schedal

Join Date 09/2008

Improvement suggestions and general feedback v1.1 BETA2

Hello, a while back I posted this comment as feedback on 1.05, but that was not the latest version of the game, now I have been running 1.1Beta2 for a while and most of my original comments are still valid, so I am posting it here, plus a few new comments/suggestions. If you already read this post before, the new items have "$$$" infront of them:

$$$Impulse:

It took me a while to get the 1Gb of free disk space I needed to install Impulse. While I agree its nice from an anti-piracy perspective to StarDock, this application does me little good except clutter my system with files I don't want and it forces me to also share more data about myself than I would have liked. I'd rather have a light update check, or something just built into the applicaiton that checks if updates are available, without impulse, but still by checking my account name/pw.

interface / usability:
- move the retreat button to the 1st screen [not a submenu item] - in the heat of battle, do you really want to have to dig it out of a submenu?

$$$If you really can't have it on the 1st screen, at least have the 'R' key already 'hot' and waiting for my keystroke, as it is I cant hit the 'R' key until I am showing the sub-screen.

$$$ the new addition to the interface to sell/buy crystal is nice, but its also too big and clunky, i want more space on my interface for the action, can we make these buttons smaller?

- make it possible to select just ONE ship via the serach screen instead of selecting ALL ships of the same type. this way one can select and control individual scouts and colony ships [alt+click on search?]; OR add a button so I can toggle between all the ships of the same type and have the camera move between them.

- you should be able to see the build progress of a sub-menu on the higher level menu as a little bar that fills the box. example: the frigate building is constructing a seeker: without even clicking the frigate build button I should see its at 33%.

- $$$ Ships that are in 'jump' should at the BOTTOM NOT the TOP of the side list because as it is their addition and remove to the top pushes and raises the list up and down while you are playing and this makes it sometimes really hard to click on the right unit if its moving up and down the list as you try and click it!! Shold be a simple change and it would fix the UI issue.

game play:

- Another action that is missing is simply 'evade'; sometimes I want to the ship to stay in the area but avoid damage by flying away, around the system - this could be another button/toggle.

- If I recall fighters so that I can jump quicker to the next sector, have them auto-launch again if there is a threat, or repair faster if docked, or at least provide some benefit to docking/launching.

$$$ It's also odd that not yet built fighters are already in flight...??? they should stay docked until they are built.

- If I issue a move order, and there are targets I can fire upon within range, and auto-attack is on, it would be WONDERFUL if the ships would still fire at possible targets while moving. As currently there is no way to move your ships around in combat to a specific location without forgoing their attack abilities! example: sometimes you want ships to move closser to your capital ship while still firing on [previously selected] target, other times you want the ships to move within range of a repair station and still keep firing etc.

- $$$ almost the same issue, but there should just be a way to tell ships to 'attack' without telling them to attack a specific target, so that they select targets themselves. This is an important yet missing command that you would need to do if you had previously issued an attack command for the fleet, or a move but now you want them to auto-engage.

- $$$ one really annoying tactic that humans se to trick the ship targeting is the 'run in circles' tactic... if I have one ship and you are attacking it, all I have to do is plan a move in a circle and I can outrun-live you for the time it takes my fleet to arrive... How annoying and unrealistic is that? We need a solution to that problem, this shouldn't be a game won by micro-management of using loop-holes in the gameplay logic. One way to fix this, other than adding the 'fire at other targets too while moving' gameplay fix as listed here, is to not auto-assign ALL ships to attack one ship, pound with some of your ships on the structures too; and if a ship is staying out of weapons range for too long [whic would only occure if the enemy is running in a long-circle], have that ship auto-select another target without me having to do that for it.

AI improvements:
Playing on hard AI, I noticed some basic issues with the computer AI that a human player can exploit to no end. Fixing these shouldn't be too hard and it would greatly improve the AI's performance.

- the AI completely ignores neutral mines that you capture, and makes almost zero attempts to capture, steal and claim neutral mines. This not only gives you a significant economic advantage, but it also gives you permanent scouting information on the locations with neutral mines, making any map with neutral mines an easy [borring] win for a human player.

- when the AI decides to retreat from a system, usually the instant you have a larger force, he will not re-evaluate that decision even if your fleet leaves the system before his is in position to jump back away. This means that you can effectively stave off several AI fleets with just one bigger fleet by moving it between your systems back-and-forth and then send a smaller recon force to mop up the computer's home on other planets/asteroids he is un-attending with his strike force [or witha jump inhibitor you can then mop up his ships too!]. I've been able to fight off two computer opponents with a combined fleets twice as big as mine by utilizing this 'failing' in the computer AI, better still, the retreating force can be picked-off by structures while it runs away and you can keep lots of computer ships in this 'run away' mode concurrently.

The solution is fairly simple: if the computer starts retreating, have the computer AI re-evaluate his retreat at least once before he actually jumps: is the human player attacking him? Is the human player moving away too? Is there a base of the computer's that is under threat instead? If so, should I split my forces, perhaps retreating only some? When AI-retreating, avoid parking/moving your ships within range of turrets if you can to escape. If the AI could also decide if a planet/structure was almost dead before running that would be great too; soemtimes it just needs to shoot for a few more seconds...

$$$- I noticed that in Nebulas the computer will NEVER retreat, even if he just has 1 capital ship and you have 10 times more forces, this is a bug because he will retreat just fine in other sectors.

- when attacking planets, the AI is very predictable in where it moves to attack. the path finding affects both your units, and the computer's units. There are a few algorithms needed:

* When siege ships enter a planet, have them move around the range of turrets to the 'gap', and bombard from there.

*$$$ if there are lots of planet defenses but the attacking fleet is still larger than the defender, consider not moving in the siege ships until AFTER your other ships kill off the defenses.

* If there are no turrets around a particular target [structures without protection] have those be the first priority for destruction of the fleet and have the fleet maneuver around the turrets to reach it. Strike squadrons should have their own target priorities: example: enemy hangers being top-priority.
* defending ships [human-assisted AI or computer AI] should always seek to remain within the healing range of repair ships and their own turrets when defending a planet, whenever possible.

$$$ My ship in my own system should move within range of a repair ship if it is damaged but iddle with no order!

Fleet formations:
$$$ Fleets suck. The Auto-join fleet should be off by default as it leads to critical problems when you have two or more fleets in the same location. A support fleet set to 'hold position' that adds in a capital ship is going to make the capital ship completely useless... suicide-killing it or your fleet. Alternatively, make the 'auto-join' only work if there is at least ONE ship of that same type ALREADY in the fleet. Meaning that if I have a fleet of siege ships, only new siege ships in the gravity well will be added to the fleet.

Instead of just 3 attack modes: gravity well, local and hold position; which I find useless if not frustrating [hold requires intense micro-management to use effectily]; I'd rather see different attack modes: aggressive, normal, evasive.

Aggressive means you hunt enemy ships you are best at defeating: even if this means moving through or into other enemy ships range, Normal means you attack ships in the gravity well, but you also try and stay away from enemy ships - especially those with an advantage over you. Evasive means you attack ships you are good at, but if any ship is good at killing you attacks you, or if you are within range of a stronger force: you run away.

Another thread talked about retreat as auto-cast, I think this is an essential addition that would greatly reduce micro-managing battles. At the moment I have to watch the display and any time I see a ship that is under attack I click "retreat" as soon as the shields are down, the AI can surely do that for me. Vasari might want to get a slight tweak to their auto-cast retreat to be something like 'hull at 90%' and Advent might want to retreat at 'shileds at 10%' - would need playtesting to set exact % accuratly but this is probably close enough.

Ship movements:
battles are very static, ships line up and just slug at each other. To make them more exciting, realistic (?), and tactical, consider changing the physics so that ships can't drop to zero speed in an instant [deceleration rates equal [or less] to acceleration rates]. Ships would fire on targets within their arc and if they have a specified target, they would make passes to fire at it. And fire at other targets while manuvering; if possible.

A toggle mode can then be created to switch between three modes of speed: "Erratic maneuvers', 'Normal', 'Static'. Where Erratic maneuver ships will maintain maximum speed at all times and just turn to get targets in arc, 'Normal' ships will slow if they want to maintain arc on a target and speed up if they need to chase a target and 'Static' ships will only move if they have no more targets, and attempt to stop again whenever possible - resorting to turning in place when possible. Alternatively: hard-code these modes into the different ships instead of allowing a user to change them; at the moment all the ships seem to behave according the the mode of 'static' where most ships should be of the 'erratic' or 'normal' type - so I find this strange, except the strike craft which look like they are behaving as 'erratic' but because they can turn so quickly they don't really need to switch targets. Ships also seem to be able to stop so quickly no matter how fast they were going, this is neither realistic [in physics terms] nor much fun to watch.

This would open up many new strategy avenues such as getting an enemy out-side of his weapons arc [chasing his rear] and the strategic advantages created by turning rates, speeds, acceleration and weapons-arc.

If this mod is implemented there are other new tactical changes that can be made such as projectiles [missiles, pulses] have a limited endurance - if your missile is chasing the enemy and doesn't hit him in time, it depletes; pulses could loose damage over time. To compensate for the negative of endurace, these weapons can have higher damage output.

Another change can be to give faster moving ships a slight modifier to their to hit chances, both when firing and when being fired at. This could be a factor of speed/100. So a ship traveling at 400 has a -4% chance to hit and a -4% chance of being hit. This same ship firing at a target moving at 500 would have -4% for its own speed and -5% for the target's speed = a -9% chance to hit. Fighters in this model would get less basic hit modification because their speed would account for up to 27% of it. Presumably the fighter's own speed would not affect its to-hit chance when firing at its target [though the target's speed still would].

Racial differences: minor:
1. Make similar hull ships between the different races have speed and turning differences. The Advent could have higher speeds/acl and less turning, the vasari higher turning and less speed/acl.

2. Add (more) research relating to ship speeds, acceleration and turning abilities.

3. have some ships/races jump at faster/slower rates.

4. Have some research in one area make research in OTHER areas impossible, this would force you to make decisions, and it would also mean that no two players, even if playing the same empire, would be exactly the same. Alternativly, make the dependancy sequence more constricting, so that I have to plan ahead where I am going and make lower-level research more expensive and higher-ranking tech cheaper so that all tech choices are ore equal and the real choice is what path you are following. To be a strategy game, this should be a game about choices, not speed-of-click-to-top-research.

Racial differences: major:
1. It's a shame that all the races are actually quite similar in mechanics, only the details change and some of the technology. Personally I loved the dramatic differences in feeling that one got when playing star-craft. It would have been possible to mix up the systems to a far greater extent that currently employed. One of the races could have had ships built by their capital ships & the research structures could also be ingrained in the capital ship[s] [think mother-ships]. More specifically though: Each empire should have had a far greater difference in their building types and ship types. example: maybe one of the races doesn't have strike craft but instead it has flak ships and detonators [against structures]. One of the races could have ships that are half the size and cost of the other - while another has ships that are double the cost and size. Another unique ship ot just one race could be boarding parties [for capturing ships]; defending crew has a chance to (auto)'scuttle' before capture. The vasari could salvage their enemy ships for cash while the advent increase their 'fleet size' via their mind control abilities instead of 'fleet purcahses' [obtained by mind controlling enemy crews or enlisting populations] - whereas the vassari fleet size could be dirrectly tied to their mineral output etc.

$$$ Cinematics:

One thing that is really missing in this game is a reason to get up-close. There are beautiful ships in thsi game, but game-play preceeds funciton, so I almost never zoom in or around ships to look at them at close range unless I am already clearly winning... the solution is both simple as well as enthrawling to our sense of value and meaning: cinematics.

When key events occure, like a capital ship is destroyed, pause the game for a moment [for all players] and show a realtime camera zoom/pan of the ship in question being blasted by the other (capital) ship.

When my fleet engages another fleet, show a random ship from my fleet, or even a fighter and have the camera trail behind it for a moment as it sets off to attack. When I bombard a planet, show my ships bombing the planet from the ships-close-up view.

If you want to take this further, you can add additional material that is not already in the game, like views of the cock-pit inside of a ship, visual-radio messages from the specific ship in question, people running around the inside of a capital ship as it is exploded etc.

This can then be a mode that is 'on' for all players, and if you are watching a cinematic, the gameplay pauses for the 5 seconds or so it takes to show it.

I hope that some of my feedback has been of use and interest,

With kind,

Sebastian.

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GenuineD

You've done some thinking I see. For the most part thumbs up. Esspecially the stuff concerning the ai.

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I agree with most of these points, especially the one about having retreat on the first menu!

I disagree strongly with the idea of autocast retreat though. Lets not take away all requirements for attention during battle k?

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I also agree with most points but I dont like the auto retreat either. Most people dont liek the ai retreating and if ships auto retreated it would be like that ship that runs around in circles....Just annoying.

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$$$ almost the same issue, but there should just be a way to tell ships to 'attack' without telling them to attack a specific target, so that they select targets themselves. This is an important yet missing command that you would need to do if you had previously issued an attack command for the fleet, or a move but now you want them to auto-engage.

To add on a bit, it would be nice to create a "priority queue", one for each type of ship, so that if a higher-priority target (e.g. an enemy capital ship) appears in the gravity well, they'll stop attacking the current auto/manual attack target without having to issue a stop command to force a re-evaluation of targets.

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wow thanks guys, I am glad my feedback is heart felt.

Here are a couple new ones I discovered:

Death grip of dispair:

1. Playing against VASARI, retreating my fleet away from a large menace, I noticed a serious cripling ability that can be used against you. There is obviously one ship int he VASARI fleet that can immbolize your ships, in this case, it can immobilize your capital ship. So your smaller fleet is trying to run away, but your capital ship is caught in the immobilization. Not only does this mean it is left behind [and your alternative is to have everyone stick around and die with it], but when it comes out of being immobilized, it FORGETS that I told it to run away and starts selecting targets!!! I lost 2 capital ships this way with little to nothing I could do about it, and I tried once with 'retreat' and the other time with 'move order' and both orders were 'forgoten' when it regains mobility/function.

This ability is too powerful, it shouldn't affect capital ships for this long, and it certainly shouldn't make them forget their order! A few vasari ships with this ability can chain-disable your capital ship, preventing it from ever moving! No mater what solution you select, a ship should not be able to be disabled several times in a row, there should be a minimum time between disabling targets, otherwise the easy kills you can get are just silly.

Display lists:

Minor item, but when you look at lists of ships via the bars on the sides of a planet, the capital ships are not grouped at the top of the list but rather spread around - as are the fighter craft - can we please have first all the capital ships, then the cruisers, then the frigates and only then the fighters? it would also help to distinguish the types better than just by the icon.

Cinematics2:

After further thought, i think you can include cinematics in a way that is fluid in multi-player situations without makign people pause for cinematics simultaneously. There can be two lists for cinematics, the first is 'will trigger a cinematic' the second is 'can have a cinematic'. Examples of a 'will trigger' could be things like: 'two capital ships engage in combat' or 'enemy capital ship destroyed'; a 'could have a cinematic' could be something like: "new capital ship built", "fleet enters phase space".

Then you keep a count of the number of cinematics you have seen, if one player has seen more cinematics [and thus lost 'game time' more than his opponent] then the opponent gets to watch a cinematic at the first next event that could trigger a cinematic; wheras the player who has seen more cinematics only sees new cinematics if he triggers items that are on the 'will trigger' list.

In effect, all players see the same number of cinematics, but at slightly different times, but always at some important event so as to be relevant; and again: the focus is on building exceitement, context and story.

Scouts:

Currently when I click on a fleet, I select the scout(s) with it, can we please turn that off? I want my scouts to only move when I select them directly, like colony ships.

Pirate bases kill scouts, its a fact! So, once I find a pirate base, can the scout please not move there anymore when on 'autoscout'? This would make the autocast of the scout useful, whereas now I never use the autocast outside of the first part of a battle cause after that it means that that i need to build new ones to replace the suicide ones that keep visiting the pirates...

For fun, you could also program scouts to 'stop scouting' when they are nearly dead, they need to take breaks sometimes or theywear out! Granted I do this manually right now, but this would be one less 'administrative task'

Engagement distances:

Right now ships pile up, like skyscrapers. This is a good strategy in thsi game, keep all your ships together. Actually, this is really good to do at the jump in/out point of your enemy; keep your cariers at the other side of your planet though, along with your siege ships, but everyone else: stack up! Cause you know that when the enemy jumps in, he is also going to be in a stack, and unlike your support ships which are spread out, his will be all together: carriers and all. And preferably within seconds of your entire force. This is silly. Especialy if you have this idea of 'fleets' or wanting to have some ships at longer range.

to fix this, when your ships jump-in, they should appear not all together at the edge of the system, but rather at distances that make sense for their function [or their fleet formation if using the [hopefully fixed] fleets]. So your ships all appear in formation, with the closet ships your forward line. they should also appear at a minimal distance from the planet that is larger than where the enemy fleet is [either by restriction, or by computing some additional distance]; so that there is still some engagement range to close.

This would make it unnecessary for your ships to 'reorganize' their fleet formation, and it would make ranged units more useful.

To further prevent stacks, I would also give more weapons a 'splash' effect than currently exsist in the game, have ships that 'explode' actually hurt shps that are close to it!! That would be fun, and it would also give you a slight incentive to 'dismantle' within enemy ships too... hehe

Final tweak I would do is to make the minimum distance between ships greater, ships need some breathing space! So even if you tell all your ships to move to one spot, they would still occupy a minimum distance as the minimum space between each ships can't be circumvented.

String of move orders:

At the moment when you give a string of mvoe commands the ship will move from zero speed to its coordinate, then slow to zero and only once it is as a complete stop will it then move again to its next move point... geesh how anoying! Granted this would make the 'circling around the planet' tactic even easier to pull off, but there are better ways to solve that problem. All i know is that I would expect a ship to stay flying at maximum speed between move-points, not stopping to zero!

Retreat block:

The new 'make a big circle' when retreating is nice, but it does mess up sometimes, if there is an object in the way, say a planet, the ship will turn right into it, then stop, then turn to go the other way instead - all taking an eternity and then...oh wait now its dead. yeah, you guessed it, a retreating ship that turns into a planet doesn't get very far very fast... probably a path finding issue in the new retreat algorythm...

Auto-retreats:

Lastly regarding the auto retreats, my idea is that this would be something you can turn on or off as you wish, so it wouldn't be forced upon you.

To me, a good strategy game is one where you win or loose based on your choices; not your micro mangement. So having ships auto-retreat one-by-one is a micro-management 'win'. But the choice as to whether or not I retreat the WHOLE fleet or not is always mine, and that's the higher level strategy choice.

I guess the discussion is really about where your attention is best utilized. I don't know about you, but by the time we tech up to cruisers, ship engagements are easily in the order of 40+ ships with 1 to 3 capital ships; it becomes impossible to really do more than one or two critical things like manually use your capital ships abilities and select the move/atack pattern of your siege ships... loet alone micro-manage the retreats of your ships! Most of the ships in a fleet have to be content on auto-cast; its just too many things to deal with [let alone non-battle tasks such as new builds, movements, pirate pays, stock markets etc]

Hope this new additional addendum is equally useful, great game and I am glad that you are still working to improve it!

With kind,

Sebastian.

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some of the stuff seems interesting enough, especially the ai requests in the initial post.

ad research choices: if well designed I think I'd like it. still, dont exaggerate it. soft choices are mostly bette than hard choices.

moving and attacking at the same time is also good (is that really not possible yet?). homeworld did it nicely back then.

as to maneuvering and so in general: how about a slightly more accurate acceleration model? it takes a lot of time an energy to get a still object to start moving but once its underway, the further accelation is not that hard. so, maybe ships should behave more towards inertia. in concrete terms, maybe when you give a move order, the engines fire up but it would take a few turns for your ships to start moving.

why all this trouble? well, with a bit more immobility, positioning and firing arcs could play a greater role. it would be cool if it actually mattered when you attack a fleet from the flank and it would take several hits before it turned and returned fire.

ad racial differences: has been discussed a lot. I enjoy the differences that are there, but of course more radical distinctions I would welcome too, like a race without shields but other measures vs mass dmg or a race that doesnt colonise planets quite the same as the rest do. but again, the game has a very good working basis, so lets for the moment focus on improving that and keeping the very advanced stuff for a sequel.

yeah, keeping scouts out of normal selection sounds good, they are rarely ever good for fighting. maybe an option to keep siege frigs out too would be nice, because it is rarely ever clever to send them in with your main force. so fragile these things.

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If anyone here played Startrek Armada, they might remember the cinematics window. This small window constantly showed up close footage of random things happening around the map. If there was a major battle, it was probably being displayed in the window, and if nothing significant was happening, it would just show the harvesters doing their thing, structures being built, or scouts zipping around. Perhaps this idea can be expanded on, such as the option to open the cinematic window to fullscreen during major events, or to select between different events.

Depending on the frequency, 5 seconds for each cinematic could get pretty annoying over time for the players who would rather not watch them, especially in large battles with many capital ships. A constant video stream of the current events in a smaller window would at least allow the gameplay to flow, and allow the player to keep his bird's-eye view of the action while watching from an closer angle at the same time.

Another idea would be to rework the cinematics button so that when you enter cinematics mode, it gives you a mini-map of the gravity well or something that lets you order units around on it.

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Nice idea Silence.

Shadowhal: Note that in space there is no friction at all, so the amount of energy you need to go from zero to 10miles(or km)/s is the same amount of energy you require to go from 10/s to 20/s. So your idea of having 'slow to start' simply isn't 'natural' to space either.

On the flip side though, breaking is a lot harder, cause no friction means that you just continue on your merry way forever, to break youhave to apply exactly the same energy, but in reverse. So to go from 20/s to 10/s costs the same energy as it did to go from 10/s to 20/s and its also the same cost as to go from 10/s to 0. So space ships that want to stop quickly have to have the same big thursters pointing forwards as they do backwards!! [this is probably not reflected in the ship designs of SINS]

Turning is another interesting one, cause actually turning is rather dificult. In space you can rotate your ship asmuch as you like with little thrusters, that will make you face a new direction, but that won't change your direction of travel! So far the tie-fighters and x-wings are the only space-ships I've seen that actually employ thrusters in their ship design that would be smart to have to turn your ship. Space ships don't need wings, but they do need manuvering thursters, preferably mounted on long arms that come out of it at least the 4 different sides [top, bottom, left and right].

So if you were moving 20/s north and turned to face east with manuvering thursters, you would be flying sideways! Granted this might allow you to shoot a different direction than you are traveling. If you then apply thurst fowards when facing 90 degrees of-center, and you applied 20/s in that direction, your actual vector would be the pathagorian equasion that gave an angle of 45 degrees [north-east] and the actual velocity wouldn't be 40/s because some of the new thrust would actually cancel out the old one and be more in the range of ~30/s [id need a calculator to get it precise].

Since it would be costly to make a ship that could thurst equally forwards as backwards, most space ships would probably relly on turning in full reverse to apply breaks!

The only space game that became popular that was 'almost' true to space-physics was the arcade classic 'asteroids' you'll recall you could rotate and shoot in different directions than you were traveling. Asteroids though gave the ship a gradual but continual 'friction' ellement that would make any speed eventually become zero, something which just isn't 'natural' in space.

This game simply isn't true to space-physics; it would be fun though to play one that was, cause the tactics for motion are very 'different' as you can see than air or naval movement... though maybe the technology that allows 'jumping' also permits 'atmosphereic-like' movement as well... we can only guess...

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ah, friction, surmised as much, but wasnt sure.

don't forget about bsg vipers, they seem to use small air exhaust to control for fine tuned maneuvering.

aside from that, in the game, capital ships do seem more ... heavy and harder to turn. and all of ships do need to fly arcs and can't exactly "turn" completely. and for those slow circles the use of one of their drives instead of all of them scattered at the end might suffice. but maybe this already gets a bit too hardcore. I don't exactly need to see ships with huge front engines or ships turning 180° to produce a full stop. gameplay > realism.

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Naturally just 'seeing it' wouldn't add much to the game. Except that the dramatic difference is that your forward turret arcs would not be tied to your direction of motion, so you could fire to any direction while traveling forward - just as long as you didnt need to alter your direction of travel. And if you wanted to stop, you wouldn't beable to fire forwards anymore! As putting your aft towards an enemy would turn your guns away from them... of course, in such a model one might want to mount guns that take care of their own rotation [360degree gun turrets], but even the best turrets always have blind spots [created by the ships own silhoute]. So it wouldn't just affect the visual aspect, it would also dramatically affect the tactical decisions too, essentially, one would want to break and turn as little as possible so that you can maximize facing/weapon arcs...

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Quoting ,

quoting post

- Another action that is missing is simply 'evade'; sometimes I want to the ship to stay in the area but avoid damage by flying away, around the system - this could be another button/toggle.

Quoting ,

quoting post

Some good points you listed but for the above two, doesn't the second completely contradict the first, or did you mean it in a different way than I took?

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one thing i would like to see added would be a quickbar that would have all the special abilities of the selected units available to click on this would make micromanaging in large battles more user friendly

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Some good points you listed but for the above two, doesn't the second completely contradict the first, or did you mean it in a different way than I took?

It would if no other actions were taken to elliminate the 'flying in circles' tactic. The essence of why the flying in circles tactic works is because:

- ships don't fire at other targets while moving except the designated target

- ships don't auto-select new targets if they can't fire on primary target w/i an acceptable time-frame

- ships will auto-attack an enemy ship with all ships even if it is just 1 ship and you have 30 ships. Instead of the audo-attack enemy ship only sucking up a limited number of your ships with the rest auto-engaging other targets such as the planet and it's structures.

- ships weapon ranges opperate on an 'all or nothing' scheme, meaning that as soon as I am beyond your rage, you can't hurt me - this can be kept as is, or changed to be more of a distance degeration.

The abuse-situation is pretty simple:

1. You attack an enemy planet

2. The planet has 1 ship or the ship you focus fire upon starts flying in circles

3. your continue to chase indefinetly

All that needs to change is 3:

3. Computer logic change: IF:

((the traget ship is traveling away from you) AND (your ship is slower than the target OR the target is not nearly dead OR I have already assigned enough other ships to attack it))

{

THEN: switch target and abort chase.

}

If the acceleration model is changed to where ships cant just hit zero-speed in an instant, the whole tactic of flying in circles becomes fairly moot cause all the ships will be flying in circles in different directions: clockwise and counter-clockwise and this would make the battlefield far more engaging and hectic - like a real battle-field feeling when two lines of an army clash and then the ships of both sides are all flying all over the place...

Seb.

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Hi all,

I've a small UI suggestion, which admittedly I don't know if it has already been implemented or not (I play 1.05, and I'm still very new)..

Can the devs please add a text to the empire tree - the name of the planet next to its icon? I find it time consuming to scroll around and mousing over trying to find the planet that I want. More than once I've clicked on the wrong asteroid/desert planet and many times, I end up pressing C -> move around then double click because it is confusing to look for the planet that I want on the empire tree..

And on the topic, are the planets sorted in a particular order in the empire tree? Can I re-sort them? Maybe i should rename all planets to 1, 2, 3.. etc

Otherwise, the empire tree is a brilliant idea..

Thanks!

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Sorry if my prev post was OT, but wrt the suggestions at the top by schedal, I fully support the idea of "R" for quick retreat and also the ability to "patrol" or attack an "area". One of the things I could do in starcraft/warcraft (can't recall which/both?) was to ask my units to move to a particular area and "attack" whatever was in range. I just click on move/attack to an area, instead of (in SOASE) click on ("attack") some moving enemy unit.

Many times in SOASE I asked a fleet defending a planet to move to a certain position, under the prediction that the enemy will move there later. But the trouble is, when the enemy is near enough to be engaged, the fleet is still "moving" and will not engage unless I ask it to. I think this defeats the idea of considering turning radius and ship speed. If I see an enemy ship moving in a certain direction, I should be able to ask some other unit of mine to move to a certain position in the future on the assumption it is an intercept course, as opposed to "attack" the enemy -> which always seems to make my unit "follow" behind the enemy all the time. This way, I can estimate the enemy movement, and plot a triangular intercept course, "move" to a location far ahead, and automatically engage along the way as they get within range. (Sorry, do I make sense?)

All this means that slower ships and those with larger turning radius always have a tactical disadvantage against faster ships. Shouldn't I be able to plan ahead and move/position my slower ships/turn them accordingly in anticipation of where I think the enemy will be and have them automatically engage when in range?

Partially related, can I use my kol as a (expensive) floating defense platform? ie. hold position and attack, but do not move? For example, I have a bunch of small frigates moving damn fast (compared to my kol), I just want my kol to hold position (defend position) maybe at a key point (near jump? etc), attack all frigates flying by, while waiting for reinforcements to arrive? At worst, it is an expensive diversion, but like in Chess, sometimes you have to sacrifice the queen to checkmate.

Sorry if I could do this already in SOASE.. I'm still exploring

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Can the devs please add a text to the empire tree - the name of the planet next to its icon?

Tip: Use the spacebar to instantly jump to highlighted planets from the lower left "reports". Click to cycle thru the highlighted reports. (PS. the 3rd Tutorial gives better explanations.)

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Quoting SageWon,

reply 16

Its already available. You can either: hold down the Alt key to temporarily reveal names on both the empire tree and the map. Or under Menu>User Interface> select "Show Names" to permanently use names, but then you loose the pips.

Tip: Use the spacebar to instantly jump to highlighted planets from the lower left "reports". Click to cycle thru the highlighted reports. (PS. the 3rd Tutorial gives better explanations.)

Hey thanks! I know about the space bar, but after I pressed it and jumped to the planet in question, I wanted to use the empire tree to get back to where I was before, that's where I got lost, especially if the tree had "scrolled" I'll try the ALT when I get back.. Thanks for the tip!

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