How is it possible to raid without retreat ability?

[Taera]

then there's the opposite of my idea - add a component high on the tech tree that would prevent the enemy from retreating.

[Suicide Junkie]

One more person backing Rollo.

The only "retreat" option I wold prefer to have is in the combat strategies.

Something along the lines of "If my shields (or hull) are below ## percent, then switch strategy to don't get hurt"

Your raiders could harrass a slower enemy, and then fall back to the edge of the combat map before they get severely damaged.

Retreating from the combat map should only happen after 30 turns. If your ships had the ability and the orders to retreat, they wouldn't have entered combat in the first place, since they would have stayed away from enemies on the strategic map.

[Marvin Kosh]

Originally posted by Taera:
then there's the opposite of my idea - add a component high on the tech tree that would prevent the enemy from retreating.

Like Warp Disipator from MOO2, except there's no warp to dissipate

[Atraikius]

I'm with Rollo on this too. Retreating in SEIII was a pain and ate up far too much time when chasing down a single colony ship or transport.

[Gandalph]

I will start by saying that I am neither for or against the idea of retreat.

In several of the Star Wars games I have played, impulse engines are used in tactical combat and if you wanted to retreat you had to go to the edge of the combat grid (IIRC with a movement penalty) and wait a turn or two while your warp engines warmed up. This made you vulnerable to attack and sometimes your warp capability would be knocked out so you would then be unable to leave the combat grid. As you were retreating, you still had the ability to fire, as long as your weapons were still intact. If you managed to make it out of combat, you would only end up 1 square away from the enemy on the system map and could still be attacked if the enemy still had movement. This style makes total sense to me and IMHO would add to the game play experience.

[Baron Munchausen]

When we asked for retreat in the past, the reason we were given for its removal was pretty much what has been discussed. Running down a colony ship was tedious. Strategic movement after combat made it possible to cheat in too many ways. etc. But getting pinned in an invisible corner is also a pain in the arse. I guess there's no single solution to the problem without some sort of complex 'scaling' of the game like Starfire uses. But that would be awfully complicated to program.

[ June 25, 2002, 16:56: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by Puke:
i.e., can slower ships retreat from faster ones? if a force is of mixed ships, will only the faster ships be able to run? what becomes of ships of the same speed? is a fighting withdrawl being made, or is the fleet being routed? if a fighting withdrawl, do they inflict damage as they flee? do they take any? do they take more if its a route? how is a route determined? where do they flee to? what if they dont have any movement left?

Why do you need to get into any of this? Why not just abstract it as in MOO2? If you choose to retreat you select "options/retreat" and your ships begin to move to the opposite edge or whatever--and sure, they can be taking damage as they flee. Then, on the next turn the two opposing fleets are still in the same space. The originally attacking fleet may choose to continue to flee on the galactic map (and be chased, or not chased, by the defending fleet).

while most, if not all and possibly more, of those questions can be answered, you do see how it could be problematic to program, and was perhaps left out of the initial release do the the extra time designing and testing that it would have caused.

Though I'm no programmer I don't see how what I described would be difficult to program since it would not actually involve any additional programming beyond adding an option to the options menu.