I’m going to assume that the warp system will likely change. Because “warp as an afterburner” will make lancing attacks very easy and I’m assuming that’s not the kind of game I-Novae wants to make. I think it’s much more likely that warp ends up being a speed/acceleration multiplier that is affected by artificial or natural gravity fields.
The way I imagine it is like this:
You speed up until you reach warp speed. How high warp speed is is dependent on nearby gravity fields, artificial or natural.
Once you reach warp speed, you initiate warp and optionally set a warp level. You rapidly accelerate until you reach a speed dependent on your warp level and the strength of nearby gravity fields, similar to how the prototype works.
If you disengage warp, you rapidly decelerate until you reach the warp speed necessary for your current location (perhaps multiplied by WarpLevel/(MaxWarpLevel/2) or some variation of that, to allow someone to have some control over their exit speed while avoiding things like going ridiculously fast).
If a ship’s speed falls below a certain level, runs out of warp fuel or is affected by a strong gravity field, it could be automatically pulled out of warp. Warp fuel can very slowly recharge but is quicker to recharge at a friendly station or carrier (taking it from a carrier could lower the carrier’s fuel level). Alternatively, warp speed could be restricted to level 1 when out of fuel.
That’s the basics of how I would do it. Then there are things that need to be decided like how team warping or interdiction works without the need to have a specialised “match warp speed to target’s warp speed” button.
Allied ships could have a certain warp “frequency” that allows friendly ships to stay in warp while in the gravity disruption field their warp drive or some sort of special interdiction field creates. That would make team warping possible.
There could also be structures that have an interdiction field that affects all ships, even friendly ones. Perhaps it shouldn’t be possible for interdictors to not affect friendly ships, since that could create a situation where enemy ships cannot escape or be reinforced while friendly ships can constantly receive reinforcements quickly.
Perhaps all ships not currently in warp should have a small safety interdiction field around them, to prevent others in warp crashing on them. That would also mean that once the lead warping ship starts slowing down, its teammates will be affected and pulled out of warp too.
I guess I don’t see the issue with forcing people to have to consider their destination before they make a jump. I assume it’s possible for us to have maps indicating the orbital velocity of all significant objects in the system, considering that we have such knowledge of our own system already. All we need is a “speed relative to star” indicator, where the star is assumed to be zero, and to make it clear during the tutorial that disengaging warp requires being at or below that speed. Don’t dumb something down just to feed the masses, make them learn a unique and interesting mechanic.
Example: Earth orbits at ~67,000 mph. Mercury orbits at ~107,000 mph. If we assume the system I have proposed, I would need to enter warp at 40,000 mph relative to Earth if I fly in the same direction as it orbits, 174,000 mph if I fly the opposite of the orbit, or 83,427 mph if I fly perpendicular to the orbital velocity. All three of these result in 107,000 mph relative to the “stationary” star, and all three of them only require that I read the “absolute speed” indicator, which would say “107,000” in all three cases. Obviously, if I’m looking to get to the proper warp speed quickly, and I started at 0 mph on the ground, the smartest takeoff heading is in the same direction as the orbit, but that is where player skill and intelligence play a factor.
I think I most prefer the idea that two objects in warp will tend to draw each other into a third, different vector as they approach. This allows you to not have to disengage warp at all as either party, allows you to intercept the enemy (as long as you have time to intercept their angle of approach, of course), and offers a simple way to ensure players can force interactions.
The simplest answer I can think of is that it predefines areas of interest as opposed to letting players define them dynamically. In Eve the places you can travel to are all pre-determined. If you wanted to go to a certain spot in the middle of nowhere (not between two points) too bad. You can’t. Maybe I want to do because it offers a great staging point to attack a base or station.
A system that defines two points as the only destinations ignores 99.99999(repeating to infinity)% of the space between them. What’s the point of having a full scale solar system if you only want to be at the planets? May as well have jump gates. It limits all future aspects of travel not just in BS but also in TQFE. Maybe I want to hide in the middle of nowhere so I can’t be found.
I gotta go and I’ll come back to your example later but please use SI in the future along with km/s.
If a “lancing attack” is the same as a slashing attack, that’s just going to be standard fare. A game that allows for extremely high relative velocities isn’t going to make things any worse. Slashing attacks are only viable at relatively low velocities, even for large objects. Heck, the warp prototype limited relative velocities to 3km/s, and making a slashing attack at that speed was nuts.
Flavien could easily have implemented warp as a multiplier in the prototype. The fact that he didn’t suggests to me that he intends to pursue warp as an afterburner and put in @Crayfish’s interception assist stuff. Note that Crayfish is a former developer for the team.
Also, the afterburner approach stays true to the idea of a pure Newtonian system. Ships just go faster and faster, and the only challenge is being able to match velocities with your target, whether a planet or another ship. Put in some assists and you’re done.
Be careful with the words “warp” and “jump”. They mean two very different things around here.
Warp: a velocity enhancer of some sort that facilitates interplanetary travel. Warp does not use fuel.
Jump: a point-to-point transport system that facilitates interstellar travel. Jumping uses special fuel.
I believe the developers have mentioned that they might implement an interplanetary jump system for Infinity:Battlescape to speed everything up. I assume that would mean pointing at a planet, hitting the jump key and arriving somewhere near the destination based on distance, size of the body, power of your drive, etc. It would still draw down on a limited supply of jump fuel.
But…it doesn’t. In fact, with the proposal I’ve made, all you have to do is reach the relative-to-star speed you started with to disengage warp. If you want to do this in the middle of nowhere, then by all means, do it in the middle of nowhere. I have not defined how to initiate a warp in my described system, so it may even be possible to fire it back up in the middle of nowhere. You’ll be stuck using conventional burners if you’re unsure of your destination’s speed, but you can go where you want and stop where you want unimpeded. The only “restriction” this places on warps is that changing your destination mid-warp will likely require a great deal of acceleration (positive or negative) once you drop out of warp.
As for SI and kps, we’ll see. I’m American, and think in mph. Ultimately, in space details such as units are irrelevant. All speed readings could be nothing more than numbers and an arrow, and the point is still valid. The only difference is scale.
I did not know they were considering a jump system. I kind of wish they wouldn’t, but I suppose most people won’t want to have to initiate travel hours ahead of time just to take action. Maybe it could be limited in some way that requires conventional drives and warp drives to get there first…
EDIT: Because I used the term velocity again, which is wrong. I just want vectorless speed to factor into warp engaging/disengaging.
Absolutely not. There’s a very good reason that games with that kind of travel time as a mechanic are typically A) singleplayer and B) give the player the ability to accelerate time.
Distances that your players are expected to cover on a regular basis should be able to be traveled in a reasonable amount of time, preferably within the time frame of a single play session.
Since IB players can’t accelerate time, the players themselves have to be accelerated.
Oh boy. Tell that to the probe that smashed into Mars due to some units being in SI and some in Imperial. Its definitely not irrelevant. Plus, at interplanetary scales its a lot easier to think in smaller numbers than hundreds of thousands of anything(aside from LYs)
Anyways, I’m from the US too and I find it easier to use SI than imperial for anything outside of my daily life. I won’t be using km/hr for the highway speed but I sure as hell will for just about anything else.
These sorts of calculations are exactly why SI was created and units are very relevant. It’s a lot easier to do math on 30km/s(And also for me to know what sort of ballpark velocities we’re talking about) than 107,000 mph. No one ever uses that sort of number in their daily life to the point where converting it to mph gives no more scale than 18 miles/second. I have no idea what the acceleration of gravity is in miles/s and I don’t want to convert it.
Decelerating/Accelerating 18km/s (your 40,000 mph matching speed) with maneuvering thrusters is a bit ridiculous. I’m not sure what’s the acceleration on the helion, but lets say 10g. It would take about 225 seconds just to prepare for warp. That’s 3 and a half minutes! I’m not waiting 3 and a half minutes just to start traveling to another planet. Maybe in the MMO(I’d still hate it) it might be reasonable but not for an action packed arena where I still might have to match velocities for whatever errors I accumulated, making sure I exit warp in the exact right spot(otherwise I could have my initial velocity going retrograde of the planetary orbit meaning I’d have to spend another 5-10 minutes correcting this), all before finding the fight in the first place.
I’m pretty sure we’re not launching probes to mars, we’re talking on a forum about gameplay. As such, the relationship between the two is all that is necessary, not the absolute values.
Regardless, four minutes to achieve a proper matching velocity sounds like great gameplay to me. The devs have stated that they expect matches to last more than a few hours: if I can get from planet to planet in less than ten minutes, I’ve negated any aspect of making matches last a long time. It should take planning to get where you want to go, not just a “Whelp, here I am! And again! And again! And again!” I don’t expect it to take hours to blow up a station if I show up with a squadron of bombers, and if I can show up to your location in mere minutes, all I have to do is wait for your team to leave one place unguarded and move in for the kill with a few teammates. How long does it currently take to get to warp speed, anyway? It’s “only” 4 kps, if I’m not mistaken (I’ve never played, and I haven’t kept up with new videos very well), and it never seems to take all that long to get there.
I would argue that it would be better to have a long “spool up” time for the warp drive and faster warp acceleration than a fast spool up and a slower warp acceleration. Gameplay testing will determine what the developers think an appropriate amount of travel time is, the debate should focus more on the time spent in each stage. Additionally, do we know approximately how far the station spawns will be from the star? I assume they will be roughly equidistant from each other and at similar orbital distances to the star. If they are within 1 AU, and if it only takes a minute to get from warp engage to the speed of light, you’re looking at less than 15 minutes to get to your enemy’s main base. That’s…nothing, really. Give me an hour of my enemy not being online, and I can win the game with no contest.
I hope for something more along the lines of jumping in for a mere half an hour results in you being able to get from point A to point B, and (assuming you have some modicum of skill) fight at point B, once. If your team brings a capital ship capable of acting as a spawn point, then you can get back into smaller craft very quickly. If they don’t, then you’re SOL. Respawn timers should be short, giving advantage to the defender (or the well prepared offense).
The point of making matches last longer is to add gameplay and fun to them for the strategic player. The point of making travel times fast is to add gameplay and fun for the causal player.
Contrasted to the above, unreasonably lengthy travel times seem like unnecessary padding to artificially lengthen the game time for no reason. People should be able to join the game and have fun (perhaps after some time to organize and a reasonable travel time if there aren’t any carriers or bases close to the action). Not join the game, go get a cup of coffee and return to hopefully have fun.
You should also remember that travel won’t only be between planets. There will also be moons, asteroids, space stations, rings, etc. that will be much closer together. So travel time will probably be balanced to make the journey between those things relatively short but still meaningful, while travel times between the planets themselves will take relatively longer. At least, that’s what I’m getting from that newly posted gameplay comic in the KS updates.
Except longer travel times does serve a purpose. If I can get an accurate reading of your speed at warp, I can narrow my expectations of where you’re headed (you wouldn’t do 50 kps to attack a station moving at 5 kps). If you have to travel 15 minutes to arrive, that’s 15 minutes for me to detect, interpret, organize, and get on station. If it takes you five minutes, then I have significantly less time to prepare. Remember, the NPC AI will be limited, at best. It’s going to be nearly entirely PvP, and too short of travel times will result in matches being nothing but “who can bomb the most facilities the fastest because attempting to defend is pointless.”
Yup. That means that you’re not going to prepare. You’re going to be ready all the time. That’s the immediate nature of a game like Infinity:Battlescape. It’s just not an MMO. The other team is going to be coming at you all the time. That said, five minutes is a very long time in a game. Even if scouts only spot the fleet a couple minutes out, that’s time to redeploy people, close up vulnerable facilities, get haulers back under cover and so forth.
And that’s assuming that the enemy will come in fleets. They may just have ships constantly arriving in little dribs and drabs, and a constant melee may swarm above some planet. There will be no redeployment, closing of facilities and so forth. Players may just get used to constant warfare, and have to punch every hauler through a screen of enemy ships.
In any case, INS has stated that they want someone with 30 minutes of free time to jump into Infinity:Battlescape and feel like they’ve played the game. With 15 minutes of travel, that’s half of their game time, and I’m fairly certain that fails their goal.
As for SI units, I’d very much recommend that you get in the habit of working with them. In these forums I certainly skip over paragraphs where somebody starts using US units, just as I’d skip a paragraph that uses knots, hectares, rods and fortnights.
In Battlescape, max warp should be kept at the speed of light. This would indeed cause the outer planets to be very far away and hard to reach for a lone fighter. Capital ships on the other hand should have the ability to microjump, and this would allow for carriers to truly be forward operating bases to a team that is staging an invasion on the tough to reach outer worlds. Losing sides tend to fall back to the outer solar system in Sci fi, think Hoth in SW or Pluto in Freelancer…
I use kts and nm whenever I’m out on the water In case you were curious Earth’s orbital velocity is 276 31306551 Knots per fortnight(multiplied instead of divided ) . I hope this may be useful in your endeavors
Please no. Pluto is 5 hours away at c from the Sun. If it’s a realistically sized solar system I don’t want to travel hours to reach the other side.
Paris also made a new thread for the topic of travel time so we don’t have to clutter up this one and can leave it to fuel.
That’s the point of what I said. Micro jumping would solve this by forcing carriers to serve a very important role in the fleet, to carry the strikecraft that cannot jump. Corvettes and up should be independent of this.
i do not understand what is problem? if you stucked in dead or empty ship just hit “respawn” button. IB will be more like planetside+tactics/strategy then EVE where you are really care about your “pilot”
this is why carriers/capital ships are invented in scy-fi
to transport everyone in “warp/hyperspace” modes with their huge “warp/hyperspace” engines
a single ship shouldn’t be able, by any means, to perform long distance travels as fast as a capital ship can.
don’t want to travel for 5 hours? land on a carrier or capital ship and be transported, hell, it’s even an obligated tactic if you wanna attack your enemy massively
now for a “solo mission” option, we could have a warp platform where your ship is accelerated to a “micro jump” state calculated to reach your destination, which should be obtained using credits, and should use credits to be used as well, again, by any means, minor ships shouldn’t travel long distances easily, something like that will just spread people even more, and will lead strategies to be as much as “be sneaky and destroy things on sight. Location? what’s that??”.
Oh, and don’t forget it’s semi-persistent, so you can travel for 5 hours being sneaky, but we could have the option to log off, while the server still manages your ship to get to your destination, with the risk of being intercepted, but with the benefit of being pretty much undetectable since you accelerate then shut down your engines
In case you were curious Earth’s orbital velocity is 
) . I hope this may be useful in your endeavors