In an effort to improve the multiplayer gameplay status of Supremacy, I'd like to open up discussions for how conflicts should be handled at colonies (after fleet-to-fleet combat has completed). This involves answering the following questions, among others. Feel free to toss in your own:

1. Should orbital defenses partake in fleet combat at colonies, or should there be a "second stage" of combat that occurs during an invasion or planetary assault, during which time an invading fleet must battle planetary defenses? If the latter, then what about shipyards--should they be present in the second round of combat as well? If so, they could be optionally destroyed (if the attacker does not believe she can take the system), or left intact (if the attacker believes she can win the invasion and use them for herself). Should there be a tactical 3D mod for the proposed second stage of combat, or should it be kept simple?
2. Should ground combat occur in rounds (with up to a handful of rounds each turn), similar to the MoO games and the current automated combat system, or should it simply work like in BotF? If the former, you would presumably have the opportunity to retreat after any round, but you would likely take additional damage from enemy troops while fleeing the area. Consider the impact of added waiting time during multiplayer games--with 3 or more players, you'll likely spend a lot of time waiting while other players are engaged in combat, so more complex ground combat would exacerbate that wait time.

Let me know what you think...

Mike

I would like to see the attaching fleet take on the orbital batteries, ship yards, outpost, Starbase, science stations and defending ship in a 3D space combat at the planets square on the galactic map. Can player not involved see the combat play out?


The long time to cycle turns is an issue in multiplayer games of BOTF. Can we keep the invasion to your simpler set of options?

Any word on SharePoint or an alternative to it?

Well i always like to advocate the option of choice when ever available, i don't think it is possible to go down the route of some kind of 3D RTS C&C style ground combat. Something as complex as MOO3 though expanded (We are more imaginative people ) seems as complex as it could be, while the option to switch to a simple BOTF style.

Obviously this option would be at the start when you first set the games parameters.

With regards to 3D representations of outposts, starbase, science bases etc i would agree to include them, though for something like fleetyards, detection grids and arrays, scrap depots etc iI would see it as an option to attack them later if no ships are in the system perhaps.

Regards Wolfe

Like BotF, space stations should certainly participate in fleet combat.

As for other items, I see the best options being:

1. Objects such as shipyards appear in fleet combat, but cannot be attacked unless (a) no defending fleet is present, or (b) the defending fleet has retreated or been destroyed (an optional post-victory action).
2. Alternatively, such objects appear in the "second stage" of combat that I described in my first post.

Could you capture a Starbase, outpost or yard? (Cards move back into the DS9?)

I would like to see ground combat but think it should be put off for a later version or BOTF3.

I briefly considered this, and decided we definitely don't want to allow it. Such observation has the potential to reveal information about enemy fleet composition and location that would otherwise be unknown to the observer. We could, however, include a little mini-Tetris game (or Star Trek: Invaders? ) that pops up to entertain the player whilst she waits on other players engaged in combat.

I'm not getting into advanced tactical operations like capturing space stations. That goes well beyond the scope of a turn-based strategy game. Shipyards, however, I think could be left intact to be used by the occupying civilization (as in BotF). It would be advantageous to the invaders to leave them intact; they should only really be destroyed if the attacking fleet commander wants to damage infrastructure without actually occupying the system (or if the commander doubts that her invasion will be successful).

I tend to agree. I'm not going to implement an interactive (3D), tactical ground combat system, period. However, a few rounds during each turn of invasion (showing the current results with options to 'continue' or 'retreat') would not be out of the question if there is a lot of demand for it.

One thing i would like to see though to be honest it is complex and not exactly necessary was a 'astrometrics' tab, which would overlay all intel knowledge you had gained, i.e specific bulidings on systems you found out, recent ship strengths in surrounding areas 3x3 grid, etc.

And the option to draw up a limited but variable battle plan which you could add text to and pass on to any allies you had to coordinate attacks.

Give you something to do while you wait for someone elses combat to end.

Regards Wolfe

I think shipyards, a non-military unit in and of itself, should not be destroyed in combat. I also believe that any planetary based defense, starbases, or ships in the system should be attached all at once. It makes sense given a look ahead at future weapons that you would engage the entire solar system at once and not just a single part of it. At the same time, this will make it quicker and easier to evaluate a value of defense/attack for any given system. This is my two cents.

I definitely want the ground combat to be more complex than in BotF, I hated the fact that you either won or lost, with very little info about how well you did except for how many transports were destroyed. I think you should have to land troops, and have the possibility for the combat to take a few turns, so reinforcements could arrive and drive you off. The on-planet combat options don't need to be overly complicated: Hold ground, capture ground, ambush, search and destroy, etc; should be just fine.

I also think it would be nice to be able to choose how complicated each combat is going to be either throughout the game (changing in the options at any time) or having the player choose at the combat start screen. So they can choose to fight really important land battles if they want, but auto less important ones. As for shipyard destruction, are we going to have espionage in here? cause that way might work, but sometimes it was a pain in BotF.

To some degree I can understand putting in some sort of resistance ground forces, but we must remember that this is a space based strategy game. Maybe making a ground based attack ship that could engage a ground based unit. I would still recommend for simplicity's sake that we make the shipyard responsible for building both. I would also include a feature of scortched earth where by a leaving army or an attacking army can just wipe the planet clean. This would destroy everyone on the planet and a colonizer would be required to recolonize the system. Thoughts?

Scorched Earth should give massive negative modifiers to morale and relationship to certain other races (type=Federation-alike), depending on how good your intel works in covering it up or blaming someone else, in order to strengthen importance of good intel production and have that ruthless tactic not without a catch strategy-wise.

Could you let the guys not involved in the combat hear the voice actors' lines being generated by the 3d combat engine? They could pick it up on subspace transmissions without seeing the real complement of ships and bases. That would be a little more interesting than tetras.

If it was not too much work could we generate propaganda reports from the battle by each combatant and let the non combatants try to guess what really happened?

I'm generally against confusing the player with false information. It seems to me they should get accurate information or none at all, except when evidence is planted during intelligence operations (in which case the text should indicate uncertainty, e.g. "evidence suggests the XXX were responsible."). I think something along the lines of "The XXX lost a major battle to the YYY in Sector ZZZ" would be sufficient if both sides are known. If only one side is known, then the player would see something like "The XXX lost a major battle in Sector ZZZ". If neither side is known, they would see nothing.

Figuring out what happened could also factor in scan strength of where the battle took place.

On ground combat, Master of Orion 1 & 2 had a simple way of handling it, more sophisticated than BOTF (which took MoO 2 and simplified it further). Barracks on planets created a certain number of troops and tech in ground weapons and other areas increased their defensive abilities, along with a races natural defensive advantages or weaknesses. Troop ships had a certain number of troops when built, which could be used to invade or simply deployed on a player controlled planet to keep order (number of troops against number of unsatisifed members of the population). Bombarding a planet would reduce troops, as well as buildings (but you could not bombard until you destroyed any fleet in orbit of the planet along with any planetary defenses such as starbases, ground batteries, missile bases, shields, all of which occurred in ship to ship combat for each planet in the system). If you invaded the planet you would get a little screen with all the number troops you landed against the planetary ground forces, and a display at the top with the increases from racial benefits and technology (along with planetary gravity penalties). It was pretty simple when you see it, but it sounds more complicated than I made it out to be I think. This was of course completely abandoned when BOTF was made and any calculation was put to the back ground and fleet combat went to the entire system, not each planet and the defending fleet had to engaged or retreat and could not choose to engage ahead of the planet defenses.

I always found it strange the defending fleet engaged the enemy outside the range of their orbital defense weapons..

There were some strategic reasons for avoiding defenses, mostly keeping them away from the defenses or from bombing the planetary defenses. I can't remember if it also ate up a turn and allowed the defender to build another ground defense in the meantime (rush build/purchase). You also didn't know which planet they attacker in the system would go after, usually the most heavily defended was not the first target, so you would engage them so they wouldn't attack the weakest planet with no defenses and let the heavily defended planet fend for itself.

sure but what about 1-planet systems?

also I would multiply orb defense structure strength by the number of habitable planets in system since I think we should consider a uniform deployment of these weapons in all planetary orbits for gameplay's sakes. So they should be helping to a certain percentage (1/number of planets) in fleet battle. They can only be shot down up to that number.

In the final ground battles, they should have full strength (minus the lost ones) again.

I see no point in building a complex live-ground combat system.

1- This is not the idea of the game
2- Would need ground troops design, and since are virtually none is StarTrek canon the purpose of making this game as canon as possible will be lost.
3- This is StarTrek, not StarWars. Want ground combat, go look for stormtroppers. Here we Explore the galaxy.

Auto combat should do fine.

But is canon that combats can take more than just a month (turn). So combats should take a number of turns based on the planet resistence. Being that calculated throught it's population amount, and race (Klingons should fight longer than mizarians ). There also should be a minimum amont of time required for the combat to be resolved. Let's say, three turns. This way the defending race has a chance to conter attack and send reinforcents. And the attacking one cannot make easy grabs.

Orbitals can be dealt with in the first turn of assault, perhaps with defending ships in close orbit (set on defense).

Regards,
Spider

So let me see if I can clarify:

1 - two part combat - all combat is auto calculated
a - solar system (ships and orbital defense)
b - ground attack - all the planets and ground based defense (tunnel systems, bunkers, hold outs) at once.
2 - ground defense can be created by the ship yard or are constructed buildings

3 - scorched earth - whereby an attacker can bypass all ground defenses, wipe the solar system clean of all construction, and the system will need to be recolonized. This can hurt internal moral of the empire (federation, whatever) depending on how high a player's internal espionage is. The higher it is, the more likely a cover up is. A third party player can only find out about a scorched earth attack if their foreign espionage is high enough.

4 - attacking player must bring a "Ground Strike" vessel in order to launch a ground landing. However, scorched earth can be carried about by any vessel.

Reasons for this is to maintain a space oriented strategy and not to get hung up on ground fighting.

Thoughts?

Whilst not fully implemented yet, the minor races are getting defensive structures that they never had in BOTF. These structures are:

• Hardened Bunkers (Underground bases, reduces damage caused by orbital attacks by 25%)
• Resistance Cells (Guerilla armies, increase planetary combat by 20%)
• Anti-ship Batteries (Orbital Batteries, +50 Anti-Ship Defenses)
• Defence Shield (Planetary Shield, +30 Shield per energy tech)
• Fighter Squadrons (Planetary Combat Fighters, +20% Anti-Ship Defense, +10% Ground Combat)

The exact amounts have been set by me - Dafedz never came up with figures. They are therefore subject to change. Each race has a different variety of these structures based on their tech and known fighting styles, type of society, etc. Some races have none of these defenses, some have all of them. Most have 2 or 3.

The Ground defense bonus has always puzzled me. If buildings can be destroyed by orbital attack, wouldn't it make sense to give buildings hit points? A hit point system has not been included in Dafedz's database, and the option to do so would need to be added into the editor. I imagine it would simplify how the game calculates damage etc though - and the building hit points wouldn't necessarily need to be displayed, they could merely be a part of the programming.

...

On the point of destroying shipyards, it definitely shouldn't be easy to do, otherwise an undefended shipyard could be wiped out easily by a single, lone scout in a handful of combat turns.

Shipyards could simply be in as eye candy and play no active part in battle. Then again, we could go the other way and have them increase repair rates for the defending ships. Or we could have them as actual parts of the battle, with their own hit points (Shields? Weapons?) just like outposts. But if we include shipyards, what about mothball yards?

...

I'm personally against "proper" ground-based combat. As others have said, this is a space-based strategy game; we don't care what happens on the surface. But I would like to know roughly what is damaged/destroyed; this information can help me to plan what structures should be rebuilt or better defended later on - perhaps the option to temporarily improve your defenses at the cost of resources should be available as well, for instance evacuating colonists, reinforcing fortresses, etc. You wouldn't see this, you would just get a bonus based on the choices a player makes from a series of prompts etc. Some of the random events i've come up with have a similar system of user-choices, such as encountering the Think-Tank, who would ask for funding in exchange for their expertise for a brief period - if my random are included of course.

There's a lot of things that could be included in the system, and we need to mke sure we don't get too ahead of ourselves. Still, I think what we're really asking for is more customisability - we want to be able to make the game as complex or simple as we want. This would certainly make the game more interesting, and may even attract more attention. If such a system could be create though, i'm all for it.

I am in full agreement with this statement. I'd like to see more customisability (provided it is not out of the way of the programming), so every one could play the style they want, be it simple combat or more complex combat with more micromanagement involved.

Then again, this might take more time to program and delay the release date.

Oh, this brings another question to mind. How will multiplayer be set up with these options in place? I'm assuming that everyone has to agree to a set degree of customisability before the multiplayer game begins.

I think ground assault should work with an option like this:

Planet is in 3rds, when attacking a planet, you automatically take the 1st third, the invasion under way, you choose an option to fortify your invasion 3rd or attack the second 3rd, with a random selection of who wins the battle basing on numbers in areas and how fortified they are, with the ground assault not completed until all thirds are taken by the attacker or defender. But you choose your attack at the start of each turn until the battle is over.

Otherwise have an option of going Risk style and throwing dices until a winner is decided

I want dice shaped like ships.

I like option 1.

As for ground combat, I say keep it like it is in the original. In multi-player, there is already enough going on to slow the game-play. In single-player, I'm not sure I'd even want to bother with this. For me, it's all about building up and amassing fleets of ships for battle.

On ground combat, Master of Orion 1-3 had variations on ground combat that didn't suck up too much time. It was calculated on the natural ground combat ability of a race, tech (weapons, shields, armor), and gravity (best combat in normal gravity, but can compensate with tech). After defeating all fleets and space stations a player could bombard a planet (in MoO2 this occurred in the turn, not the next one, and continued until the player stopped it or everything and everyone was destroyed). MoO3 introduced some new things, such as ground combat that lasted more than 1 turn (which makes sense, but does take more time and can be a distraction), and basic combat strategies that a player could choose from or just let the computer decide combat. MoO1-2 had animation of troops dying on both sides, but you could just click to get the final combat results because it was all calculated and there was no interaction beyond launching the invasion itself. MoO3 had a simple 2D picture of the planet that looked like a percentage bar of how much you controlled each turn.

I like the idea of at least having to invest in ground combat tech and garrisoning your planets with troops by building defensive structures. I also wished in BOTF that you could have some general idea of how your troops would fare in an invasion, and combat tech, race combat abilities, and defensive structures could give you some idea of that (maybe producing a defensive rating for systems which could be displayed when your fleet is in orbit and scans the planet, or through intel gathering).

Anyway, my guess is that it will be a lot simpler to keep the BOTF system which means just building a ton of troop transports and seeing if it you pull off an invasion, which is fine because combat in the game is primarily about fleet combat. Still, it would be nice to have some kind of ground combat system that didn't suck away your time.

Its been so long since I played the original BotF that I've forgoten how planetary invasions worked in it . As far as ground combat goes I would vote for something along the MoO3 lines, do we have any way planned of knowing before an attack how many troops are likely to be in a system and how many troops ships we'd need to defeat them (back to the importance of accurate intelligence I guess, good intel should be able to make up for a military short fall), I don't like the idea of walking in the dark here!

Personally I would include orbital defences and minefields as a sort of second layer of defence to a system. First you would have your big space battle with the other fleet then you would have to clear out these inner defences before you could secure a system. I suppose I've you have a large number of landing craft and you don't want to risk your ships you could just ignore them and sacrifice a few soldiers but it could tip the balance in the enemies favour.

Its probably not entirely on topic (but it does tie in to it a little) are we going to have planets revolting and whats the mechanism for it? I was thing about the starbase issue with referance to DS9, if an empire builds an SB and the system its in leaves the empire for what ever reason what happens to it? Obviously in a battle the station would likely be destroyed but if there was a revolt or a politically decieded withdrawal from the system a station might just be abandoned. Just some thoughts...

why should inner defences like orbitals and mines be separated from fleet battle? A fleet could withdraw behind the orbital line or at least keep themselves within firing range so they help defeating the enemy along with their defensive fleet. It should be an option. The attacking fleet could then decide not to attack but to siege the planetary system.

In BOTF, you could tell how much ground combat had from a scroll-over box that would appear if you moused over a star on the map. Troop transports carried around 800 troops each, so you just had to make sure you had more troops than the system had. Obviously you have to have more ships in case any are destroyed during the invasion. If you had enough troops survive during the invasion, you were practically guaranteed victory.

The structures that I mentioned in my previous post are out of date now. Me and Dafedz have come up with a lot more of them that upgrade with increasing tech levels to ensure the minors remain at least a little bit competitive even in the late game.

Bunkers

• Basic Shelter
  +5% Ground Defense
  Upgrades To: Hardened Bunker
  
• Hardened Bunker
  +20% Ground Defense
  Upgrades To: Heavy Bunker
  
• Heavy Bunker
  +30% Ground Defense
  Upgrades To: Heavy Bunker

Cells

• Civilian Reserve
  +10% Ground Combat
  Upgrades To: Resistance Cells
  
• Resistance Cells
  +25% Ground Combat
  Upgrades To: None

Shield

• Molecular Shield
  +10 Shields Per Energy Tech
  Upgrades To: Positron Shield
  
• Positron Shield
  +20 Shields Per Energy Tech
  Upgrades To: Gravitron Shield
  
• Gravitron Shield
  +30 Shields Per Energy Tech
  Upgrades To: Advanced Gravitron Shield
  
• Advanced Gravitron Shield
  +40 Shields Per Energy Tech
  Upgrades To: None

Anti-Ship

• Air Command HQ
  +5% Anti-Ship Defense
  Upgrades To: None
  
• Combat Grid
  +10% Anti-Ship Defense
  Upgrades To: None
  
• Missile Silo
  +200 Anti-Ship Defense
  Upgrades To: None

Air Response

• Fighter Squadrons
  +10% Anti-Ship Defense, +15% Ground Combat
  Upgrades To: None

The exact combination of structures that each minor race can build varies depending on their technology, personality, etc etc. Dafedz has worked these out:

Bunkers are available to almost all except Pacifist races.
Cells are available to only Warlike and Militant races.
Defence Shield are available to Developed and above races.
Anti-Ship are available to mainly Warlike and Militant races rated Developed and above.
Air Response are available to Sophisticated races and above.

If the defending fleet has the option to fall back to the planetary defense zone, then the attacking fleet should be able to stay in the system and form an effective "blockade" rather than attack. This could cut all trade routes to the system as long as the ships remain.

yeah, that's what I meant with siege in the last sentence . Is it possible in star trek to also jam subspace and other signals from planets? If so one could also hamper intel, research, credits and other production on that planet since it is cut off the rest of its empire.