Request: Simultaneous combat

[tbontob]

Originally posted by Mylon:
The idea of ship idleness is just a little too complex for my tastes and also would have to take into account race traits such as happiness, emotionless, whether the fact the ship is using a computer or not, ect...

I do like the idea of iniative. It isn't truly simultaneous, but it's close enough. It would also make sense that smaller ships, fighters, and seekers would all get a huge bonus to iniative.

Mylon, we share the same thoughts...

[Stone Mill]

Agreed.

In all the simultaneous games I've played, this is the absolute #1 priority issue that would make the biggest improvement.

The slaughter one side or the other (lopsided battle outcomes) is probably the thing that still disappoints me a bit.

The drastic results are expanded by the sizes of the forces clashing. Just once, I would love to see to equally massive forces fight it down to the Last few ships.

I somehow believe this proposal would remedy the issue. You have my vote (and the vote of my friends). Great idea.

[Arkcon]

[quote]Originally posted by TerranC:

And Also, the idea of a permanently ready-and-able fleet is lost to me:

See, I had a simpler explanation to myself why ship on a warp point has an initiative advantage. Either the "warp" capability of the engines is separate from the movemement capability, or the ship is in some "non-real-space" or some such technobabble. Whatever, exiting a warp point put the ship or it's crew unaware or unable to react.

Modeling shoreleave to improve crew effectiveness at a small penalty of having the ship ready would be a great addition to the game, however. For all ships, not just those that partol warp points, ships on a long trip would also benefit.

[Groggy]

You all have good points about initiative and surprise affecting battles at warppoints. My concern is primarily with fleet firing orders. Someone replied with a proposal for ship-based instead of fleet-based firing order; this doesn't sound all that hard to do and would go a long way toward realizing simultaneous combat and movement. And I like how crew experience, ship speed, etc. all play into who get to move and fire first.

A few years ago I wrote a C++ program to simulate battles with simultaneous movement and combat, lots of text output but I never managed to couple it to a GUI. Based on that experience, I don't think it would be all that hard to implement this. I also included the effects of ship explosions causing damage to nearby ships, that would be a cool feature to add as well. Give people second thoughts about using point-blank or short weapon range.

[tesco samoa]

Another by product of this initivative thing is that ... The Talisman go first player will not wipe your fleet out every single time.

Lets hope that MM decides to work this out with this game. Instead of leaving it as is.

For this ruins mid to late games... Every time.
I have seen a fleet of 200 ships get wipped out by a fleet of 120 ships who went first. And the fleet of 120 lost about 25% of their ships. Unbalancing to say the least.

[geoschmo]

I would love to see something along these lines done. Unfortunatly it is not as easy to implement as it appears on the surface. It would require a massive rewrite of the combat engine. So many things would have to change. For example:

Currently once initiative is determined, that players fleet gets to move all it's ships, then all it's ships fire. One suggestion would be to calculate inititive on an individual ship basis instead of by fleet. However, would this work with the current fleet mechanics? Would a ship in formation break formation to move and fire?

Simultaneous fire as well has problems. As it is now ships can move in to max range, fire and then move as far away as their movement will allow. In simultaneous fire everybody would move and assign targets and then fire at the same time. Does this mean you don't get to move away after firing? And who moves first? What if you move first, target a ship and they move out of range before the simultaneous fire phase?

Another suggestion is to move and fire the ywa it is currently done, but not apply the damage until the end of the combat turn and apply all damage simultaneously. This seems the most complex, but is may actually be the easiest to do. One problem I do see with it is PDC fire on missles You might have to allow PDC damage to be applied instantly unstead of waiting or your missles would still hit the ship even though they were actually blown up.

I am not hopeful of any of these beign implemented in SEIV, however I am hopeful that something along these lines will be done for SE5. Especially since the next SE game, "SE: Quadrant Wars" that is supposed to come out before SE5 is being billed as the combat engine for SE5. That will allow him to concentrate strictly on this portion of the game and get it working the way he and we want it and then he can plug it into the SE5 game as a whole.

Geoschmo

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Another suggestion is to move and fire the ywa it is currently done, but not apply the damage until the end of the combat turn and apply all damage simultaneously. This seems the most complex, but is may actually be the easiest to do. One problem I do see with it is PDC fire on missles You might have to allow PDC damage to be applied instantly unstead of waiting or your missles would still hit the ship even though they were actually blown up.

Geoschmo

Ooops, I didn't think of that. Now you gotta think, fighters drones sats which are targeted, if the PDC doesn't know what it's done.

Tractors, Repulsors, and Wormhole beams have to go first.

Engine destroying weapons, and the other special weapons have to go first as well.

Yeesh, what a mess.

See, maybe there's nothing wrong with the current system. There's just some FUD in combat, like it should have.

[ September 24, 2002, 18:59: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Groggy]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
I would love to see something along these lines done. Unfortunatly it is not as easy to implement as it appears on the surface. It would require a massive rewrite of the combat engine. (examples omitted)
Geoschmo

In light of all the examples you raised, I agree, it would be a lot harder to implement than I first thought. I certainly didn't take into account static fleet formations and "move-fire-move again" tactics with my crude combat engine. Good thing I didn't quit my day job
I have some other ideas (like splitting combat turns into sub-turns or impulses) but all are CPU-intensive and would slow the game to a crawl. I hope the SE5 combat engine will offer some improvement.

[tesco samoa]

Or he could just make the combat occur real time... On auto... That would clean up most of the problems.

Initative or one ship moving at a time etc... does not work. The Problem is not removed.

Everything should be occuring at the same time.

If that ever occurs then combat will work in seiv. Until then it is flawed.

That way range works. Ship movement works. Fleets work. Units work.

I doubt this will happen.

So perhaps the combat system should be set where
the movement is the same as it is in regular ship movements.

And the creation of Temp Damage and Temp Ship Destroyed. So that all ships can partake in the battle. And at the end of each combat segment all damage is changed from temp to real.

I could detail it out later. It would be a long post.

But the juice of it is One combat turn is made up of many segments. That way the current game turn based engine could be used.

But that kind of system would need initative based on crew experience, fleet experience, computers, sensors, current damage. etc...

Not based on movement or engine numbers.

Then they build the number of actions out of this for a ship or unit and then run though the segments removing action points from the highest to lowest. And away you go.