I accept that it will be mostly the AI that micromanages the battle.

Umm? you could retreat, the problem was it was so inept as to bascially tell the enemy fleets 'shoot me while i flitter about for a while then run away'

Regards Wolfe

Agreed. On all points. We need to be able to disengage, and as Wolfe pointed out, do something other than take it like a man while doing so.

i hope this idea has not already been put forward, hate to read through 19 pages of comments. I would like to see a commander system similar to that of Hearts or Iron and HoI II. Not sure how diffucult to add it to a game but for those not familiar with it ill sum it up. Your "generals" have base rank and skill, as you parcipate in battles your exp increases, allowing you to increase rank at the cost of skill. the higher your rank the more units you can command effectivally. also many generals have special skills that help in specialized units or in types of combat,terain, or weather. a simpilar idea would to have commanders like in Masters of Orion, who add one simple benifit to your fleet and require aditional support cost. Just an idea, and the games looking great, wish i was good with code id love to help out.

I don't think the ship combat system in Star Wars: Rebellion (ironically called Star Wars: Supremacy in the UK) has been mentioned here!

When battle occurred, fleets were broken down into task forces (1-9), usually split according to size and/or function (1 group for capital ships, 1 for cruisers and anti-fighter ships, 1 for non-combat ships). This made sense, because the game had it so heavy capital ships (Star Destroyers) had poor anti-fighter batteries.

Ships could move and positioned themselves/be positioned in 3D. Though mostly I found it better to leave it the details to the computer, after I gave the orders.

Orders: manually telling each ship or task force to move to certain point on the battlespace was mostly difficult and pointless. You could specify a specific target, or give a general order.

1: Attack enemy capital ships
2: Attack enemy fighter squadrons
3: Flee battle (ships need to go to the edge of the map they started on, and then engage hyperdrive). They head to a nearby allied system.
There was probably a 4th - can't remember.

The computer would then carry out the order: positioning the ships to maximise damage (this is important - some ships have more powerful side weapons than fore weapons).


Shields were just a number (ie.: 500) and were not split into forward, rear, port, starboard etc, so no bring down shields in just one arc - although you can still just concentrate fire on one enemy ship.

Weapons: split into 3 types
1: Turbolasers (anti-ship - takes down shields, then damages hull and subsystems)
2: Ion Cannons (slowly disables/damages ship systems and shields - I think without damaging the hull).
3: Laser cannon (anti-fighter)

Incidentally, whereas shields aren't split into forward, rear etc., weapon ratings ARE. Only forward, rear, port, starboard - no dorsal or ventral. Ships may more in 3D, but weapons fire works 2D (i.e.:

X
Z
Y

X and Y face ->

Z faces <-

if ships X and Y fire on Z, they use their forward weapons, even if they are not on the same plane as Z.


Ship stats: (general) (I might have missed some)
Ship cost:
Ship maintenance (per turn)
Max Shields
Hull rating
Weapons (forward)
Weapons (rear)
Weapons (port)
Weapons (starboard)
Repair rating (how fast repairs occur).
Tractor beam power (not sure how this works - but I think in order for a ship to tractor another, it has to have a higher working tractor beam rating (ie.: after battle damage is taken into account)
Maneuverability: states how fast a ship turns (Super Star Destroyers are SOOO slow to turn. Which is a problem if the enemy has got behind you, since it's forward weapons are the most powerful.
Sub light speed rating (top speed)
Hyperdrive rating: (top lightspeed).


Ship stats (battle):
Hull
Shield strength
Then you get subsystems: I think there are 5 damage states - undamaged, slightly, medium, heavy, disabled/destroyed.
Weapons recharge
Shield recharge system (manual says shield system can suffer damage before shields are depleted, which make sense).
Sub-light Engines
Lightspeed engines
Tractor beam strength (assuming ship has this). This is automatically activated if a ship gets within range of it's target.

You can disable ships - but capture is impossible. The main point of disabling ships is that once disabled, you can switch target rather than finish destroying its hull.

Fighters:
Some ships may carry fighter squadrons. These can attack other ships or fighters, or be ordered to reboard their carrying ships and stay out of the battle. Your fighters are split into 4 groups, depending on type and how may you've got (normally X wings in 1, A wings in another) (it is possible to have, for example, 3 groups of X wings and 1 of Y wings)

Economy:
Raw materials (comes from mines on systems under your control)
Refined materials (comes from refineries - the raw material is automatically transported immediately to refineries).
Maintenance: This is generated by having mines and refineries. Each pair (1 mine and 1 refinery) generates a certain number of points. Fail to have enough, and something that needs maintenance will randomly be destroyed (seriously - you'll get a message saying that a ship or facility or troop or fighter squadron will have been destroyed.

Thoughts:
Not worth having torpedo counts per ship. Armada doesn't. It would involve too much logistics and remembering how much ammo you had left. Although proton torpedos and other limited number (non-energy) weapons exist in Star Wars, Rebellion doesn't include limits on them (in fact, for capital ships, they don't seem to be included - maybe they were merged into the turbolaser strength rating?).

I didn't like the ship combat in BOTF. Far too scissors-paper-stone-y. I can understand scissors-paper-stone for ship types/classes, but not for fleet battles! Why should my fleet of 10 ambassadors lose or win by a large margin simply because I clicked circle or assault (assault wall?) at the tactics? In the end, I ended up clicking assault all the time, which kind of makes combat pointless.

Tactics/strategy: One problem with the Rebellion combat system was that victory tended to go to the side with more/bigger ships (unless one guy had only brought heavy capital ships and the other brought Ywings and B wings - in that case, the capital ships were normally doomed). Also, the ships tended to just hang about in space shooting the hell out of each other (a bit like big-gun battleship combat in world war 1 and 2) - trek battles are normally depicted with more maneuvering (but not in armada
1 and 2 though). However, the fighters are not like this (they DO fly and maneuver around their targets).

Hmm.....maybe the smaller trek ships (destroyers, light cruisers, defiant) could be given different movement patterns? It kinda doesn't work seeing a defiant class hanging motionless in space blasting away and being blasted. Although that only worked in Rebellion because the fighters were modeled as having equal firepower in all directions - which these ships won't.

What will be the point of having smaller capital ships? Aside from cost and time to build (and maybe warp speed - Star Destroyers were slower through hyperspace than carrack light cruisers), and being in multiple places at once with a weaker force. I remember armada tried this to give the smaller ships special roles (akira - chain reaction pulsar), but ultimately, I just built as many sovereign classes as possible (with corbomite reflector and fully upgraded at the Vulcan Science Centre). In Rebellion, small anti-fighter ships were required to make sure your expensive Star Destroyers didn't get wiped out by 6 squadrons of Y wings). I remember BOTF had ship ranges (many could not go more than 1 sector away from a sector you controlled).

Warping during a battle - wasn't done in Rebellion (only at start of battle or when fleeing) - probably because the battles took place above a single planet

Will phasers and torpedoes be merged into just one "weapons" rating? Or will they be 2 separate ones?

Maybe the defiant should be modelled as being relatively cheap and powerful for it's size (and relatively powerful for it's cost) (and durable for it's size). BUT not be a supership (ie.: not a Super Star Destroyer). It would, of course, have a far higher forward weapons rating than sides or rear.

PS: I've never played Empire at War, so no idea how ship combat works there.

Is the current combat system going to be like Starfleet Command 3, but actually turn based?

Woah...looks like i've got competition for the rank of official uber poster.

I've never actually heard of Star Wars: Supremacy - in fact I know next to nothing about Rebellion either!

The combat system for Supremacy hasn't been decided on yet - if you have a look Here, then you'll see that we've got two playable demos of possible combat systems. The two demos are far from what the final thing will be like though, and we don't even know which system Mike will "approve". We might even end up with both systems in there, although I don't know if that is possible or not. The combat system will likely be based on the BOTF1 combat system style-wise, but will have a better AI, more eye candy, more weapons types and will simply be better.

The editor for Supremacy is already capable of adding ship stats to the game, but as there is no combat system, any info entered is arbitrary and has no use. I would show you a screenshot of the ship stats entries but the editor isn't currently working at the moment because some .dll files are missing from the current release of Supremacy. (7th February)

Anyways, even though the combat system isn't ready, there's no harm in discussing how the combat system will actually work, so hopefully Cdrwolfe and Strings (The developers of the two combat systems) will post here soon with their thoughts on what they think combat should be like. It would be useful to see what everyone else thinks as well, so please post your thoguhts, whomever is reading this post.

I'am always open to suggestions , I've always wanted to go down the root of Homeworld style 3D combat but i have to take into consideration that where in homeworld the game focused primarily on combat, in Supremacy it is just one part. This means where i wanted to get the most a 3D combat system can give in this instance, i.e more tactical aspects and control by the player, i have to also factor in time.

You can't have each combat lasting 10 minutes, especially when other people are playing perhaps over LAN, but also you can't shorten it significantly so that combat becomes irrlevent, i.e lower hull and shield strengths so that ships die relatively quickly, or make it so that regardless of range you can see where the enemy is, which lowers tactically the combat etc.

It's an interesting balance, like Mstrobel in Supremacy takes on for his views for management ie the option is there for micromanagement from hell you can always have the option of setting management to a system viceroy and the AI does all the work. This is what i hope mine can move towards.

The chance to macro manage large amounts of ships quickly and efficiently, to set the AI to take over and have some confidence it will do what you want. While also allowing you to get into the minutae of each ship and set it's commands yourself, chain waypoints for movement etc etc.

Should be fun

Regards Wolfe

Oops, that X Y Z positioning was a bit wrong.

X
Z
Y

X and Y face ->

Z faces <-

if ships X and Y fire on Z, they use their forward weapons, even if they are not on the same plane as Z.

Uh, Star Wars: Rebellion is Star Wars: Supremacy. It was called Rebellion in the US but Supremacy in the UK.

When I had narrowed the list of names for my game down to just a couple, I ended up going with "Supremacy" partly in honor of the Star Wars game . It was also the most appropriate given the nature of the game .

I'm not entirely sure, but as far as I can tell, Star Wars Rebellion/Supremacy *may* be classed as abandonware now ... it's certainly old enough to be, and the only places I can find it for sale are EBay and amazon new/used thingy.

mstrobel: I always preferred the name Supremacy over Rebellion for the SW game Quick question for you, checked out the thread with leaders/commanders stuff recently? I kind of took it in a new direction (discussing the XP system) and would like to know what you think

Haven't had the chance yet, but I'll try to have a look before I leave for Vancouver tonight .

Headed over to Cunuckistan i see, good man, and a great country

Regards Wolfe

Sprechen sie Cunuck?

Shoot back while doing so? Most ST ships have rear torpedo launchers or phasers/disruptors.

I also agree with the torpedo count. It's useless. Any ships will have enough torpedos for a an extended battle, if not far more. In between turns one can easily assume ships were re-supplied. Some things can be reasonably abstracted away (like a supply fleet following your main fleet).

Mayhps people should look a bit into Sword of the Stars to see just how fun and simple space combat can be made.

Ships don't have any firing arcs at the moment so they can fire backwards regardless of angle. Adding weapons firing arcs is as much a gameplay issue as it is acoding one.

The torpedo count has the essential factor of computing damage and adding some kind of random element which is both fair and natural. Actual torpedo numbers aren't needed or used in the sense you won't run out half way through a battle lol.

Regards Wolfe

are you really sure? I mean if 4 torpedos can be fired (for example) in 10 seconds and botf had around 100 torpedos mostly as limit per ship (though only in theory I know..), then you run out of torps in about 4 minutes battle time if you got several good targets ahead..

I don't understand, do you want ships to run out of torpedoes? because currently they won't.

Regards Wolfe

only in really large battles. As far as I remember, the wolf 359 battle had sequences where ships were reported to be out of ammo torpedo-wise so against borg ships or in general in battles that last longer than a few minutes I'd expect ships to run out of torpedos which eventually will lead to totally different strength' distributions since cardassian ships are known to have better phasers than anyone else.

I think it's a valuable tactical element that should not be neglected. But SirP is currently not concurring with me in that matter so BotE will handle ammo as unlimited too .

I do admit it is an interesting area to look at, but you must remember it is a faster paced RTS then a more tactical Bridge Commander style game. Most ships only generally last 5-7 rounds of combat, the majority even less if they are ganged up on.

Of course this is based of Dafedz numbers currently, there is no reason you couldn't reduce damage or increase hull strength etc to make it longer.

I'll look into adding it if you would like, if i did at the moment you would never really see it used as combat does not last long enough for a ship to currently run out i believe.

Regards Wolfe

P.S if there is anything else you would like to discuss adding or looking into feel free.

If limited ammo going to be in the game, try to make it a moddable value, rather than simply hard-coded in. There's always gonna be people who will hate the concept, and there's gonna be people who will take it to the extreme and have only enough torpedoes for one round. Making it moddable will keep everyone happy.

It is. But it should be done. Klingons and Romulans in particular favor forward fire weapon arcs. This also leads to different battle tactics.




When I said torpedo count I meant the actual torpedo stock eachship has.
IIRC, ships can use replicators to create new torpedos (lighter ones at least). Having torpedo stock adds nothing as a mechanic but tedium.

I've never noticed it if it's true, but I read *somewhere* that the Cardassians are the only race whose ships were able to fire backwards in BOTF. If BOTF had firing arcs, then I don't see why our better game shouldn't have them.

I don't know if you saw it or not Wolfe, but I posted an image of the firing arcs that they used in SFC2 in the Staffroom a few months ago as an example of possible firing arcs that we could use. Obviously we would need to modify them for use in a 3D battlefield since SFC2 used a 2D battlefield. The image was a scan of the booklet that I had with the game so the pic was a bit grainy tho. I'll see if I can find it again.

*Edit - here it is:

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/8269/arcsgy4.jpg

Well i must admit i do like the idea of weapons arc but it is a bit more complicated then some might think.

First off being ease of use and making the system simple enough to use for a novice player commanding mutliple ships.

- Where do you add the visual representation within the UI?
- How do you allow a user to control multiple ships in order to bring about certain weapons with a specific firing arc?
- I believe the picture you added would probably be a little to complicated, you would have to tie in each ships specific energy weapon to one of the angles.

At the moment all damage is computed as taking each ships weapon count and mutliply it by the energy weapn damage factor and applied to the target ship.

If we were to go as complicated as your example MOE then you would have to go about rotating the ship to get each specific beam to be on target.

Now i would propose a simplification in which you really break it down to two types, those that can fire forward and those that can't.

Where say a federation ship would have a 270* forward firing arc and perhaps a Cardassian would have a 360* arc.

The only other aspect of having firing arcs os the visual one of getting a correct 'canon' look of phasers on the bottom of a ship not firing through there own hull.

Of course this would also mean someone. i.e ME , would have to go and check every ships beam node placement and assign a correct value to them.

I.E With a federation saucer type ship those on top have a 180 by 360 spherical arc on the top for those beam arrays set on the ships top etc.

Also there are the gameplay issues as mentioned previously, someone would have to take Dafedz ship numbers and factor in the effects ship angles may have. And then also add them.

One last thing, there will be some aspect of weapons angles in game anyway, and that is with fixed firing weapons such as those on the defiant and Bird of Prey.

As they will have pulse weapons the system which controls how they fire will be completely differant to the others. For example it will have to probably set the ship to have a constant movement so as to allow them to manoueveur to a correct angle of attack.

There will have to be some automatic level of movement, so your not having to constantly move the ship back and forth to give it the required angle and strafing room to actually fire lol.

Regards Wolfe

Starfleet Command is the most complicated Trek game that I know about - and that's why I love it. (If anyone knows of a more complicated Trek game, I want to know about it ) so I was expecting there to be a dumbed-down system *IF* firing arcs were in.

SFC is probably way over-the-top compared to BOTF when it comes to combat. It handled the firing arcs by tying in each weapon to a specific firing arc like you said, so a ship could only fire backwards if a weapon is aimed backwards AND is undamaged. However, the ship could fire its weapons if the enemy ship was within the firing arcs regardless of where in that arc it was placed. (Unless another object was in the way, such as a Planet lol) The enemy did NOT need to be dead in the middle of the arc, nor did the ship have to be directly facing the enemy (Which allows ships to fire sideways for instance). For this reason, I don't think Pulses would need to have a special system, they could simply have a very minimal firing arc in which they could fire. Other weapons, such as standard Phasers (The Defiant actually had three Phaser arrays on top of its four Pulse Phasers) would then make up for the lack in firing arcs.

Now as I said earlier, and you also identified, the ships would be in 3D space so the system would need a 360x360 set of firing arcs to account for the two fields of play (Left/Right vs Up/Down) SFC didn't have an Up/Down arc so this wasn't a problem. (Although ships passed over each other instead of crashing when they were too close because the game prohibited ramming, and you could still fire your weapons with the enemy either above or below you)

In other respects though, SFC was also simpler, because you mostly control one ship, and if you had more than one ship (You could have a maximum of three) then the other ships were put under AI control, but you could take control of any one of them at any time from a special fleets screen. This screen gave you control of a limited number of the AI-controlled ships functions, such as how closely the AI ships should match the speed/direction of your own ship, who to fire at/when to fire/weapon power settings, whether special systems such as cloaking devices or electronic counter measures should be used, and so on. More advanced settings could only be accessed by taking control of the other ship though.

Each weapon was independant, and had its own charging times and power requirements. The use of different power settings would also change the energy requirements and recharge times. This was further complicated by the level of damage they cause, as the damage was afected by the power settings, and distance to from the enemy. (Except for Missiles, as their amage was constant) Plasma Torpedoes especially suffer from a loss of attack strength over range, as they shrink and loose integrity of the Plasma shell. They eventually disappear after travelling a certain range.

Some weapons had special effects or counter measures as well. Hellbores can damage or destroy ESG's if they make contact with each other; Missiles can be stopped by Tractor Beams or destroyed by Anti-Missile Defense Systems, Phasers, or Plasma-I's; and Photons, Disruptors, and Hellbores can be made less accurate by enemy ECM (Electronic Counter Measures). There were also a lot of weapons in the game, so it could get quite complex. This is a list of all of the weapons:

• Phaser 4 (White, Starbase Only, Offensive Use)
• Phaser 1 (Yellow, Offensive Use)
• Phaser 2 (Orange, Offensive/Defensive Use)
• Phaser 3 (Red, Defensive use)
• Gatling Phasers (Purple, Can Fire Four Times Per Charge)
• Plasma Torpedo Type I (Small Violet Torpedo, Defensive Setting Only)
• Plasma Torpedo Type F (Small Green Torpedo, Has Normal, Enveloping, Defensive Settings)
• Plasma Torpedo Type G (Medium Yellow Torpedo, Has Normal, Enveloping, Defensive Settings)
• Plasma Torpedo Type S (Medium Orange Torpedo, Has Normal, Enveloping, Defensive Settings)
• Plasma Torpedo Type R (Large Red Torpedo, Has Normal, Enveloping, Defensive Settings)
• Plasmatic Pulsar Device (Fires Waves Of Energy That Splash Against Multiple Shield Arcs, Has Underload, Normal, Overload Settings)
• Missiles (Throw-Away Weaponry That Must Be bought, Has Slow, Medium, and Fast Engine Types, Type I and Type IV Available To Buy. Fuel limits them to a range of 100)
• Anti-Missile Defense [AMD] (Limited Recharge)
• Disruptor I to IV (Has Normal, Overload Settings. Does Half The Damage Of Photons But Takes Only Half The Time To Charge Up)
• Expanding Sphere Generator [ESG] (Generates A Destructive Energy Field Around The Ship To Destroy Enemy Missiles And Fighters Or Can Be Used To Ram Enemy Vessels)
• Fusion Beam (Fires A Short-Range Blast Of Hydrogen And Ignites It. Has Normal, Overload, And Suicide Overload Settings)
• Hellbore (Fires An Energy Pulse That Envelops The Enemy Then Collapses, Damaging All Shield Arcs, Especially The Weakest Arcs. Has Normal And Overload Settigns)
• Photon Torpedoes (Counted As An Energy Weapon So Has Infinite Ammo. Has Normal, Overload, Proximity Charge Settings. Does double the damage of Disruptors but takes twice as long to charge up)

I doubt this many will make it into the game, but it would be nice...

Why complicate matters? You don't need a fancy UI or anything.

Look how Armada (and Armada2) did it.

Ships had several fire points (vectors) that were all had a 90° Field of Fire (default. You could make it smaller for specific ships/weapons). The game would simply pick the closest point to the target that had a clear shot.

One thing I don't want to see in this game would be ALL phasers fireing at once like in BOTF.

We can introduce a " initiative value" something like in MoO2, ship with greater initiative would fire first, bad thing in MoO2 was that initiative was dependent on ship's velocity, greater velocity meant greater initiative. In Botf 2 we can make initiative dependent on ships's crew expirance, for example ship with regular crew would fire first against ship with green crew. Just raw idea...

Crew experience is used to calculate ship energy recharge rate, so better crews recharge faster and therefore can fire faster.

Also used in ship shield recharge rate.

Another factor is sensor range, i'am not sure what i will use but currently it is either sensor range or scan strength which i can use to determine the range of each ships beam and projectile weapons.

Remeber it isn't turn based so you can't use initiative.

Regards Wolfe

I meant more in the line of fireing 1 phaser at a time (like in the movies and series), instead of 7-8 at once.
Disruptor cannons and pulse phasers are an exception.

I'd basicely simplyfy the whole phaser weapon system thing. You don't actually fire off all 7 phasers of ship X, but rather you can just use any of the 7 phaser fire points.
The number of phasers/disruptors really didn't do anything for ship weapon power in any ST movie/series - more phasors just meant better coverage and more possible fire points. but you always fired one at a time, and the re-charge of phasers was low enough that you could end up using the same 2 phaser strips trought the whole battle.

The delay between the phaser shots could be influenced by number of phasors (unlikely) or crew experience (more likely), ship tech (likely).

- Ships can only 'Visibly' show 1 to 5 beams, the number depending on how many energy weapons the ship has and a random roll.

- There is a 0.5 second delay between the creation of each beam, therefore making it seem more realistic

- Damage is always computed on the first beam at maximum damage, the others are essentially for show.

Regards Wolfe