|
Guns slider Armor slider Speed slider 90 points to distribute, relevant tech level provides a multiplier to points spend in that category. If you have to have special systems they cost 10 points or a multiple thereof. Included with the game is the "Unimaginative ship engineers" game setting that locks everything at 30. Combat is dominons style, but with less scripting. MOO and MOO2 made ship designers work. Just because something worked before doesn't mean you have to have it in your game.
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 08:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 13:47 |
|
|
I got Distant Stars 2 and the first thing I automated was ship design. gently caress that noise.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 09:13
|
|
|
Alternately just make a game with moo style combat again. It’s baffling that moo clones are an entire genre with slavish devotion to recreating mechanics like ship designers but every single one of them has decided that they’ll be the ones to finally make real-time autoresolve work. Even the moo reboot that was like a 1:1 remake inexplicably decided to do some weird real time thing. Is there like a technical limitation? Like how the original Xcom had that under the hood voxel based cover system that no one wanted to redo?
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 09:37
|
|
|
FrancisFukyomama posted:Alternately just make a game with moo style combat again. It’s baffling that moo clones are an entire genre with slavish devotion to recreating mechanics like ship designers but every single one of them has decided that they’ll be the ones to finally make real-time autoresolve work. I think it's just a widespread industry believe that turn-based is a strictly inferior version of real-time that only existed in the first place because of technical limitations that we've now outgrown.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 10:07
|
|
|
There's a lot of difficulties with attaching tactical combat to a strategic game. One is that making a decent AI for combat can be hard, particularly if you have interesting combat modules available. The other big one is that the time investment doesn't scale. One combat can be a cool and interesting minigame. A hundred combats is a soul-sucking time drain. Autoresolve? Either doing the fight manually gets better results so you have to babysit every single fight to minimize losses, or autoresolve gets you at least the same result as manual in which case why did you ever spend the time? Making all this poo poo actually work is hard, so it makes sense to just punt and remove tactical combat from the game entirely.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 14:55
|
|
|
I think civ6 style where the tactical combat takes place on the strategic layer is cool and has the fun of tactical combat without the tediousness. HumanKind handled it well too IMO. And would make a lot more sense in space where spaceships can fire at really long ranges. But the AI in such games cant handle thr systems well so theyd need really good ai. If they cant make the ai fun for it, then they should skip tactical imo
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 15:35
|
|
|
Put ship designers up against the wall and just give me sub-classes for each type of ship ala Sins of a Solar Empire. Let me play around with the composition of fleets by adding more or less line frigates or PD frigates or missile cruisers or carriers, rather than having to manage eleven different weapon types and shield modifiers and crew recreational facilities for each of my ninety-seven ship classes all in order to curbstomp an AI that barely understands how to install the engines on their ships whenever a new tech unlocks. Alternatively give me Sins but with a bunch of tedious groggy 4X stuff dumped on top and I'll declare it a perfect game. I guess that's basically Distant Worlds 2? Haven't played enough to really tell but it seems close.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 15:37
|
|
|
Tendales posted:There's a lot of difficulties with attaching tactical combat to a strategic game. One is that making a decent AI for combat can be hard, particularly if you have interesting combat modules available. There are whole game series built around tactical turn-based combat. You wouldn’t complain in such a game about the game forcing you to play out a hundred combats, because that’s the game. The problem is when the strategic layer keeps producing combats that are repetitive, boring, or both. Fewer and more curated fights would lead to a better game, as would asymmetric foes built around semi-fixed tech trees and associated combat tactics.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 15:38
|
|
|
First of all, the MoO2 ship design screen has awesome music. Though MoO2 in general has awesome music. MoO2 is small enough in scale that most times, your ships are kind of like player characters, and it makes sense that you'd spend some time designing them. And MoO2 has a lot of goofy-fun weapons like the gyro destabilizer that it at least feels like the player has a lot of freedom with what kind of ships they want to make. Of course this kind of falls apart in the end game, where you can find your friendly neighbour Klackon or Sakkra empire has built dozens and dozens of relatively crappy ships, absolutely filling the combat screen on their side, and at that point you just hit AUTO and go do something else for 30 minutes while all the firing animations happen and this is obviously no fun for anybody. There's a unit designer in SMAC, but I never really tooled around with it the same way I did with MoO2, not sure why really. SMAC does automatically give you new unit designs as you climb the tech tree, so it's not really obligatory in the same sense as it is in MoO2. And of course the power move in MoO2 for the lazy is just wait until you get the plasma cannon, which even after they nerfed it (  ) does ridiculous damage, fill up some battle ships with those bad boys, go beat the Guardian, and you're pretty much set for the rest of the game.I remember the MoO2 "community" also min-maxed the ship design and tactical combat stuff so that you could build an unstoppable fleet almost out of the gate with missile ships, or something like that, but I never had the patience for that kind of play even as a kid.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 16:16
|
|
|
Smac let me build aircraft carrier submarines with the unit designer, which was fun.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 16:37
|
|
|
most games have lame unit design because 4X is a wasteland of the imagination where the biggest difference in unit parts most designers can conceive of is a gun that does 10% more damage with 20% less range or if you really wanna get kinky a rock-paper-scissors thing with shields and armor. This is not an issue in any other genre that has customization (RPGs, tactical combat games) because the people making them aren't stuck trying to replicate DOS-era game design and let the little modules have weird gimmicks that synergize in distinct ways, so you can build goofy stuff like aircraft carrier submarines and spaceships that only work at point-blank range but shoot grappling guns so they'll stay at point-blank range and have those be extremely contextually effective against someone who didn't plan for that, and also hilarious
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Mar 20, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 16:43
|
|
|
scifi 4x games are made by science fiction nerds which means they're easily distracted by dumb details that dont actually matter I don't want to give a poo poo about the loadout of each specific ship, I want to know what they were built for and what their use for the state is. I don't want to declare that this planet will have this building and personality dictate it's construction plan for the next 10 years, I want to dictate an economic plan based on available resources and stay focused on the bigger picture
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 16:50
|
|
|
there's an alternate timeline where Kohan was a really popular RTS and its ideas of army building and not-always-fatal combat took hold if you squint I guess total warhamster and stellaris have some of this at play but... army building is almost always "whatever you pile into the stack" in most 4x games, and combat is very often winner take all, which causes horrendous snowballing problems specifically thinking about the strategic/tactical problem, where you're really playing two games linked by badly welded joints, Age of Wonders is probably my poster child for this, where the tactical combat can be really fun, but most of the time it's either complaining about the auto resolve, manually fighting inconsequential battles, or if you're really really lucky, you get a roughly even battle that's entertaining! ... except you don't actually want those, because losses are bad, you want those snowballing nothing fights to insure strategic victory the games that dodge that are almost all single unit per tile games where individual losses are less catastrophic, but you often pay the price there with much less interesting combat (and frequently, daft ai) not saying there are easy answers to these problems, but man it sucks watching the 4x genre walk from rake to rake
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:00
|
|
|
The way Stellaris has a ship disengagement mechanic is pretty cool. Even after you lose a battle between two fleet doomstacks, roughly 30% of you free will have disengaged instead of outright killed, and it will get back to your capital after some time. Usually it's enough to re-build the rest of the fleet, if you haven't been skimping on your resources and shipyards, and try again.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:04
|
|
|
Tbh even in the MOO games the ship designer kinda broke the game. The AI would always build these balanced ships with missiles and laser etc while the player builds intensely minmaxed designs like unarmoured missile boats that shoot two massive volleys of missiles and then warp out.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:06
|
|
|
Oh yeah, that's the other reason why unit designers kind of suck. Because it's yet another thing that makes the AI worse, in a genre well known for difficult to make AI.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:07
|
|
|
A Wizard of Goatse posted:goofy stuff like aircraft carrier submarines and spaceships that only work at point-blank range but shoot grappling guns so they'll stay at point-blank range and have those be extremely contextually effective against someone who didn't plan for that, and also hilarious Which game is that?
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:11
|
|
|
victrix posted:you don't actually want [close battles where an in-depth tactical system can shine], because losses are bad, you want those snowballing nothing fights to insure strategic victory It's this; this is why I immediately stop paying attention to any new 4x game that advertises tactical combat or a ship designer. The two layers of gameplay are not compatible. I want the Victoria 3 war system applied to a fantasy or sci-fi game.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:11
|
|
|
Jack Trades posted:The way Stellaris has a ship disengagement mechanic is pretty cool. Even after you lose a battle between two fleet doomstacks, roughly 30% of you free will have disengaged instead of outright killed, and it will get back to your capital after some time. otoh roughly 100% of the time this just translates to the winning doomstack having to play a dumb little game of whack-a-mole for an extra half hour while they chase the same slowly diminishing loser fleet from station to station with the loser having no hope of meaningfully rebuilding in time to affect the outcome.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:13
|
|
|
Brendan Rodgers posted:Which game is that? the former is SMAC Best Friends posted:Smac let me build aircraft carrier submarines with the unit designer, which was fun. the latter is Sword of the Stars
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:14
|
|
|
I think the total war games have actually done a good job of solving the tactical battle issue, though the decisions they've made to do this are extremely controversial. For example, they've coded the AI to avoid the player if the player has an advantage, so you actually want weaker armies that the AI is willing to fight. They've added extremely strong rubberbanding where a lot of the cost of an army is in upkeep, so a force that loses an army will quickly be able to build a new one. The income from holding territory can sometimes be dwarfed by the income of winning a battle and sacking a town. There's strong restrictions on the numbers of armies you can build, which forces more max stack Vs max stack battles.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:30
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Tbh even in the MOO games the ship designer kinda broke the game. The AI would always build these balanced ships with missiles and laser etc while the player builds intensely minmaxed designs like unarmoured missile boats that shoot two massive volleys of missiles and then warp out. That just anticipated modern drone warfare. Corbeau posted:It's this; this is why I immediately stop paying attention to any new 4x game that advertises tactical combat or a ship designer. The two layers of gameplay are not compatible. I'll take separate combat mode in 4X over 1UPT, tbh.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:35
|
|
|
A Wizard of Goatse posted:most games have lame unit design because 4X is a wasteland of the imagination where the biggest difference in unit parts most designers can conceive of is a gun that does 10% more damage with 20% less range or if you really wanna get kinky a rock-paper-scissors thing with shields and armor. This is not an issue in any other genre that has customization (RPGs, tactical combat games) because the people making them aren't stuck trying to replicate DOS-era game design and let the little modules have weird gimmicks that synergize in distinct ways, so you can build goofy stuff like aircraft carrier submarines and spaceships that only work at point-blank range but shoot grappling guns so they'll stay at point-blank range and have those be extremely contextually effective against someone who didn't plan for that, and also hilarious (emphasis mine) This is a good post, IMO. Master of Orion 2 was good at what it did, but a lot of the game-play itself involves tedium because the designers wanted to make little pixel mans or ladies for you to care about, and the economical system revolves around that. You want more pixel mans, you make buildings that help make more pixel mans, etc. I realize I have heavy nostalgia glasses for this stuff, so I sort of like the pixel mens mechanic (they're so cute in the MoO2 remake!), but it leads to a game that's maybe a quarter about painting the map in your colour and the rest spent micro-managing the planets, designing ships and so on. And of course diplomacy is also easily abused in MoO2, and then sometimes the AI just seemingly randomly declares war on you, and welp. Agean90 posted:scifi 4x games are made by science fiction nerds which means they're easily distracted by dumb details that dont actually matter Master of Orion 3: The Bad One was meant to be a response to this, but it was... Well, awful. Later games not in the MoO franchise did better, but even the later Civilization games have building queues and the like.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:45
|
|
|
Spaceward Ho! remains the pinnacle of the genre.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 17:56
|
|
|
I liked how Endless Space had tactics cards for combat. It's a nice way to both have some influence on a battle (fight defensively if you have an overwhelming advantage, fight recklessly if you just need to do as much damage as possible, fight from long range then retreat later, etc.), but not have to do a full-blown tactical combat every single engagement. It's a very nice and elegant system in a lot of ways.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 18:23
|
|
|
I played Endless Space for a couple hours and nearly fell into a coma due to immense boredom. Ugh. I avoided the second game like a plague because of this.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 18:28
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:Spaceward Ho! remains the pinnacle of the genre.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 18:38
|
|
|
Dirk the Average posted:I liked how Endless Space had tactics cards for combat. It's a nice way to both have some influence on a battle (fight defensively if you have an overwhelming advantage, fight recklessly if you just need to do as much damage as possible, fight from long range then retreat later, etc.), but not have to do a full-blown tactical combat every single engagement. It's a very nice and elegant system in a lot of ways. I dunno man...I think that might be the idea but in reality most of the cards just seem to cancel each other out or you get an endless amount of card like get a small amount of salvage that doesn't scale or tiny amount of exp.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 18:42
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:Spaceward Ho! remains the pinnacle of the genre. Spaceward, Ho! certainly great, but Space Empires IV Gold is the be-all-end-all of space sims for me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 18:55
|
|
|
As a huge weirdo who really, really likes tinkering around in extensive ship designers, my favorite is still Space Empires V. (It would be Aurora, but I sadly don't have the time to spend on Aurora for the foreseeable future. Believe me, I tried but I'm too dumb for its UI.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:00
|
|
|
Coming in to play the black sheep because I picked up Distant Worlds 2 the other day and I hate that I can't micro hard enough! I went into the pre-ftl start so I could goof around and meticulously manage my expansion down to the nitty gritty details but the game actively works against you on this through the auto refit mechanic. I had designed a small mining station and I figured that would go on deposits of rare materials because those are used in small amounts so I could just have a small stockpile, then I unlocked the medium station and made a design for that to go on gas giants and asteroid fields with lots of basic materials and POOF, all my mining stations everywhere auto refit themselves to the medium station design. I ended up tuning it so that my designs will only upgrade into their own hull type but my next problem is that the construction ship UI doesn't allow for this, it will always highlight the biggest design on the UI and it's killing me. I want to play a tall empire with minimal sprawl that I can meticulously micro manage the but game is fighting me on it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:01
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:It's this; this is why I immediately stop paying attention to any new 4x game that advertises tactical combat or a ship designer. The two layers of gameplay are not compatible. nah, there are multiple examples of it being done well - Age of Wonders, Total War, and HoMM all come immediately to mind it's just hard, there are consequences to doing so, and I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the games I mentioned have somewhat simpler strategic layers that are oriented towards supporting the tactical battles also I guess none of them have ship designers and only one is (partially) sci-fi in Planetfall, though I actually think the last few Age of Wonders games are likely great models for a 4x "ship designer," in that having your base ship classes informed/influenced by overarching cultural/technological archetypes and which can then be given a few mods achieves nearly all of the ostensible goals of such a thing: you get aesthetic and tactical differentiation between different factions, you can set up interesting tactical combos and counterplay (tactical and strategic), and you restrict the design/decision space to something your AI can actually deal with
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:02
|
|
|
Dirk the Average posted:I liked how Endless Space had tactics cards for combat. It's a nice way to both have some influence on a battle (fight defensively if you have an overwhelming advantage, fight recklessly if you just need to do as much damage as possible, fight from long range then retreat later, etc.), but not have to do a full-blown tactical combat every single engagement. It's a very nice and elegant system in a lot of ways. I really like it too.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:05
|
|
|
Libluini posted:(It would be Aurora, but I sadly don't have the time to spend on Aurora for the foreseeable future. Believe me, I tried but I'm too dumb for its UI.) If you're a computer toucher then you could just play Aurora at work. Nobody will be able to tell the difference between Aurora and a particularly funky excel sheet.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:06
|
|
|
Jack Trades posted:If you're a computer toucher then you could just play Aurora at work. Nobody will be able to tell the difference between Aurora and a particularly funky excel sheet. Sadly, I'm a tech writer and therefore actually expected to produce work normal people can identify as products of said work. Also, our company is constantly making up new products and as the only tech writer, I'm kind of too overworked to do anything not work-related at work. Believe me, if I could get away with this, I would have already tried!
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:13
|
|
|
Demiurge4 posted:Coming in to play the black sheep because I picked up Distant Worlds 2 the other day and I hate that I can't micro hard enough! Did you go into the empire settings? I think they have a preset that just shuts off all automation
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:14
|
|
|
In many ways, Distant Worlds does right what MOO3 was trying to do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 19:40
|
|
|
Demiurge4 posted:I ended up tuning it so that my designs will only upgrade into their own hull type but my next problem is that the construction ship UI doesn't allow for this, it will always highlight the biggest design on the UI and it's killing me. I want to play a tall empire with minimal sprawl that I can meticulously micro manage the but game is fighting me on it. Agean90 posted:Did you go into the empire settings? I think they have a preset that just shuts off all automation Some of the sub settings could use clearer language imo, but much like distant worlds 1 you should be able to micro every ship and mining post and be able to do piecemeal retrofits/only when you want. (Even retrofitting ships one at a time as the money comes in) Just set automation to none and then turn on what you find tedious as you go. I mostly do ship design stuff for cost savings until someone needs their butts kicked/conquered The 1-2 guns on a exploration or construction ship is kinda pointless until you can steamroll a good tech advantage and upgrade civilian ship size. Some cheap mining stations won't hurt so bad to rebuild if they wouldn't have won the battle by themselves anyway. I think I've brought this up a few times before but you can make a bare bones star port on your home planet or a new colony that just has bare minimum on it and some modules for less maintenance cost, medical for population boost, and whatever boosts economy and only upgrade to a serious star port later.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 20:17
|
|
|
They kept stations shenanigans for Distant Worlds 2? Please tell me they got rid of the construction yard voodoo or mining components having a extremely low cap so it was always a waste putting more than 3(?) mining components on anything, including mining stations. Or my favorite cheese, building a single massive research station on your homeworld and capping your research for the rest of the game.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 20:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 13:47 |
|
|
On a side note I really wish there was a whole genre of civ clones like there is with moo and master of magic clones. Firaxis keeps getting sloppier every release since they don’t have any competition, civ 6 didn’t even get any code access for mods so all the mods are xml edits
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 21:20
|
|