SEIV and VGA Planets

[ClamBoy]

Some time back, I spent a few years with some friends doing the PBEM thing with VGA Planets. I've been keeping half an eye out for a replacement (I have no interest in VGAP v.4) and want something a little more strategic in fleet battle than stacking Ship ID's. I've had a quick look at the SEIV demo and it looks like it could nicely fill that niche. I'm just starting to lobby that old crew into starting some new PBEM that's NOT VGAP. I've already volunteered to host some shareware games.

Anyway, I'd like to hear from people who have VGAP experience with SEIV and VGAP 3.x about the similarities and differences between the two. I'm interesting in things such as resource management, research, PBEM fleet battle resolution etc.. As things come up, which I hope they do, I'll probably have more questions.

I've just started playing around with the SEIV demo only scratching the surface (I did the tutorial the other night) so I'm interested in the obvious as well.

Thanks in advance and cheers!

[sapperland]

I have played VGA v.3
The game systems are very different for battles. In vga you do one ship at a time until one side runs out of ships to fight with. Planets get mined out so fuel and minerals get to be a problem after 100 turns or so. You have very limited research ie, 1-10 in hulls,beams,engines and torps. I look at vga as a simple PBEM game that takes 30 minutes to do a turn. SEIV is much better then VGA. Not as good as starfire, but then again starfire is still only a board game and this is the closest computer game modeled along the same game system.

[ClamBoy]

Thanks for the comments. What about in the area of play balancing? VGAP was heavily biased towards carriers vs. torpedoes ("fighters rule, torpedoes drool"). Same thing with race balancing. Just perusing the forums there seems to be some degree of exploitable tactics (what game doesn't) but at least there are appropriate counter tactics (such as the fighter defense thread).

[Talenn]

ClamBoy:

I never played VGAP so I cant help you there. But, I can tell you that in a game as complex as SE4 there bound to be a host of 'exploits' that people will find. I have seen plenty and I've only had the game for a few weeks.

The GOOD news is that you can change almost anything so that the exploit is removed. Sometimes you have to take a more indirect route to do so, but I have yet to come across anything truly 'unfixable'. My usual method has been to post about it here just to see if I am missing something completely obvious. Barring that, I go in and tweak it. I'm quite pleased with the way my custom data set is evolving.

Some bad news for you...if you are playing PBEM, there is NO ability to control the combat. You can set prebattle strategies for your general ship types and general fleets, but the battles are all autocalc-ed. To me, that kills have of the fun of researching all the neat gadgets and outfitting the ships with them. Also, designing multi-role fleets etc is far more entertaining when you can see it all unfold.

So, if you looking strictly for PBEM, my opinion is that the game is certainly VERY good, but you wont get the joy of using your pretty little ships in battle. The emphasis is on much higher level decision making (for better or worse).

Hope it helped a bit.

Talenn

[ClamBoy]

This e-mail notification of replies is going to be the death of me... <g>

Do you get to watch the battles resolve? I haven't had the chance to check this out for myself yet. VGAP had a "VCR" you could watch the battles play back as they were resolved by the computer.

Personally, I like the idea of deploying your fleets and having the battle resolve automatically. Sure it's a bit of a crap shoot (okay, a whole lot of a crap shoot) but seeing how your "fleet commanders" fare with the resources given to them is interesting to me. As long as some feedback mechanism exists for finding out how well what I deployed fares in the heat of battle, I'm quite happy with that in a PBEM context. Give some general orders and watch the drama unfold...

[Taqwus]

At least in single-player mode, strategic combat gives you -

- A view of dots flying around. Not too informative, but sometimes useful since you might notice fighter/missile launches. Also, you might catch the initial enemy formation and probable orders.

- A report of what ships and planets were involved, along with ship class (IIRC), ship design, and how much damage was sustained. You do NOT get any information on unit (mine, fighter, satellite, weapon platform, or troop) numbers, classes, placement or casualties, but you might get their designs (don't recall).

You therefore have most of the information you need to plug 'em into the simulator (potentially a very useful tool, since it'll let you see how your designs might fare against the enemy before you even build a single instance, and how different fleet organizations and orders work).

In tactical combat, you can always hit 'resolve' and watch (in full detail) what the AI would do. I *think* you'll get the same results as with strategic combat, minus variance due to randomness and any tweaking you did before handing over control.

You will, however, in certain cases get MUCH superior results if you manage the battle yourself in tactical. So ship designs meant for this will not necessarily do nearly as well in strategic combat during a multi...

BTW, on limited resources per planet, there is a 'finite resources' option. Expand, expand, expand...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Seawolf]

I'll make it simple, I have played both, if you like VGAP then you will come to love SE series

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Seawolf on the prowl

[Hydraa]

I have not played VGAP but I am a former Stars! player and have also played SEIII PBEM. If you can't get your old crew interested and are still interested in trying a PBEM with the demo Version I would be willing to play against you.

[ClamBoy]

Thanks for all of your comments and I'm looking forward to digging a little deeper into the game.

Thanks again and cheers.

[Hydraa]

I have not played VGAP but I am a former Stars! player and have also played SEIII PBEM. If you can't get your old crew interested and are still interested in trying a PBEM with the demo Version I would be willing to play against you.