I had some brief ideas. I think there should be ways of improving your odds in battle without creating a unit or defensive structure. I think the most important part is not to let these become too great a factor in warfare.



So I submit for your considerations...

----



Defensive Satellite Network | System Improvement



Coordinated Counter Measures - Invading fleets suffer -5% accuracy.

Transmission Jamming - -1 enemy fleet movement within system borders.

Synchronized Tracking System - See incoming fleets farther out.

-4 Dust on improvement.

So, as a dev responded, system defences are just passive. And if you get outgunned by your enemy, you'll lose dozens of fleets to the same enemy fleet, and later on lose your system no matter you do what. And in the process, enemy won't take a single damage. Baaaaaaaaaaad choice.



It is an invasion. There should be 2 options when you are invading; siege & "real invasion". There is no infrastructure or population damage at all on what we have, siege. Every system should have defenses that can fire back, something "active", not just passive. During invasion, invader doesn't suffer any damage. They just park next to a planet, and wait for you to surrender. This is just silly.



As I've said, systems/planets should have their own defenses. And if you are picking siege option, your fleet should suffer much more damage compared to the "invade" option. But, siege option won't cause much infrastructure/population damage, while invade option causes heavy infrastructure and population damage.

There has been a lot of interest in these kind of threads and after playing the alpha extensively I feel even more strongly that we need some form of starbases and active planet defences.



Hopefully they take note, they have a good track record of listening so far. :eek:

For those who missed it, or just got lazy or tired to check all the pages of this interesting post, a person from the team said that they could be added a bit later in the development of the game.

I admit it's kind of heavy to read all the post when you don't follow a post since the beginning.



I like the concepts about space stations that had MOO2 and that summed up basicaly Stargem in his post (/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12281-system-defence-and-orbital-structures)



But seeing how the game is (so far in the alpha) i see it a bit complicated.

Why? because here we have a game where the entity is the system and not each planet. The only personalization you give to planet is defining if it is dedicated to make more food, research, production or money within your system.

Well, we could always rename it and not have a "space station", it would make more sense to have some sort of "space station network" or something like that as a concept.

The idea needs to be at the size of the system and not of a planet.



The "space station network" could be adding a +1 to population per planet/asteroids field as a main boost and than adding a specialization to one of the four "resource" and/or defense, as a simple concept to insert in the game as it is.



But i'd rather see it adding a defense/attack purpose.



As a defensive choice it'd add maluses to the invading fleet(s) inside your system like a -##% to accuracy and/or damage (each general or specialized, maybe depending on the affinity of each race to a type of weapon/defense),and a -# fleet command points that would force the invader to attack with smaller fleets (unless a hero is inside the fleet).

And of course it'd be the other way around for attack, giving your fleet(s) inside your system a +##% to accuracy and/or damage, and/or a +# fleet command point that allows your fleets to be bigger inside of your system (that could be interpreted as GQ giving tactical advantage, something like that).



I'd love to see system have some relative damage power like cities in Civilization V. Even if it's not very powerful depending on how advanced in tech is each player/faction, it'd nice to see some sort of active defense from your system, showing that it is against that invasion.

Because so far the only "interaction" between the invading fleet and the system, is the balance between the two powers defining how long it takes for you to change the influence inside the system. Sounds more like a brainwash of the population of the system than an invasion, because there are no loss of population or of infrastructures.

(I guess it'd fun to see a faction of "converters", that would be specialized in doing that instead of taking the system by the force but maybe that would add another mechanic to the game and be complex...)



My guess is that concepts need to remain simple for the game developpers or else when you're going to play in multi, each player might spend 10-15min to select what to do on his turn and might ruin the rythm of the game.

Hard challenge to try to make a hybrid between a 4X and a turn based strategy game and make both fans of each genre happy with one concept.

Again, my hat off to the dev already for bringing an alpha that is rich and enjoyable to play.

jazzmiq wrote:
The "space station network" could be adding a +1 to population per planet/asteroids field as a main boost and than adding a specialization to one of the four "resource" and/or defense, as a simple concept to insert in the game as it is.

I love that one.

Instead of star bases, there is one other option to defend a planet, something more technical, what i am talking about is surface to space missiles, simply put, a missile base can cover a larger range of space rather then guns and can be much more efficient as the hit to miss that is there with traditional ballistics and even the travel time of lasers.



I suggested this in my post about adding a system improvement or a planet improvement that would in turn, when close or mid range is engaged a volley of missiles would come from the planet(s) direction and help with the invading force or in turn, slowly damage enemy ships every turn as they are invading the planet, Or even allow us to construct moon bases on planets with moons that have orbital defenses, aka the missile base and other long ranged artillery, fighter craft that aid or damage each turn and such, even the possibility of a "Satellite" network orbiting the planet.

Orbital and surface planetary defenses are utterly useless in space combat. They follow predictable paths, and it is therefore extremely easy to set an asteroid on a precise collision course, destroying all your hard-earned money in a big explosion while the fleet responsible is half a solar system away. Ships are the defensive weapons of the future, just as they are the offensive weapons. Being able to move independently makes them impossible to hit from a distance.



Surface-to-space missiles suffer from the same problem. Computer targeting systems will be so powerful on fleets that it is way too easy to destroy the missiles with lasers before they even get close. Especially since lasers (by definition) move at the speed of light, the missile would get no warning for an incoming. Even if they had random course corrections, when they get to within 1 light second (300 000 kilometers) they wouldn't be able to change course fast enough to evade an oncoming laser that was sent to the location the missile was predicted to occupy 1 second earlier. Even if they were nuclear weapons that detonated when hit, this distance is still far too far (about 25 earth diameters) away to be able to inflict any damage to ships.



This CAN be overcome by the sheer volume of missiles launched, as it is in ship-to-ship engagements, but one should ask whether it's worth the resources. Also, in ship-to-ship engagements there is much less time to react, and the targeting systems have a lot more to target than just missiles, meaning in this situation missiles have a much better effect.



Short answer: wouldn't work.

Bratyn wrote:
Orbital and surface planetary defenses are utterly useless in space combat. They follow predictable paths, and it is therefore extremely easy to set an asteroid on a precise collision course, destroying all your hard-earned money in a big explosion while the fleet responsible is half a solar system away. Ships are the defensive weapons of the future, just as they are the offensive weapons. Being able to move independently makes them impossible to hit from a distance.



Surface-to-space missiles suffer from the same problem. Computer targeting systems will be so powerful on fleets that it is way too easy to destroy the missiles with lasers before they even get close. Especially since lasers (by definition) move at the speed of light, the missile would get no warning for an incoming. Even if they had random course corrections, when they get to within 1 light second (300 000 kilometers) they wouldn't be able to change course fast enough to evade an oncoming laser that was sent to the location the missile was predicted to occupy 1 second earlier. Even if they were nuclear weapons that detonated when hit, this distance is still far too far (about 25 earth diameters) away to be able to inflict any damage to ships.



Short answer: wouldn't work.

except you can fit your missiles with bomb pumped lasers

Bratyn wrote:
Orbital and surface planetary defenses are utterly useless in space combat. They follow predictable paths, and it is therefore extremely easy to set an asteroid on a precise collision course, destroying all your hard-earned money in a big explosion



Short answer: wouldn't work.

And whats stopping the base from using the high end ordinances to blow the asteroid into small pieces making it a ineffective strategy?

HELLO! we dropped a nuke back in the 1990s on earth, look what it did! don't you think we have much stronger nukes now for "Space" use?

Seriously did you not even think thought what you typed before submitting?



And yes it takes a Huge computer system to use Surface-To-Space missiles but hell, what else good is a moon for, other then building a military complex with a ultra super computer on it?



Obviously you know nothing of missiles, computer targeting and many other things, The missiles would only have to link into the targeting data of the ships in orbit or from the surface sensors, they even got missiles TODAY that auto target as it is, not to mention FoF singals that your friendly ships can be putting out and the enemy ships don't, i mean we have lasers for crying out loud in the game, don't you think we'd have FTL data links with our ships and what not?



The only problem i would see is the fuel of the missiles if the moon was on the other side of the planet at the time of the invading fleet, but then again, none of our ships require supply like fuel now do they so thees advance civilizations obviously have a clean renewable fuel source that they can adapt to missiles for a cheap cost.



Read up on such stuff before hand please, as for what i said about the lasers, in this game the lasers don't move at light speed now do they?

"Short answer: Think thought before you post."

Seldion wrote:
And whats stopping the base from using the high end ordinances to blow the asteroid into small pieces making it a ineffective strategy?

Seriously did you not even think thought what you typed before submitting?



And yes it takes a Huge computer system to use Surface-To-Space missiles but hell, what else good is a moon for, other then building a military complex with a ultra super computer on it?



Obviously you know nothing of missiles, computer targeting and many other things, The missiles would only have to link into the targeting data of the ships in orbit or from the surface sensors, they even got missiles TODAY that auto target as it is, not to mention FoF singals that your friendly ships can be putting out and the enemy ships don't, i mean we have lasers for crying out loud in the game, don't you think we'd have FTL data links with our ships and what not?



The only problem i would see is the fuel of the missiles if the moon was on the other side of the planet at the time of the invading fleet, but then again, none of our ships require supply like fuel now do they so thees advance civilizations obviously have a clean renewable fuel source that they can adapt to missiles for a cheap cost.



Read up on such stuff before hand please, as for what i said about the lasers, in this game the lasers don't move at light speed now do they?

"Short answer: Think thought before you post."

Wow wow wow, excuse me for my lacking intellect... Allow me to remove myself from the gene-pool straight away, sir!



Anyway, destroying an asteroid with planet-based ordnance will necessarily happen relatively close to the planet. While planet-based ordnance is en-route to the asteroid, the asteroid itself is also closing the gap to the planet. In essence, you change 1 predictable big lump of rock, of which you know where it's going to hit, with thousands of small rocks that will follow unpredicted paths, probably too many to track. You will have no idea where they'll hit, what areas to evacuate, and the resulting destruction may even be worse than with a single rock. This is exactly the reason why NASA, ESA and any other space agency highly discourages the use of ordnance to blow up an asteroid that's on a collision course with earth.



With space ships it's another story, because they have a lot more precision at their disposal, not to mention other tactics entirely (giving an asteroid even a little nudge or tug at that distance will make it miss the Earth entirely). Not to mention it's very likely that ships are already much closer to the asteroids when they're detected than the planet is, so you'll have much more time to react.



Next, the computer I mentioned wasn't the surface-to-space missile control system. I was talking about the hostile fleet's targeting computers. Also, range and targeting capabilities are not what I think the problem is. The problem is that it's too easy to shoot down missiles before they get in range. Now in-game the big powerful lasers may not move at lightspeed, but only a tiny laser beam is needed to incapacitate a missile, and it's very probable that a space-faring civilization would have access to such small lasers before the big, destructive kind. You don't even need to use lasers. Jack Campbell uses 'grapeshot' in his novels, which are basically thousands of tiny metal balls that they shoot off at a few tenths the speed of light. This creates a 'wall' of tiny balls moving at incredible velocities. Even if they are only a few millimeters in diameter each, just a single hit is enough to release enough energy to destroy a missile utterly (this works just like a Gatling-type anti-missile turret on present-day navies). I did not even mention present-day countermeasures such as electronic jamming and fake heat signatures. My point being that there's just too many countermeasures you could use, and way too much time to use them in. It takes hours for missiles to reach a space fleet from a planet, unless they're in orbit. And following my previous point, if they weren't in orbit, they could just blow the defenses away with well-aimed asteroids.



Finally, I don't know what nuke we used in the 90s. Are you referring to the bombs in the 1940s instead? Or some nuclear test? Anyway, yes, we can make larger nukes, but remember that larger nukes = heavier weight and larger size. You can't make them too powerful, or the missiles will be too big (= too easy to hit) or too heavy (= too slow and requiring way too much fuel, leading to bigger missiles to carry all that fuel, leading back to the downside of being too big). The largest nuke we ever detonated (Tsar Bomba, check Wikipedia) required a bomber to carry it, because it was far too heavy for a missile. It only gave a fireball of 3.5 kilometers in diameter, and 35 kilometers total destruction due to the shock wave. Now, as we know, space has no matter in it to allow the existence of a shock wave, so that leaves the 3.5 kilometer fireball. EMP occurs as well, sadly I don't know the EMP radius of the Tsar Bomba. However, suffice to say that 3.5km is WAY less than even a pinprick on the Earth, and the distance I was talking about is 25 earth diameters.



EDIT: Typical nuclear EMPs with high-altitude explosions cover an area of a few hundred to a few thousand kilometers diameter (although not usually circular, depending on wind etc). Still less than 300 000 kilometers, or 25 earth diameters.

-Face palms-



Okay look, Smaller rocks... mean they burn up in the atmosphere easier, so if it hits a planet, hardly no damage will be done, not to mention.... dun dun dun Shielding!



Then there is the simple fact of civilian ships and the range of our sensors, frankly put we have light years to detect it and in other words react to it, its not like its going to happen in a blink of the eye.



The point of all this is, Surface to Space missiles aren't useless as you may think and the asteroid strategy is., even if you don't blow it to smithereens, you can still alter it with a gravity bomb as from what you said even a little nudge would alter its course.



Our ships travel at FTL and only thing keeping them from traveling faster is the fact they have more mass and thus need more energy to maintain a field of integrity to keep them from tearing them self up at higher speeds, a missile is much smaller and thus don't need a high out-put to keep the integrity field up and also allows it to move faster, So in turn we could have a missile at the asteroid with in a day at max, and with all the technology of the space fairing civilizations a portable gravity bomb is more then capable of altering the course of the asteroid and simply put with our sensors we would detach the asteroid months before hand, so what is stopping a planet from firing 2-4 missiles at X point in the asteroid's trajectory and blowing up when asteroid is in X distance and then having the others blow up in a course to set it towards the enemy's planet?



If your thinking about the asteroids in system then yes this might work but it becomes more of a tactic then a strategy, but then the system would have to be void of enemy for it to be used and then it would damage the planets eco-system and such.



If the enemy used a smaller size then even the nuke we used on earth would be more then enough to break it into millions of small rocks that would do no damage and if it was detonated in front of it, wouldn't that push it back into space?

Smaller rocks do even more damage, as I already stated. You can't predict where they'll go, and 'smaller' doesn't mean 'tiny'. They can still have plenty of mass to penetrate the atmosphere. Next, when an asteroid evaporates in the atmosphere, where does the heat go? It goes into the atmosphere. So if you have a million rocks vaporizing in the atmosphere, the entire atmosphere will heat up to the point where for example trees would spontaneously combust (another scenario described by NASA). Yes, of course this would have terrible consequences for the eco-system, but if it's an enemy planet, who cares? It's just like nuking a country on Earth. It'll make that country uninhabitable for millennia, but that still doesn't stop leaders from contemplating the option. Finally, of course I was talking about in-system asteroid launches. There is no point in launching them from interstellar space, because it would take centuries for the rocks to reach their destinations. I thought that was implied in my posts, but my apologies if you misunderstood that bit.



Now, about FTL missiles, that would work. As would 'gravity bombs', however I wasn't aware of their existence in-game (I haven't played it yet). The reason, however, that NASA discourages normal nukes is that, while they could be used to nudge them off-course (with small asteroids), the explosion is more likely to blow it apart, and the asteroids are usually far too big to be influenced by even several explosions. Add to that that by the time the nukes (unless they fly at FTL speeds) reach them, the asteroids would be so close that much larger course corrections are needed to keep it away from the planet. The further from the target, the smaller 'nudge' is needed. Also, if you explode a nuke to nudge an asteroid, it also destroys a tiny bit of the asteroid itself, changing the dimensions and weight of the asteroid, thus changing the path in a way that may not coincide with what you were trying to accomplish with the nudge. For example, you nudge an asteroid with a nuke, trying to make it go faster and overshoot the Earth. However, as you nudge it, it loses a bit of weight, thus gravity from the Sun has more effect on it. Therefore, the net result of that explosion is 0. It will go faster, but also get pulled to the sun more. As for 'turning an asteroid around', however, that's completely impossible. Every explosion that nudges an asteroid also destroys it a bit. By the time it's stopped, much less turned around, it would have broken up in pieces.



Of course, asteroid strikes are difficult to accomplish with an enemy fleet in-system. However, just how are ships going to nudge an asteroid? Ram it? Can you see a 100-meter long ship ramming a 1km (or more)-wide asteroid? I highly doubt it would survive. Even a controlled nudge would probably buckle the infrastructure.



Anyway, you mentioned some possible ways of defeating such a strike. Question is only whether gravity bombs and FTL missiles exist (don't forget that FTL missiles will be extremely expensive... You're basically paying for single-use FTL engines). I was talking from the standpoint of 'normal' missiles and ordnance available to a defender. But, in SF everything (to a limit) is possible, it all depends on how far you go. I don't mind if such things like asteroid bombardments are left out of the game, but for realism's sake there should be a reason why it's impossible, or impractical. It's just silly to assume a highly advanced, FTL-capable civilization wouldn't be able to set an asteroid on a collision course with a planet. Especially when it's even already within our present-day capabilities.

The way I look at it, this is a game, not a physics simulation in space.

Don't 4x games profess to be realistic? In any case it's easy to do away with the whole asteroid warfare by just saying there was a sort of 'Geneva Convention' that banned their use.

Thing is, how would the Cravers fit into that?

Whilst I'm happy with a lot of abstraction I'm concerned that it is too damn easy to push a defending fleet off a world - there's no serious benefit to holding the planets in a system with the battle system 'as is'.



Amplitude have stated that they wanted to focus on 'dynamic' battles by limiting combat to fleets, but in fact it is entirely possible to reduce things to a war of attrition where a better and stronger fleet with a more experienced commander is 'ground down' by wave after wave of expendable craft. I'd far rather have the invader need to tailor his fleet to deal with static defences and thereby run his invasion by beating the fleets first, then grind down the orbitals and finally take and hold the planets.



There should possibly also be a differentiation between taking and destroying a system. It's relatively easy to wipe out a world - just drop lots of radioactive rocks on it. It's much harder to take a system from an enemy while leaving it habitable afterwards.

SpaceTroll wrote:
we wanted to focus on dynamic battles for the release, but star bases could something we could definitely look into for the futrure.

system defences are a mix a system improvement and population.

The problem I find with current system defenses however is that they only slow down the rate of invasion for an enemy fleet but there's no way to defend themselves, wittle down, or destroy the enemy fleet in orbit if your own fleets are away, busy, or counterattacking your enemy's territory. Some kind of space defenses like orbital turrets or fighter squadrons or troop transports to try and board enemy ships, something to fight back with would seem nice at least if you gave us the option to research them. Perhaps give heroes the ability to try sabotaging ships in an enemy fleet based on their melee skill so if they just want to try sitting in the same spot invading a well garrisoned planet for many turns it may be considered a tactical risk. This would give you some incentive to place someone who is a pilot/admiral on a system getting regularly attacked if they provided buffs to system defenses and had sabotage capabilities but didn't provide production bonuses, to my understanding right now they only provide bonuses to ground combat depending on their melee skill but this only delays invasion for a fleet of yours to come in and repel the enemy fleet. This can be tough if you're trying to hold a "choke point" but are trying to constantly deal with fleets getting past that choke point because it doesn't seem to blockade off enemy fleets all that well as it doesn't give you some sort of notification for whether you want to engage a fleet that is passing through a system or not. Like a domino effect that adds up to frustration of trying to chase a few fleets around defending your systems, only to keep allowing more to pour in as a result.

It may be not important but orbital space installations should not be able to be built around a planet that is suffering from the Kessler Syndrome. All the space debris colliding around...

Just putting my oar in.

Xervitus wrote:
The way I look at it, this is a game, not a physics simulation in space.

A marine from Starcraft shouldn't be able to fly through space should he? He's not Iron Man.

some defensive options would be nice. i don't mind that planets cant fight back without a fleet in orbit. (if alien spaceships apeared above the earth today, what chance would we have against complete solar system wide bombardment. a gound war would favour guerilla tactics, but if spaceships are blowing you back to the stone age from high orbit, there is nothing you can do). and stationary defence platforms wouldn't do much against ships that can move FTL. warfare is all about mobility and initiative... and space is big



my two sence on the physics debate above. you don't need to nudge an asteroid, watch this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbFmzNV2WQk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTuaLeivzEM



ships could just allow their own mass (small gravitational pull) to tow asteroids around. asteroid's gravity pulls on ship, ship's gravity pulls on asteroid, ship moves a bit--- asteroid moves a bit, ship moves some more-- asteroid moves some more. the business men who want to mine asteroids are going to do this by puting heavy space craft in orbit around asteroids. food for thought