But we can't go on the combat system at the moment. We might have a demo, but it doesn't yet contain most of the ship designs that are in the shiplist. The stats aren't set, and there haven't been any updates for it in a few months. So all we really have at the moment is what's done on paper with a small bit of speculative combat system observations. Saying that we've already got a full combat system would itself create confusion, so it's best to just stick with what we've got for the time being.

My reply was for Sheva. Was yours for me or for Sheva, MoE? I didn't mention the combat system, so I'm guessing it was for Sheva?

My post was aimed at you .Iceman. When you said "the game" I assumed you meant the combat system since most of the the ship stats don't really mean much outside of the combat system.

You mean the construction costs? Or the "size" of ships? Or their upkeep? Or their speeds? ... Ah, ok then...

Everything really. The stats. Build costs, shield strength, whatever.

I vote from now on if a post is aimed at someone it should mention them specifically.

...So this post is aimed at you, .Iceman.

Well, I'd say most of a ship's stats don't have any impact at all in combat...

Nope, GGs cannot be colonized. They can be harvested for Deuterium by fleets, but only if they are outside their fuel range - which is odd at best...

I thought about this:

When you encounter enemy ships you may be able to capture them when you have the upperhand.

The regular fight takes place by firing out your weapons to enemy ships in order to destroy them before they destroy you.

I watched into the ships stats and thought: "Well the shields are down very fast" and "The hull is stronger but wont last very long". Not very good for long fights.

I thought back on Klingon Academy and remembered this:
You have troops on your ships that are able to capture enemy ships OR are able to repel enemy forces. When we take the crewsize of a ship and have taken down the shields of a ship, you may attack the enemy ship with a "desintegration" attack that will shut down warp engines and weapons. With this on hand, you may be able to capture an enemy ship.

You send over marines that will fight against the enemy marines.
Per turn, your marines will engage 50% of its own strength and per turn you are able to beam over 1/3 of all marines of your ship avaible.

Example:

You have a crew of 1000 crewman and you may be able to use 500 of them as marines, then you can beam per turn 166 marines.
These marines will "kill" 83 enemy marines per turn and so on:

Turn 0:
After the enemy shields are shot down, you bring your ship into transporter range and fire your weapons in desintegration volleys. After you managed to make this action, you only need one thing left: Have enough marines and be able to destroy really ALL weapons of the enemy ship. (Lets say when you make damage of 50% hull value, the enemy ships counts as desintegrated)

Turn 1:
You shut down your shields and beam over the first group of marines. Your ship got 500 marines, the enemy ship got 300 marines. You beam over 166 marines.

Turn 2:
- result of turn one: 166 marines beamed over, 83 enemy marines killed, 150 of your marines got killed. Marines left:
16 on your side and 217 on the enemy ship
- you beam over 166 additional marines

Turn 3:
- result of turn two: 166 marines beamed over to a total of 182. 91 Enemy marines killed. The enemy marines killed 109 of your marines. Leftovers: 73 on your side and 126 on the enemy side.
- you beam over 167 marines (you are out of marines)

Turn 4:
Total marines on your side: 240. Enemy side: 126. Your marines kill 120 of the enemy marines. Enemies kill 63 of your marines.
Stand: 177 vs 6
You have no marines left to beam over.

Turn 5:
Enemy marines down to zero, 3 of your marines killed. You have captured the enemy ships.
You have 173 marines left and lost 326 marines in order to capture the enemy ship.

Sounds okay. You need a little bit more marines to capture enemy ships than they have, but not too much.
Here we may channge the values with certain equipment:
- personal armor: Decreases the losses of your attempt by 10 %
- frontline-equipment: Increases the kill-rate by 10%

We can also add a modificator for veteran ships, for example: Losses reduced by 3% and kill-rate increased by 3% each level-up. That don't sound much, but will do much.


If you fight one-on-one, this tactic might be very usefull, but when you fight in fleets, you have to shut down your own shields for at least one round or more so it is a little bit risky. You may, with this tactic not be able to capture enemy ships if you fight in larger fleets.

We may also now be able to increase the abilities of the troop transporter which might now be able to be an effective ship in order to capture enemy ships. For this, the troop transporter might get a very good hull armor cause he will fly around with shields down all the time.

Just my 2 cents,
Sheva

Turn-based might work, but for a real time environment i could see it turning into a real micromanagement nightmare.

Regards Wolfe

Well, not really. If you have a real time fight, you make it similar to Star Trek Armada. You have a transporter range and a transporter-ability that will define, how many troops you can beam per period and then we go on with it.

You simply select "capture enemy ship" and your ship will go into transporter range, will fire the disintegration volley and then send troops over until the ship is captured or you are out of marines.

Okay, when we make it in real time, we simply make a turn to a 10 second period and we got it. The values I gave are not fixed, it is only to show the idea.

You could make the combat system a little like space empires 5 where its real time but you can slow time or even stop it to issue orders.

I was thinking about how ships become obsolete when a bigger tougher ship with more weapons can be built.My suggestion is to take ideas from Sins Of A Solar Empire and give different ships roles or special abilities that can augment your fleet or the enemies.Maybe even different types of fire that effect different armor.For example soase has a cap ship that can regenerate shields of friendly ships within its range.This is based off antimatter and it costs 100 antimatter to use it and the ship has a reserve of 300 or so.Some ships can repair ofthers and add range to their weapons and so on.

Also it is alot of fun when your ship can level up and get new abilities.A level of customization of all systems would be great too.

Im for the use of real time battles myself.What would be great is if during battle you can target enemy systems and have a level of strategy involved with it.Also strategy involved with how you move your ships.Different shields for different sides of the ship.Different amount of weapons facing sides or maybe even blind spots.


Be cool to be able to retreat and have settings you can place on a ship such as all power to engines or shields ect..


Maybe if you battle near a nebulea or something you can retreat into it and it cuts shields off to both ships or there can be different strategies like hiding in one like in the show.

We turned down the idea of giving ship special abilities a long time ago. Quite simply we don't want the game to be like Armada. Admittedly that was a cool game, but ships in Trek were never portrayed as having all the special abilities that they did in Armada. Many of them were made up simply for that game.

That said, Mike, the developer of the game, does like Sins of a Solar Empire (As do I), and he's said that he's considering incorporating some of the ideas in that game in Supremacy. He hasn't specified precisely what these ideas are though, so he could just as easily be referring to the clean visual style as to the special abilities of the ships.

As for experience and level gaining, BOTF had that, and to my knowledge we're going to have a similar system. Whilst we don't know what the specifics will be yet, increased experience levels will likely grant bonuses to your ships, such as increased weapon accuracy, faster responses versus cloaked enemies, faster shield recharge rates, faster hull repair rates, and better combat tactics. As I said with the special bonuses above though, it's unlikely, although not impossible, that ships will gain any special abilities through levelling.

Nebulas will likely have unique properties, such as preventing your ships raising their shields, or reduced weapon accuracy. They will also have uses outside of combat though. Ships that are low on fuel will be able to refuel in nebulas. Nebulas can sometimes hide Rogue planets as well. You will also get a research bonus if you build a science station in a sector with a nebula as well.

Thats sad you guys turned down special abilities because they are really fun and they dont have to be game wrenching abilities.They could be something simple for a slight edge on something and that would still make it fun.It doesnt have to be ability regens hull point at 20 a sec but something simple and light.IMO the trek has always showed special abilities thru the crew.They always augmented their ship for a specific purpose.Turning the deflector shield for a specific use.Extending the shields.Changing the way phasers work against the borg...The list goes on.BTW Im not trying to reopen this if its already decided.

I know there is a demo for the combat system but is there a list of strategies and commands that are planning on being in the combat system?Is it all set in stone?Any details yet?Sorry if this has all been talked about before.

The combat system is at a very early stage in development; in fact, the developer recently said he is going to be converting the whole thing to use a different engine, because the limitations of the current "irrlicht" engine are just too restrictive. This work will mean a delay, but in the long run will mean a combat system that is less buggy/more stable, will be able to handle more ships on the battlefield, will be able to handle better special effects, and generally will be better.

As for making decisions, just because we've made up our minds about something, that doesn't mean the discussion has ended. We're a fan-based project and we listen to the fans, because we're fans ourselves and we want our game to be everything that BOTF should have been. If we say a decision has been made, you *sometimes* might just need to shout a little louder, or come up with a reason for why we're wrong.

...That said, if we continue to say no even after you've shouted and come up with the reasons, it's because the decision really was final.

The limitations of the combat engine are one of the main reasons why we say no to ideas about the combat system - sometimes we can't do it because it simply can't be done. The new engine might be flexible enough to allow some ideas that have previously been turned down to finally be worked into the game, so we will re-evaluate those ideas at that time. But even still, that doesn't mean that all ideas will make it in. But we're trying as hard as we can to cram as much into the game as possible, so just have patience.

Thats great to hear!The more dynamic the battle system the more fun the game.To me the battle system and ships make up half the game so the better we can make it the better the game.To me the battle becomes more fun the more I can make a difference via strategy,timing abilities or, just customizing my ships.The more options and choices I have the more I can change the outcome.Special abilities could be limited to full power to the engines for a timely retreat that saves my ship(Star Trek is all about close calls).If you guys could make ships have sections of shields then strategy would go up as well.I just hate to see the combat system to be like a certian game where you run around in circles shooting and thats about it.

It will be more complicated to deal with combat once we have large fleets of ships in combat. An expanded AI may have to come into play. We should be thinking of ways to make it interesting to manage a number of ship rather than micromanagement of each ship.

I get what your saying but like in sins you dont have to micro and you can still do very well.It will be an option for the player if he wishes to micro ships.However if you dont have some overall fleet window this will be very difficult to do.Maybe if you make a window that lists all ships in fleet with stats this micro could be worked from there and an overview of the battle.

Maybe it's just me, but I found all the different manuevers to be worthless. I would always just pick charge and my fleet would usually just alpha strike the enemy and blow them up.

I'd be happy if "tactical combat" was just 4 options: Attack, Evade, Hail, Retreat.

Attack would try and line up the enemy with the most # of weapons. Evade would try and get out of the enemy's firing arcs, hail and retreat as self explanatory.

actually, evade was much more effective, took longer, but in the end you had more ships left. Worked of course only with heavy destroyers and less.

Really? So you had to keep choosing evade and then you'd get superior firing position or something? It just seemed like a waste of time as the ships rarely missed and then you didn't have all your weapons lined up...

take a bunch of Constellations or Ferengi Raider II and set them constantly on evade, they will hit the enemy no matter what ships whilst not being hit themselves. Sometimes if distances at first combat turn were too far you had to make a fly-by first but once they were in the bulk of the enemy fleet, they really dished it out .

I guess it rarely came up because I almost always play romulans and between cloak + plasma torps combat would rarely last past the first turn

okay, that's an argument .

Lol good point, but I find that the torpedoes in BOTF were extremely inaccurate. Ships could easily doble their firepower if their torpedoes were more accurate.

Mal is right. the Ferengi Raider II is probably the most survivable ship in the game if you set it to evade. And as with all Ferengi ships, they're so cheap that if you lose one, or even a fleet of them, it's an easily replaceable loss. And if those ships have legendary crews, they're practically unstoppable. Trust me, try playing as the Ferengi and try conquering the Galaxy by building Raider II's and just evade in every battle. The orders really do work, you just have to learn how and when to use them.

As a "good" Romulan, I only ever fought battles with overwhelming odds on my side. Otherwise, I'd just retreat, and come back in larger numbers.

I've beaten the game as every race, but I don't recall Raider II's being so special. I might have to go back and try again...

It may be you concentrated on building the battleships and cruisers. Yes they're powerful, but the Raider II's are so manoeuvrable that not much hits them. And the Ferengi ships have weak shields and hull strengths so manoeuvrability has to be their greatest defence anyways.

Yeah Moe and Malle are right Raider II is the best "value for money"choice.

although they look like crap..

They need new polycount and textures for sure.

Remember the TNG episode "Pegasus?" Should there be a feature to allow the Federation to develop phase-cloaking covertly, or does that become too much of a slippery slope?