Empire at War and the Annoyance of 'To-Hit'

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8 years 3 months ago #215617 by Locksley
Naturally, after watching the new film, I really want to game in the SW universe. Problem is that I'm played most of the games totally to death (and my GPU can't handle the new Battlefront). I love tactical/strategy/4x games, and Empire At War originally seemed like it'd be a blast - and it is for a limited time, but like almost all such games it has one massively central mechanic that I have really come to dislike. The 'To-Hit' chance.

There was a little indie game I played ages ago called 'Battleships Forever'. It's nothing special graphics-wise, but it had a mechanic that I personally is years ahead of anything else in the ship combat genre. It didn't use a 'To-Hit' calculation for weapons. Instead it relied upon incredibly complex real time calculations along with the base statistics of the weapon - meaning that if you fired a cannon, the projectile would travel along a path determined by a limited physics environment. (Limited because the game engine was very simple, but, while limited, still incredible).

In Empire at War you would NEVER have a situation whereby an A-Wing fighter might totally disable a Star Destroyer - but in Battleships Forever, such an occurrence it totally possible. In EaW you basically end up trying to get more 'points' into your fleet than the other person. Basically whoever has the bigger fleet will win, pretty much regardless of abilities, environment, or any other component - granted, there's also a 'shield/hp' component, which means that a large fleet of weak-hulled ships will not survive long, but it still comes down to the utterly boring 'To'Hit equation that's run whenever an attack happens.

What I'd love to see is a mod, or a new game, that allows for truly dynamic combat, so that - say - having a smaller, heavily-armed ship that's fast but structurally weak, might be a viable choice against a ship three or four times as large.

This is just something I've been wanting for ages, and I felt I'd share my desire with all'y'all. :laugh:

We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, and nothing can grow there. Too much, the best of us is washed away. -- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5

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8 years 3 months ago #215672 by Tellahane

Locksley wrote: Naturally, after watching the new film, I really want to game in the SW universe. Problem is that I'm played most of the games totally to death (and my GPU can't handle the new Battlefront). I love tactical/strategy/4x games, and Empire At War originally seemed like it'd be a blast - and it is for a limited time, but like almost all such games it has one massively central mechanic that I have really come to dislike. The 'To-Hit' chance.

There was a little indie game I played ages ago called 'Battleships Forever'. It's nothing special graphics-wise, but it had a mechanic that I personally is years ahead of anything else in the ship combat genre. It didn't use a 'To-Hit' calculation for weapons. Instead it relied upon incredibly complex real time calculations along with the base statistics of the weapon - meaning that if you fired a cannon, the projectile would travel along a path determined by a limited physics environment. (Limited because the game engine was very simple, but, while limited, still incredible).

In Empire at War you would NEVER have a situation whereby an A-Wing fighter might totally disable a Star Destroyer - but in Battleships Forever, such an occurrence it totally possible. In EaW you basically end up trying to get more 'points' into your fleet than the other person. Basically whoever has the bigger fleet will win, pretty much regardless of abilities, environment, or any other component - granted, there's also a 'shield/hp' component, which means that a large fleet of weak-hulled ships will not survive long, but it still comes down to the utterly boring 'To'Hit equation that's run whenever an attack happens.

What I'd love to see is a mod, or a new game, that allows for truly dynamic combat, so that - say - having a smaller, heavily-armed ship that's fast but structurally weak, might be a viable choice against a ship three or four times as large.

This is just something I've been wanting for ages, and I felt I'd share my desire with all'y'all. :laugh:


I've been thinking about re-getting sins of a solar empire series, there is a complete overhaul mod for it that turns it into rebellion vs the empire and so forth, it had some better mechanics where the smaller ships might debuff but by no means disable larger craft, bigger craft would always win out unless you had superior numbers, it was a fun game back when I played it at the time but I haven't tried the expansions or anything yet. I couldn't get too far into it for a crappy computer I had at the time. Now I have beast, which is why I've been thinking about it again. Trying to finish off the TOR stories though first.

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8 years 3 months ago #215720 by Locksley
Yeah I remember Sins! I didn't love its stock game, but I could definitely see playing it with a Star Wars mod!

My current computer is awesome in every respect except for the video card, lol. It's actually really annoying. :pinch: :whistle:

Yeah, I dunno why this is such a hard thing to find. I've seen a couple of 4x games that had realistic space battles, but their other aspects never appealed to me (poor graphics, poor interface, 3k high learning curve, etc.). I also prefer it when there's a good modding community for a game. With all but a few exceptions I feel like a strong modding community is a sign of quality, lol. I was so sad to see that Filefront closed down, taking so many great mods with it when it went. I was going to reinstall KOTOR II, but I'm going to have to try and recompile the mods list I wnat from scraps across the whole internet, lol. :dry:

We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, and nothing can grow there. Too much, the best of us is washed away. -- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5

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8 years 3 months ago #215733 by Adder
Tough to find a balance between complexity and simplicity I guess. I'd like 1st person POV for the character, and let system interfaces represent a 3rd person POV where applicable - and let those systems have an auto-mode to make it easier for simple play. Allowing manual control of systems to edge benefits from fine tuning things... so that the learning curve is optional, but worth it - and lets face it, when things get complex having half the ship running in maintenance mode would allow the player to really focus more deeply on particular systems - so it might be required to really enable system complexity in a game without it becoming redundant and a resource drain.

As a flight simulator nut, I'd be more of a light craft pilot type. For me it should be mostly about the experience of flight down in the terrain and atmospheres of planets, and of course the penetrations and escape from them and other objects and bodies in space.

My ideal would start out as a flight training academy, where the simulation of the experience of flight was the main factor and it served to teach actually flying skills (handling, systems, navigation, communications) which then progressed to formation, combat and other advanced operational modes... before shifting out of the atmosphere gradually. Once out in space the ship's can get bigger and there it becomes more about systems warfare, which is that resource management game.

Damage modelling would be interesting in terms of structural design and system vulnerabilities of the target versus weapon effect, but if the target design is know or detected then the interface in a targetting system might generate a hitbox as the 'point to hit' from the point of view of the weapon operator. But I guess the 'universe' could be that everyone's ships are slightly different, dynamic shielding and jamming might mean adhoc targetting could feel legit in game - it certainly would be more fun and let pilots 'fly' their ships to absorb damage etc

Knight ~ introverted extropian, mechatronic neurothealogizing, technogaian buddhist. Likes integration, visualization, elucidation and transformation.
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8 years 3 months ago #215764 by Tellahane

Adder wrote: Tough to find a balance between complexity and simplicity I guess. I'd like 1st person POV for the character, and let system interfaces represent a 3rd person POV where applicable - and let those systems have an auto-mode to make it easier for simple play. Allowing manual control of systems to edge benefits from fine tuning things... so that the learning curve is optional, but worth it - and lets face it, when things get complex having half the ship running in maintenance mode would allow the player to really focus more deeply on particular systems - so it might be required to really enable system complexity in a game without it becoming redundant and a resource drain.

As a flight simulator nut, I'd be more of a light craft pilot type. For me it should be mostly about the experience of flight down in the terrain and atmospheres of planets, and of course the penetrations and escape from them and other objects and bodies in space.

My ideal would start out as a flight training academy, where the simulation of the experience of flight was the main factor and it served to teach actually flying skills (handling, systems, navigation, communications) which then progressed to formation, combat and other advanced operational modes... before shifting out of the atmosphere gradually. Once out in space the ship's can get bigger and there it becomes more about systems warfare, which is that resource management game.

Damage modelling would be interesting in terms of structural design and system vulnerabilities of the target versus weapon effect, but if the target design is know or detected then the interface in a targetting system might generate a hitbox as the 'point to hit' from the point of view of the weapon operator. But I guess the 'universe' could be that everyone's ships are slightly different, dynamic shielding and jamming might mean adhoc targetting could feel legit in game - it certainly would be more fun and let pilots 'fly' their ships to absorb damage etc


being a fellow space sim nut, would it be accurate to assume your keeping as close of tabs on star citizen as I am?

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8 years 2 months ago - 8 years 2 months ago #223263 by
The to-hit chance never really bothered me, but i guess that's because i made my fleets as big as i could as fast as i could. The game has some great mods too, if you're into that. On my last pc i had a super star destroyer mod. That one kinda takes away the challenge but it's still cool to watch an entire fleet go up against a lone super star destroyer and just get annihilated
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