Combat Initiative...

[The Puke Empire]

Why not just reduce tactical combat to 20 turns, or 15? IMO 30 is too much, a lowly frigate will be able to inflict massive damage to a planet without defenses.

With 15 ~ 20 tactical turns, a fleet wishing to retreat would have 5 turns or so to run for the corner without fire, then 10 turns trying to survive (against AI, u could do this by spredaing your forces). Once the battle has ended I'm sure the weaker fleet will sustain some damage so they either has to head home for repairs or ditch the damaged ships and move on, which will makes em weaked and the next battle will probably be its total destruction.

In my games few battles (except planet assauts) Last longer than 15 turns.. and for planet assaults it should work this way: the defender will have sometime to send in reinforcements and the battles will unfold more like a siege: taking many turns to bring a well defended planet down.

[Snap Spelljammer]

Yeah, I think the lowly scout taking out a planet with a laser is kinda pathetic. You would have to figure that with a planet of 6 billion population, they would be able to breed faster than that scout could pick them off

I think they should make all weapons but bombs and troops useless for attacking planets. This will also force us to build bomber ships instead of just attack dreadnoughts.

I've not played multi, but with the AI I normally just build attack dreadnoughts and use them to take out planets. I don't even bother with ground combat. If I need to take over any of thier population I'll just use my subverter to take a colony ship.

This also lets me set my Strength to -50% to get more racial points =)

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Snap Spelljammer:
Yeah, I think the lowly scout taking out a planet with a laser is kinda pathetic. You would have to figure that with a planet of 6 billion population, they would be able to breed faster than that scout could pick them off

I think they should make all weapons but bombs and troops useless for attacking planets. This will also force us to build bomber ships instead of just attack dreadnoughts.

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That would make Weapon Platforms invulnerable to normal ships. If you could make normal weapons have a far higher damage per population ration than ground attack weapons it would make more sense. Ordinary beams ought to have 100:1 or so damage to kill population. So, you could harass a planet with beam ships but it would be almost impossible to destroy it. Then if "Planetary Napalm" and other ground attack weapons did closer to 10:1 population damage you'd really want to have some ships with those weapons to attack planets once your warships had taken out the WPs.



[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 02 January 2001).]

[Psitticine]

I know it would take a lot of coding changes and may not be worth implementing, at least at this time, but the engine system I'd like to see would be based on thrust/mass.

Each engine would rated for thrust produced and that would be compared with the mass of the ship to produce a speed. Fairly simple, but it makes good Newtonian sense, especially when compared with the current system.

I'm not really sure what I think about the current cap on speed for larger hulls. Is there a rational behind that, besides possible game balance issues? Reduced hull integrity for larger hulls or some such? And is it really neccessary for play balance?

I don't really think there should be a cap on the number of engines that can be placed on a hull. It would open up a whole 'nother area of choices to be made - exactly how much component space should be sacrificed for more speed?

If you have an initiative system based, at least in part, on speed, it would give faster ships an advantage but they'd have less weaponry to apply with that advantage so I think it'd even out fairly well.

It could give even more problems with the missile dance maneuver but if may even prevent some if enemy ships have the speed to close that gap despite retreating opponents.

I think, when it comes to retreating, there's no reason not to allow faster ships to break away. I'd like to see a scrolling combat screen and the ability for ships that reach a certain distance from the nearest opponent to remove themselves from combat.

If ships of more variable speed are allowed and not every one proceeds at virtually the same pace, than interceptor ships as well as raiders become possible. Add a ship or two optimized for speed to your fleet and let them harass the enemy as they attempt to retreat. Put some engine destroying weapons on them and they'd have a good ol' time!