The Romulan Republic wrote:There are other solutions to that. One is to have combat occur on a very large scale. Or if that's not feasible, make planetary defenses that can withstand a long attack. Or both.
I'm just envisioning scenarios like the following (note, I'm probably exaggerating to make the point): you decide to attack the enemy empire. So, you send your fleet through. They have a few thousand mines clustered around the wormhole entrance, and obliterate your navy as they come through. So you send more ships. By now, they have their fleet in position. So you send more ships, and so do they. Unfortunately, this is the only way to reach any of their worlds. You can't reach the next one until you reach this one. You both commit more and more ships until one side or the other is wiped out by attrition after a painfully long, boring, and repettative slug fest, where tactics take a back seat to spamming out units like so many other strategy games.
Firstly, to that I have to ask, what, in principle, is so bad about the above? You describe it as boring, but on a
tactical level. I feel the need to question why the issue should be about tactics at all, when we're looking at things at too lofty an elevation for detailed tactics to be an issue.
Secondly, I can't see the scenario play out like that at all. In the games I've played (SE3 and SE4 being among them), the scenario instead looks something like this:
- You decide to attack the enemy empire. So, you send your fleet through.
- Mines and defences kill your ships. Now, you have no more ships, because unless you were a moron, you put everything into the attack.
- They send their fleet in, savaging your defences but ultimately dying.
- A lot of rounds pass before new mega-fleet is built on both sides. Since static defences are dead, next exchange of fire essentially determines the course of the war.
That, I find boring. There is no time for a battlefront to even develop, no time for enemies to glean technological secrets from one another, no time for the desperate arms race and underhanded methods that culminates in a back-breaking offensive. There's just the total war, started as soon as possible, ending in an eyeblink. A tank rush.
Obviously, their are ways around this. This sort of thing would only happen if the game was very badly designed. I'm just saying that thought must be given to preventing this. I'm trying to remember how we delt with these issues during the discussion over that STGOD I dropped out of.
STGODs are completely different from regular strategy games. Their very makeup ensures this.
In the end maybe its just a matter of what I'm used to. I've watched a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek, and those are the types of FTL I prefer. I like the thought of being able to just fly out in any direction and explore, or circle around an enemy fleet and hit them in the rear. And I find choke point battles boring. Especially if they can keep cycling out damaged units for healing/repairing and bringing in fresh ones.
In all the games I've played, it takes far longer to build up a credible fighting unit than it takes for the victorious enemy to reach and annihilate your production centres.
I also prefer games with tactics to spam and rush type strategy games where the the battles largely come down to churning out units and mashing them together.
I prefer strategy to tactics. Particularly in strategy games.
You simply don't get the impression of fleets locking in combat; it's always a few ships briefly clashing, and then you get down to bombing the shit out of all the enemy planets.
Then make it so that there are fleets worthy of the name.
That can be done, I think. I would support it. Generally, I suspect the reason developers don't seem to do this is because it ties into the whole model they're used to: singular ships that are ridiculously powerful, take enormous time to produce, and are sent out in groups of five at the most, trying to avoid the enemy fleet (note the singular) while slagging enemy planets.
Later on in MoO2, it became quite ludicrous. Wars were decided not by fleets but by stray ships, and lasted as long as it took to travel between the enemy planets.
Not having played MoO2, how the hell does that happen?
Technological disparity is generally huge late in the game, meaning a single one of your ship will outmatch tens or even hundreds of enemy ships. The tactical combat is round-based and you always get to fire first, leading to hugely lopsided battles in your favour. Ships remain goddamn expensive though due to all the fancy tech, so you can't churn them out, meaning the ships tend to be few in number but overwhelmingly potent. Finally, the weapons loadout of even a destroyer will at late levels be sufficient to sterilize a planet in a turn or two, and once you've eradicated the entire enemy fleet in the first two battles, basically all that remains is torching enemy planets.
We have those in real wars, without cities on earth being reachable only by wormhole. A lot of things can make a point strategic: resources, political significance, industrial might, etc. Note also that if you took your whole fleet and warped past the outlying worlds straight for the enemy home world, you could risk leaving your own territory open to attack, and risk your fleet being cut off, so there is a possible disincentive to doing so. My way simply gives greater flexibility, I feel, than a point to point warp network.
- Who said anything about "only by wormhole"?
- Who said anything about a "warp network"?
To pursue this thought, you fail to mention many other variations on the theme that might be suitable. For instance, Freespace and Wing Commander both seem to have a system where natural points in space allow for FTL, without them being "tunnels"; you can have a system where there are a sufficient number of jump points so that you can't just bunker up and mine the crap out of them all. Wing Commander jump points, interestingly, also have size limits to what can pass through them. Babylon 5 also uses jump gates, but only as a concession to space and energy concerns. The Manticore wormhole in Honor Harrington, finally, is simply a fairly large area in space where you can travel indecently fast to another fairly large area; thus, fleets are needed to police it, and mines are largely useless.
As you see, there's no necessary need to pick the DS9 variant.
I completely agree. I just don't like warp point only.
Me neither. I did like that in Space Empires you could create and destroy Warp Points with certain late-game technologies. I used that trick to carve up the enemy empire into several disparate chunks. Sadly, it was a strategy the AI had absolutely no idea of how to counter.
) who spend many hours a week ensuring that the programmers actually follow procedures, keep documentation up to date, write comprehensive tests etc. Open source projects tend to lack it not because people fail to realise that it's a good idea, but because it's equivalent to making hobbyist carpenters file ISO 9001 quality control documentation on their homemade coffee tables.
