Combat Mechanics

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by pydna

...Point Defence...Missile Interceptors... Electronic Countmeasures...

The main point is you don't get cluttered with lots of gizmos that do the same thing.

SE4/5 modeled each of these effectively I think but my concern with weapons in general was besides the incremental upgrades (version 1, 2, etc.) some of the actual distinguishing characteristics of the weapons was to me too minimal - been a while since I played either but off the top of my head a uranium cannon, beam cannon, and meson cannon were all very similar. The meson cannon was a little lighter, the uranium cannon required you to budget for ammunition (vs energy), and the beam weapon had a slight range advantage. Torpedo weapons were always better then missiles but the variances in Torpedo's too subtle of a nuance. I don't want to have to study weapons tables (Excel spreadsheets) looking for +1/-1 calculations - just think the advantage/disadvantage of one or the other should be more well defined for building and strategy.

[pydna]

One thing a friend of mine came up with (over 10 years ago) was a pen and paper space campaign/combat system.

Nothing too unusual about that except one of the neat ideas it had was players could custom design there missiles.

It was very simple I won't bother going into details unless people are interested but it was a lot of fun not only designing your ships but also designing the missiles. It added loads of depth to the combats very little in the way of extra design time.

Anyway more food for thought.

[Xrati]

SE4 did have missle design and fighter design and even troop design...

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by Xrati

SE4 did have missle design...

I remember drones which you could add warheads too and use like a kind of missile - but the missiles (always preferred the torpedo's myself) that you could build into a ship were more fixed from what I remember.

The biggest thing I hated about the drones was you couldn't use them like a UAV etc. and arm them with "ship" weapons - I might be recalling wrong as it has been a while since I played SE4 - but I would like in SL to have an autonomous (no crew) in-system only drone platform that would be bigger then a fighter but much smaller then even the smallest of ships.

[Ed Kolis]

I don't remember if drones could carry ship weapons in SE4, but they definitely could in SE5... made 'em pretty darn powerful!

Actually, I think they COULD in SE4, it's just that they were hardcoded to ram, so they wouldn't get to fire very much before they died; SE5 let you assign other strategies to your drones!

[Xrati]

They had the same capabilities in SE4 Ed. They didn't have the fire rate of a ship for missles carring 'direct fire' warheads. Anti ship missles would 'Ram' and you could even put drones (like a Multi-Warhead) on the missle. Due to the three turn re-arm cycle. They weren't too effective.

[jars_u]

Because of their superior speed on the tactical map I always found drones without any weapons or warheads were best used to blockade the worm holes/warp points. Enemy ships would just chase them around until one or the other ran out of resources.

[Xrati]

Seems like exploitation of the AI's limited capabilities. Not much of a strategy and a waste of resources jars. If you had played with 'finite resources' [on] you wouldn't be wasting resources on such items.

[MarcoPolo]

Once upon a time (1998) there was a marvellous game called Decent: Freespace. In fact it was so well developed and groundbreaking that the following year (1999)Freespace 2 came out. And to the satisfaction of all space combat sim fans, it was very good. With an epic storyline worthy of a blockbuster hollywood movie for both Freespace 1 and Freespace 2. And a space combat system that looked splendid and revolutionary as far as 3d gfx went for the time. It also completely immersed gamers everywhere with titanic capital ship battles that players would engage as fighters and bombers in. I remember targetting subsystems from engines to weapons and sheilds and feeling completely immersed.

Many years later when Volition revealed it was unlikely to make the long awaited Freespace 3, it revealed the source code and invited with this move many modders and programmers into the open source Freespace community. Mods like Battlestar Galactica called Beyond the Red Line as well as the original game with updated textures is a pretty sight to behold.

What I would like to know from the makers of Star Legacy is: if a game like Freespace was possible back in 1998-99 when PC specs were fairly modest and 3d technology barely running into 2nd generation hardware, can't this game (Star Legacy) have a combat system that is as extensive and as aesthetically pleasing as Freespace? Surely a 10yr old engine can be reproduced and made for a larger scale space strategy game yes? If anything programmers can freely check the open source code for any pointers or hints on how to make space combat epic again like in the 90s. Freespace employed realistic collision detection, unlike sphere based collision detection that would merely push the fighter in the opposing direction. This little attention to detail is what set it apart. And the amazing thing that it was acheived on a tight release schedule and with budget constraints.


Even the Direct X8 game "Hegemonia:Legions of Iron" that hit in 2002 held quite a few promising features. There have been very few games that push the envelope of realism and ingenuity for space combat games. One recent addition being Nexus Jupiter Incident and its never released sequel Nexus Jupiter Incident II were to boast the most spectacular realistic models of planets and ships effects known to the genre.

I guess all in all what I am posing is the question of how difficult is it to make a beautiful looking game? Logistically speaking, if a combat space sim game more than 10yrs old! (Freespace)could do it then. Is it realistic to ask that Star Legacy look at least as good? I just hope we don't fall into it looking more like Armada 2526 where combat is concerned. This game came out in 2009 and promised to be a Total War in space. In reality it was a humble effort more suited to a 1990s release date. Don't get me wrong the gameplay is more important than gfx, but c'mon we are in 2010 now and asking for the atmospheric gamestyle and presentation ala Freespace 1998-99 offered is not so outrageous now is it? Otherwise it seems games these days have lost its soul in some strange twist where recent games of this genre look worse than games of over a decade old!!!

Peace and looking forward to a top rate combat system for Star Legacy.

PS: I ask that the programmers doing Star Legacy's combat system and gfx, take a short look at Freespace 2 open source code. You will probably find a few pleasant surprises on how to better your own amazing game. If there is a game out there that had blood sweat and tears go into it, its definitely this one.

[Urendi Maleldil]

Hey Marco, we're still figuring out how the combat system will work, but it will be a 2d environment as opposed to Descent's 3d one. (Descent was a great game, by the way. I remember the original from 2005). We'll also be using PNG images for the ships rather than 3d models, since they don't require special 3d tools for users to mod. That said however, we are attempting to create the epic feel of large scale fleet vs fleet combat actions.

The problem we're facing right now is how to get that same epic feel from a real time game into a turn-based game.