Making Sins More Fleets Focused

The best way I can think ofve would be line of sight. That way ships could hit each otehr resulting in friendly fire. Or some ships wouldnt be able to engage combat because of friendlies blocking the shooting line. But this would be intensely demanding cpu vise.

as for making Sins more fleet focused, (I have posted this suggestion in  a couple threads, but I don't think it was really noticed) you could give options on fleet formation, like in Age of Empires II - there are choices in what formation you want (admittedly, only four, but it's still better than one)  the collumn would be replaced by the wall, the box replaced by the sphere, flanking groups would be about the same, but you could have them take advantage of the 3-D element by moving above or below.  you could limit fleet size - in age of Empires, the limit is 40 units, but armies can still travel together.  you could create areas with sensor shadows - i.e. the far side of a moon or planet, it would make scouting much more strategic - and asteroid fields would have a very, very short sensor range, and ships that are not moving are not picked up unless with such and such kilometers of one of your ships, and ships that are moving are not picked up unless within a little bit larger radius.  the Idea of stealth ships has been tossed around.  and maybe making ships' armament more forward based, which would add to the strategy so that mobbing a group is not as viable a tactic. 

not quite to make sins more fleet based - put in an option so that if all one type of ship is selected, and you hit use an ability, that all the ships use that ability (other than caps, that is) mainly because manually telling all my LRF's to stop using discharging missiles indivdually is a major pain in the ass.

First of the counterpoint must be mentioned, Skill being equal(Napoleon vs Nepolen) would result in a who has most the most units.

If skill and gear is equal then industial power will be the determaning factor ( see WW1 or the us civil war).

The question is to what extent, and i must agree, that the limeted options for fleet mangement are making industry a bit to equal to skill. In the end we all dream of pulling a Thrawn but that is only a dream in sins atm.

Personally i like the idear from MOO3 HFoG - heavy foot of goverment, to refleckt the everincreasing buracracy of an interstelar empire. making lager empires pay more for each unit ( this is not only fairly realistic but helps smaller empires stay competativ for far longer)

Besides that, I fully suport/agree with ading more fleet formation and making the Z axis more important.

Finaly, though not vary realistic,i would sugest upping the shildmigitation to near 100% (say 95% for fully resharched Advent in own culture) to stop focus fire instagib's.

btw i love the idear of sencor shadows and fog of war even in grav wells( gogo sencor grids in astroid fields and jaz like that^^), but as i understand it, the game dossent alow for it ( can't make invisible units)

well, that's why these are suggestions to Stardock -  they can do anything with the game.

Err.. this is actually suggestions to me. I'd like to input them into a mod so I'd like suggestions that are do-able through modding.

I don't mind having other suggestions though, hopefully IronClad will be able to pick up on the feedback and implement it in their next game.

The focus of this thread though, I'm hoping, revolves around things a mod could do.

Big issues here; if a fleet is too small, it cannot overcome defenses. If the enemy has 7 hangar defenses, a repair bay, and a few turrets, then you need a fairly good fleet to break through.

Resolution: Make -anything- with weapons on it consume the same ship supply, and replace the existing static defenses with exceedingly slow-moving but still mobile versions.

There is never a good reason to split your fleets unless the enemy is also attacking from multiple directions at once. If he is coming from only 1 area, then thats the only place you want a fleet. Even if he's coming from 2 directions, a single combined fleet can easily dispatch one half, then leave to try to intercept the other.

Resolution: Decrease ship speed/range in-system and in phase lanes. Make anti-planet ships more effective, and/or give all ships weak anti-planet munitions. This makes it so with larger empires, a single fleet isn't as effective as several smaller fleets that eat through your worlds.

Possible addition: If a ship that died dealt damage to all ally/enemies nearby, then players would want to spread out their ships, otherwise a large fleet too clustered together could cause a chain-reaction death cloud.

ah, I guess I assumed it was for Stardock 'cuz you posted ur ideas and it wasn't in the modding section - mainly the latter.

actually, you can have ore than one fleet in a gravity well, but it would encourage smaller fleets because of the hassle to move your entire strength at once.

I agree that right now most of the time the guy with most units wins; I would like to see more strategies involved.

They need to put in formations (such as wedge, line, phlanx etc).  That way we don't just charge each other with same formation.

Also I remember some RTS games where it is beneficial to out flank an enemy and strike from the sides.  Maybe give bonus to striking from the sides and rear.

And maybe even introduce a downside to having a large fleet, that would force you to fight with smaller fleets.

That would improve the games.

I think that cap ships should at least deal damage to friendlies when destroyed.  That's a LOT of junk flying around!

true.

someting I'd like to see is to make fleets fight at longer range, I think it would make for a much more epic experience.

traveling broadside passes - it would really make it epic, and a lot like the good ol' wooden mast an' riggin ships

The best thing would be that if you do have a fleet rather than some ships grouped together.  The real fleet the ships would move as one maintaining the formation that has been assign to it.  Ie fleets can only move as fast as the slowest ship in it.

Flank attacks do have an effect.

Check the ship specs and you'll notice weapons banks for sides, front and back.  Also knowing what can fire on the move and what can't, it's very beneficial to have a 'fleet' that's actually composed of smaller groups.... starting a thread about the my ideas there soon.

currently the game comes down to discipline vessel/ skirmisher spam, with LRFs making the occasional appearance, but rare. I think the main reason for this is the cost of labs is too high, as well as possibly the cost of those starting ships too low. adding in a small crystal requirement to the starting ships would probably combat the starting ship spam, which seems to be the worst problem.

exarion,

What you bring up is a bit off topic, but it is something I've thought about before. This is what I'm proposing for my mod:

I find that those ships that get spammed are the early ships to research because, just as you pointed out, they are the easiest to build.  I'd add to that and say that the counter to most of those ships need to be researched at a later level. 

ie. LF's are countered by LRMs, so it's very easy to pump out a bunch of LF's before the opponet can build the two labs, research the ship then start amassing the counter ship.

ie2. LRM's are cheap and easily produced, but their counters: carriers and HC's require more labs and more training time/resources.

What I'd like to do in my mod is make all ships available within the first 2 layers (requiring a max of 2 labs for the most advanced ships). This way if someone rushes another player with only one type of ship, the counter will be easily available to research and produce. 

How would that work?

Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a long game against a TEC hard AI that is a pain in the ass 'cuz he keeps just merging his fleet with mine, stripping away nearly all tactics.  and he consistently loses, so he doesn't learn.  it's just that it's kinda slanting my view a little.

btw, anyone know what the "fleet sizes" options does?

Well, this is kind of shooting early(researching and testing to make a more detailed post) but,

You can embed groups (fleets, but I think it's maybe not the best term when dealing with this specific topic) within groups.  Ships can belong to more than one group simultaneously, with each group having different fleet/engagement settings.  I actually think the fleeting options are very open ended and can be made very complex if you look at them this way.

Simplified TEC example:

Akkan capital + 1 cielo command cruiser + 4 flak frigates + 4 hoshiko cruisers (group, close formation, engagement mode to medium range)

then unselect all of them, reselect the akkan and create:

Akkan + 20 javelin lrms + 6 flak frigates + 4 heavy cruisers + 2 cielo command cruisers (wide spacing, engage entire grav well) + 8 cobalt lfs.

You end up with something that has your first group in a tight ball doing one thing, and a wider cloud of ships doing something else, both centered on the akkan.  If you check the fleet formation controls, notice that you can select create fleets, and disband ships from any fleets.  No where have I seen it that you can't have one ship belonging to two or more fleets, so it's possible to embed groups kind of like a pyramid scheme.

Right now I'm still brainstorming, especially the engagement orders being different for each group attached to the akkan type of thing... not sure if this idea works as I hope it does, but hopefully you get the gist of it.  I'll create a thread to discuss (or debunk if it just doesn't work for some reason) these ideas with the fleeting, feel free to join in.

The way to do what you want might be done with Admirals, they would gain experience and as a result would also influence battle such as the 1963 Isreali/Palistinian conflict.  Greater numbers beat back by superior leadership....

The admiral I would assume would be aboard your flagship and thus losing your flagship could be crippling, though a skilled admiral would have "tricks" up his sleeve to change the results of a conflict in his favor.  This would also mean only one fleet would have these "bonuses"

Sort of an RPG flavor to the game...

I'd like to see us have more control over capital ship ability levels... I hate the caps imposed...

That's cool, maybe if it was set up so each admiral had different tactics available (and more as they themselves level if they were able to do so) would be cool too.

Yeah, it'd be nice to have some lvl 10 abilities.  It'd make some capitals more specialized instead of all lvl 10 caps of a single type being the same.

The capital ship levels idea seems a good one to me, even though its not the purpose of this topic. Having pretty much the same abilites availble, but the caps for each ability are like level 6, 7, or maybe even 10 would mean you will almost ever have the same exact level 10 caps of the same type having a mothership with level 10 shield restore and one with level 10 malice might be a bit too game breaking though.

For encouraging multifleets I have an idea (inspired by some other games) that has a slightly different motivation than proposed here, but works here anyway i think

What if we can have specific fleet bonuses? for example, a fleet of  "X" flak frigates would be (100%+ some computation related "X") as effective in a fleet of only flak frigates as compared to a mixed fleet/no fleet of the same number of flak frigates. If you wanted to get really crazy, maybe a fleet of only certian support ships could gain an additional special ability(eg a fleet of "Y" advent guardians can gain an ability similar to TEC planetary shiled,or some other random idea like that) You get the picture: certain fleet compositions (pure one unit, mix, w/e) could yield specific bonuses.

All this tied to research, ofcourse. Maybe an additional row in "fleet" research

What about a new logistics system geared more like GalCiv2, where there's no limit to the number of ships you can build, but the amount of ships that be in a single fleet are limited by research? And then limit the number of fleets allowed in a grav well at one time, by any one race. Also decided by research?

If colonies took longer to build up, and were more fragile, it'd be more valuable to defend them.  This does not seem unreasonable; for a high technology, multi-planetary empire with FTL drives, flinging asteroids at planets or using large-scale radiological or toxicological warfare or so forth is likely to be far easier than repairing the resulting mess.  If a colony has been essentially obliterated with nuclear bombardment, and perhaps subjected to hypothetical nastiness like engineered bacteria or nanites meant to keep it inhospitable, it's going to take a long time for the planet to be useful for anything other than a very inhospitable low-pop mining outpost or a particulary nasty penal colony. 

The facilities around a wrecked colony should also probably stop working if the colony is dead (and perhaps start breaking down); that they can only bebuilt around a colony suggests that the colony's functioning is sort of important to them.

I could also see a temporary hit to allegiance, as your remaining citizens hear about how you failed to protect their brethren.

If the stakes for colonies were higher, and it were easier to attack (higher connectivity -- more open map) while difficult to reinforce in time (slow movement, so *reaction* is slow), it becomes more valuable to have defenders nearby when the attack starts.

Also agreed upon the debris fields.  If a vessel is destroyed, carrying nasty ordnance, by nasty ordinance, it's not necessarily a great idea to be nearby.  Some of the stuff inside might not react well to being rapidly damaged, and pieces of ship flying at high velocity aren't going to be very discriminating about whom they hit.  Space is big (and the engagement ranges are likely to be large, compared to the sizes of the ships, given the lethality of the weapons and the difficulties of a fleet "sneaking up" on another short of waiting in ambush with almost everything turned off and parked on asteroids in a huge field of 'em), and there's no air to spread a pressure wave, so there would seem to be low probabilities of being hit, but some chance would not seem amiss.

This would seem to make more sense to me anyway than introducing more elements which break immersion because they're only really explicable by saying "it's a game".