So to begin with, why don't we ask the devs to implement, when the camera is zoomed past a particular point it starts to move subtly, a bit to the left, a bit to right... but SUBTLY; it worked in Homeworld and I can't imagine it being to hard on the computer. This subtle movement would give the impression of drifting ships, rather than sitting ships - Adama's idea, incidentally. At least in the sense of drifting ships, we can compare to HW.

The only ships that I know of in HW2 to move other than fighters, bombers, and corvettes were destroyers, for their broadsides. Nothing else apart from chasing down enemy ships...

Speaking of which... could we ask the devs to implement an attack move system? I know that people have complained that ships don't really fire on the move...

Who asked about performance hits? There would be some depending on how many individual units you're dealing with and how robust your PC is. Moving objects increases the complexity of the collision detection among other things, but the biggest hit would come from the AI trying to plot courses around other ships to avoid them. I doubt it would bring the game to a crawl unless you were dealing with thousands of ships though, Sins seems to be designed well enough to handle large battles already.

In modern (well, early '90s) ground combat tactics we used maneuvers to get armor into position or to get out of a bad place. In reality, combat maneuvers are about getting yourself into a position of advantage or out of a position of disadvantage. When you see soldiers diving for cover they're doing that to minimize their disadvantage by getting behind cover or concealment, not to dodge bullets. When you see tanks running at full throttle across an open field they aren't doing that to dodge fire, they're doing that to minimize the amount of time that they are fully exposed which was more of an issue of not giving your enemy time to shoot at you than it was a matter of making yourself harder to hit. And, incidentally, even with 20th century technology it was pretty easy to hit a moving target while you were moving yourself. In all of these cases you have an element that is almost completely absent in space, you have terrain. With the absense of terrain tactical maneuving would be completely different, more like aerial combat than anything else just without the altitude and gravity based maneuvering. Since I have no real experience in naval tactics I can't comment on what they do beyond what I've seen and read, but again my impression in most cases (save very small craft) is that they're moving to get into firing position and minimize exposure of key vessels.

Now if the cinematics are important, just track a fighter or bomber and zoom in, those things dance all over the place in a big fight and should give you plenty of motion to watch

Personally, I never really noticed it myself since I'm always moving the camera around (or tracking bombers) anyway. I think that any sort of uncontrolled camera motion would be more annoying that anything else. Moving for position is already handled by the game, with the absense of 'tactical' features in the battlefield they're left with the only tactical concern being range. I'm pretty sure I've watched my capships with forward firing weapons turn to face opponents so the game already has that aspect covered.

Wrong:
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, but yes even in Nexus they don't have to move.

Do you know the word "immersion" ?
Sometimes there a things in games just to add to the immersion, but have barely a effect to the actual gameplay, but it helps many players to get more into the game, you should understand that, and even respect that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4WXX0VXCR8&feature=related (speed up x2) Just dont asume that Nexus is a arcade game...if you do you are damn wrong. (And just to mention in Nexus you don't have that many Ships in fight actually, it's even slow, but far more immersive and tactical than other Games.)

Sidenote, in Nexus the ships have sometimes to move because you can destroy specific Parts(devices) of the ships, and yes actually in sins it would not matter because there is no such feature, that needs more movement, i agree.

I hope you are kidding? Hell, Asteroids had moving ships and combat back in the 70s. Did you ever play Star Control? Freespace? Pirates of the Caribbean? And if you look at land-based games, they are rife with fluid combat from the 90s on. Even the most recent Star Wars game has ships moving in space when they fight - not all of them, but most of them. And no realism value? Last time I checked, things had inertia. The closest corollary to space combat would be navy battle and those ships don't ever stand still.

Sins is a great 4X game, but the combat is dreadfully dull and uninspired. It was the first thing that hit me negatively about the game. I build this badass fleet and when it goes into combat, it sits there - combat is static.

But this a 4X game, not a RTS game. So, I chalk that up as an intended game feature to reduce RTS micromanagement and system requirements. Combat, though, is far short of the glorious fluidity I was expecting.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy the game. Everything else is pretty solid. The combat just is not what I was expecting.

It would be a pretty cool idea, (since most ships fire forward) to have ships drift backwards abit after firing , and then compensate using their engines (2-3 engine bursts) to move close again.

some more movement would be nice.
I believe ships dont move around much because they are designed to have weapons just at the front (most of them) and no turnable turrets that fire in (almost) any direction. (for balancing?)

It would be nice to have ships with turrets that move around to let them move around in battles. But on the other side it would be harder to target ships and the stats of ships have to change too?

Saven05 also had a great point, I just re-read his statement. Without damage based on hit location (rear sides etc) this whole discussion is meaningless without terrain. Frigates dodging incoming fire in space doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless said projective was ballistic in nature... hmmm I think we could have another discussion regarding realism and I don't want to have that. WHAT IS MORE FUN!?

It sorta bugs me too that they just sit there, shooting, until they either kill what they are shooting at or die. However, I'm willing to put up with it, except I really think we should be able to set our ships up with a sort of 'pain threshold' where they automatically retreat if they are getting torn up.

Maybe there is a way to do that already and I just haven't figured it out.

A Button to crash into other ships (suicide) would be nice.
Let's ram our biggest ships in the enemies ships or planets just before they explode!

...there should be a shipdesigner to design your ships *dreaming of MoO2*

I played Sword of the Stars a few days ago and the battles with the targetable shipsystems were great! you could disable the engines or aim on every turret and other parts of the ship. If you destro the tank of a tanker - there is no fuel for the rest of the fleet. But it's unplayable in multiplayer because its just stuttering the whole time (if the other player has low fps - even with lowest settings available). (

While not having played much in the way of Sins, I have played quit a bit of HW/HW2. The way I see this debate (perhaps too weak a word) and the way it seems is that in Sins, we are encouraged to keep a mostly hands off approach when it comes to battles. Whereas in HW/HW2 it was very much to your advantage to take a somewhat hands on approach because with some ships if you maneuvered your ships the other ship's main weapon(s) would not have the firing arc to shoot at your ships. Think the Ion Cannon frigates and the like.

From my limited play time, I see Sins as a 3Dish environment, and us players don't seem to be able to directly give movement orders in the Z axis, just the X and Y. I could easily be wrong, if I am someone please enlightenment.

Now the point I think people are getting caught up on is this is a Strategy game, not a large scale Tactical game which most of HW/HW2 maps were. Granted, some of them were pretty large, but for the most part it was tactics, and not strategy that took precedence. With Sins the way I see it is all about building and managing the support structure, and moving the ships to the right place, and then letting the local commanders (aka unit/fleet AIs) manage the battle with minimal input from the players.


My .02 dollars worth.

There is no reason to allow individual ship movement in combat other than axis rotation (i.e. for broadsides...but as has been brought up, the majority of ships seem to have most weaponry mounted in the fore sections). We've reached the point where accuracy is such that even with modern weapons, we have very good accuracy levels on ground, sea, and air targets...maneuvering is no longer done to directly to avoid fire, but rather to obtain tactical positions of superiority (i.e. cover or higher ground, etc.). In space, there is very few situations where one location would have a much greater tactical advantage over another (and those are already covered by Sins with gravity well ship movement speeds).

Now, fleet movements based around fleet formations, a la Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series would be an improvement to Sin's combat system, but then again Sins would have to be expanded to accommodate greater ship speeds, and somehow incorporate time-lag into orders/responses, and I don't see that being too much fun in a video game.

Also, to the couple of people that feel the need to throw out the "LOL Realism? We don't fight in space, so it's already not realistic, lulz!!!", honestly, go shove it. Just because something doesn't occur in real life doesn't mean it can't behave realistically, which is what the major argument in this thread (and all of the previous ones about movement...) is about: whether it makes sense to have caps running in and strafing each other pell mell when there is zero tactical sense in doing so considering the environment they are fighting in, or whether the current system is good enough (since I certainly can't see a system style like Campbell's working in a video game, even if I think it's the most realistic naval/space combat system I've read about).

is there no NAVY EXPERT in this forum   

PLEAAASSSSEEEEE as im loosssing my mind

ps all those that would like moving ships seem to base their opinion on the old styl of navel watrfair BEFORE they had jets (game dos have jet equivalent) i may be wrong abouth this though

so im despratly looking for a modern day navel expert pls pls pls pls