If no one realizes how big the ships are, then something should be done to more accurately convey the size of the ships in the game. There are no ships or objects small enough (besides fighters) to convey the relative size of the frigates and capitals. Also, as I mentioned before, the design of many frigates makes them look small.

Okay, next phase: PROVE IT.

Compare, contrast, show me hard numbers and direct me to links if you're too lazy. Present me with a scenario that displays weapons moving at sub light or at light speed combined with perfect targeting systems assume no energy dissipation from the said energy weapons.

Dumb fire weapons may not be dumb fire and they may have guidance and may move near light speed. Also tell me what the engagement range is and then show me the numbers that prove you can evade said weapon assuming it already has perfect targeting say that can hit a molecule any given distance including across solar systems (like the Nova cannon can).

On top of all that , let us assume racial exclusive technologies, phase missiles cannot be jammed for instance, or stellar converter which projects a plasma torrent that is a few miles in radius and can be constantly streamed for at least a minute now then show me how it is like a naval battle writ large.

If our targeting was perfect with aircraft with 99.9% lock and no ability to jam or disrupt do you think it would be the same? And pray tell, can submarines destroy each other by shining a flash light at one another?

What you think is not what it is. To see what it is make a time machine or go ask someone who is talented at physics, engineering, or any hard science.

You'll also need to figure out how big ships will be what their movement is like and if they have inertial stabilizers or nullifiers or any other random techno babble technology.

Yeah, sure... they're the EXACT same Danielost (sarcasm in the event that you do not comprehend the fact that I am disagreeing with your poor assertion/analogy).

Forgive me for not reading the whole thread - I am also new to these forums / the game as a whole. This idea may have been brought up before.

The way I see it, the ships ARE moving. Have you ever been zoomed in fairly close to some ships, and they seem to 'slide' off camera until you reposition it? My take is that the ships are moving, but it is very difficult to perceive on the bigger vessels because of the scale involved. Remember the ships aren't actually as big as they appear in comparison to the planets; also you cannot see movement of a large vessel against a backdrop of stars because the distances involved are so vast that relative to the background they might as well be stationary.

I havnt read through the 2nd to 4th pages, but are you talking about dog fighting sort of movement or tactical movement? 'Cause those two are entirely different things, dogfighting movement would look entirely stupid and make everything hard to control (I enjoyed the Admiral to captain thing that some1 had on page 1   ), tactical movement however might simply mean larger ships moving forward, swinging around another larger target or simply rotating to a better angle to improve firepower, Every single ship doing this would unfortunely look something close to dog fighting due to the amount of ships this game can have, but just having capital ships having this sort of tactical depth would be a good thing, right?

I also think that things like this would be tottaly unneccasary if more ships would have gun implacements along their sides and not just at their front (This would give the impression of tactical movement if more ships can move from place to place and still fire from their sides/broadside or w/e). I hate most of my ships having to only be able to fire from their front! It makes it horribly difficult to maunuever, and actually get fire on a target that is destroying your battle plans quickly, most of the time I just see my ships flying around and rotating constantly all the time because they simply cant focus their firepower on some annoying ship, it also makes it impossible to do a decent amount of damage on a retreating foe, or simply moving foe.

Again, I also think a better variaty of ships would add a needed tactical depth to this game without making everything move constantly, a good amount of lower strengh ships with only frontside fire would be alot better if you had more bigger ships with sidewise firepower aswell, without having to be a captial ship or some sort of command post.

I'd better stop there, as I have probaly written to much! And still have more I want to say.   

But on a general note, I love this game! But I believe that it needs alot more tactical depth and unit depth, the tactics and variaty, aswell as general gameplay of the battles seem really poor when you put it next to the depth and coolness of the rest of the game.

No lasers in this game, or 99.99% of all scifi games. Space combat with lasers is boring to look at, because there is literally nothing to look at. What modern scifi calls "laser" is some sort of weapon that fires shaped bolts of plasma in an magnetic field or any such other possible explanation, thought up by people who have way too much time on their hands to calculate all that stuff and obviously need to go out more, for nicely coloured lines flashing between ships. Since no weapons in this game impact the very millisecond they are fired, they are all railgun equivalent and thus can be dodged.



Battlecruisers aren't supposed to be moving, they are supposed to be large blocks of pain that laugh at the puny damage your ships do to it and then swat those same ships aside without effort. Frigates however are those tiny little mobile things that are designed to fall apart if someone sneezes at them but can take advantage of the battleships being large immobile blocks of pain by making sure those large immobile guns of pain can't actually hit them while they slowly gut the battleship. However, even if they didn't actually evade, Homeworld managed to imprint a sense of movement and fluidity on the player and this game fails utterly at doing the same thing. Hence, the complaints.

I love how you state the obvious and then reveal the misnomer yet fall for the same thing when you talk about the weaponry in this game.

And the beams don't impact the very millisecond they fire? Funny it seems like they did unless I missed something - show me a video and high light it for me or slow down the frames. Then again, you ought to consider that scaling a game to quantifiable data is pretty hard (down right stupid) but what has been said is that the weapons are 99.9% accurate or some such.

So on the .1% off chance that something misses, yeah, I guess you can call it dodging but that's the best you'll ever get.

Here's a bit of added irony - you posted on the forums, you rely on those people who make those calculations to give you some evidence of whether you're right or wrong. Do not be so ungrateful.

I agree. I really don't care how big the ship is, I care about its acceleration on screen, I care about the size of the shot, and I care about how fast the shot moves. If a ship can outrun a autocannon, who cares how big it is?

I've got a degree in aerospace engineering, I focused on orbital mechanics in school. First, all movement in space is orbital motion. Everything in space moves in an ellipse, circle, or hyperbola. To change a ships motion in space it must be given impulses. These impulses merely change the size and eccentricity of the ellipse of the orbit.

In a fleet of ships, every ship would have a different orbit. Albeit a small difference between two closely space ships, if this were to span across two entire fleets, the difference could be huge across the two different ends. No game I know of has utilized this kind of motion.

There could semi-realistically be some ship motion relative to each other but I'm pretty sure it would put a fairly large and unnecessary load on the CPU and GPU. Furthermore it's not remotely possible to give fully realistic motion to SOASE. Calculating trajectories is extremely processor intensive. Not to mention realistic motion would make the whole game just that much more difficult to keep track of and play. Plus to make a fully realistic simulation of motion, structures would need to orbit planets and planets would need to orbit stars, completely throwing off the mechanics of the game. I've thought about games employing a physics engine to do realistic space motion, I just don't think its going to happen for a while.

On top of the difficulty of implementation and gameplay that this would require, when I think of past strategy greats, I don't recall a whole lot of motion. Starcraft, Warcraft, C&C...the only movement is running to a spot. Then you just sit there and shoot until you have to give chase.

My two cents as engineer, programmer and gamer.

As a fellow engineer and an avid science fiction literature fan I can say you make a good, but unfortunately irrelevant point. As much as I would love to see a game or movie centered around realistic relativistic space combat, it will probably never exist because it is considered boring to look at or play. Every form of scifi in movies and games is based on naval combat, with ships existing in some form of pseudo-newtonian space where most of the troublesome aspects of gravity and impulse are ignored for ease of representation. It has nothing to do with CPU capabilities or traject calculations, but everything with the laws of "cool".

PS: Any game developers out there: please, please, please make a game featuring near c combat on a battlefield the size of a planetary system, for the hardcore military and science masochists among us



Now, as a gamer. Neither Starcraft, Warcraft or C&C were designed for CPU's capable of handling a lot of movement in combat. They were also displaying ground combat, not space combat. Also, those games are 10 years old. I would like to think this industry is still capable of a little innovation in a ten year period, no? More recent games like COH clearly show how easy it is to have units in constant AI controlled movement during combat.

The reason is that today, we have these things called quad cores, with superscalar pipelining, multithreading and a lot of other fancy extras. Very neat stuff, orders of magnitude better than the old junk that existed when Starcraft was created. Having a bit of movement in combat won't be much of a performance impact, but it will be a lot of extra programming work. And seeing how the devs apparently skimped on this and a lot of other details and polish, it seems the extra work involved was the deciding factor here. Another year (maybe two) in development and this game might have become a great innovation in 4X instead of yet another bland and mediocre RTS.

Yes, slow moving, but stationary? It makes sense... but is it visually appealing?

I don't know, when the modding files come out, I'll see if I can change behaviour of some frigates to that of bombers, only slower... for shits and giggles, maybe it will look good!

Ok, well I'm going to roll up my sleeves and dance about in the grand geek war, er discussion, concerning 'space ships moving while they blow each other up'.

Here it is to the point:

The basic reason the ships don't move around while engaged in their deep space Tralfagar is that they have short range weapons and can take a massive amount of damage. The difference between the omnious 'ever inching forward' manuver of the Imperial Star Destroyers and the Sins ships is that the SD's never actually got there so they didn't look so silly.

If we were to mod the game to where the ships could take only 1/10th of the damage that they can now and doubled the range of all the weapons, they would mostly die while moving twords the enemy fleet.

If we modded that and put even more attention into the formations (say even different flight groups within a fleet which could be ordered to bait, flank or hold) we would have a rich tactical enviornment for our high stakes, white knuckle, six second space battles that would leave alot of people complaining "Dude! My Caps are poppin' like bloody Rice Krispies man!".

I think that anyone would agree that the exact and percise nature of how you manuvered your ships in that scenario would be vitaly important to victory or defeat. In contrast, the way things are now, its not as important about the details of manuver as they heavy hulls are going to forgive tactical blunders that will only see modest damage delivered before they can be rectified and the enemy is going to have to close to where where raw power will tell.

If you just 'made the ships move when they fight' without adjusting the offense/defense ratio, they would just run around like dogs after their tails and it would look real silly. You have to ask where are they going to go.

But manuver is always imporant in warfare regardless of wether or not you can bob and weave around shots. Manuver on a larger scale creates situations where even if you have less total power in a given theatre, you can get it into proper position with what you do have while the other guys pointy sticks are in the wrong place and by the time they have arrived you have equaled the odds. For example the American Fleet at Midway.

But Sins is not a tactical game (manuver in the face of the enemy), its a grand scale strategic game. To tweak the tactical game is going to do things to the gameplay elements. For example, if the gravity wells were huge, we'd have alot more room to increase the weapon ranges and could have more manuver without needing to take the ship hulls down to egg shell durability. But, that would skew things as far as moving your ships around the map. Now it would take a bloddy long time to go anywhere as the map is skewed twords the tactical. Thats just one example too, there would be all kinds of other balance tap dances that could be affected by tweaks like this.

So anyway, I think Sins did well as a release with the way its set up now. I have some idea about seeing a mod in the future with fragile ships and long range weapons though. Maybe semi fragile ships, long range weapons and then high costs per ship (so that theres less of them to control) and it would be very different.

I belive that would be all that's required to see moving ships.

GalCiv 2's combat viewer has ships moving about as a purely aesthetic effect. It's horrible. You'll find dreadnoughts dancing around in circles for no apparent reason. Missiles can be seen coming out of the back of their launchers. Gun shots are fired at absolutely nothing, only to have a ship at the other end of the screen deliberately go off course just to hit the cannon slugs. And ships explode on screen quite a while after they've been 'destroyed'. Sins' combat is MUCH, MUCH better as it is, even if the ships don't move. And at least fighters and bombers are moving, BTW, and shots are fired with some logic. There's a reason why the ships have things called shields and armor on them.

In fact, this system is more realistic, more like real naval battles from WW2. Ships move only to come in and out of range and to adjust firing arcs or dodge torpedoes, while fighters and bombers swarm around shooting stuff. The 'dodge torps' aspect would be out of context for Sins - there are no torpedoes - but optimizing fire-arcs and ranges are things that the player can very easily do.

Well, the way I see it, the main reason *some* ships look silly in combat is because their design does not imply a turret-based gun platform (think Star Destroyers) but more like a forward-firing fighter type craft (like "Defiant" cruiser from Star Trek, or one of those big Kilrathi ships from Wing Commander). So it wouldn't make sense for a capital ship to gallivant around, but take your Vasari Skirmisher for example. That ship *looks* fast... it looks like its meant to fly around the battlefield, blasting stuff with its chin-mounted cannons. I know it's a 500m long frigate, but the design is that of a nimble craft, not a hulking behemoth.

I think some ship classes should be made to move in battle, but not all. Here's the added level of complication for ya.