The enhanced Warp Interdiction system IS easy to pick up and understand. It needs minimal thought and can be easily explored by trying it out. Also I think todays gaming community is more open to experimentation, less turorials and walls of text are needed.
And why should discussion be redundant? Now at the time close to the design documentation (it is prpbably allready done but by the sound of the devs still pretty loose) gameplay discussion is still reasonable.
The problem for me personally is that most the discussion from the old forum still apply to battlescape and most of the best ideas concerning warp, weapons, UI or flight mechanics were allreedy posted.
We need those old forums online to reference those posts.
Assuming a suitable mix of ship sizes, I think thereâs room for combat at just about every range and most styles to be viable. The really tricky one under Newtonian flight mechanics is close range combat. You can force it by giving ships weapons with stupidly short firing ranges, but I think it makes more sense for close range combat to be seen as a small fighters vs larger or capital ships type scenario. Fighters would then engage with other fighters at medium ranges, while frigates and larger ships would take on enemies of similar sizes to themselves at long range.
And sometimes, if INovae plays things right, youâll just see two battleships pull up along side one another and blow the ever loving crap out of each other.
I think interception at high speeds needs to be considered less from the point of view of the attacking parties â this âhow are we supposed to catch them when theyâre flying at a bajillion mph!!!â stuff really doesnât amount to much more than concerns over whether a particular preferred trapping or combat technique will work â and more from the point of view of the traveller. Travel â particularly space travel â is an inherently boring endeavour. It either needs to be made more fun and interesting, or it needs to be eliminated. Eliminating travel kinda sorta breaks things, especially in an MMO setting, so ways of making it something other than staring at a nearly static screen need to be brainstormed.
One of the ways to make travel more interesting is to make it dangerous. This means that players need to keep an eye on their scanners and other instruments while travelling in order to make sure theyâre not about to be attacked. This is where I prefer JBâs warp model over the frequency based one, as interception and warp field merging doesnât halt travel. It turns combat into part of the journey. For larger ships, it even makes arrival at their destination a viable escape route! And if one favours durable ships and âslowâ warp speeds, you could end up with combat lasting 10s of minutes, with the arrival time essentially acting as a countdown timer to when the attackers will either have to disable their target, or break off their attack.
I still think thereâs room for frequencies, or some other kind of advanced management of the warp system (and, well, every system, really; I like the idea of having an âadvancedâ mode for just about everything on your ship), but Iâm no longer convinced their place is in the realm of interdiction.
Exactly my thoughts on the travel/battle thematic. I want to see this realized, I want to see dynamic moving battles instead of (just) fixed backgrounds or stadions. Not that those arenât cool too but its something that will definetly stand out and be worth it.
The attackers getting more and more agressive as they try to disperse the enemy reinforcments on route to the main battle. In the end they fail and are dropped right into the center of enemy flak fire and crushed by a flod of deadly projectiles. Had they suceeded the battle for the station might not have been lost.
Can you elaborate further? What advanced functions could you imagine and what would they affect?
I was wondering the same thing. Iâm a big believer in depth of gameplay, but I figured that the raw warp system would have enough challenges in it.
In general, the more nimble your ship, the less skill required. The more evasive your destination, the more skill required. Flying a nimble fighter to a large planet requires the least skill. Trying to chase down a fighter with another fighter requires the most skill. Stuff that lies in the middle includes rendezvous with a friendly fleet, and intercepting an enemy fleet - while flying ships that vary in performance. Intercepting a battleship with another battleship while both are on the move is not easy.
Warp frequencies and other modal changes might have a role in combat. For example, if there are warp-seeking missiles, the guy firing the missile may have to lock to your current warp frequency before firing. That frequency may be determined by the game according to the size or configuration of your ship (and accurately figuring that out for an enemy ship could be a skill test). In an effort to reduce your warp signature on the frequency which the missile is looking for, you can âdetuneâ your warp frequency, but it will also reduce your warp performance, costing maneuvering and velocity for a given power setting - perhaps while boosting heat generation, broadband warp signature detection etc.
If there are submarine-like âwarp noise makersâ, then a pilot might kick out a noise maker on his warp frequency and then detune his shipâs warp drive and evade. The evasion would be sub-optimal, but the combination might be all thatâs needed to evade a missile thatâs been detected early enough.
Detuning would be a skill test itself, where if you mess with the frequency too much or too quickly, it could do damage to your warp drive, or just shut it down entirely; stall your engine. And the only quick way to restart is to have a larger ship come along and give you a jump start. Though for the sake of gameplay, the engine would reset after a time, but youâd be dead in space. If you flew near a gravity well in an effort to evade, you might very well end up contacting the surface.
Some pilots might even get clever and go into a fight with a detuned warp drive. If a missile is sent their way, they can retune their drive to nominal again and have a better chance of escaping.
Restarting a stalled warp drive could also be a skill test. The stall has misaligned a bunch of pieces in the engine, and it falls to the player to sort them out again. Or, using a more traditional treatment, itâs on a timer and the gear you buy determines the length of that timer. (rolls eyes)
The roll of the eyes was for the gear changing the length of the timer. Timers are pretty standard fare, but donât constitute entertainment in and of themselves. The rampant reliance on gear to decide so much nauseates me, resulting in what Kichae once called something like The Battle of the Hangar, because you win or lose by configuring your gear back at base, not by what you do in the field.
In this situation, in order to create real entertainment, there would be an engineering aspect to the game. This particular skill test would be one of many engineering tasks throughout the game, keeping busy those players who are interested in engineering (or tinkering with stuff, whatever). The more general pattern is that players improve systems that are, by default, automated. In this case, the crew can wait for the warp drive to restart, or somebody who is good at engineering can tackle it. That person would also address combat repairs, which could get really interesting if they have lots of leeway in innovating jury rigged solutions.
Just as I would want the gameâs combat system to allow for some creativity by combat commanders, I would want the engineering system to allow for some creativity by its players. A minigame doesnât really do justice to what Iâm after.
This is primarily for an MMO, of course, but it can be applied to a degree in smaller-scale games.
Not directly related to the main topic, still
Having âminigamesâ for the sake of dodging a simple timer is not something that ends well IMO. It just becomes a repetitive thing where itâs essentially still a timer, except now you have to do the countdown manually. (Not to mention the annoying feeling of âI could be doing this fasterâ if you are not willing to play the minigame) Iâd rather have a battle of the hangars situation instead of some flat minigame. If something similar is to be implemented, it should take time to learn how to use it (maybe even hide the rules, so people have to experiment and figure out how they can get better results).
Tracking, for one. I was thinking along lines very similar to what JBâs since mentioned.
Other ideas I have floating around in my head are more related to the idea of the warp frequency being a slider; there are other warp sliders one could imagine: Warp field radius, warp field strength, things like that. Given a finite amount of energy to the warp engines, different combinations of field radius, field strength, and field gobbilygook could result in higher warp speeds, or making your warp field more difficult to merge with, etc.
I would be very leery of putting in controls that alter the basic operation of warp drives. Movement speeds, disruption ranges, etc Those things constitute the gameâs movement system. I was going to offer that improving performance could be implemented at a heavy cost of side-effects, but I donât even like doing that much.
In my opinion, from a design standpoint, itâs much safer to explore ways that the warp drive can affect other aspects of gameplay. For example:
Let players play with the warp frequency to alter how sensors work when applied to them. The player might choose to trigger a fog-bank type effect on a particular sensor band or bands, at a cost of drive performance. The player canât see out of the fog bank on those bands, but nobody can see through the center of it either. This is an expansion of the missile scenario. Ships could engaging in blocking (i.e. jamming) activity. Imagine deploying a âmine fieldâ of such fog generators, creating an interplanetary fog bank. I suspect that such things should probably also exist naturally, when certain conditions are right in a procedural star system. Players would then be faced with the question, âIs that a natural fog bank or is someone hiding something?â
Let players play with the field to increase heat generation for any ship that interacts with their warp field. The closer to the center of the field, the more heating. Because the playerâs ship is at the center of the effect, it hits him hardest. If heâs got good heat management gear or simply doesnât generate much heat anyway, heâll be fine.
I canât remember any other parameters from our old discussions. We talked about lots of systems, and a warp field becomes a great way to alter the environment in which those systems operate. In a space game thatâs invaluable as a means of turning all that empty space into a more complex environment. I think thereâs a lot of gameplay mileage to your idea of fiddling with the warp field when applied to stuff that isnât about movement.
In terms of actual gameplay, I am wary of this idea. It strikes me that the average player would see this simply as irritating, arbitrary restrictions on where he/she can fly successfully with their current equipment. But then, Iâm not convinced by the whole heat management idea as a whole anyway.
Back to flight mechanics, I do agree the warp system with interdiction is one of the best ways we (as a community, and you personally JB) managed to come up with. How would it work with fleets though? Centred around the largest ship? The warp field gets more diluted the more ships that are there, so ending up with a collective barycentre, if you will?
Coded frequencies? Each player could âtuneâ their warp drive to the same frequency so it wouldnât interfere with other ships in their fleet. Or just a basic âjoin fleetâ UI feature that does this automatically.
Would make for interesting drama if anyone could drop their whole fleet out of warp at any time. Betrayals and all that.
Iâm not convinced about manually changeable frequencies (or whatever). It seems unnecessarily complicated and ripe for exploitation. Could someone being chased constantly change frequency and make themselves nearly impossible to pursue because the following ship canât synchronise? Sounds like a minigame that isnât really needed.
I do, however, like the automatic warp interference concept that JB came up with on the testbed program. But Iâm still curious as to how this works with many ships. I never got to test that. And how well would it work in 3D space?
I think frequencies works OK for tracking, since your shipâs sensor suite has the ability to track multiple bands of frequency (your goal would be to get your ship to emit in one of the bands where your enemyâs sensors are relatively weak (but not necessarily 0), reducing the detected signal strength). This is OK for the homing missile scenario if your ship also emits over a narrow band of frequencies (so that the tracker doesnât need to be looking for an exact match), and it takes time for your shipâs frequency to change). Time + bandwidth = something possibly worth exploring.
Multiple ships flying together would fly in the direction of the fleet average, with the average weighted by warp field strength. Obviously, larger ships would have stronger warp fields, so they will dominate this. In a fleet with a couple of large ships, if one large ship broke formation and pulled away, this would actually affect the flight paths of the rest of the fleet. I think this would be a neat little immersion element, so long as the game auto-corrected everyone elseâs flight path for them (when flying billions of km, small deviations can throw you way off course, of course; thereâs no reason to burden people with this, but imagine flying along when when one of the large ships in your fleet breaks away to the right. You see the visual indicators of travel also skew to the right momentarily, and then sway back again automatically. It gives the ships, especially the larger ones, the illusion of weight).
Just so folks know, the idea of warp disruption is not mine. I contributed to the discussions in the old forums and ironed out enough details to build my interpretation in the prototype, but other people thought up the basics.
It would work just fine with many ships. If they are within each otherâs full warp disruption, youâre left with an ICP arena that moves around the star system. If there are any celestial bodies in range of full warp disruption (e.g. a moon, asteroid or ring), then itâs literally an ICP arena because the celestial body pins down the arena. If a ship isnât within full disruption, then itâs either approaching or departing an arena. I guess youâd have to experience it to realize how it works.
Others were also concerned about 3D intercepts. I think it would be a challenge, and I think thatâs exactly whatâs needed in a full-scale space game. It establishes that space is mind-numbingly large. I can imagine that some interception aids would be either helpful or downright essential, but just keeping the target at the same point on your screen would suffice as a basic technique.
Providing a fully-automated interception system would be appropriate for a game that tried to provide as broad an appeal as possible. That is, with as few demands on player skill as possible; a World of Warcraft type game. An I-Novae engine is overkill for such a game. Just go with No Manâs Sky, where planets seem to be separated by a few thousand miles.
A hybrid would assume that players would have access to an automated intercept system for intercepting celestial bodies, but that ship-to-ship intercepts would be manual. This would allow a kind of EVE Online experience to novices (where everything happens near celestial bodies), but provide varying degrees of challenge to the rest of the players.
[quote=âKichae, post:35, topic:513, full:trueâ]
Multiple ships flying together would fly in the direction of the fleet average, with the average weighted by warp field strength.[/quote]
Right. In the prototype, ship mass determined warp field size. The mass of celestial bodies did as well, but it was on a different scale as planets lack a warp drive.
[quote=âKichae, post:35, topic:513, full:trueâ]
In a fleet with a couple of large ships, if one large ship broke formation and pulled away, this would actually affect the flight paths of the rest of the fleet.[/quote]
Right. In the prototype, it could be quite pronounced. Capitals were such lumbering beasts that separations could take a couple minutes if I recall correctly. (A separation is going from full warp disruption to no disruption)
[quote=âKichae, post:35, topic:513, full:trueâ]
I think this would be a neat little immersion element, so long as the game auto-corrected everyone elseâs flight path for them (when flying billions of km, small deviations can throw you way off course, of course; thereâs no reason to burden people with this, but imagine flying along when when one of the large ships in your fleet breaks away to the right. You see the visual indicators of travel also skew to the right momentarily, and then sway back again automatically.[/quote]
Ships will need to pay attention to a departure like that for another reason. Fleets are like globs of soft taffy with ships stuck in it; if you pull a big ship out and there are small ships nearby, theyâll be pulled out with it. So unless you want to depart with a large ship, get away from it when it is leaving. Contrariwise, if you want to go with it, fly over to it.
The prototype lacked the automatic course correction feature. If a ship comprising a significant portion of a fleetâs mass started to move, the rest of the fleet felt significant effect. At the local level it just looked like the ship left. But at the star system level, the fleet was dragged off course for a while. For example, if it was traveling on course 135, then while the ship was in the early stages of its departure it would swing to 150, then slowly return to 135 as the departing ship got farther away.
That illusion could be reinforced by having a variety of effects, both visual and audial, that result from interacting with large warp fields. Perhaps groaning and creaking from a shipâs structure. Perhaps some light static on sensors during transitions in and out of large fields, etc. The goal is to say that this is a big freaking ship and the forces involved are huge.
The other appealing factor about this is - as Kichae mentioned - giving capital ships some real presence on the battlefield. We all know a sense of scale can be almost impossible to achieve with a space game because of very few reference points. However, if a capital shipâs presence is felt as much as seen, it kind of eliminates that problem.
That does also seem to lead onto thinking about comparative warp field and thruster strengths (going back round to the beginning of this discussion maybe? ). It stands to reason that, as a general rule of thumb, bigger ships would have more powerful warp drives. Therefore, they would create a wider area of disruption and possibly have different flight characteristics.
In the scenario where one large ship pulls away from a fleet and takes fighters with it, those fighters need to be capable of flying back to the fleet. So their ability to thrust away from the departing battleship must be able to counteract this effect. Of course, it would be dependent on how long they waited.
So how might we see an interaction between warp fields (which I understand could be mainly used for interplanetary travel) and conventional thrusters (local manoeuvring)?
Could they be treated as one hybrid system working together (probably more likely for a simpler game), or separate systems that need to be managed independently?
In my opinion both drives should be separated and not affect each other. Warp Fields only affects the warp drive.
So when flying around the system you would have two relative speeds. The warp drive speed and the thruster speed. This would allow for all kinds of movements inside a moving warp field without restricting interplanetary travel.
The thruster speed could be displayed relative to the centre of the solar systems, if they are really fancy the barycentre.
Problem with that is that it complicates movement. Iâd like to hear how the âcombined propulsionâ team thinks they can achieve free movement inside a moving warp sphere even when just alone ⌠or does there always need to be a bigger ship that always points towards the destination of the warp bubble, Isnât that restricting the biggest part of the fleet in manoeuvring inside a battle?
The faster they react, the less time they need to travel between the two capital ships.
Thinking about that now though. It highly depends how exactly combining or mutually affecting the warp spheres will be practically coded and how exactly they behave.
Will they combine? In that case smaller ships need to actively rearange as the other capital ship fly outwards the combined bubble until the bubble starts to split. This includes all ships except for the other capital. The movement of the departing capital ship will move the center of the warp sphere and thus all the other ships relative to it. Ships that are evenly arranged between the two capitals will be evenly âstretched outâ and have to actively fly back to their resposive command ships.
Edit: I had onether paragraph starting like: âOr will they mutually affect each other?â and then realized that it would look exactly the same as the previous paragraph.
This could be confusing and exploitable in a battle. Allowing big ships to it could allow for crazy maneuvers, like tanking ships âstealingâ whole parts of enemy fleets and pulling them into a trap.
One solution would be to have a big âNo effect zoneâ close to each warp bubble. But how would the border feel like and what would happen if in case of departing capital ships the combined center of both will be totally empty of ships ⌠oh ⌠I think now I start to grasp the concept. Though more questions arise. When do they start to combine? Will it be aprubt or more like a gradual movement? If they start to combine wonât fleet ships suddenly be able to move much faster relative to each other because they now fly parallel but not any more in the centre of the warp bubble?
Either in case of a combined system or a separations of warp and thruster drive: Both throw up questions.
are problems to be solved, instead of 100% pure awesome sauce. What youâre describing are large scale fleet tactics that utilize the artificial and dynamic geography the warp fields impose on space. This is the kind of thing that makes generals (or admirals, I guess) a thing.
[quote=âSab1e, post:37, topic:513â]
In the scenario where one large ship pulls away from a fleet and takes fighters with it, those fighters need to be capable of flying back to the fleet. So their ability to thrust away from the departing battleship must be able to counteract this effect. Of course, it would be dependent on how long they waited.[/quote]
In the prototype, arenas were dynamic, but it was impractical for a ship to sneak in and steal ships that donât want to be stolen from an arena. Instead, it was much more likely that ships that want to stay with a larger ship could do so in a natural way.
Hereâs how the prototype worked arenas:
A ship has an area of full disruption (AFD) around it. A fighterâs AFD radius is about 0.6km and a battleshipâs is perhaps 3km. If one ship enters the AFD of another ship, then the two ships are considered linked. They experience newtonian relative motion. Note that even though the fighter enters the AFD of the battleship long before the battleship enters the AFD of the fighter, they are both linked.
The linking of AFDs chains, producing an ICP-style arena. Imagine three linked fighters as they approach a battleship (i.e. they are within 0.6km of each other). As soon as the first fighter enters the battleshipâs AFD, all three fighters are linked into an arena with the battleship. If a frigate comes in and enters the set of linked AFDs on the opposite side, then the frigate is linked in and the arena is extended to include the frigate and its AFD. In the prototype, arenas were a collection of overlapping circles. In a 3D version, it would be a set of overlapping bubbles. The bubbles are rigid; they never stretch.
Now assume that a battleship is trying to wedge itself into a fight so it can drag ships away. That only works if the battleship can somehow manage to ensure that it is their point of attachment to the rest of the arena. If it is, and the battleship disconnects from the rest of the fight, then the arena spontaneously splits into two (the original and the one with the battleship and whatever ships were linked to it) and the battleship can start to carry away the ships linked to it.
However, if there are other shipsâ AFDs linking those ships to the overall arena then the battleship cannot drag any ships away; those other shipsâ AFDs keep them attached and the battleship just flies out of the arena. Also, a battleship is not a nimble ship. That means that smaller ships can just fly past it to touch one of the AFDs of the original arena and get linked to it again.
What can a smaller, more nimble ship do? Well, it will be more able to move around, but it will have a smaller AFD radius and a reduced ability to actually move anyone anywhere. A fighter might magically be able to work itself into the AFD structure such that it is the link between a battleship and a larger arena, but the fighter canât move the battleship anywhere.
The prototype used a single system for both, and I thought it worked very well. The reason that it worked well is that the system remains fundamentally newtonian at all scales. Itâs simply that the turning radius of a ship in interstellar space is typically measured in AU instead of km.
There was a restriction in the system where ships cannot move faster than 3km/s relative to an arenaâs ârest velocityâ. That restriction is very intentional and desirable for reasons that I spent a lot of time explaining in the old forums. The short form is that allowing players to spend lots of time accelerating to higher velocities interferes with the playersâ ability to interact once they get near each other.
An extreme case is one where you and I have spent two minutes accelerating our ships. Now weâve accumulated some velocity. That velocity is either low, which means that we wonât be able to maneuver when we reach each other , or itâs high, which means that weâll just flash past each other. What weâre looking for is situation where ships take a modest amount of time to get from zero to maximum velocity, and where that maximum velocity works for the sizes of the ships.
In the prototype, fighters took 30 seconds to get from zero to max velocity. Battleships took 5 minutes or so (useful only for long interplanetary runs). The maximum velocity of 3km/s meant that ships would pass each other at no more than 6km/s, and thatâs a pretty extreme scenario that really doesnât allow the ships to do anything. At that speed, a fighter would have about one second to snap off shots at the battleship while they were in the same arena. Assuming the fighter didnât just smack into the battleship.
So the moral of the story is that giving players lots of time to accelerate to high relative velocities inhibits their ability to interact.
The only exception to that is that players can still fire missiles at arbitrary ranges and relative velocities. So if you want players to engage each other in those conditions, missiles are the way to go. In fact, for interplanetary ranges, warp missiles were our solution in the old forums. In those cases, ships have huge relative velocities and are at colossal ranges, even when using the prototypeâs warp system.
So how exactly does your (the one in the prototype) differentiate between warp speed and relative speed?
If it is, as you say, a combined system?
If it is a combined system accelerating in one direction with my thrusters in deep space would result not only my âthruster speedâ to increase but also my warp speed. I guess that it is solved totally differently and those terms donât apply anyway.
So by capping the relative speed you also capped the warp speed right? As warp speed is pretty much a multiplier of you âthruster speedâ (can remember some from the old forums).
So at full speed, after those 30 seconds whatever, I will be at max speed of 3km/s + 3km/s * warpMulFunction.
You do the same from across the system â aim at each other at max speed â as we get closer our warp fields merge and our warp speeds slowly decrease to zero â we pass each other with a relative velocity 6km/s.
It is a solution. Not a big fan of the speed cap but I can remember your argumentation from the old forums and thatâs ok.
The warp combination solution sound in itself like a typical programmer solution. As I understood it, it is the timing and direction of the arriving ships that creates the tree. So those âwarp forcesâ arenât transferred trough the âwarp field/treeâ based on the distances between the ships that is present when the force arise but when the ships first joined together? What happens when the fleet rearranges? Does the tree update every now and then?
Or does no problem arise from this architecture and it is only in my head? Probably got the concept wrong.
Of course you are right and as there will also be Battlescapes near planets where that effect isnât as pronounced.
Not saying that I wouldnât love it. I just want to preserve maximal variety. And that includes that certain fleet maneuvers work in certain environments and in others they donât.
). It stands to reason that, as a general rule of thumb, bigger ships would have more powerful warp drives. Therefore, they would create a wider area of disruption and possibly have different flight characteristics.