What is the problem with SE5?

[PvK]

President_Elect_Shang said:
... One thing you said gives me a new thought. How would you implement the retreat feature if you could?

Well, my design style is different from MM's in many ways, but I would do it by making it less abstract. I like the feature that allows the players to specify where within a system the ships are deployed - I think it should be applied more literally. So, the game would track where all ships are within the ENTIRE sector, meaning the sector would be much larger, and time/rate/distance would be consistent. Ships would actually travel across a sector to reach the next sector. Combat would occur and endure whilst ships were in range and engagement was imminent. In other words, continuous action, and rates/times/distances actually consistent, with no artificial rules about combat ending and restarting, or ships teleporting an entire sector, etc.

Now, that's not the only way to do it, I doubt MM would choose to do it that way since Aaron seems to like abstractions, and there are probably abstract ways to represent it that don't have so many loop-holes. For example, in SE3 I believe ships were only allowed to retreat as long as they had strategic movement left - that alone would solve one of the problems with retreating. Improving the conditions under which retreats occur would also help (i.e. realizing when ships are all running away and no combat will occur so don't record it as a combat, and realizing that slightly faster ships WILL catch someone, so make a scatter decision and then start combat only somewhat outside of range, and let it continue based on relative speeds not based on artificial distances or time limits).

PvK