3D, do I use it?

I have a question... I've played several games and gotten some great strategy and help from the boards and while playing with the camera I had a thought...

Does the map/game really work in 3 dimensions? If it does, is there a point to taking my ships and structures out of the plane of the ecliptic? I typically play from a 90 degree directly above view, playing with the camera from time to time during battles just to make it look pretty.

Am I missing an entire other aspect of the game?

Mick

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Although the ships are spaced out with some above and below others, the gameplay is on a linear plane. You're not missing anything other than different views of things.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

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You can manually send ships far above or below the plane, but there's not much strategic advantage to be had from doing so. Just press then press and hold D for a Homeworld-like Z adjustment for your move orders.

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Learn something new every day here

Thanks kyro - didnt know about that one!

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Also you can't control building placement on the Z-axis. It has built in height variation which you can't control. But yeah, generally speaking it's not needed much. If you absolutely have to fly through a large concentration of buildings or ships, for whatever reason, it's normally faster to fly over/under than through, but I've never actually had a game where I wanted to do that.

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Well it only applies to multiple star maps but I have a couple uses for z-axis.
First one is I like to place scouts at stars to keep an eye out, to avoid them being attacked I place them high above the star.
Second I have a defense fleet that I keep at a star so it can quickly get to where its needed, I place that fleet hi\low on the z-axis and it jumps to any star almost without moving thus getting where its needed much faster.
Third though I have heard its a bug, sometimes in multistar systems you will find that you cannot jump from one star to another, change your z-axis and you will jump no problem.

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