What did I do in the meantime? Well, I am trying to improve the current ship combat system. Even with the changes I made from S4 to S5, it appears some still find it repetitious. So what can I do? One idea is to add structural damages to the ship components resulting in skills being unavailable during X turns. This effectively forces you to think about new ways if your favorite skills are unavailable. Likewise the computer enemy has to use different twists.

Alternatively or additionally I am thinking about removing the ship´s own special skill in favor of a combat special skill determined by the different ship types or ship classes fighting each other. This means that each time you fight the same type of enemy ship with the same type of your own ship, you get special skill X, but if you find this other type of enemy ship, you get skill Y.

Any comments?

What I would really like to see is some type of fleet combat option with multiple ships like in the Master of Orion battles. Not only would it make the ship rights much less repetitive, but it would also mean lesser ship classes wouldn't have to disappear from the universe just because you have a battleship.

Why force us to stick with one ship when we could have a whole armada? I understand if that would be too radical a change for S5, but that should certainly be considered for the next sequel.

If you wanted to add some "Variety" to the combat system, I would recommend you change it back to the old skill bar, but add a second skill bar (Visible bellow the first) with maybe 2 to 4 slots in which you "RANDOM" powers appear.

Further, you might want to only include powers from the player's chosen class. It makes the choice more important.

If you then really wanted the player to be able to have some powers from other classes, I'd add to the Spaceport Bar (In Hire Crewmen). Just add a tab with Special Recruits, Each being either a Crewman, Officer, Pirate or Space Marine, but with a character name, and THAT recruit can grant you a special power.

These Special recruit powers could go straight into your Regular one, but you may want to cap how many a player may have active at a time, or to make it simple, they could instead be added into your RANDOM BAR.

The whole random skill thing makes this game near unplayable for me. It takes all the strategy out and leaves things to random chance. I would recommend that combat looses the randomness all together and to make more varied skill trees. This will make combat more varied yet remove the complete randomness of the current system.

The problem is that there is no way to create sort of "deck" of your skills.
The more combat options you unlock, the more unfocused your skill list becomes as you can not influence what kind of skills you get.

Maybe splitting the maneuver and fire skills into two where the maneuver skills influence the relative position the ships have to each other (+ engine speed and other modifiers) and the position itself influences the % chance of certain skills to show up?

For example there are 4 different ranges
Long
Fighting happens at light minutes distance so even lasers have a traveling time

Medium
Still beyond visual range, but laser still hit nearly instantly

Short
Ships are in visual range, even though you might need image magnification

Close
Fighting happens within several hundred meters

The same for ship orientation/position

Head on
Both ships fly towards each other

Circling
Both ships circle each other

Followed
The enemy is behind you

Chasing
You are behind the enemy

Each position and distance states have combat modifiers and also a different % chance for skills to show up. Added together those % chances are used to seed the ability bar.
For example, being behind the enemy and being at medium range both have a increased chance for (hypothetical) missile skills, so being in this position means you have a very high chance to get those skills if you have unlocked them.

The position is changed depending on the maneuver skills used. For example, if one ship uses "Afterburner" and the other only spends its AP firing, the orientation stays the same, but the distance is reduced by 1 (or even 2).
In the end its a 4x4 state machine. The only complicated thing is that there are several inputs (two ships and possibly multiple skills used at once).

There also need to be more options for combat even without skilling them. Mostly basic things like fleeing and stuff like that. With the current combat system the chance of defeating a bigger ship is low, even when using the extremely OP Dummy Missiles. Encountering one as random encounter is a guaranteed defeat when you do not have a flee ability.

A lot of good ideas in here...the only thing I would like to add is having the ability to fire at specific systems:

For instance, if you have a smaller ship, you could fire at the enemy's engines, slowing them down which would make my ship even more maneuverable.

Also, if a ship locks a tractor beam on me, I could fire at the tractor emitter (a popular Star Trek move) :P

I think this would only work if the combat system were changed from a random chance to a pure skill/tactical one, like previous posters mentioned above.

It´s likely I am including a manouvering and positioning feature in the future. Feel free to give me more ideas of what manouvers you want to see and how positioning should affect the combat.

I have also given the idea some thought of having multiple ships fighting each other at the same time. A logical game balancing problem I see here is that if e.g. a ship costs 1 million and the player loses 1 ship while fighting an enemy fleet, he will most likely not capture enough goods to make up for this loss of 1 million. When the enemy fleet does the most logical thing of concentrating their fire on one ship, it´s likely one ship is destroyed. Any idea of how to balance this?

Have ships that are designed to soak fire to reduce the chance of losing one to focused fire.

Alternatively have the value of taking multiple ships exceed the value of losing an individual ship, at least if you tow and sell those ships.


I have to say though I went to play this game some after not having played it since December and I really want to roll back the patch to the pre-random skill days. This game isn't fun like this. Do you have anywhere we can roll back at?

How about a fleet salary treasure volt, or something dull like an winners ship insurance (you pay insurance, but only victorious leaders get full refund).
Or maybe a chance you can salvage a big ship/fleet for parts, like the towing of a captured ship?

In addition, i love the random part for the excitement, but it can also be frustrating. Is'nt there a way to "bonus" captains that like a particular ship?
For example, if you had 15 fights in one type of ship you rank "shiptype veteran" and get 1 AP or 1 extra choicebox during combat.
If you had 50 fights, you rank "ace" and get even bigger bonus.
And how about customizing the ships special? Like a deluxe shoppinglist, if you like missles, buy the misslerack special (from the patton), or gatling gun if you like smal guns.. etc.

I really like your game and was happy to spend money on it! Let me know what you think.

Best regards,

I like the theory of the combat system, but more reliable ways of AP improvement and possibly more ways of stacking your "deck".
Having played a bit more, I can understand people's complaints about too many abilities, but I have very seldom been in a situation where I've been unable to adapt to what has been given to me-the biggest problem I've encountered is a lack of target locks, but this could be explained in RP terms as the enemy is too good at maneuvering or ECM-ing.

I would also like to see opportunities to force long or short-range combat for yourself, rather than just having these weapons that can aid you in occasional random events.

My biggest issue with the game so far is lack of explanation of non-combat mechanics, and the frequency of ship battles against higher classes. Another issue is the immediate jumps of enemy ship classes encountered whenever you go up a ship, that can make it feel like a Red Queen Race.

Also, boarding needs to be made more effective in my opinion, given that it's apparently the most reliable or only way to graduate into a battleship.

Hi,

you can already tow a captured ship for salvaging or using it yourself after repairs at a friendly starport. It´s a choice that comes up when you have boarded a ship and captured the bridge.

One solution to the problem of multiple ships fighting each other would be if the ships would usually not be destroyed, but just immobilized. There would only be a small chance of total destruction. Exception would be if the enemy continues to pound on an immobilized ship. However this would not be the usual behavior, because everyone will like to capture it. I am not sure if I already talked about it here, but I am thinking about going this way in a future iteration of the series.

Best regards

Niels
Do you have any idea for improving or exchanging the boarding system with something else? This is on the very top of my agenda, but a complete X-Com like squad system would be too much. I also think that if it would take you 10> minutes to capture a ship, it would get tiresome, even compared to the higher rewards.

Hmmm. It could be fun if done right-say you can either do an "auto" combat that is resolved by the computer on base strength of units (similar to the current system) or you actually have a tactical map for those who like that kind of gameplay. It could be an interesting way off putting cross-genre play in, and creating more variety in a game session.

Personally, my biggest issue with boarding is simply that every ship you go up against has a full complement, which makes up-class boarding very difficult-especially since this is the only way to move up into the battleship classes.

A secondary issue is that you seem to regularly lose your standard crew members during offensive boarding operations, even while using the "specialised strike" action, which seems bizarre, and is also extremely annoying as you can suddenly lose months to an undercrewed ship If you're using your crew members in a last ditch strike on the bridge deliberately it's one thing, but to lose them when you have 100-ish commandos doing a specialised strike seems stupid. I can understand losing Officers since they have to take part to impart their bonuses.

One solution, that would unfortunately require more skill points added to the game, would be to have boarding combat become more like ship combat, with actions that you can take to influence victory.

Another option to make boarding less frustrating would be to have ship damage reduce crew numbers-especially at the high end of ship damage-so that at 50% shields you lose maybe 5% of crew, but at 25% shields you've lost 25%, and at 10% you've lost half your crew. The problem that I can see happening with this is the cost of it being applied back on the player, which is why moderate shield damage should have little impact on crew strength.