SEV Tactical Combat Impressions

[Suicide Junkie]

Leave the movement AI on, and target manually?

[StarShadow]

True, that's just as good.

[Raapys]

It's sort of nice to have the ship automatically follow when choosing a target to attack though.

[tmcc]

So back to the original observation. Has anyone had success generating consistantly better outcomes using tactical combat as opposed to selecting an appropriate ship strategy and using Strategic Combat. So far I have not.

[Captain Kwok]

If you micromanage your ships in tactical combat, you can achieve better results particularly if you have a longer range weapon.

[StarShadow]

Personally I think that's going to be more trouble than it's worth. It seems to take at least 2 whole rounds just to turn! If I bother with tactical it'll be for small fights (2-4 ships), or just to watch the fight close up.

[tmcc]

I find this much more difficult in SEV than SEIV though. In an early game the only long range weapon is the missile. Missiles are now much weaker than their SEIV counterparts. I am currently using CSM lvl 5 and they only do 80 points damage. The enemy frigates have 345Kt of structure 140 of which is armor. My missile frigate has 3 missiles so their first voley only does 40Kt of damage. on top of that by the time they actually fire the missiles and turn around to run the enemy is within DUC range. Ussually the missile ship only gets one more shot, at most, before it dies, leaving a damaged but living enemy behind. While typing this I just realized that I need to put the engines in the front of a missile boat.

Bottom line is that, for me, tactical is much less useful than is SEIV and as such takes away a HUGE portion of the enjoyment I got from the game.

[arthurtuxedo]

Whenever you switch to something new, there will always be people who liked the old way better, but I maintain that the turn based combat of SE4 was absolutely horrible compared to this new system we have. The missile dancing, the "first shot wins" of warp points, the fact that an entire fleet of hundreds of ships can unload full salvos into their helpless enemies without a single shot of return fire, the way that ships could dance into range and then dance out after firing to be virtually immune to stationary targets, the list goes on. All of these problems are cured now, it doesn't take nearly as long for combat to play out, it looks better (even disregarding the graphical upgrade), feels more exciting, and the only drawback is no longer being able to take advantage of the game's limitations to walk all over the AI. To me, this is not a drawback, but another advantage.

[tmcc]

Everyone has their own opinions of what makes a game fun. For me it has always been mastering the nuances of the tactical combat system in order to pull victory from what should have been defeat. This has been true for me from the early days of Wizard's Crown on a C-64 though to today.

I agree completely that the new system is much more realistic and looks pretty, but that doesn't make it fun.

[Phoenix-D]

You can do the same tricks in SE5 as in SE4 you know. Just have to get used to the new system.

For example, your missile boats need to turn *before* they fire. Close to, say, 2x CSM range then heel around and let the enemy come to you. When they come within missile range accelerate away.

Your ships will hammer the enemy as they approach, and since you're heading directly away from them, catching up will take a while.

Pressing F5 to show the range circles helps a lot with this, by the way.