Thread for thoughts on sins 2

This isn't as smooth as you might think.  Many people have to share their games with siblings, and when they can't distinguish between their two personas this can cause a lot of trouble.

 

Ships slowly getting knocked offline is interesting... but does it really have a place in a large-scale game with massive empires and huge fleets?  I think this would be better suited for a small squad-based tactical game where you could expand on it and do things like focus your weapons on the enemy engines, or something to that effect.

 

Personally... I hope that IC pulls a Warcraft/Starcraft thing on us and sets the sequel to Sins in a Fantasy universe.  Completely analogous gameplay and mechanics, but a fresh setting and theme.  It's not that hard to envision; replace gravity wells with territories, the "planet" with a capital city, and extractors with villages.

 

Really, I'd want Sins 2 to be its own game, not railroaded by what its predecessor was.  I that respect, my greatest hope is that our conversation here (aside from very general stuff, like campaign and multiplayer support) is completely moot.

I don't, not the least because I will be getting my fantasy game fix with Elemental more likely than not. And I don't really think the game play would transfer as well as you think, because it sounds a lot like completely real time Total War. And I for one am not sure if that is an innovation we need.

 

Regardless, I am sure Ironclad has already decided what their next project is going to be, it is just a matter of them telling us what it is going to be. Though that might take a while as they are probably busy getting their new office ready, hiring new people as they are undoubtably going to expand, maybe researching new software etc.

Elemental is coming out in a few months.  Whatever IC is working on is going to be 2011 earliest.

 

Total War, Lord of the Realms, there are more than a handful of games that use this layout.  I think it could be very interesting, and I'd love to see it tried.  Remember, Sins was pretty risky and out there when in development, and it's only in hindsight that we can say it all worked out masterfully.

 

Agreed; even if they hadn't already decided by the time they'd finished Diplomacy, they certainly have by now.

 

Here's hoping.  If I saw an announcement of an opening for programmers, I'd apply to IC in an instant (I happen to be a recent grad here in Vancouver; didn't I pick the best time to arrive into the job market?)

I believe that many of the OPs suggestions can't take place.

- Focusing on smaller number of ships is in direct contradiction with what devs wanted the game to be. They did not want a tactical strategy game like DoW or CoH, where you have a handful of units and losing one worker might cost you the whole match. They wanted a huge game with thousands of units battling over massive star systems.
Unless they change their minds (like SupCom's developers did, somewhat, with SupCom2) this is not likely to happen.

- Moving turrets, animated ships, ship damage, accurate weapon trajectories etc. are also unlikely to happen, unless IC wants to print "3GHz Quad Core with 10 GB RAM" in the "minimum requirements" box. While some of the people here do have such systems and see nothing astonishing in those specs, you have to understand that the VAST MAJORITY of players have PCs that don't overstep the $500 line by far. What's more, many of those people have better things to spend cash on than getting a new beefed out $2000 rig just to see some non-existant virtual ship disappear in a nice cloud of visual effects. Like myself, I got a dual core 2,66 ghz, 2 GB ram PC and the devs are well aware that I am not going to spend a thousand bucks on a new PC just to run their new game.
And so, if the devs still want tens of thousands of ships to roam around on 100+ planet maps with 8+ players, they have to keep things as smooth as they can, even forsaking the effects you mentioned. A few of them might make it, majority though, will not.
Well, unless IC want to sell 5.000 copies of the game instead of 100.000 ^^.

For the same reason as above, things like strike craft evading solid objects cannot happen as well - it is too CPU-heavy to calculate the paths for hundreds of lightning-fast dogfighting units at once.

One thing I definately have to agree with is that Hold Position + strike craft = LOL FAIL.
Flak (not flack for heaven's sake, it looks absolutely hilarious!) should do 1000% damage to strike craft that do not move.

They already are. One answer. Phase missiles.

You can select fleet sizes as you probably know but the truth is if you play on small fleet sizes SB and planet defenses become even more powerful. Thats why i think MP community plays on medium setting. Unless there is 4 humans against 4 vicious AI match.   then they reduce fleet sizes. And people like to see big epic battles.

 

I like that up to a point where it comes to randomness. Randomness makes this too much of a gamble. I would love it if it was fixed occurrences. But I think this would put really massive pressure on processor.....

 

 

As someone still new to the game, I will not be suggesting many as far as multiplayer is concerned. I only have a few words on that.

Map sharing (similar to starcraft/warcraft), no desyncs, and improved latency.

 

As far as new ideas go, I have think that phase jumping needs a bit of work. First, there should be some way of telling your ships where you want them arrive in the target gravity well. As far as I can tell, you can place a waypoint within the gravity well to tell them where to move after they enter, but it would be nice to have more control over where they first appear. I like the idea that ships can only travel in a straight line in phase space, but I think something along the lines of a curve that appears when you hover over the edge of the gravity well you are jumping from would be nice.

(

This would represent the "range" at the edge of the gravity well from which the ships can jump. I realize that right now you can simply order the entire fleet to move to the left or right side of the phase line, and then order then to make the jump and end up in a different position, but some sort of interface change would be appreciated. Perhaps make this something that only appears when holding the ALT key?

 

As far as graphics go, I do not have a problem with the current graphics. Increased texture resolution would be nice, but not necessary. A lot of excellent games have worse graphics then sins. Better effects when turning up planet detail would be awesome though. Maybe have a few planets with VERY defined rings (along the lines of saturn). Add some more lighting affects. My thoughts with this are "raise the high end, maintain the low end" Massive fleets and maps are the goal here.

PLEASE make ships at least TRY and avoid objects that they will smack into though. I agree it is very sad when you know you lost your cap once it gets too close to an object of doom.

 

Most important----If this game could be run in 64-bit mode, and was threaded for several cores, it would be amazing. I also think that some problems could be resolved by putting more load onto the video card. Sins seems to rely a lot more on the CPU for things considering how pretty the graphics already are. While I do not seem to have the extreme stalling in big maps that some others do, everything plays out in slow motion. The engine needs to be more efficient. However, this game still has some of the BEST camera controls I have ever seen.

 

Well--that turned out longer than I thought. I usually just shadow the forums...I hope I got the idea about phase jumps across. Not the best at explaining things.

 

I realize that, but really I don't need a fantasy strategy title every year (perhaps you require a bigger dose than me to get an effect ). I still play Lotr:Battle for Middle Earth II mods to get my fix, and that came out over three years ago. And it sure seems that elemental will be a much deeper game.

That's true, and they probably could get it to work. But is that really the best medium for them to show what they can do? Maybe I am just too biased towards games with massive ship battles.

Good timing indeed my friend, if I were you I would hunt Ironclad's office down myself and ask for an application (or maybe internship if that is often required first in your field) directly. And if they don't give you one force them to take your resume anyways!

As to the OP, just being 64bit compatible would be a huge step. Other than that a serious increase in planet types and ship design would be nice. I just feel that a lot of the ships should be a bit more complex that they are now, especially the TEC (yes I am looking at you Kodiak, surely a warship has to be more than a big metal box with autocannons on one side and engines on the other).

What makes you think they plan to make a Sins-2?

I don't think we've heard one peep out of Ironclad since the release of the last patch.  It leaves me with the subjective feeling that Ironclad feels a little malevolent about Sins for some reason.  They don't seem to be expressing much enthusiasm for their game here on the forums.

I think this would be a bad idea.  They have a winning formula with Sins, so the simplest thing to do and the surest bet is to just build on that with a Sins-2.

What they might consider doing is to make a land-based 4x-RTS that would have gameplay similar to that of Sins, but I don't think they should tie it to Sins.

Oh its in vancouver? Aw, thats the other side of canada for me lol.

 

I think Ships guarded around the capital ships should act as meat shield for the capital ship. so then every ships should have chances they will miss, and also the missed shots still have a chance to hit another ship.

When the Ships guarding the front of the capital ship dies, players will bring more ships from the back to the front to protect the capital ship.

I dont think this game should be based more on individual ships (attacking engines, sub systems). It should be more about how you control a fleet. and forming formations to effectively take out your opponent ships. Make fleets more important and easier to create more than 1 fleet!!

 

Graphics don't really need improvement, theres many that don't even mind playing this all with 2d icons. But I guess improved graphics will help the game sell more.

 

Honestly, I don't really have a fantasy or sci-fi "fix" to address.  I move from one game to another based on them being a good game, and usually in the long-term the fantasy/sci-fi stuff evens out.

Certainly in the near future I have both Dawn of Fantasy and Starcraft 2 on my "to play" list so presuming neither are a let-down I'm going to have more than enough content in each genre.



I was briefly involved in the modding community in BFME2... but certain "events" caused me to abandon it completely.  Still, that seems like ages ago now.



And maybe I'm a little biased towards innumerable columns of clashing warriors and devastating arcane magic.



I really do need to start getting more aggressive about this job hunting business... I've been unemployed too long as it is...



Why not?  It doesn't have to be a strong tie, only as close as Starcraft is to Warcraft.  The theme, story, factions, and specifics are all unique to each game, even if there is an underlying similarity in style and mechanics.  Anyways, I was just expressing a desire to see that kind of game, and given its profound similarities to Sins I was musing on the idea of a Starcraft/Warcraft duality with the Sins franchise.  

I think sins 2 should change the overall interface of the maps.  The solar systems need to orbit stars.  They also need to have certain maps that are different star systems, but there should also be the option of building a galaxy instead of a solar system.  But mostly the planets need to orbit stars, and the phase lanes should be changed to something different.  Maybe not removed but I felt like the map interface was less than realistic.

I agree, this is unlikely to happen, but I think it would be nice if they at least enabled some of these things for modders. Then if you have the computer that can handle it, you can mod it in.

Speaking of modding, that is something that was left off of the OP. It would be really, really awesome if Sins 2 takes a page out of Elemental's book and lets us mod just about everything. There are a lot of things that can't be done with the current Sins engine, but openning it up in the sequal would allow all sorts of new and awesome things.

 

Dirty Sanchez's ideas for Sins-2:

1. Add more planet types--perhaps taking some ideas from the Sins Plus mod.  Allow the additional planet types to be optional with a checkbox type of option.

2. Add one or two more races (this is the really hard part, I know, but you need something to justify the creation and sale of a Sins-2.)

3. Improve the graphics a little bit (see the Bailknights mod).

4. Make it a truly multithreaded game and see if it can be further optimized (ala the Sins Optimization Mod).

5. Consider adding some other game types to the game.

• How about a Capital Ships Only option similar to the mod Annatar created according to specifications I laid out two years ago?
• How about some sort of a Capture-The-Flag type of game?  (A capital ship or some special ship has been deployed to obtain and bring back secret new technology to your base and the enemy tries to destroy it while you try to hunt down the enemy's courier ship.)
• How about a King-of-the-Hill or Domination type of game (maintain ownership of a certain central planet(s) to get points)?
• How about an Open Field type of game--no phase lanes just one huge gravity well (the playing field) with min-gravity wells around planets in it.  It could be used for some sort of a Soccer-like type of game--get a certain ship (the Bomb) across the enemy's goal line.

6. Create an improved and more powerful Galaxy Forge that will allow mappers to (easily) specify exactly how many extractors and other structures are around each planet and where they are in the gravity well.

7. Make sure that Impulse or some sort of easy way to access and update via Impulse is built-into the game, seamlessly.  It should be easy for legitimate purchasers to register and patch the game.  (Maybe this should be part of the Online Gamers Bill of Rights.)

 

All of those ideas, together, could help justify and sell a Sins-2.  Maintain the exact same game play as the original--there's no reason to mess around with a proven winning formula.  Of course, Sins-2 should have all of the features present in Entrenchment and Diplomacy.  Sins-2 would sell based on the additional things it brings to the table such as my above suggestions.

This game also needs several Online Multiplayer enhancements and improvements.  I know that you guys aren't real enthusiastic about online multiplayer, but Sins is actually a great game for online multiplayer and, if it's done right, online multiplayer can become one of the reasons why people would want to purchase the game.  (There are, in fact, many successful games that are primarily about online multiplayer.)  Aside from the obvious improvements such as fixing minidumps and desyncs:

1. Figure out a way to allow players who have been dropped from games to rejoin the game.  When a dropped player rejoins, perhaps the game could halt for a minute while while the current state of the game is downloaded to him.

2. Create an option to allow people to choose to receive auto-downloads of mods and custom maps.  This could be accomplished by allowing players to check off options such as--don't receive any downloads, auto-download everything, ask for approval before each file is downloaded.  This is important because it would increase the fun-factor for the game and unleash the creativity of enthusiastic players, mappers, and modders which essentially adds content to your game for FREE!  People will increase the value and desirability of your game--for FREE!  It increases the fun-factor because the free-market will determine what mods and maps are good and which ones are bad, with only the best ones receiving playing time.  (This also makes the game more desirable for people who only play it in single player.)

3. Provide support for games of up to 7v7.

4. Provide support for built-in voice comm.  Allow players to easily mute other players or to mute all players if they like.

5. Come up with a window-based chat room system so that people can open up the Lobby chat and other chat channels while they are in game if they like.  Allow people to be on multiple chat channels--like an in-game IRC.  Also, please allow games to maintain a separate in-game chat log.  (Players could only see their team's chat and public chat in games but all chat during replays.)

6. Come up with some sort of a system that assigns players a "Skill Rating" from 1-100 that is tied to a CD-Key.  This would pretty much end the smurfing problem while allowing people too play under new names and maintain some sense of anonymity.  Perhaps the game could receive some type of a scoring system where players are assigned experience points for doing certain types of things--killing human opponents' frigates and capital ships, bombing out human planets, eliminating opposing players from the game entirely, killing human players' structures, being on the winning team.  The weighted experience points could then be divided by the length of time that people have played a game to come up with some sort of a skill rating.  Players who only play comp stomps against AI would be limited to a max skill rating of 10.

7. Include a system where the game host can press a button to automatically balance the teams based on those skill ratings.

8. Create an optional built-in "pickup games" functionality.  This allows 2 or 3 players to choose to become team captains, randomly determines which of those players should be given the option to choose 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, and then manages the player-draft.  (When a captain drafts a player--that player is automatically moved to that captain's team.)  (If someone leaves the game setup room, it has to start over unless that player rejoins the game.)  The draft orders should work as follows:

3v3:  A-B-B-A

4v4: A-B-B-A-B-A -- and provide an option for: A-B-B-A-A-B

5v5: A-B-B-A-A-B-B-A

3v3v3: A-B-C-C-B-A

(Similar player draft orders can be created for 6v6 and 7v7.)

9. In the game's main menu, call the direct connect LAN games "LAN games" and not "Multiplayer".  Then change the name of "Ironclad Online" to "Online Multiplayer".

10. As part of the Tutorial menu, include an Online Multiplayer tutorial to encourage players to consider coming online and to reduce the barrier to doing so, perhaps reminding them that they can start by playing comp stomps.

11. As part of the game's marketing, increase the prominence of mention of the online multiplayer aspects of the game, perhaps taking 1/4 of the inside front cover of the game's box to discuss it.

 

Actually, given that the multiplayer crowd has pretty much come to a conclusion regarding the "standard" game settings, you could bypass this step altogether and just enable automated matchmaking.  Click "ready to play" and it will try to form a game with other players who are online at the time.  Lots of games have this feature, and it really streamlines matchmaking in multiplayer.

1. hyperthreading, multi-core (up to 6/8 for future-proofing) and SLI/Crossfire support if not already included

2. New race Or single-player campaign

3. Differeing game modes like king of the hill, or domination, where holding a certain central planet gives a massive advantage whilst held, but say, cant build any defenses

4. New achievements like "Form 50 pacts" and "Destroy 30 starbases" - suspisciously lacking in Entrenchment and Dipomacy

5. New planet types, like Urban, Industrial and Toxic from SINS Plus (I think)

6. More dangerous pirates. Not just more, but more variety of ships, including possible capital ships

7. More variety among races. They all have light/long range/flak/siege frigates and so on. Same with capships. the only variety is in cruisers

8. If 7 i s not doable, then make more difference between races, emphasising low cost, high firepower, heavy armour or whatever

9. Make shield mitigation only work when shields are up, otherwise what else is armour for?

10. Provision for longer ship names

11. Allow players to set up seperate ship name prefixes as part of their player set up (replacing TDN with HMs or USS for instance)

- Temporary cloaking for ships and anticloak technology (tiberian sun anyone?)

- Could you add a button to divide fleet in two fleets with equal numbers of ships of every type? Dividing fleets for example into one attacking and one defending fleet is generally pain in the ass. I think this could be automatically done with some clever algorithm. Also, I would like to see something like fleet manager in Galactic Civilisations.

- a Bug: I have noticed that strikecraft can fly straight through a star or planet, hopefully we wont meet again in sins 2

- I would really like the idea of being able to fleet down. If u loose a few planets and resources you can drop as many tech levels in fleet support as you want for some payment and time if you decide you cannot retake your lost planets... BUT to fleet back up you have to research all over again investing the resources (and time!) necessary to do so. This ensures that you cannot use it to quickly boost your economy and fleet up again, but if you get beaten from owning many planets to few, overtime you can adapt (revert to previous fleet infrastructure states) istead of wasting most of your small resource income on unneeded fleet supply

- planetary invasions (they will take longer and cost some resources, but developed planets wont be absolutely destroyed after invasion, and maybe u could get slaves?)

- At least minimal amount of flak for capital ships and starbases, its just totally unrealistic and not cool that there are no anti-fighter guns on such precious ships.

- add planetary defenses located on planet surface(ground to orbit missiles, cannons, lasers....)


-asteroid fields IN systems that have some tactical effects(only fighters/bombers and frigates can navigate them, caps and cruisers cannot)
-Diffrent gas clouds alot like armarda, some that drop shields.. some that increase shield regen or interfere with diffrent kinds of weapons.

-minor races like in GalCiv 2

-space creatures(giant amoeba)
-destroyable ship subsystems(weapons, engines, sensors...)

-trading planets, ships, technologies and negotiating options
like in GalCiv 2
-capturable key resources like in GalCiv 2
-capturing ships and stations
-binary star systems, blackholes (include bodies from various mods in vanilla game..)

- fix retarded ship movement (arcing turns)

- get rid of shield mitigation (at least disable it when shields are down..)

-spies like in galciv2

- allow longer ship, station, planet names, allow players to name fleets

 

I hope someone reads it all

 

doublepost

For me Trinity is really a perfect Multiplayer RTS. The only thing I would like to see is a Single Player campaign. The background story really is amazing. It would be cool to find out more and how could this be done better as in a campaign. So please a campaign for all Single Player Fans like me!

Graphically I would like to see bigger Motherships and bigger stations. Maybe a little bit more Diplomacy Interaction like said above (spies, technology transfer etc.)

Needs an automatic mod/map download system, but otherwise I concur that they really hit the nail on the head here.

i want to see a real-time damage system

also, i don't like being forced to download a content delivery program just to get patches for the game. what's wrong with updating directly through the game with the cd key as verification?

Impulse is the least of the "content delivery system" evils out there right now, and I'll take it any day over Steam or GFWL, but I agree with you that I'm not a particular fan of it.

Not too sure I'd like a new race added to Sins.  I'd rather just see that Sins 2 is perfectly balanced between the 3, which they have come close to getting in this version.

A campaign is something I'm in full support of, but, as others have pointed out elsewhere, a campaign that focuses more on giving the Sins universe some more background story rather than just training new players on the mechanics of the game.

All the technical stuff, like hyperthreading and 64bit support and whatnot, I'm sure will be in so isn't really worth mentioning.