "skip" the bolted on combat system, I think we can all think of the times when auto-resolution surprised us. In Sword of the Stars the dolphins can't even get close enough to attack a planet properly in the early game (due to their slow-in-gravity-wells drive system)... but if I auto-resolve I can do that nicely and crush planets easily. While that is nice for me (I like the dolphins), my opponents demand full resolution every freaking assault because the timer distorts the battle in their favor.



From what I have seen with the auto resolution in this game, it is basically using the same die rolls that the full resolver uses, minus any card play. I like that and would be saddened to see the board/card game element supplanted because 4X is the focus right now... but that focus could easily be lost.

I thought 4x included combat, with the whole exterminate concept? I don't see why alot of people want to shove combat to the side and play a city builder in space. Turn based battles may last long, but rts battles don't take long at all. All that needs to be done is put the combat speed to the current battle speed. I have yet to seen a rts in space that required tons of apm. Most of the time, its just how you do your fleet formation.. Rarely do the actual "fights" in normal rts games last as long as those in total war and grand strategy games. Your ability to navigate a fleet in endless space consists of the grand total of right clicking where it goes. Maybe thats all the combat you want but I've yet to seen any sort of 4x game where your apm in battles mattered a whole lot. Yeah in Total war, how you attacked, and whether you flanked properly and unit formations mattered, but those amount to a grand total of maybe 20 effective apm.



I notice that you want to spend as little time in combat as possible. Well since the autoresolve works so well, why not use that and let those who want to have a space battle engage in real time? You choose where to spend your time, I can choose where to spend mine.

kasnavada wrote:
I think that RTS combat would be a huge mistake for the goal that endless space seems to pursue. From what I can gather it's going for multiplayer.



While playing multi, one of the most annoyingly feature of most turn-based games is their battle system, in which you have to move every unit one by one and ke battle last for up to 20-30 minutes. That is, if you play at all : if you are not in a conflict, you just have to wait for hours sometimes until others play out their battles (while 2 players are at wars, they may have 4-5 battles per turn...), and then, when it's your turn to battle, your inflict the same torture on others.



Other good tries at solving that problem coming to mind would be : SOTS, which limited battle time to do so. So much that at first, if you do not play with extended time (default is 4 minutes, up to 10), while assaulting planets with early game ships, your ships actually do not move fast enough to even shoot at the planet. Or in dominions 3, multiplayer game is more about PBEM, and you actually script your armies, enabling complex battles without requiring the other player to have the same playing time as you do. Endless space does not look like it's meant to be played by PBEM, however... so neither solution is actually good.



Secondly, this is not a space battle game. It's a 4X type of game. 4X, in my opinion, do not have to be huge "battle simulators" like gratuitous space battle is. Once again, my opinion is that 4X games are more about outproducing, outresearching, and outmaneuvering your troops so you're overwhelming the enemy, than micromanaging battles to gain an edge.



While more options would add a lot to the game (fleeing comes in mind, or more card choices - 2 cards for long range, 2 cards for med ?) the current battle system seems a pretty good solution for what the game seems to aim: multiplayer 4X, in which turns come fast one after another.

The whole macro vs mico thing is getting out of hand. The fact that you can move ships does not mean it is mico intensive. Its like setting a formation like so many people have suggested, but instead of just clicking a button, players can actually define how they want them to align. Outside of moba/competative rts the word apm and micro have very little weight. It helps, but barring relics's attempt to remove base building from the genre entirely, What you build still matters alot.



When you say outmaneuvering troops, I'm pretty sure that is a micomanaged task...So your augment is pretty contradictory.