I don't think there's any reasonable doubt that tactical combat would be better. But since this is a game designed to be able to work at a relatively fast pace in multiplayer with simultaneous turns etc., the card based system is the best way to simulate an actual tactical experience in a limited time frame without actually providing one. For anyone that's played Age of Wonders multiplayer (another simultaneous turn based game), you'll remember how much a speedbump anyone fighting a battle tactically was.

Current combat is interesting and as in depth as it should be when you consider the fact that it has to take place during a turn. Most prominently for multiplayer with several battles possibly occurring each turn. If not for this system, it could take FAR too long.

Then again, anyone could spend and hour just going over the options that all their systems have, let alone if you are playing as the amoeba who can see the ENTIRE galaxy to start with... so maybe a more in depth combat system could work. I just don't think it is going to change this late in the game. --pun intended

Master of Orion is THE best space game IMO!! (In my opinion!!)

My favourite and the one I am playing as we speak is MoO 3.

Current space combat is boring again in my opinion, and is a little based on chance on what the other fleet's card is.

Bring on something a little more interactive rather than just watching the ships battle.



If you could also add an ability to fast track the rest of the combat, then that would also be beneficial to speeding up the combat.

I really loved the combat system of MOO2. And I prefer turn based combat in general. But with the background that ES gives (missing diversity of weapons and combat modules) I think this wouldn't work out well.

The only thing I'd like to have changed is the option for pausing combat in single player while chosing battle cards as posted here: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12629-suggestion-pause-combat-while-chosing-battle-actions.



PS: It is not a good style of discussion to insult other people by calling their posts "dumb". You could be more polite and point out what kind of answer you expected. There should be enough room for all opinions. Thank you.

I'd say the current system needs more depth and decision but don't make it turn based or real time. However this sitting in a line shooting back and forth till death says either your race failed basic tactics and thus was considered the best choice of tacticians or they hired some peasants and told them which buttons to press. It works for the russians but more enlightened species or even humans are hardly going to join a military which says fly in straight line and shoot at the other side. At least Honor Harrington Universe has an excuse for such tactics.

I play MOO2 since 1998. And I like TB battle of MOO2.

This makes it possible to defeat a fleet of ten ships with a pair of ships.

You only need a good ship design and tactical sophistication.

I would love to have this option in ES.

The current combat system is too simplified.

While I could get behind more layers, more complexity, more variety, or even more combat types (ship-to-ship, ship-to-ground, or ground-to-ground), expecting an entirely new game mode is just impossible. It won't happen. Probably not even in the if-it-happened sequel.

id like to see something like a total war series meets homeworld system. but this is fine for what it is.

ArrowLance wrote:
I'm unconvinced, write the essay. I enjoy the card combat system and would like to see it expanded upon and not removed.

I agree with you. This combat system is quite interesting, it enables us to enjoy the fight. But yes, more flexibility in terms of types of cards -like keep at range, approach cards, something that changed the way each battle would occur instead of always having the same animation would be an welcome addition.



Having head on battles and pursuit... I already listed this on other topic.

My input on this issue is that I do not like the way the current combat system works and the unreliably of the auto resolve to get the best possible results makes me manual practically every combat that doesn't involve scouts (Yes I am OCD). Due to the very small number of variables its nothing more than spread sheets and the vast majority of weapons and armour systems are useless and just clogging up the game with trap options. I feel the only way to effectively make more options viable is to take another approach to combat as a whole. As it stands it is my least favourite aspect of the game. Even in multiplayer I've never needed to research more than Flawless Machining for weapon systems and built fleets with 1 Battleship or Dreadnought to serve as hero life boat and Laser DD spammed my way to victory.

Current combat is perfect in Endless Space for the sort of game we're playing. Here's why in a deceptively long and one-sided deliberation.



In my experience with Napoleon: Total War, my multiplayer games are generally isolated to two players-maximum, as have been all of my friends' games. Real-time combat in Total War is in-depth and challenging, but the game also provides the "auto-decide" feature because battles can be absurdly long, and the people I play with insist that they have to command the battles themselves because they think they can "pull an Alexander" on me. I can't imagine one of my other pals having to sit and twiddle their thumbs as Britain while Prussia and France here duke it out in a half-hour extravaganza of thousands of casualties, reinforcements, and additional casualties.



Endless Space resolves this problem by providing the players with a means to pull out a chance of victory in tight or seemingly hopeless engagements, and in a comparably short timespan too. One minute of battle is vastly more productive to a long-term gaming experience than 20 minutes of me fighting Napoleon.



I have a tendency when playing Endless Space to skip over battles that I know the outcome of. I'm not entirely familiar with the way the game is coded, but I notice that the military power comparison bar that shows up whenever you engage a fleet has very little effect on the outcome of things as opposed to other, more severe concerns - say a lone sophon battleship goes against a swarm of crappy, unarmored hissho destroyers. This has happened to me, incidentally, numerous times, when I was putting down the sophons in a recent game.



9/10 times the battleship loses because of certain things we already are very familiar with. The way combat goes in ES seems to be very easily and quickly-generated, with visuals on battles just being highly elaborate illustrations of a few lines of code. "This ship shoots a battery of lasers at that ship, that ship gets hit, absorbs some of the shots, takes damage from the rest."







Not as grandiose as this makes it out to be, mind, but that's precisely why we opt out of automatic resolution of combat.



And it's very frank in its realism. Historically we see that it doesn't matter how big your dreadnought is; if you can't fend off a swarm of warships specifically designed to abuse your inability to hit a dozen targets at once, you've no hope of survival. While several other factors played into the sinking of the Bismarck, it's unsurprising that Germany's leviathan was defeated by a swarm of smaller ships.



A dozen destroyers will kill three cruisers, unless there is a considerable technological disparity. A dozen destroyers against three cruisers and three escorts - now there's a chance to smack those destroyer-spamming hissho scum.



In Napoleon, the success-probability bar is an illustration of a modifier to a very basic chance-roll of who wins and who loses and how bad. As Prussia, I often would find myself sighing when the damned Russians finally decided they'd stab me in the back and invade Poland, at which point I would save the game, auto-battle, then reload and repeat if I lost. I'm lazy like that.



In Endless Space it's an approximation, but from my observation (haven't tested this too much) it has no real effect compared to the real logistics. No matter how many times I reload the game, I suspect, the outcome will very likely be the same and I'll still be doomed to a fate worse than the defeat of l'empereur at Moscow.



Is it odd that these ships just stop firing after 50 seconds of brutality? Yes. If there is some in-universe explanation for this, like, "oh god we've got to let our systems cool down before the ship explodes" or maybe if the two fleets just jumped back out after it was done, this would be less of a problem.



I can tell you right now, developing combat into a real-time strategy would make matters worse in all regards.



A huge problem I notice with space combat games is that none of them seem to be able to accurately portray how space combat would work: you've got an enormous armada that is very likely going to have arrived in a planetary system in a very likely different alignment to the local orbits than your opponent. You have every direction to choose to send your ships.



Never mind tiny factors like debris in space, asteroids, dust clouds or anything - just directing ships through the void alone is a nightmare. Many games refuse to bother with this and instead approach it with the disappointingly simple birds-eye view of a flat grid.



Those that do attempt to do it, I'm told, are unspeakably horrible.



Endless Space's combat, as it is, satisfies me greatly by not forcing me to try to maneuver twenty-two ships individually, but instead giving me options for how the ships should be gearing themselves for the coming battle. It's fast, it's simple, and it's a stroke of genius in its own way. Because the game is much more about the building of an empire, combat should be just that way.

Staffen wrote:
Current combat is perfect in Endless Space for the sort of game we're playing. Here's why in a deceptively long and one-sided deliberation.



In my experience with Napoleon: Total War, my multiplayer games are generally isolated to two players-maximum, as have been all of my friends' games. Real-time combat in Total War is in-depth and challenging, but the game also provides the "auto-decide" feature because battles can be absurdly long, and the people I play with insist that they have to command the battles themselves because they think they can "pull an Alexander" on me. I can't imagine one of my other pals having to sit and twiddle their thumbs as Britain while Prussia and France here duke it out in a half-hour extravaganza of thousands of casualties, reinforcements, and additional casualties.



Endless Space resolves this problem by providing the players with a means to pull out a chance of victory in tight or seemingly hopeless engagements, and in a comparably short timespan too. One minute of battle is vastly more productive to a long-term gaming experience than 20 minutes of me fighting Napoleon.



I have a tendency when playing Endless Space to skip over battles that I know the outcome of. I'm not entirely familiar with the way the game is coded, but I notice that the military power comparison bar that shows up whenever you engage a fleet has very little effect on the outcome of things as opposed to other, more severe concerns - say a lone sophon battleship goes against a swarm of crappy, unarmored hissho destroyers. This has happened to me, incidentally, numerous times, when I was putting down the sophons in a recent game.



9/10 times the battleship loses because of certain things we already are very familiar with. The way combat goes in ES seems to be very easily and quickly-generated, with visuals on battles just being highly elaborate illustrations of a few lines of code. "This ship shoots a battery of lasers at that ship, that ship gets hit, absorbs some of the shots, takes damage from the rest."







Not as grandiose as this makes it out to be, mind, but that's precisely why we opt out of automatic resolution of combat.



And it's very frank in its realism. Historically we see that it doesn't matter how big your dreadnought is; if you can't fend off a swarm of warships specifically designed to abuse your inability to hit a dozen targets at once, you've no hope of survival. While several other factors played into the sinking of the Bismarck, it's unsurprising that Germany's leviathan was defeated by a swarm of smaller ships.



A dozen destroyers will kill three cruisers, unless there is a considerable technological disparity. A dozen destroyers against three cruisers and three escorts - now there's a chance to smack those destroyer-spamming hissho scum.



In Napoleon, the success-probability bar is an illustration of a modifier to a very basic chance-roll of who wins and who loses and how bad. As Prussia, I often would find myself sighing when the damned Russians finally decided they'd stab me in the back and invade Poland, at which point I would save the game, auto-battle, then reload and repeat if I lost. I'm lazy like that.



In Endless Space it's an approximation, but from my observation (haven't tested this too much) it has no real effect compared to the real logistics. No matter how many times I reload the game, I suspect, the outcome will very likely be the same and I'll still be doomed to a fate worse than the defeat of l'empereur at Moscow.



Is it odd that these ships just stop firing after 50 seconds of brutality? Yes. If there is some in-universe explanation for this, like, "oh god we've got to let our systems cool down before the ship explodes" or maybe if the two fleets just jumped back out after it was done, this would be less of a problem.



I can tell you right now, developing combat into a real-time strategy would make matters worse in all regards.



A huge problem I notice with space combat games is that none of them seem to be able to accurately portray how space combat would work: you've got an enormous armada that is very likely going to have arrived in a planetary system in a very likely different alignment to the local orbits than your opponent. You have every direction to choose to send your ships.



Never mind tiny factors like debris in space, asteroids, dust clouds or anything - just directing ships through the void alone is a nightmare. Many games refuse to bother with this and instead approach it with the disappointingly simple birds-eye view of a flat grid.



Those that do attempt to do it, I'm told, are unspeakably horrible.



Endless Space's combat, as it is, satisfies me greatly by not forcing me to try to maneuver twenty-two ships individually, but instead giving me options for how the ships should be gearing themselves for the coming battle. It's fast, it's simple, and it's a stroke of genius in its own way. Because the game is much more about the building of an empire, combat should be just that way.

Even if the Devs do not decide to go tactical turn based combat the claim that it is perfect as is is extremely flawed due to the number of trap options. I have no problem with having no control over combat beyond the cards but the current way it is calculated took all of a few weeks to boil down to one or two winning tactics and to me and a lot of other people that's just unacceptable. As it stands every none Laser weapon on the tech tree is or is next to useless, all kinetics are for sure useless. They are wasted space and a trap option for the AI to fall into so it can suck harder. Something needs to be done and in my mind the only way to pull the game out of the Laser DD Spam gutter is to alter the way combat is calculated.

I voted for the current combat system but with a caveat. I always use auto play because I never have time to study the cards and figure out what the good choices are. If you took off the timer between phases and let each phase start when a card is selected that would work better for me. I hate feeling rushed, and it's not what I play the game for. It also might be nice to be able to give different orders to different battle groups in a combat, for example missile carriers hanging back and pummeling the enemy while your destroyer screen closes to engage, while the enemy engages your battle screen and tries to slip other fast ships through on full defensive to engage your missile carriers.

I like the current combat system, but would like to see some extra interactivity/options and tie in it better with the ship design. Make the default cards tactical stuff like "focus fire", "retreat", "defensive manoeuvres" only, then have special cards like "EMP", "Nanobot Repair" unlocked by ship modules or certain weapons (that would also make ship design a bit more interesting beyond the pure numbers). Perhaps also have a "default card stack" for a fleet, so if you find a card combo that synergises well with your ship load-out, you can use it in auto-resolve, too (ditto for enemies, of course).



Also, throw some extra randomness into the flight paths/cameras for the combat, so two battles with similar fleets don't end up looking nigh-identical. In short, mostly polishing and improving the current combat - the concept is neat and strikes a good balance between resolution speed, tactical choice and prettiness.

Current combat is fine but couldhave some sort of rear line or semi retreat. So damaged ships and colony ships could be protected or withdrawn without forced to retreat all the way to next system or the whole fleet withdraw.

Thomas.Trainor wrote:
Even if the Devs do not decide to go tactical turn based combat the claim that it is perfect as is is extremely flawed due to the number of trap options. I have no problem with having no control over combat beyond the cards but the current way it is calculated took all of a few weeks to boil down to one or two winning tactics and to me and a lot of other people that's just unacceptable. As it stands every none Laser weapon on the tech tree is or is next to useless, all kinetics are for sure useless. They are wasted space and a trap option for the AI to fall into so it can suck harder. Something needs to be done and in my mind the only way to pull the game out of the Laser DD Spam gutter is to alter the way combat is calculated.

Some tuning is needed, that's all.

The Voters and the Devs have spoken! Combat will stay as it is, with a few fine tunings here and there. Stop beating the old poor horse!

I would LOVE for it to be an RTS combat style like Napoleon total war, but I still love it now aswell, what I would like is retreat option and maybe a limit to the number of fleets around a planet, playing a game the other day one of the AI had 17 different fleets around the planet (all small) and I just kept on having to go through the motions until all my ships were dead, a retreat button in the auto/manual menu is a must honestly atleast as the offending fleet.

Gardiiad wrote:
I would LOVE for it to be an RTS combat style like Napoleon total war, but I still love it now aswell, what I would like is retreat option and maybe a limit to the number of fleets around a planet, playing a game the other day one of the AI had 17 different fleets around the planet (all small) and I just kept on having to go through the motions until all my ships were dead, a retreat button in the auto/manual menu is a must honestly atleast as the offending fleet.

A retreat card will be included.

Yay! Glad to hear it