Official SE5 release date announced - September 12

[Gandalf Parker]

Just to devil-advocate my own previous post...

You all realize of course that the 3D wasnt necessarily done for us. We all stayed with SE thru the things that sent other people away. So of course we would rather see that extended than invest in eye-candy. The pretties were added to impress the fickle public who cant see past 2d graphics. It goes hand in hand with shifting from what I think of as a publicity and online publisher to a marketing and shelfware one.

I can just hope that it achieves the larger player-base that it was meant to hook into. Hmmmm do I hope that? Maybe not. But Im sure they are hoping for it.

[Fyron]

It's not all about the "pretties..." There are game mechanics to think about too. Personally, I think the concept of a continuous time combat engine is far superior to the insanity of the SE4 combat engine. Sure, you can build a turn based system that tries to emulate continuous time with complex initiative and phases and all that, but why do that when you can just make it actually be continuous time?

It's not like Aaron went and built a Total War type 3d graphics engine for the game... It'd never get done if he tried to do that by himself.

Possum:
I don't think anyone will be able to ***** about SE5 construction queues.

[AMF]

Ok, so where do I go to pre-order this darn thing?

[Q]

I agree with Fyron that an improvement of the combat engine compared to SE IV will certainly be most welcome.
And certainly you can't please everybody, but that makes modding possibilities even more important.
Which implies: make as little hard coded limitations as possible!
Therefore the maximum number of 255 system would be a bad news IMO if it is hard coded.

[Raapys]

Sure, you can build a turn based system that tries to emulate continuous time with complex initiative and phases and all that, but why do that when you can just make it actually be continuous time?

I'd prefer a complex turn-based system, really. All other considerations aside, real-time combat is and will play differently, regardless of the ability to pause whenever, etc.

[Suicide Junkie]

It is a very complex turn based system if you get down to the nitty gritty details.

It is simply that the turns are one millisecond long, with non-instant weapons and turning.

[Ed Kolis]

Hehe, sort of like "Titans of Steel" on autoturns, if you want to think of it that way
Though I do wonder if the turns are really run every millisecond... that would be an awful lot of turn processing for every measly frame of animation...

[Karibu]

On MOO2 there was a nice (though imperfect) way to simulate realtime combat. Ships had initiative, which then gave you the turn to move. Though, for some reason human players had every time the first move. I think initiative should be calculated by many things like:
- level of engine
- engine capacity divided by ship size class
- experience of the crew
- experience of the fleet
- level of battle computer

Also, there should be different initiative for guns and movement (you may have superior engines but lousy battle computer or vice versa), and also - very difficult to implement - if two ships are have almost identical initiative but one has slightly better, the better ship should not be able to do everything before another ship gets the change.

My logic would say that high engine initiative gives you some movements (perhaps 1 or 2 squares) before another ship gets to move his one square. An example:

Ship A: total movement 7 squares, battle computer level 1
Ship B: total movement 5 squares, battle computer level 2

Battle:
Ship A moves 1 square
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 2 squares
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 1 square
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 2 squares
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 1 square
Ship B moves 1 square

Firing: If guns itself have no initiative and both ships would have same weapons, firing order depends only of battle computer. the ship B would fire first when in range (even if ship A would move inside the gun range and still have movement to go, but at this point Ship B gets his firing turn).

Example continued:

Ship A moves 1 square
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 2 squares
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 1 square
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship A moves 1 squares (ship A have 1 more square to move)
Ship B fires at ship A
Ship A moves 1 squares
Ship A fires at ship B
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship B fires at ship A
Ship A moves 1 square
Ship A fires at ship B
Ship B moves 1 square
Ship B fires at ship A

etc.

Of course, this is a crude combat model but similar what I hope to see in SEV. You get the point. Well, can SEV betatesters give any preliminary information about this or does NDA prevent you from comment?

[Puke]

what would be super confusing if each race had a unique callendar. so for the texrux it would be year 4000, but the eee would be marking a new calendar at the year 50 or something.

and of course each race would have time that passed at a different pace, depending on the orbit of their particular homeworld around its primary star.

and each planet would actually orbit its primary star at a unique rate.

or, you know, maybe that wouldnt be so cool. it would actually be a pain in the butt to keep track of.

[Noble713]

Gandalf Parker said:
Just to devil-advocate my own previous post...

You all realize of course that the 3D wasnt necessarily done for us. We all stayed with SE thru the things that sent other people away. So of course we would rather see that extended than invest in eye-candy. The pretties were added to impress the fickle public who cant see past 2d graphics.

I've been playing the SE series for 9 years, ever since a friend gave me Space Empires II (which had HORRIBLE graphics, BTW). I like 3d graphics. I WANT 3D graphics for the Space Empires series. I guess that makes me one of the "fickle public", huh? On a side note, besides SE4 there is one other excellent 2D game that I play: Hearts of Iron 2 with counters for unit icons. I'm not sure how it would look with a totally 3d engine, but if Paradox said they were taking things in that direction for the sequel I would wait for screenshots with pleasant anticipation.

As for "Aaron should spend his time on the AI and not fancy graphics": if what I've read about the scriptable AI is correct, the talented modders in this community will churn out AIs vastly more capable than what Aaron can do programming and debugging the whole game by himself. What the mod community CAN'T do, however, is change a 2D graphics engine into a 3D one, and there is only so much you can do to improve 2D.

I guess I look at SE4 and SE5 not so much as games, but game engines. Much as the Quake 2 engine served as the basis for most FPS games for years (including Half-Life), Space Empires serves as the basis for a variety of different 4X play experiences. Sure they all involve building ships and conquering planets (much as FPSes all involve running around and shooting at people), but the nuances vary. To me, the best games are the ones that are flexible enough for the community to create phenomenal, polished, unique games from the base model (Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat for Half-Life, Rhyse and Rule for Civilization 3, Total Realism for Rome:Total War).

Are you going to argue that 2d bitmaps are more flexible than a 3d engine? Would you honestly rather stare at totally flat graphics instead of 3d ones if it had no impact on gameplay?