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It's just hard to do naval combat in games because you have to hit a very careful balance of both gameplay and map design to make it work. If naval units are too weak relative to land or air units, there's no reason to build them, if they're too strong then there's no counter to them when one side gains the upper hand. If the terrain makes it so there's no strategically important areas next to water, the navy might as well not exist. If you need to cross a body of water to reach your opponent, then nothing else matters besides the navy. So many ways for a large chunk of your unit rosters to just not matter at all.
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Aug 9, 2022 16:31
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A big part of the problem, of course, being that for all we call them "real time strategy" games, RTSes are in a military history sense pretty focused on the tactical. Some have elements of resource gathering and so forth but they don't have the things navies were really useful for IRL, which is to say logistics and other transport of goods. Not that incorporating that would be an improvement, necessarily. The more zoomed-out games that try to model that by having sea trade routes need protection or whatever tend to just introduce navy-as-economic-tax or navy-as-boring-chore, neither of which are really better. But I think it's interesting that the difficulty of making a navy matter in games is frequently rooted in games not modeling the things navies were historically useful for.
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Aug 9, 2022 17:17
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Okay, more boat chat since multiple people have been bugging me on discord about one particular ship. This is the Horde juggernaut:   This is actually a pretty straightforward one, once you disregard the weird sail/flag things. You're looking at a ship that's relatively short from bow to stern, has a wide beam, high sides, a conical shape with forward/center cannons, and motorized paddlewheels? We're looking at a monitor, folks. A short-lived design in naval history, born in the ironclad era (American readers probably know about the type's namesake, the USS Monitor during the US Civil War, and its battle with the CSS Virginia) that didn't last very long before being phased out in favor of more sophisticated designs when the world's navies moved to all-metal construction. The juggernaut is obviously a bit fantastical, and those sails/flags serve no purpose whatsoever, but it demonstrates the type nicely. Monitors in real life were mainly used as coastal defense vessels, they were notoriously prone to sinking in rough seas and weather (this is what sank the USS Monitor!), and most of them were very slow. But if what you needed was heavy armor and big guns, and they don't need to travel very far, they did the job nicely.
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Aug 9, 2022 19:02
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Yeah, getting the buildings that increase production of a given resource is a really big boon. It's the literal opposite of the "Upkeep" Mechanic in Warcraft 3; Upkeep took a full load of 10 gold from the mine, but only added 7 or 4 to your stockpile if you were in low or high upkeep. Having the increased production from a Lumber Mill, or a Refinery means that a regular load of 100 resources becomes 125, no hidden fees or questions asked, so long as you have access to the building. Doesn't even have to go to the correct building, as long as the building exists. This mechanic exists for Gold too, but it works *slightly* differently. Naval upgrades are attached to a third Coastal structure, but you'll gain access to both the Refinery and this new building in Mission 4. The training wheels are coming off, but the actual difficulty will grow gradually. And someone already mentioned this, but once the Oil Platform is up, you can fit as many Oil Tankers in there as you want just like a Gold Mine, but be wary of overcrowding the path between the dropoff and the Platform; both Peons and Tankers can get stuck in traffic and forget what they were doing if things get too hectic.
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Aug 9, 2022 19:33
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Cythereal posted:The fact that I am deeply hostile to video games with unit designers that expect you to design your own ships doesn't help either, they're particularly common in games that feature ships (be they of the seagoing or spacefaring variety). Would you be willing to elaborate on this a bit more?
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Aug 9, 2022 19:52
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Thinking on it today, I was able to remember one naval battle of actual plot significance in WoW: the fight between Genn Greymane's air gunship and the Horde fleet sailing for Stormheim in Legion. It was a pretty fun quest too, although you don't really participate in any actual naval battle, the player's actions are fighting boarding parties and doing air support on war bats.
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Aug 9, 2022 19:58
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Quackles posted:Would you be willing to elaborate on this a bit more? Dating back to Master of Orion, a very common feature of non-historical 4X games is the unit designer. A subsystem that allows you to customize your units, or make your own from scratch. You typically have a wide variety of chassis, defenses, weapons, special abilities, passive bonuses, etc. Even non-naval 4X games sometimes get into it, like Endless Legend. This subsystem is one that I almost invariably dislike. I much prefer being given a pre-defined list of units with well designed roles. To me, unit designers tend to either feel like pointless busywork as I research Laser Gun Mk2 and have to upgrade my fleets from Laser Gun Mk1, or they feel like a major part of the gameplay and you have to have well-built units to have a chance of succeeding. Pre-made units are almost invariably mediocre in such games, or at least not as good as they could be. There's even some games where this is a central gameplay feature, like Rule the Waves or goon-designed naval action game Waves of Steel. Now, I have seen games where I liked the presence of a unit designer! Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is my gold standard: a carefully restricted and very self-explanatory set of things you can modify, with an extensive help system and the unit designer is great at suggesting things. There is some room for creativity, like my favored synthmetal formers so they can gain veterancy to shrug off mind worms, but the game does a fine job on its own. In general I am firmly an aesthetic-driven game player. I tend to play games for how they make me feel: the story, characters, music, and visual design. What I am not is a mechanics-driven gamer. I almost invariably play games on the easiest difficulty settings, and skip optional content that requires real effort to do. I only stick my toes into such side content if there's a story hook that grabs my interest (this has completely baffled friends regarding MMOs in particular, how I'll just skip most or all endgame content). While I have the utmost respect for people like Melth and Zoran here on SA who can think ten steps ahead of the AI and break strategy games over their knee, or the people who can hyper-optimize character builds in RPGs on the fly, I am very much not that kind of player. To me, unit designers in strategy game feel very much like character builds in RPGs: I do not enjoy it, and if pressed will google for what is optimal and copy/paste that. Games where I sincerely enjoy playing them on hard difficulties for the sheer fun of the mechanical gameplay do exist but are extraordinarily rare. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 20:25
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Cythereal posted:Dating back to Master of Orion, a very common feature of non-historical 4X games is the unit designer. A subsystem that allows you to customize your units, or make your own from scratch. You typically have a wide variety of chassis, defenses, weapons, special abilities, passive bonuses, etc. Even non-naval 4X games sometimes get into it, like Endless Legend. I'm with you on this FWIW. Unit designers seem like a cool idea, and if they're done right, they can be super fun. But the vast majority of them either have the pre-made units be good enough that there's no reason to diverge from them, or make it so that playing the unit designer is a large part of the game and generally if you customize units well you'll ludicrously outclass the AI or anyone using premades. There was a tabletop game called Arcane Legions some years back that had that issue. It had a really cool system where you put together units by putting a stat card on a base and slotting the appropriate models in that was incredibly fun, and one of the few game systems I've seen that reasonably modeled the good and bad of mixed formations. The premade formations were reasonably well-balanced against each other and fun to jam with, but once they introduced the unit builder software it became rapidly possible to break it over your knee. It basically killed the game in my area, which was too bad, as it was otherwise a pretty cool game with a cool alt-history.
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Aug 9, 2022 20:44
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Cythereal posted:Okay, more boat chat since multiple people have been bugging me on discord about one particular ship. This is the Horde juggernaut: I love the juggernaut. Just a big fat boat with lots of big guns on it.
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Aug 9, 2022 20:45
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I love unit designers, though I have my own issues with many of them. In a lot of cases they're just full of un-necessary cruft and useless options. I think it'd be nice if they had some "defaults" or a "make an optimal design" for people who didn't want to fiddle with them(I mean, obviously they have some auto-calculating functionality since the AI has units), but I also like being given the option to play sub-optimally if I have a funny idea.
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Aug 9, 2022 20:55
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Cythreal- I’m that type of gamer too. Looking forward to the Battleship. How does something with that much metal use sails to move?
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Aug 9, 2022 21:02
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achtungnight posted:How does something with that much metal use sails to move? Quite easily! All-metal ships with sails are still a thing today! Sails are a popular means of propulsion at sea for a drat good reason, and weight matters much less than the design of the hull itself. Many military vessels today still carry the means to rig sails (if not efficient ones) in an emergency if their engines are out.
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Aug 9, 2022 21:04
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achtungnight posted:Cythreal- I’m that type of gamer too. It also features large green waterwheels. I like to think the sails are redundant on that thing.
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Aug 9, 2022 21:17
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achtungnight posted:Cythreal- I’m that type of gamer too. Those are actually giant fans, not sails. They're intended to be used to blow strong gusts of wind at enemy ships to push them back into optimal shooting range, or to help push Troll Destroyers faster. Yup, that's totally what they're meant for, and this is me not just making up reasons for a ship to have cool-but-pointless side sails.
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Aug 9, 2022 21:32
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I wish more games had a naval field of battle like Supreme Commander. The sheer range and power of some of the high end ships made it so satisfying to just zoom out a bit and watch the shells batter at a fortified position.
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Aug 9, 2022 21:54
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Poil posted:Some games added fuel to planes to limit their range like Empire Earth. Other games such as for example Arsenal added fuel for all units. Hope you brought a tanker along with those ships or had enough trucks before you tried to move all of those tanks over to the enemy base. Of all the games for someone to mention, Arsenal was definitely at the bottom of my expectations. That's an obscure call-out, especially the first game.
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Aug 9, 2022 22:15
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Another shout to a game with good naval combat: Act of War: High Treason. A good, knowingly corny little RTS that feels a lot like old Command and Conquer and where it could have gone, more of a Tom Clancy RTS than C&C's silliness and Kane wankery.
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Aug 9, 2022 22:27
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This is actually my one major complaint about my favorite 4X game, Galactic Civilizations 2. There's an optimal way to design ship defenses, and how much weaponry and defense you can fit on those ships changes every time you upgrade anything. Being able to visually design how the ships look is cool. Needing to make sure your defenses against all three types of weapon round down properly, while still fitting in sensors and weapons and engines, and needing to redo this every game, every time you research things in a slightly different order or trade for a juicy piece of tech? Small wonder I always go with a huge swarm of tiny, frail wasps with no defenses and the largest laser I can slap onto them.
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Aug 9, 2022 22:31
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It caught a lot of flack but I enjoyed the ships in Age of Empires 3, though a large part of that is due to the way buildings and ships splinter and pieces fly off when hit by cannonballs.
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Aug 9, 2022 22:41
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Playing a bit of SMAC tonight reminded me of another thing about war at sea that video games seldom model: compared to land-based travel, going by sea is fast, and pre-radar can be enormously difficult to detect as well. The whole history of coastal raiding by pirates and marauding forces like the Vikings, where fast-moving ships can land virtually anywhere undetected until they're hitting a town, is almost never seen in video games. SMAC being one of those few where it is represented, I'm sure anyone who's played online SMAC has memories of the power of cruiser transports loaded with marines that can strike from outside coastal sensor arrays to hit coastal bases or other valuable targets out of the blue. One alternative is to make objectives at sea worth fighting over, and that's again not common in video games. Red Alert 3 finally added aquatic expansions to that series, for one.
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Aug 9, 2022 23:31
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In pre-industrial times, water is also the only practical way to do long-distance logistics. Getting a cartfull of grain past the distance where a driver+mule eats everything out of the cart they're pulling is complicated and inefficient. Wind-powered ships can be scaled up because the wind doesn't eat. Historical Rome ate more grain than nearby farms and overland travel could supply and would starve without water shipping.
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Aug 10, 2022 00:31
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Cythereal posted:Playing a bit of SMAC tonight reminded me of another thing about war at sea that video games seldom model: compared to land-based travel, going by sea is fast, and pre-radar can be enormously difficult to detect as well. The whole history of coastal raiding by pirates and marauding forces like the Vikings, where fast-moving ships can land virtually anywhere undetected until they're hitting a town, is almost never seen in video games.
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Aug 10, 2022 01:02
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Did I read somewhere that in current World of Warcraft the Forsaken have a potentially overwhelming fleet because they send crews to wander the seabed looking for shipwrecks and refloat them?
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Aug 10, 2022 01:13
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MagusofStars posted:It's rarely seen in video games because this sort of historical realism can be incredibly frustrating in actual gameplay. Having a ship appear at your city gates completely undetected, wipe out your town (or at least pillage the surrounding landscape), then sail off to sea before you can react might be historically accurate but it also can very easily come off feeling like unfair bullshit. I think it's the same thing as a drop in Starcraft or Supreme Commander or a similar RTS, really. Slip in a transport carrying forces past any sensors or defenses the enemy might have, and commence pillaging of the defenseless (or at least less-defended) rear. Phrosphor posted:Did I read somewhere that in current World of Warcraft the Forsaken have a potentially overwhelming fleet because they send crews to wander the seabed looking for shipwrecks and refloat them? It's been offered as a possibility, yes, but to date it hasn't actually happened. Most of the Forsaken fleet was wiped out by the Alliance during Legion and Battle for Azeroth (when the Horde allied with the vampires in a storyline only Alliance players ever see). Also the Alliance can do the same trick. This image I used in the lore post:  That was Daelin Proudmoore's flagship. Jaina raised it from the bottom of the sea in the interlude between Legion and Battle for Azeroth. She has since enchanted it to fly and fire explosive magic blasts from its cannons, and uses it as her personal flagship now that she's High Admiral of Kul Tiras and Grand Admiral of the Alliance fleet. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Aug 10, 2022 |
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Aug 10, 2022 01:15
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I think the big thing with sea battles being underwhelming in most games, especially those with air has been hit pretty close when people start talking about logistics. The seas for sea battles in strategy games are rarely BIG enough to matter. The actual oceans are loving huge on a scale that prohibits aircraft fighting in large portions of it due to fuel issues. In most games, even when planes have fuel like advance wars they aren't really limited by it. Heftier sea transports look a lot more ideal when air based transports can only coastal hop or go without proper fighter cover.
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Aug 10, 2022 04:02
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Kul Tiras and the Zandalari Empire had the strongest fleets on Azeroth for the good reason of both parties being smart enough to enchant their ships, as in the making the entire ship magical, to the point where the Lord Admiral of Kul'Tiras can SUMMON the fleet in the very quite literal sense.
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Aug 10, 2022 04:06
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Cythereal posted:Playing a bit of SMAC tonight reminded me of another thing about war at sea that video games seldom model: compared to land-based travel, going by sea is fast, and pre-radar can be enormously difficult to detect as well. The whole history of coastal raiding by pirates and marauding forces like the Vikings, where fast-moving ships can land virtually anywhere undetected until they're hitting a town, is almost never seen in video games. SMAC being one of those few where it is represented, I'm sure anyone who's played online SMAC has memories of the power of cruiser transports loaded with marines that can strike from outside coastal sensor arrays to hit coastal bases or other valuable targets out of the blue. Eh, yes and no if you're talking about realism. The Vikings managed it, probably a few other groups throughout time, but they relied on weak states opposing them and naval supremacy regardless. The Vikings could do what they did because their targets were weak enough to fall to small raiding parties without a meaningful siege, and couldn't meaningfully threaten them at sea. The speed of water transport was important in stopping a land-based response, but you still can't deliver a siege that way pretty much at any time in history, because if you don't have actual naval dominance, you can't supply your troops and likely can't even successfully land enough of them to take a reasonable fortress or urban center. Doubly so when those fortresses and urban centers are going to be located in the areas the army needs to use to forage, etc. Contrast with pirates - they were the scourge of the Americas for a while (a sparsely populated area with weak navies and little state power), but in European waters could succeed basically only on the high seas. Their crews just weren't big enough to plunder meaningful targets on land in areas of high state power. The size of the sea means you could generally do well there, but in game terms that again falls foul of the issue whereby it can just become a mugs game to build boats in the first place, unless you must defend naval trade routes or w/e. I think it'd be fascinating to do a game that actually restricted army movements based on logistical concerns, but I can never decide where the balance would be between "novel" and "actually fun." Some of the Paradox games and Dominions and such have supply issues, but IMO none of them really get it feeling right - they both just have a foraging limit, nothing about naval supply or baggage trains or communication lines. But one of the things Dr. Devereaux on acoup.blog likes to point out is that most armies are really restricted in where they can operate throughout much of history, and I think it's a well-taken point that a lot of games get wrong to their detriment, making players rely on noticing large-yet-sneaky enemy forces over a large front when instead wanting to do an operation away from communication lines should limit you to a very small and specific kind of force. But I digress a bit, heh. Of course, in Alpha Centauri specifically (or fantasy games), it's possible that the conditions are right for a raid like that to work, so it's not necessarily a criticism of how it works there; settling a new planet might well result in a situation where populations are very low, and so a small raid is really dangerous even to a large settlement (doubly so with high technology). But Humankind, say, has a real disconnect with how easy it is for large forces to move around with impunity, IMO. Or the older Civilizations that allow infinite unit stacking. (Whereas Civ 5/6 have the opposite problem where significant offensives can only occur over vast fronts.)
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Aug 10, 2022 06:47
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Thinking on the sea logistics thing, are there any games where logistics play a major explicit role in things? I'm imagining a mix of civ and transport tycoon, and that honestly sounds amazing
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Aug 10, 2022 06:50
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:Thinking on the sea logistics thing, are there any games where logistics play a major explicit role in things? I'm imagining a mix of civ and transport tycoon, and that honestly sounds amazing Paradox games generally have it to a lesser degree, but to a greater degree you need to look into what are called grog games, one of which, War in the Pacific, has been Let's Played a whole bunch on this very forum.
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Aug 10, 2022 07:20
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+1 to not liking unit designers in 99% of the games. They tend to be annoyingly fiddly and allow cheesy designs that abuse the meta. One game where I liked unit designer, such as it is, is the Original War. Due to being non-standard RTS and having very different handling of resources and manpower, having even 10 combat vehicles is a lot, so I am ok with making each of them custom. It also helps that you have IIRC 4 customization points, and they are all simple "pick an option from a drop down menu" affair. e.g. you can pick whether you want the vehicle to be solar, diesel, or magic-cold-fusion powered, whether you want it to have wheels, tracks or heavy tracks, what gun goes on top.
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Aug 10, 2022 07:58
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Rule the Waves 1&2 are about the naval arms race of the beginning of the 20th century, and has the best implementation of a unit designer I've ever seen. Upgrades are significant, but there is an inertia to both shipbuilding and upgrades, so you have to plan ahead, and balance cost vs capability.
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Aug 10, 2022 08:38
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Then again, even today we have sailing ships with remote-controlled heavy machine gun turrets.   Or the USCG's very own sailing training ship: 
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Aug 11, 2022 |
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Aug 10, 2022 12:18
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:Thinking on the sea logistics thing, are there any games where logistics play a major explicit role in things? I'm imagining a mix of civ and transport tycoon, and that honestly sounds amazing The imperialism games are good there. Especially imp2. With how much your economy depends on exploiting your overseas colonies, a lack of naval transport is quickly crippeling. No matter if it comes from blockades, raiders or even you having to use your trade ships as troop transports. And that beachhead system is one of the best naval invasion systems I can think off. And while I love the old MoO style unit designers, they are worse then useless these days. Because in MoO you had fleets of 10ish ships which gave reasonable decisions. But, modern games want bigger fleets which makes feedback from looking at the battle to the ship designer nearly impossible. VictualSquid fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Aug 10, 2022 |
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Aug 10, 2022 22:23
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The side sails on the juggernaut could reasonably assist in turning if it doesn't have a separate axle for each paddle wheel and a weak rudder due to being very wide for it's length, which was a real problem for Novgorod. The upper deck is also too crowded with guns to put up much rigging there and not have to deal with blocking the traverse on the central turrets and/or having to replace everything due to muzzle blast damage after every engagement. But they're probably on the sides to not obscure the graphical representation of role of the ship from a top down view.
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Aug 11, 2022 01:22
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Cythereal posted:Then again, even today we have sailing ships with remote-controlled heavy machine gun turrets. Real question: is that MG programmed not to shoot the masts? Fake edit: Thought this was the MilHist thread, letting the question stand.
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Aug 11, 2022 06:15
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Edit, wrong window. For a teaser, the next lore post (probably Saturday) is going to be about the history of Lordaeron up to the time of the Second War, and I finally tracked down a single actual explanation for why the other nations of Azeroth never intervened in the First War.
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Aug 12, 2022 02:09
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Given recent events I would wager it goes something like this: "Look, I just don't think we should be arming those extremist catholics. I mean, sure the orcs are bad guy invaders, but arming extremist groups to fight bad guys just never works out. Besides, the nation of Azeroth is fighting the Orcs inside of towns. When they do stuff like that it means the orcs practically had to burn down that church full of kids."
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Aug 12, 2022 02:20
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Cythereal posted:Edit, wrong window. Honestly, with how condensed the timeline was between "Portal is opened" and "War were declared", I'd be willing to accept that the other nations hadn't finished mustering their armies before Stonewind fell. Then again, with less than a year between Stonewind falling and the Orcs pushing across the ocean, can you even call it a second war and not just a continuation of the first war? Perhaps a... Great War, if you will?
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Aug 12, 2022 02:32
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Cythereal posted:Edit, wrong window. It's only when Stormwind is on the verge of falling that the other nations go oh poo poo this is bad and are spurred into action - but welp, too late, sorry about Stormwind.
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Aug 12, 2022 03:08
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Well, the other nations weren’t created yet, we didn’t know our game would be such a success… Wait, that’s the real world reason.
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Aug 12, 2022 03:34
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