I like the previous idea of ships only moving when you hit "End Turn" although I'd like to modify the handling of battle scenarios differently. Instead of picking a single battle from a list, just use the same exact system you have now - you can choose to battle the enemy or give move orders. But because your ships only move when you hit End Turn, the enemy can choose to attack you, and you won't end up in a race to see who can give the order first. It makes the game a bit more "tactical," I feel - it relies more on strategy and on a thinking game than a reaction and quick response game.

Unless this is exactly what you're implementing right now, in which case I would be very happy.

Blindmalice wrote:
When my fleets come into contact/are contacted by the enemy, I can only control the actions of one fleet, the others are auto-resolved. It's frustrating enough to have me shelve ES until this is resolved.

Sorry that this is a dead-horse issue, but I'm in the same boat - I uninstalled the game because of this issue. It wasn't even clear that these battles were happening at first, and I know I missed more than one when I stepped away from what I thought was a turn-based game to go to the bathroom.



In order to maximize planetary conquest, I would create fleets of ships with no weapons other than invasion modules. If could assign an auto-behavior of "always retreat", I probably wouldn't have uninstalled the game. It was the loss of yet another fleet of them in a competitive game (due to me fighting a different battle) that made me uninstall.

Consider the current turn sequencing without battle timers: Player A initiates an attack on Player B. Player B is immediately alerted that a battle has been instigated. Player B chooses to ignore the alert and complete the rest of his moves thus keeping Player A hanging around waiting for a response, possibly letting more battle alerts stack up. Player A may get bored and similarly continue with the rest of his turn whilst waiting for Player B to decide what he wants to do. Player B may even click Fight whilst Player A is stuck in another battle thus Player B is now the one waiting around for a response...



This is already a bit of a pickle as far as turn sequencing goes but imagine how much worse it will get if both (or more) players start to initiate multiple battles against one another, and have the AIs kicking things off as well. It will very rapidly become a miasma of bizarrely timed, mid-turn battles. Not fun at all and probably prone to some pretty weird if not exploitable results. Timers at least prevent an unending queue of battles from festering away, systematically confusing the turn with each initiation, and they do prevent multiplayer turns from being seemingly unending and tedious. However, here’s the kicker: the battle timer, the fleet sizes to some extent and the fleet engagement selection mechanisms only exist to try and smooth over the wrinkles in what is a fundamentally awkward turns system. None of them in and of themselves prove that mixing real-time mechanisms into a TBS layer work in this manner.



All of these problems would completely evaporate if the game didn’t try to mix real-time actions in a TBS layer. Sorry, but it really is that simple. That said, it probably isn’t a solution for ES as it looks like these unhappy bedfellows are here to stay. The challenge comes in trying to tweak the system as it stands now to improve the flow of the game rather than further mystify it. You could just turn off battle timers as a knee-jerk reaction but the results of that need to be thought through thoroughly because it really isn’t as simple as it might first appear.



Food for thought that may crystallize in peoples’ minds just how difficult a challenge this is: There hasn’t yet been a game created that successfully blends real-time and turn-based strategic layer mechanics. If Amplitude can pull this one out of the bag they may well set a new standard for 4X games. I’m sceptical that it can be done but I have a hat on stand-by should I be required to eat it.

I like the simultaneous turnbased thing in general, but the battle timers are extremely annoying. It's not even like the battles are all that long. While the "Wait what there was a timer?" thing is also an issue I understand why the timer exists, but I'd love to know the actual gameplay reason for only being able to manually fight one fight per turn, especially given how short fights are. Autoresolving isn't even instantaneous, it takes time too!



e: That came off as snarkier as intended. I'm being completely serious, I'd really like to know the exact intent behind the current system because there might be a way to implement it that allows for more meaningful player choice.

BadHorse wrote:
As it stands the computer feels like it's deciding which battles I pay attention to and which will be auto-fought. That combined with the realtime twitch aspect make the system tremendously unappealing and a drawback on a great game.

The devs will build the game that they want to build and ever it should be thus. My only personal beef is that the game was billed as being a TBS game when in reality it isn't.

defekt wrote:
Maybe I’ve spent too long playing TBS games to see the woods for the trees but 4X games that mix reaction style game play with turns seem to suffer from an identity crisis; pick one system then make the most of it, I say.

Amen to that.



The only time it's ever really a good idea to deny your players the ability to make decisions is when where you focus is, itself, a strategic decision. For example, you can only guide one battle: do you choose to manage battle A or battle B? That's forcing the player to allocate his resources (in this case his human decisionmaking ability) wisely; it may not be a popular or great design decision, but it is at least a legitimate one that can be said to add decisions even as it takes them away.



As it stands the computer feels like it's deciding which battles I pay attention to and which will be auto-fought. That combined with the realtime twitch aspect make the system tremendously unappealing and a drawback on a great game.

davea wrote:
To catch them, you need to get fleets ahead of them and cut them off, using intercept. In other pure sequential turn based games, it bothers me that a fleet with the same speed as another fleet can catch it. During my turn, you can't move, so I can catch up to you while you are frozen in place.

That explanation seems to me to be a fundamental disconnect with the way that a turns system works. I’ve been playing TBS (war)games for well over 20 years so maybe I assume that everyone else understands how the turns mechanic works when you try to equate it to a real world, dynamic visualisation.



With a TBS game you can’t review the state of play at the end of your turn, you must review it at the end of the round, i.e., when everyone has had a turn. Only from round to round will you see the situation playing out dynamically and fluidly. A ‘you go, I go’ round robin turns system is functionally exactly the same as everyone merely issuing movement orders during their turn and then have the computer game execute all of those movement orders simultaneously and present the results to all players. This is where ES gets its turns mechanic a bit wrong IMO because it’s a kind of uncomfortable bastardisation of the aforementioned methods and I still believe it’s the root cause of many of the issues commonly raised about the game. As has been mentioned before, CiV uses a similar system to ES and that too plays very awkwardly as a direct result.



Maybe I’ve spent too long playing TBS games to see the woods for the trees but 4X games that mix reaction style game play with turns seem to suffer from an identity crisis; pick one system then make the most of it, I say.

davea wrote:
Not sure who misunderstood who, but I was replying to tirondil.

Well he was replying to me, so I assumed it was related.

Not sure who misunderstood who, but I was replying to tirondil.

davea wrote:
Actually I kind of like the way this works today. To catch them, you need to get fleets ahead of them and cut them off, using intercept. In other pure sequential turn based games, it bothers me that a fleet with the same speed as another fleet can catch it. During my turn, you can't move, so I can catch up to you while you are frozen in place.

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you here, but I think you misunderstood me:

I didn't mean your ships would move when you hit "End Turn," but rather, all ships for all players would move simultaneously when all players had pressed "End Turn." So chasing other fleets will still require cutting them off and planning ahead.

Tiriondil wrote:
Oh yes, that would prevent the players from playing catch me if you can. Disturbs me every time, even in SP.

Actually I kind of like the way this works today. To catch them, you need to get fleets ahead of them and cut them off, using intercept. In other pure sequential turn based games, it bothers me that a fleet with the same speed as another fleet can catch it. During my turn, you can't move, so I can catch up to you while you are frozen in place.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
I like the previous idea of ships only moving when you hit "End Turn"

Oh yes, that would prevent the players from playing catch me if you can. Disturbs me every time, even in SP.

Vote for this!

If you have different battles versus one player that system can stop the counter for the others, if you have battles versus 2 different players the actual system iss better.A mix of both would be fine.

LoiCus- wrote:
We're aware of how frustrating that can be in MP especially and we've been thinking of several solutions that could be feasible to implement.

Music to my-- eyes.

When my fleets come into contact/are contacted by the enemy, I can only control the actions of one fleet, the others are auto-resolved. It's frustrating enough to have me shelve ES until this is resolved.

We're aware of how frustrating that can be in MP especially and we've been thinking of several solutions that could be feasible to implement.



We're currently adjusting the game to improve the manual/auto system. This does impact a lot of game elements so it isn't a light modification.

Veneke wrote:
This is odd. I've managed to manually control multiple battles in a single turn. The only impediment I've found is that oftentimes a timer will start in the midst of a battle I'm already playing out. Should it be the case that you can only control one combat per turn?

Maybe I should explain my point a little more clearly: currently you can fight as many battles as you like as long as they all line up in a neat and orderly fashion, which is rarely the case given simultaneous moves and often plays out the way you describe (with battles starting when you're in no position whatsoever to respond, i.e., already in a battle, or several all arrive at the same moment). One battle per turn would solve most of these problems and concomitantly reduce multiplayer turn time, and that means getting rid of the battle timers and simultaneous battle initiation. (Hell, keep the simultaneous moves but instead of starting the battle dialogue as soon as it happens instead ask to confirm attack/intercept but then lock the system down as a conflict zone to resolve at the end of the turn.) If the battle timers are here to stay, crucial component of simultaneous battle initiation turns I suppose, then these problems aren't going to go away.

This is odd. I've managed to manually control multiple battles in a single turn. The only impediment I've found is that oftentimes a timer will start in the midst of a battle I'm already playing out. Should it be the case that you can only control one combat per turn?



On a side note, I stopped playing ES because fleet spam plus the need to hit manual for each combat which required the game to stagger the timers appropriately (which didn't always happen) made the game virtually unplayable.

This is the main reason (with fleet spam being a very close second) why I no longer play ES. I don't mind only 'controlling' one battle per turn -- after all my favourite space 4X TBS game does that (SotS) -- but the manner in which the choice of which battle you want to control is presented is horribly flawed IMO, for all of the reasons discussed many times before in other threads. It all harks back to the game having simultaneous actual movement and battle initiation turns.



I applaud the devs’ bravery in trying out something new but, well, IMHO it just doesn’t work. I keep thinking how much better the game would be if it implemented simultaneous turns the way SotS does it: all players manage colonies and issue move orders simultaneously but all actual movement happens only once everyone has clicked Next Turn, then everyone picks which one battle they want to personally control from a list of all battles that turn. I think a lot of people may have convinced themselves that the ES turn mechanism is the only way to speed up multiplayer game play; this is a false conclusion because a) there are ways to retain turn speed whilst not having simultaneous actual movement and battle initiation (see the SotS way), b) it introduces lengthy stand-offs that would otherwise never happen in any other TBS approach, and c) there are other elements of the game (e.g. fleet spam) that make turn length unbearably long to the point of being unfeasible in a multiplayer environment. A core principle of 4X TBS gaming has been compromised, i.e., forcing reaction time mechanics in what should be a TBS game, in the name of an ideology that is flouted by other aspects of the game. I simply don’t understand the logic behind this particular design choice at all.



If getting rid of the current clumsy turn mechanics (the very same turn mechanic that killed off CiV multiplayer – was this even researched?) isn’t an option then I suppose that’s the end of the Endless for me, and that is a very great shame.

Steph'nie I have managed once to click on two battles for manual combat within the timer. Guess what? The game crashed.