PLEASE GOD NO!!!



I really really don't want this to become Total War: In SPAAACE!



One of the things that surprised me about ES and which made me happy is the fact that the battles -aren't- real-time.



There's a massive shift in gaming in general to go towards real-time (and first-person) for everything, and it's one I hate. I recognize that this makes sense from a business perspective, and that a majority of gamers like this, but what can I say... I'm a bit slow, and I'm old-school. Give me good ol' fashioned top-down/isometric, turn-based any day over all this fancy-schmancy real-time 3D FPS crap. Damn kids, get off my lawn! *shakes fist*



I'm all for making the battles more engaging and strategic, but please please please, not RTS. If anything, I find them -too- real-time now, the way there's a timer and you have to pick your cards "in a hurry" (well, okay, the timer's plenty slow now that I know what the cards do, but when I first started playing, it was more like "OH GOD WHAT DO I DO PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!! D:").



If the battles become real-time, I'll be using auto-resolve exclusively, and I'll be missing out on a pretty big aspect of the game. I really hope it doesn't come to that.



I do like the potential with the card system, though. Make the battles turn-based, add a few more phases, a bunch more cards, things like that. Give us a grid, possibly hexagonal. Ship placement would matter (for example, I could have "sniper" ships of smaller hulls with less HP in the back, being shielded by heavily-armored dreads up front), and you could use different cards for different ships (or at least for different "wings" of your fleet; say you could have a defensive wing and an offensive wing).

Wonderful encapsulation of how I feel about the matter, Caveman, though a bit more crotchety than I might have phrased it.



I don't think a hexagonal grid would work: you'd need to get way too involved in moving the ships from phase to phase. How about a trio of range boxes you can assign ships to instead? You have three boxes, the enemy has three boxes, and maybe there's a box in between you at the start. Every turn a ship can move a box one way or the other, unless it's really fast in which case it can move two. This is nice and simple and allows you to try to defend your long-range ships. Leaving a box with enemies in it should be painful if they want to hurt you. I don't know if I'd want targeting assignment or not, but I'm thinking no.

GC13 wrote:
though a bit more crotchety than I might have phrased it.

I'm a grouchy old man, leave me alone.

GC13 wrote:
I don't think a hexagonal grid would work: you'd need to get way too involved in moving the ships from phase to phase. How about a trio of range boxes you can assign ships to instead? You have three boxes, the enemy has three boxes, and maybe there's a box in between you at the start. Every turn a ship can move a box one way or the other, unless it's really fast in which case it can move two. This is nice and simple and allows you to try to defend your long-range ships. Leaving a box with enemies in it should be painful if they want to hurt you. I don't know if I'd want targeting assignment or not, but I'm thinking no.

Come to think of it, I think you might be right. I like the simplicity of your range boxes. Having a grid (hexagonal or otherwise) might complicate things too much.



Though one of my issues with RTS battles is partly the real-time component, more importantly, I don't want them to be too complicated or too long.



I loved King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame, for example, but the auto-resolve was basically broken, and you basically -had- to play out the battles manually if you wanted to have anything close to a decent chance. I actually quite enjoyed the battles (as far as RTS battles go, at least), but I found them to be far too involved, and I was spending a good ~80% of my playing time simply in battles, when I wanted to focus on the overall "big-picture" strategy instead. This made me stop playing, which is a pity, as I was really enjoying the game overall.



I would fear something similar happening with Endless Space; especially given how common battles can be, even though more complexity would be nice, they would still need to remain relatively quick, or they would completely take over the whole game experience.

Yes, whatever gets put in needs to be kept quick. Even when you sprawl over half the galaxy, the AI collectively owns the other half and they aren't shy about using its productive capacity to throw fleet after fleet at you.

ElegantCaveman wrote:
PLEASE GOD NO!!!



I really really don't want this to become Total War: In SPAAACE!



One of the things that surprised me about ES and which made me happy is the fact that the battles -aren't- real-time.



There's a massive shift in gaming in general to go towards real-time (and first-person) for everything, and it's one I hate. I recognize that this makes sense from a business perspective, and that a majority of gamers like this, but what can I say... I'm a bit slow, and I'm old-school. Give me good ol' fashioned top-down/isometric, turn-based any day over all this fancy-schmancy real-time 3D FPS crap. Damn kids, get off my lawn! *shakes fist*



I'm all for making the battles more engaging and strategic, but please please please, not RTS. If anything, I find them -too- real-time now, the way there's a timer and you have to pick your cards "in a hurry" (well, okay, the timer's plenty slow now that I know what the cards do, but when I first started playing, it was more like "OH GOD WHAT DO I DO PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!! D:").



If the battles become real-time, I'll be using auto-resolve exclusively, and I'll be missing out on a pretty big aspect of the game. I really hope it doesn't come to that.



I do like the potential with the card system, though. Make the battles turn-based, add a few more phases, a bunch more cards, things like that. Give us a grid, possibly hexagonal. Ship placement would matter (for example, I could have "sniper" ships of smaller hulls with less HP in the back, being shielded by heavily-armored dreads up front), and you could use different cards for different ships (or at least for different "wings" of your fleet; say you could have a defensive wing and an offensive wing).

Turn based like the top down moo2 battles? If that's what you want just go play moo2. The power of video cards and game design engines are jumping mountains in what they can display on our screens today,that cant be stopped. So the whole 3d space battle visuals thing is going to become more of the norm and frankly 'they way it is' from competing game companies trying to outdo the next big space battle display.



I love the old school space strat games, I grew up with moo2, ascendancy ig etc but if they want to stay afloat in this market they have to impress with visuals. They can do both, just balance it out without killing the game. Sooner or later space battle tactical games will look more like a movie, remember how epic the so called ig3 'nexus' game looked. That's just a taste of what is to come.



Imagine this game using the Nexus engine for the space battles *Drooooolz*