Retreating??

[wingte]

Is it possible to retreat from a battle you know you cannot win but you ships should be able to outrun??

wingte

[Lerchey]

No, you can't really retreat. If you are doing tactical combat, you can try to survive by just running around and avoiding being shot, but how well that works depends on both speed differential, formation, weapon ranges, and how tricky you are. Eventually, you tend to get boxed into a corner and take some hits while you continue to try to run.

John

[Mike Tremblay]

In SE3 your units were able to retreat from the Tactical combat screen if they had Strategic movement points left (ie. they hadn't used their whole allotment of movement points on the main starmap). If you had no SMP's left you were stuck on the the tactical screen until you won or lost the battle. I don't know if this still works for SE4 or in the demo.

------------------
Mike Tremblay
"Bitter Mike"

[wingte]

Hmnn,,
I tried to move my ships off the "edge" of the screen and wasn't able to. If I deliberatly move into a sector where enemy ships are then perhaps I shouldn't be able to retreat,, but,, if the enemey attacks me and my ships had the speed to escap, then I should be able to run.
Even in the first instance I should be able to do hit and run tactics using heavily armed lightly armored fast ships with long range weapons.



------------------
Wingte

[Mike Tremblay]

I have to make a correction on my suggestion. It seems that that doesn't hold true anymore. Last night I was experimenting to see if it was still the same and alas it wasn't. What happens now is that you have to run around evading your enemy for 30 turns and then the Tactical combat ends. Then you might have a chance to run away on the Strategic screen - as long as your enemy doesn't send in his cavalry or you are so badly damaged that you can't get away.

------------------
Mike Tremblay
"Bitter Mike"

[Narlotep]

It does seem strangely odd to have the old "table edge of doom" showing up in a computer game? I really laughed at all the little dots chasing a hostile dot into the corner, from whence it had no place to go.

I would suggest that if one side has superior tactical speed, there should be an option to break off the engagement after any single round of combat. Indeed, it should be a pre-combat option as well. "Tactical" "Strategic" or "Avoid Combat". If the unit avoids combat it is placed in a nearby square.

Also, is there a possibility of doing away with the whole "Strategic" combat view. What good does it do and I'm sure the AI isn't impressed by the little dots either...

[Jeb]

The reason the game includes a strategic view is probably the same as why there's no tactical retreat: PBEM. Since, at least with the current AI, it would be really annoying to have your enemies be able to engage you in tactical combat on their turn, the only fair way to play human vs. human is to use strategic combat only. And, if you're doing a sim turns PBEM game, you can't really use the retreat option.

I imagine the other reason for the no retreat feature is to prevent missile ships, which are already very powerful, from being able to use the "zoom in, launch a few missiles, and then retreat" tactic that made them so devastating in MOOII. Superior speed is already enough of a tactical advantage; if you slower foes don't have a chance to trap you in a corner of the tactical map, you can destroy them with impunity. The boundaries of the tactical screen aren't all that realistic, but they're pretty much essential for play balance.

[Master Belisarius]

Jeb: the retreaty strategy, was a SE3 feature... and to be honest, I used it with sucess a lot of times, and I'm missing it...
Check this example, from my SE3 webpage:
http://angelfire.com/sc/Aquilae/aquidossier100.html

I can't see why, MM removed the retreat strategy...

[Jeb]

Yeah, a scrolling tac map would make sense. The main trouble that I can foresee is if ships head off in opposite directions, so that the display area can't hold them both no matter where it scrolls. I suppose at that point you could declare the ships disengaged and end the combat, but I don't know how hard that would be to program. It certainly isn't going to make it into SEIV.

I still like the little dots, though. In my sim turns PBEM game, it's hard to know what the combat AI is going to do with my designs, so it's nice to have some sense of what my ships are doing in simulated combat. For instance, sometimes I see my ships aren't engaging the enemy at all, and then I have to reconfigure their combat strategy. If all I saw was that neither side lost a ship, I might think that they were fighting, but just not destroying one another. (Reports on the damage you inflict on enemy ships when you don't win outright in strategic combat would sure be a nice feature.) If anything, it bothers me that when I get combat reports in the log at the beginning of my turn it *doesn't* show me a replay of the combat. I agree, though, that different people like different things about the game, so maybe I'm in the minority here.

[Paladin]

I perfectly agree with the principle of the retreating tactic, and The map scrolling would be nice... Btw, it reminds me of the age-old Star Control II (darn fun game ;-) were ship's combat was real-time, but the screen was centered on your ship, and the ennemy (one at a time only) would reappear at the other end of the screen if you outrunned him... Not really realistic, but usefull idea (you could warp-retreat, it took 5 seconds to charge tough, so better be far from the opponent)


BTW, what about 3D space combat? it could be feasible even for a turn based "boxed" engine (again the old days, remember XCOM-UFO)