Ship design and tactical combat

[Zaimat]

Welcome jp161, good to have you with us.

We hope to bring in Horizon some of the situations that was so interesting in the shows and let you be the one making the decisions.

It's not easy since we can't hard-code stories in a strategy game but with a bit of character/culture/uniqueness to each race and a lot of imagination we can bring a different and a unique playing experience with similar interesting situations
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Horizon - Lead Designer

[Artagel]

Hello all. New here, although I recognize some of you from that other place..

In any case, just wanted to say hello, and I am very much looking forward to this game.

I do have some questions that I have not seen answered. (maybe I have just missed it) It seems that in this game you can only play as the humans and only begin the game at a specific point in time. Am I correct?

Also, I only see 1-3 of each race's ship design in the current ship archives.. Will there be more ship designs, or simply 1-3 graphics throughout the game?


Finally, I would just like to say that although I am watching this forum and game with much interest, I am also being very cautious. Having been through the emotional and hype ringer with the last 4x space game, I tend to be rather cynical with things such as features and release promises.

Hopefully you guys can fulfill my good expectations and not the bad ones! So good luck, keep up the good work, I like what I see and hear so far!
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You have been assigned to planet Vlorch.. home of the slaughtering rat-people.

[Therlun]

we get flooded with dissapointed moo3 fans!!

while im cautious too, i dont think hype is the right word.
we have to work hard on every piece of information!

the "only humans" approach may sound very limited, that was my first thought too.
but then its not a normal 4X game, with all races starting at the same conditions.

[Sobriquet]

[Therlun]

i played botf.
but i dont remember anything special about the races there.

the klingons got a moral boost if they were at war or bombed a planet, the federation got a moral malus for the same things...
victory was nothing special either.
you built as many ships as possible and conquered the other races.

[Sobriquet]

So you got the feeling that no matter which race you played, the path to victory was the same?

To use the oft used reference of MOO. Are the Psilons really much diferent from the Klackons in terms of choices for winning the game? Does it make much difference which race you play? They all seem to play basically the same to me.

So only being able to play the humans is not too far off from how most games are played anyway.
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i am sofa king we todd it

[Therlun]

i think in moo1 it DID make quiet a big difference.

as meklar you could be powerful with few planets.
silicoids played very different because you had a huge empire but with mostly lightly populated planets until the midgame.
many races like darloks and bulrathi had only one real strength, and to win on harder levels you had to use that strength strategically or you were toast.
as psilons you had the only advantage of getting techs faster and a bit more of them, you needed to survive until the endgame to bring up your trump.
as klackons you could spread like a plague in the beginning, but your economic advantage got considerably weaker in the mid and late game stages, AND you had some technology disadvantages which you could overcome with numbers only in the beginning.

some races were strong in early stages, and you had to ensure you stay strong as the game progressed.
some played out their advantage in the endgame and you had to make it that far alive.
some had an all-porpose advantage, that needed clever use to be helpful at all.

combined with the great technology system (which i already wrote a fanboi reply on ) and the different, partly randomized traits of the ai empires, not only the races were different but every GAME-RACE combination depending on the set of enemies, their traits and techs avaiable to you.

on the other hand, in moo2 there wasnt nearly as much difference between the races. the incredibly bad "burn in hell" pick system was a nightmare.
nothing was "unique"... not only that there were only a very limited number of picks, they also were either nearly useless, or completely overpowered....

p.s. the more i stay in this forum, the deeper my love to moo1 gets! all this posts just show me: no game has ever come close to moo1 in many aspects.
im drifting into nostalgic blindness...

[DeckPrism]

I was skimming the Official strat guide for MOO1 a couple of nights ago and I think one of the reasons that races played so different is because of the simplicity of the game. Meks could use more factories, Klackon's pop was more productive. Both help toward a similar end, but by subtly different means that could actualy have a gameplay effect. This fine distinction was possible because there were only a few interacting things (pop, factories, tech, etc)

In MOO2 you could have had a similarly distinctive group of races if the top half dozen custom race stratagies had actualy been imposed on the default races. While I think the flex of the cutom races added to the game, the player could beat the AI that way. In some sense, players discovered what the designers should have found in terms of the distinctive race characteristics. Again, race design was simple because only a few things really mattered.

MOO3, well al lot was hidden. You could tweak a base race, but there were some things to it that you could never change. There seemed to be a lot more variables for reasons of realism (habitability rings), but things were so huge, you got teraforming tech so easy and it was so cheap and you couldn't tell how much it was costing you anyway that ... It is like a dart board where each dart represents some variable most of which you can't change, but each dart also has this 3d bell curve associated with it. Each race would have 6 darts on the board positioned different from everyone else, but the bell curves do their little superposition thing and in the end nearly everyone ends up averaging near the center with little distinctive difference. Or, one or two darts came to dominate everything. (In particular the Psilons were underpowered research wise in that even with their boni, since other races could so out populate them, numbers overpowered quality. ) Again though, the process whereby it got to that point was not simple, it was complex, which meant that it was more difficult to say 'Oh these guys do this one thing well and no one else does.'

Both MOO1 and MOO2 had 'similar' combat with ships laden with specials performing functions. MOO3 moved away from 'specials' on ships to attempt a more realistic combat. Again the style move from simple (fun) modifiers to complex realistics (some which were broken ).

Simplicity can be unbalanced, but with complexity you may not know why or how or if something is unbalanced.

I favor large, simple, elegant, with specials. Hold the brokeness, extra balance. And I'd like a tall heap of mystery/challenge that manages to stay that way on my hundredth time through the game. Oh, and a diet Mountain Dew to go, please.
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Do not let light shine upon your opponent's mind through a hole in your body.

[Sobriquet]

[Therlun]

yes i have to admit it was not perfect in the aspect of "difference".
that genious tech system ( ) prevented a optimal research tree, but other aspects of moo1 had superior and inferior strategies.

some areas had to be done all the same, again and again, on harder difficult levels or you would lose.
and with some minor exceptions winning the game was all the same with every races.
either you outstripped all the other ones with population and won a vote sooner or later, or you got a big enough tech advantage and simply trounced them.
only the way to that ends was different for each race. (not as much as my fanboi post might indicate but more then in some other games... )

one ot the other great parts of moo1 was its planet management.
macro-managament on its best, yet room for stretegy.

[Zaimat]

[Ravana]

Sorry jp161, I would have said hello on a previous post, but I'd got it into my head you've been with us longer then that. I'm obviously having Horizon-less stress!

Of course I think we all share Therlun's feelings. Too many times disparate tech turned out to be nothing more than stepping stones to get to what you really wanted and would actually use. It seems that only the AI in 4X games bothers with actually producing working variants of newly researched techs, and even then they are quickly superceeded in the natural process. I would extend this analogy further to say that for the longest time, the only way I saw certain weapon types used in MoO was when they were fired at me.

"Sir, we've just been hit by a graviton beam from the enemy flag."

"Any damamge crewman?"

"None sir."

"Replay it for me would you, my monitor. Oh, so that's what it does! Now I know."

"Orders admiral?"

"Blow it up with the stellar converter crewman, on my mark."

Not very inspiring, now is it. I'm certainly hoping that Zaimat's hints foreshadow the "luxury" of using more of the technologies we research over our period of time as emperor, and then governor of the known galaxy. It would make all the effort worthwhile, and make it feel like our technology, on which all races will so heavily rely, is something to be cherished and remembered fondly. I certainly have that feeling of rememberance for the lasers in IG2. Quad lasers saved my life, as did the onset of the corvette-class ships more than once.

[Warcaster]

as far as tech research goes i would like to see the ability to 'steal' tech by capturing enemy vessels. i modded my star trek armada tech tree so that the uss defiant would gain a cloaking device once i had captured a romulan warbird. it adds a little twist to the usual 'spying' for new tech. plus running round the map trying to catch a crippled warbird without destroying it is very fun.

warcaster

[pilum]

I apologise if i am dropping back a few posts back along the thread but i have just joined the board.

Firstly i would like to say that it appears that the dev team are people who understand the 4X genre and indeed do seem to have some passion about their product and are listening to the boards, as opposed to other development houses which churn out things that they are paid to do - congrats.

On my front i am a turn based strategy fan playing most games when they come out, but finding myself returning to certain games, MOO2, botf, fallout, jagged alliance, imperium galactica etc.

Anyway onto my post. I noticed that previously posts stated that having the ability to play different races in the moo series did not affect gameplay. I disagree with this post, when you got the ability to change the attributes of your race i agree (because you could tailor make your race attributed) however if you played the stock races play was different. with the psiolons you just tried to keep out of trouble build up your technology and then just sweep the board in a mass expansion - there was no real diplomacy involved as you had all the technology. I think that if you have a human only race then (if not already planned) you should have the ability to amend the attributes of the human race.

In terms of ship construction - i liked the ability to customise your ships and refit them (ala moo2 patch) as you could building ships with specific purposes (monitor ships, point defence ships etc). however i must admit that this tended to rely on specific technologies. hence i like the fact that you do not get all technologies in each game.

With respect to ship combat, i noticed that an inititative system was proposed. I must admit i like the inititative system in games such as jagged alliance or fallout where you had action points. However i can see how this may not be "appropriate" as why should a ship not be able to fire because it has moved further... what are those damn gunners doing - having lunch

I realise that i am droning on now - so i will conintue my views/ideas in other posts

thanks for listening to me.

regards

nick

[Therlun]

boy i swear, if you mention moo2 one more time im going nuts!

down with the useless mirco hell named moo2!
long live the unreached mastery of TBS strategy, MoO1!

[pilum]

Moo1 is for antiquated commodore64 users, that is why they built moo2 (oppps sorry lets call it frank from now on to aviod being flamed).

so they designed "frank" as the sucessor to moo1 - i.e. an improvement and evolution..

eerrrr... error in logic -- does not compute moo3 followed "frank" and was pile of poo....

system shutdown....

[Zaimat]

[Quantum]

I am curious, is there any chance to have a "fire when in range"? So if say a ship moves within range, it fires regardless of whose move it is? (Although higher initiate may be able to fire first)

[ForesterSOF]

Variety is nice but balance is the number one priority in my book.
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You have two choices in life; Explore and Learn, or Vegetate

[AerionIstari]

Generally, I do think the options should be balanced and meaningful, however the word "limited" worries me a little. So before I answered that poll, I'd really like to know just 'how limited' are we talking here? Too limited, and you might as well not HAVE a ship design. It becomes just a gimmick to list on the box. If pressed to answer, I'd have to vote for mega-options just because I'd err on the side of more options rather than less.

The one thing I think MoO3 did right was ship design. My only complaint is I think there should be some limited advantage to older technologies in ship designs. I also think that technology should not go obsolete almost as fast as you get it the way it did in the release MoO3. There should also never be a "best" weapon or technology. Every technology should have strengths and weaknesses.

By far, the most enjoyable part of 4X space games to me is designing my own ships and putting together fleets to tackle tough opponents.