Maybe this has been brought up earlier, the question is how battle will be fought in outer space. Personally, I hate to see dogfights between fighters, because I believe those manned vehicles will be no match against drones, missiles or laser weapons on board the battleship, in terms of flexibility, agility, and quantity.
Since here on earth, drones will soon replace human pilots and dominate the sky, I don’t have any doubt that, when in the future, with more advanced technology, they cannot fulfill their task.
So what do u guys think? You prefer the arcade shooting style space combat or wanna be the captain in charge of a huge warship?
There are still real pilots behind the drones, thankfully.
And even so, jet pilots will likely not be replace anywhere in the near future.
To answer your question: commanding either small ship or capital ship looks both great, IMO. Piloting small ships does not mean it has to be “arcade-like” however. Besides, skirmishes exist as well
Having thought about it carefully, I think I disagree with you there. Yes, there are many advantages to unmanned aircraft and the like - one of which being that it reduces loss of life. However, for now, most of the drones used are still basically remote-control as far as I know.
My gut tells me that while future-drones might be formidable, there would be something about a pilot’s instinct that would allow them to do the unexpected. Humans have spent a long time evolving a quite ingenious brain and no AI is a match for it yet.
There can be fun sides to piloting both small and large ships. We should have the opportunity to try both if development and funding goes well for I-Novae. Fighters could certainly potentially do things capital ships cannot (such as evading the hellfire coming their way and dropping the epic-missile-of-doom in a critical exhaust port…?)
That depends on your definition of “remote-control”.
To the best of my knowledge, no one except possibly Google has ever made a UAV that autonomously decides where it’s going. The reason for this is that while building a drone with enough computing power to figure out where it should be is entirely possible, transmitting all the necessary data to it is highly inefficient when you could just have a ground-based computer do the calculations and send just the resulting waypoints (unless you have a lot of drones performing a relative simple task, such as in Google’s case).
At the same time, though, it’s been years since anyone made even a commercial airliner that wasn’t fly-by-wire, more often than not with a powerful autopilot. Oh and fighter jets without a computer to control them? They crash.
Drones are pretty much the same. There is usually someone (or something) telling them where to go from a remote location, but actually flying there is something they can do on their own - and that goes for both military drones, corn-farming UAVs, small surveillance UAVs, and the fancier versions of RC quad-copters.
As for this…
I’m sorry to say, your gut is wrong.
While the human brain is indeed the rather impressive result of 3 billion years of evolution, this allows us to deal with the unexpected better than a computer, we are useless at doing the unexpected. I mean the obvious example is to ask anyone to pick a random number between 1-10; if it wasn’t 7 it was almost certainly 3.
So yeah, if the totally unexpected occurs, humans will have a chance to deal with it while computers (at this point in time) will not. If the target fighter decides to dodge in a different direction than expected, the reaction speed of a modern day computer is measured in billionths of a second, while a human will take hundredths of a second to react even if they predicted the action.
If the totally unexpected occurs, a freak supernova, the fight is already over.
So…
This is basically true.
Having said all that, I still expect and hope to see manned fighters in I:B because they’re more fun, and in a game, that’s far more important than realism.
Play testing will likely play a huge part in determining our final flight mechanics. We’re probably going to experiment with a number of different configurations.
Yeah, I completely agree with Runiat. The swarm intelligence in combat, if full employed in the future battlefield, will be proved to be formidable. I am not against manned fighters, actually I myself enjoyed the experience been in the cockpit, However as watching the technology been developed all these years, I realized that, in the future when people can already explore the deep space, real pilots in the fighter cockpit can still prevail an arm of drones with sophisticated AI system is just a wishful thinking.
Well, no denying that manned dogfight is fun, and I love flight simulators like il2, DCS and BMS. However, from the realistic point of view, I would wanna play as the commander as capital ship, like captain kirk, or even a fleet, because the most difficult part of future battlefield is to make correct decisions in various circumstances, rather than knowing when to pull the trigger.
Furthermore, fighting realistic battles in such a realistic environment generated by Novae engine, that is an impeccable logic, right?
Actually, the wishful thinking is that people would be exploring deep space at all. That’s never going to happen unless a significant error in our understanding of physics is discovered, and even then it’s highly unlikely.
After all, having robots explore space for us would be - and is - far more efficient, safer, and cheaper. That’s why no human being has been further from Earth than 2000km in over 40 years.
So sorry, but the argument of “realism” simply does not apply. Manned fighters are more fun (or rather, more realistic fun, having a human pilot would explain slow rates of acceleration) for the majority of players, so that’s what most games deal with. If you want to be captain kirk, I think I heard something about a “Star Trek online” a few years back. Maybe go check that out.
Okay, regardless of whatever gamers are hoping, even we wanna all fights be fought between humans or alien physical life forms, I still wanna point out that, in space dogfighting, the guided missile will be much more lethal and accurate than its counterpart in the atmosphere, it will be flying @ much higher speed with greater agilities, with the continuous vector thrust it will be correcting its flight path continuously and traveling much faster than conventional bullet which has no power. U can even combine these two together of course, the “guided canon rounds”, which is already been developed here on earth for many years.
Or put it this way, in the future, the fight between two ships will be all basically BVR(beyond visual range), and close quarter combat will be short and sweet, since you don’t have to point your weapons @ the enemy to fire. The off-angle of the infrared missile and laser guns are so big, you can simply pull the trigger when enemies are in range in order to hit the target.
Therefore, stealth and jamming technologies will be essential to fighters and all warships, however I wonder if players want these or not, maybe most of us just wanna be a trigger-happy pilot all day long, but for such a brilliant game like infinity to last and be treasured, you need more than that, right?
@hrobertson, they are not making the Infinity that we spent years on arguing and discussing gameplay mechanics. INS has a clean slate with IBS, you can probably disregard 95% of what was discussed on the old forums, as those discussions were for Infinity, a different beast.
I would be happy if they just implemented 5% of our discussions of gameplay mechanics from the old site.
I’m currently reading the Human Reach (warning, only 2 books out so far), and in addition to be pretty damn good books, they are portraying one option for realistic space battles. Here, big warships are used (they travel by fixed artificial wormholes), and sometimes defence drones at fixed positions (around wormholes).
They are equiped with ginormous lasers, and smaller laser counterbatteries (who try to fry enemy lasers when they’re firing), as well as fragmentation missiles and coilguns (who aren’t expected to hit, but to force the enemy ship to manoeuvre to avoid it).
The acceleration is typically between .1g abd .5g, fight range is counted in thousands of kilometres (sometimes more), and as there is no stealth in space, battles are planned days or even weeks in advance - unless two orbiting starships suddenly decide to fight at near-melee range. One big problem is heat, as radiators can’t be armoured, so they are retracted during battles. If your heat sink fill, you either have to retreat, surrender or fry if you can’t deploy your radiators.
And given that there has been no major interstellar conflict so far, everyone has doctrines that look good on paper, but have yet to be tested against other’s doctrines in a real conflict.
Other possibilities are, constellations of laserstar and missile bus drones, either with a command vessel around, or, if you don’t care about giving orders an hour late, directly commanded from the planet - so basically, interplanetary missiles, only better armed, and possibly reusable. Or sufficiently large lasers that can hit from a planet to another. With a km-sized gamma ray laser, you could hit a planet around a close star, even. The kinetic equivalent being relativistic kill vehicles.
What does that mean for Infinity’s gameplay? Surprisingly little. Space fighters are fun, newtonian space fighters are even more fun. So let’s have space fighters, and to hell with drones! We’ll figure an explanation about why there aren’t drones later, if needed.
Heat management would be an interesting element of gameplay, an a quite unique one at that - surprisingly, one of the biggest concerns for any realistic (including real-life) spacecraft is about never mentioned in space games.
Just popping by: not a good example. We’re talking here about scenarii, not randomness
Proper example would be: a combat drone is on a battle field. Detection of a lone man, arm raised, no weapons. What to do? If that scenario was not implemented as a “civil” or “surrender”, there’s a high chance the drone will … simpply kill the target.
Now we, humans, are good at making the unexpected as well, all depends on the human. If a drone is programmed not to kill civilans / surrendering militaries, he won’t (forget bugs since the bug will happen on all the same versions with the same context). Humans might still kill however.
While it’s true that a missile in space will travel quite faster than on earth, I’m not sure about its precision. Once a certain velocity has been reached, it is hard to readjust; not to mention that fuel might be a problem. Nothing will beat laser for precision … except range of course
On a physics point of view, I agree with you that combats would mostly be out of visual range … but on a gameplay point of view, that sucks
Well, guess we have to live with the fact that, this great game have to fuse advanced XXth century technology with early 20th century air combat mechanics and late 19th century navy warfare philosophy together, like every other space genre in the market is doing. Fair somehow sad.
I guess the problem is that if we make it ultra-realistic and have long distance combat etc, it would simply not be fun. But more than that, players would find it hard to engage with. There has to be a healthy dose of something familiar, which is why so many space games end up echoing WW2. It’s the same effect as needing films with alien main characters in to have human-like characteristics so we can connect with them.
I disagree with the notion that a totally realistic game wouldn’t be as “fun”, it would cater to a different market. As an example take Military Shooters: For that market, games that try to resemble the real world do exist and do have players actively playing it and having fun.
The problem is that there is an unsaturated market of people who would like to have futuristic realistic battles.
I do agree that Inovae should hold onto their Star Wars guideline as that is a thing a lot of people want, incliding me.
If a game existed that matched musikerz expectations of space battles we could just point him to it and that would be the end of the story.
It’s a different game Inovae is planning.
Though if someone knows of a game with “realistic” space battles please tell me. I’d like to try that too.
There is nothing like that, if you want to know why just try a spaceship simulator. If you are near a planet and not in orbit you are falling, nou matter how many km you are above the surface. If you are in orbit, you speed is measured in km/s, maybe 3 or 4 depending on the height. And if you are in deep space you are surelly travelling at superhigh speeds, and due to the inmense size of deep space is not probably you find any hostiles.
Space battles in orbit, however, should be fun if we only use normal ballistic projectiles and not laser weapons, 1. because of the heat generated to the attackig ship (no heat transmission in space, how do you cool that ship) and 2. you are 50km away from your objective, it throws you a laser beam, it reaches you instantly, you attack him with another, it reaches him instantly, and so on… where is the fun, if you cant even see it exploding?
With ballistic missiles things are different. Their trajectory is almost linear because of the inertia, but you at least have time to change your position, and if you want to hit your enemy you have to approach him. It surelly will be fun if you play with that, changing the orbit to catch a spaceship, pointing the missiles calculating the future position of the objective, maneuver to avoid projectiles, and defenitively who wins the combat is who better maneuvers his ship, at least for non giantic spacecrafts. The thing is all those mechanics will be surelly way slower than normal dogfights, but I think it doesnt mean it would be boring.
