Any One Still Playing This Game?

[capnq]

It was stock v1.95. The larger battle was 21 BCs with Seeking Parasite Vs and Combat Move 6, vs. 18 DNs with Phased-Polaron Beam IVs and Combat Move 4. The BCs could flood the DNs' Point Defense and stay out of range of the PPBs, except when the formations started the battle overlapping, or the BCs got hung up in a corner of the combat map.

[Suicide Junkie]

CQ, That sounds perfectly sensible to me...

The faster ships with longer range weapons stay out of range.
If they warp in, they get burned until they can open the distance (which happens to be quite a lot of distance with stock weapon ranges; too much IMO, relative to the combat map size).

Fyron:
Other absurdities?
Initiative issues do matter on the first turn of combat, if the ships start within range of direct fire weapons.

In the case of missile weapons both sides get to fire and both sides get to hit, no problem.

If direct fire weapons are being used at a warppoint, the defender fires first. A reasonable, but hardcoded, WP defense advantage.
If direct fire weapons are being used in deep space battles, neither side gets to fire first, since they are all out of range.
In that case it is pretty much random who fires first as they charge into weapons range.

In empirical testing, I have yet to see any non-warppoint battle where the order of play made a difference.
Even in warppoint battles, who fires first doesn't matter much.

In CB, initiative questions are completely swamped by ship designs, fleet composition, and most importantly; strategies and formations.



Contrasting with SE5, and putting aside issues of moddability (more flexibility in most things, losses of others such as multiplex and inf. range missiles)

We have a pro:
- Initiative is moot.
Two ships with equal range will both fire before either takes damage. Often, ships with 10-20 difference in range will fire before the other ship's damage is applied.

We have a big list of cons:
- Shipset choice affects combat results.
- Turn processing speed affects combat results.
- Rolled hits (such as PD) may not actually hit, depending on the timing. (Very noticeable at high time multipliers.)
- Ships can overlap into token stacks (at least as bad as any initiative issue, IMO)
- Combat processing is SLOW!


So, that's why I say SE4's combat system is superior.
Deterministic combat given the random number seed is an indicator of many good properties.

***

What if SE4 were upgraded to have a system which works exactly the same as currently, except that ability loss is deferred until the end of the turn.
IE: Some particular ship may be targetted by the first volleys. Everybody will see that it is destroyed, or has lost all weapons as currently and stop firing when appropriate. But retains its ability to fire back with previously undamaged weapons and movement points. At the end of both players' turn, the ship explodes or loses its weapons.

Note: Attackers would see the abilities being lost. Taking out the Self Destruct or Master Computer, ECM, and fancy armors for example.
The ship taking all this damage would be oblivious to the ability loss until the end of turn, and so would fire back with full Combat Sensors, talisman, weapons and multiplex abilities.

[Fyron]

Initiative matters on every turn of combat (especially if you do it right and give each ship a randomizing factor every turn)...

The overall order of play isn't what is important; what matters is who gets to fire all of his weapons first before taking any damage. Sure you can swing the pendulum in the other direction with short weapon ranges and high hit point amounts, but not everyone wants to play a slow(er)-paced slugfest.

"In CB, initiative questions are completely swamped by ship designs, fleet composition, and most importantly; strategies and formations."

All of which would be heavily tied into initiative if such existed. You'd probably want to include light, high initiative ships for some quick coup de grace action on wounded targets before they could act, and slow pounders for the main damage-dealing segment.

Most of the cons you speak of with SE5's real time combat are not inherent to such combat systems, but rather poor choices Aaron made (eg: explicit slot layouts, layouts based on shipset instead of mod by default (luckily fixable), the timer implementation, stacking...). Neither game is a very good example of its combat engine type.

"What if SE4 were upgraded to have a system which works exactly the same as currently, except that ability loss is deferred until the end of the turn."

Such would be better than the current system, but I think a good initiative system would be preferable.

[capnq]

Suicide Junkie said:
CQ, That sounds perfectly sensible to me...

The faster ships with longer range weapons stay out of range.
If they warp in, they get burned until they can open the distance (which happens to be quite a lot of distance with stock weapon ranges; too much IMO, relative to the combat map size).

Ah, my outrage was such that I forgot to mention the most critical detail: my missile BCs LOST that battle, badly. (I still have the notes I took to write an AAR for my allies.)

The battle started with the two fleets arranged in two crossing Wall formations in the SW corner. The DNs fired first, and killed 8 BCs in the first round before they could respond, and 2 more in each of the second and third rounds. By that point, the 9 surviving BCs had opened the range enough that the DNs couldn't hit them, and killed 2 DNs before getting caught in the NW corner and losing 5 more BCs. The 4 surviving BCs killed 1 more DN on their way to being caught in the NE corner, where they were all slaughtered.

With an initiative system, the casualties would not have been so lopsided. With an unbounded battle space, the BCs wouldn't have taken any casualties after the third round. If the fleets had entered the sector with a wider angle of separation and therefore not started in overlapping formations, the BCs would have won (as they did in every simulator run).

[Suicide Junkie]

Fy:
You seem to be comparing SE4's implementation against an imaginary optimal RTC system, rather than the available or even reasonable expectations of future implementations in SE5.

CQ:
My condolences. Stock weapon ranges and combat speeds aren't matched to the size of the combat map.

There is also a realism vs gameplay tradeoff there. I prefer having the steel cage matches where the edge comes into play only after the halfway point of battle (how long after, depending on how much of a distraction you deployed to the front lines)
Combat speeds of 2-4 are much better for the available map size.

Having missile ships just run away forever, lobbing missiles until they run out and head back to a planet for more... would be anti-fun IMO.
SE3 has missile launch range equal to a typical DF weapon range.
SE4 has longer missile ranges, but includes the no-retreat map.
SE5... uh oh!


PS:
That's what I'm talking about with weapons > defenses...
Instant vaporization of 8/21 ships in the first freaking round? You surely couldn't have been outnumbered by a huge margin if you thought you should have won.

You know, this reminds me of SE5's issue with the 128x processing rates.
If you have fights occur in huge time steps you lose a lot of fairness.

[Fyron]

Fixing the timer and stacking issues isn't a reasonable expectation?

And yeah, its certainly true that stock se4/5 have bad damage:defense ratios... but alas, Aaron seems to prefer ships being treated as unarmored medieval infantry instead of ships.

[Suicide Junkie]

I meant "realistic" there.

[Black_Knyght]

Artaud said:

I agree 10000%. I can easily see myself playing SE4 for another 10 years. It's just so immersive, so DEEP and yet so easy on my computer system.

I only played the SE5 demo, but the game as a whole turned me off. The things I remember most about it were 1) that the ships were way too small and that 2) when you entered a system, you could not see what was in the system. That just made no sense at all to me.

SE5 had an entirely different feel, IMHO, and was just not very appealing. I expected the game to have more of what I loved about SE4: more resources, more techs and more (and better) political interaction. Let me create my own government. Let me appoint and fire system governors, sector governors, cabinet ministers with abilities and flaws. Let me make realistic treaties with other civilizations.

Instead, it gave us...3D graphics. Yawn. Well, I'm 50 years old and I am just not impressed by eye candy. I want more game depth. I saw SE5 for sale for $10 a couple weeks ago and still could not bring myself to buy it.

But hey, lots of people like SE5 and more power to them. I hope a lot of copies were sold. Different strokes, as they say.

Gotta say, I agree here completely. I keep trying SE5, keep giving it a chance, and keep ending up regretting the money spent.

I had hoped for more than a flashy 3D game. There are others that come across better if that's what I wanted. And of the things that did get improved in the latest incarnation of Space Empires, they get lost in a game that quickly becomes uninteresting and frustrating the more I play.

SE4 had a way of grabbing my attention and HOLDING it that SE5 just doesn't seem to have.

[Fyron]

Black_Knyght said:
I had hoped for more than a flashy 3D game.

Luckily, it is absolutely not a "flashy 3D game." Instead, its just as deep a strategy experience as SE4, if not deeper in some ways.

[Makinus]

There is not any way to create an "se4ish" interface for SE5? If the main problem is the interface (or even the 3d) thare is not any way to create an 2d interfae for it?