SE:V, I'll be honest

[eddieballgame]

Do I see MOO3 making a come back? With the last patch, mods, moddabilty, & STABILITY. This game (in my opinion) should be considered a classic. Alas, such is not the case, but the game does have a "feel" like no other.

[Kana]

Captain Kwok said:
I can understand complaints about how the UI is clunky or the demo is buggy or the AI isn't optimized, but I can't see how SE players can argue that game mechanics were not improved or gameplay was sacrificed. Seriously the unfair combat of SE:IV was eliminated, ground combat was at least expanded, improvements were made to construction point usage, unit individualization, research, customizable lists, etc - and that's not even talking about the modding capabilities of SE:V versus SE:IV.

I agree...SEV does have many modding capabilities, and the code under the hood so to speak, is going to be very helpful in modding...

Yet...I could have easily lived with SEIV graphics, a non-real time combat engine, and these improvements...

[Ragnarok-X]

Captain Kwok said:...ground combat was at least expanded...

Sorry Kwok, but that argument is a bit weird, dont you think ? To be exact, i would prefer the old system over the new. I for one cant call the current system an improvment. That is the worst ground combat, ever. I was hoping for something similar to MoO 2, and now we get a C&C -clone which additionally appears to be the ancestor of C&C 1

[Barnacle Bill]

AngleWyrm said:
Or the guy needing a lawn mowed.

And here I wonder if the original reason is simply that there are a lot of lawns to mow, so a fella could make a living at it. But bypass surgery is a skill needed only rarely, thus we make up for it by paying him a full wage for a few hours' work.

Then of course greed set in.

I wouldn't call it greed. It is a matter of (1) the investment in training time and expense to produce a cardiovascular surgeon is a whole lot higher than that to produce a lawnmower-pusher and (2) the percentage of the population that is mentally capable of getting through the training to successfully perform open heart surgery is a lot lower than the percentage of the population mentally capable of mowing a lawn. Why would anybody go through all those years of medical school, residency, etc... and pay all those big tuition bills if at the end he got paid the just same as a non-skilled laborer?

The value of anything (including an hour of your labor) is exactly what somebody else will pay you for it, and not a penny more or less, and if the market price isn't high enough to justify the investment then suppliers exit the market (which in fact is happening in the US medical industry as malpractice insurance rates continue to rise and insurance reembursement continues to fall).

[Barnacle Bill]

arthurtuxedo said:
You could have had a real time system with 2D, sure, but the ships wouldn't be able to pass over and under each other and planets, and I can't imagine how it would have worked with a lot of ships if they can't occupy the same square.

Why couldn't they occupy the same square? They can in board games like Starfire & Starfleet Battles? It's called "stacking". It happens on the system map now (and in SEIV and in SEIII). The above games had "range 0" entries on the CRT and SFB had rules for determining weapon direction at range 0 (since it had directional weapons & shields). A set of rules that can be written for a board game could certainly be programmed for a computer game.

In fact, with location quantized to a grid (hex is better, but still true for squares), the SFB proportional movement / pre-ordered movement system effectively is real-time. I can envision an almost direct real-time port of the SFB system, with the player able to pause at any impulse to change movement orders (subject to turn mode) or fire weapons that bear & are charged, and the computer just stepping through the impulses. You would not have to take the complexities of SFB internal energy management, sticking with the more simplified SF/SE assumption that (aside from ordnance & weapon cycle times) everything in the ship can be run simultaneously at full bore. You could track shields & armor by the hex side they face and determine weapon firing arcs by the side they face and how much extra $/hull space you spend on a mount with a bigger arc. A 2D system that eliminates the issues of SEIV combat is very doable...

Not to say that I dislike the SEV system, just that it wasn't the only way to skin the cat...

[Captain Kwok]

Ragnarok-X said:Sorry Kwok, but that argument is a bit weird, dont you think ? To be exact, i would prefer the old system over the new. I for one cant call the current system an improvment. That is the worst ground combat, ever. I was hoping for something similar to MoO 2, and now we get a C&C -clone which additionally appears to be the ancestor of C&C 1

I'm not saying that it isn't ugly - but it is certainly an improvement in gameplay terms. Factors like speed, range, reload times, armor, and shields are all involved. Heck if you're using strategic combat then it's not much different that SE:IV ground combat but with advantages of the items I mentioned.

Thermodyne, I see your points about UI etc. I don't see how strategy was traded for eye candy though. By my experience, there's more strategy involved with SE:V...

[aegisx]

I didn't really like the SE4 UI, but I only played the game 5 years after it was released. On the other hand, I like the SE5 UI which seems more intuitive to me, just another viewpoint.

As far as strategy, I agree with kwok in that it there seems to be more but there is a 3d layer on top of it.

[Xrati]

I agree with Kana, I'm not very fond of REAL-TIME combat. In multi-ship combats the advantage always goes to the computer as it will give and process orders much faster then I can. If I wanted real time then I would purchase a ‘first person’ action game. I want to be able to sit and drink my coffee while doing combat or be able to pause the action (which never seems to be an option with real time) when something comes up in the middle of combat. The only way to determine if your ship designs are good is to run them in battle where you can see what is taking place and the results of the battle as they happen.

I will wait to hear the reviews on this board before I decide to purchase SEV. I’m not interested in a game that will be corrected after it’s released. I would rather purchase a functioning game out of the box and patch it later to improve it, but if the game is not similar to SEIV and what’s new is what doesn’t work, then MM missed the point of releasing the game.

[Barnacle Bill]

Xrati said:
I want to be able to sit and drink my coffee while doing combat or be able to pause the action (which never seems to be an option with real time) when something comes up in the middle of combat.

SEV combat is pausable.

[AAshbery76]

You can slow the real time combat down to a crawl if you want too,you don't have to pause,there are multiple speeds.