I am all for it but I would like to see more flexible or custom ship caps as many would agree that this is sins biggest flaw especially in larger maps..  the economic structure should stay the same.  some jaw dropping super capital ships too.  much larger area around planets perhaps even more than 1 planet.  More commands and formation options.

maybe an option on the game menu, like in LotR 2 (The Battle of Middle Earth). In that game theres a hero customization button you select and you create a custom hero, from any race, with any powers you'd like, with a tier system so you have to select a certain amount of "weak" powers before you can select the "best" powers. For Sins, we could be able to choose a basic hull design, what colors would be painted around it, what weapons (instead of powers) to equip onto it, maybe we could adjust the size and position of those cannons so each capital ship would be unique, and all those other little things. Most certainly a headache to code in (I assume), but it would be worth it!

(p.s. i hav no idea y both paragraphs changed fonts and one got bolded, but I can't fix them. forums go boom?)

I vote yes. Maybe well find out wth is chasing the vasari.

*sigh*

@paladins- PLEASE use- proper punctuation, capitalization, and grammer. Your one paragraph is a wall of text that presents an almost unintelligible and barely legible (thank god for standardized text!) thought.

It also sounds as if you are saying that the lore states that a "nanoswarm" or "fleet of nanobots" wipes the Dark Fleet out and causes the fall of the Vasari core worlds, when it does not state any such thing.

Additionally, there is a separate thread for speculation on the Vasari threat.

that is what we call a run-on. be that as it may, what I think whiskey was trying to say was that the forum community pays more attention to well written, cohesive posts, instead of long blocks of text with no clear breaks.

This is also a thread about a possible Sins 2, and while it IS possible for Sins 2 to have whatever is chasing the Vasari, this thread is not the place for putting what you think the enemy is nor what you think are the "clues" that reveal to you the identity of the Vasari's stalkers. Please go to a thread dedicated to that subject and copy + paste.

awesome.

No problem whiskey! if ur feeling generous im always in the mood for karma.... haha  just kiddin'

First, let me preface this idea by saying: I don't think there is no place for micro in this game. However, I do feel that one of the constraining factors of the first game is that late-game coordinated strikes can be hell to organize and worse still to try and micro-manage for maximum efficiency.

The Admiralty (or Fleet Command) is an upgrade for frigates or capital ships unlocked as part of fleet logistics upgrades, and is meant to allow the player to delegate fleet construction and tactical decisions to the AI, leaving  the player to handle strategic decisions (or intervene tactically, if they so desire).

The Admiralty upgrade has two main functions: Automating new ship procurement, and allowing the player to determine what tactics their fleets use in combat. A ship which receives the Admiralty upgrade is a flagship (suggesting there can exist any number of flagships).

Procurement

After construction, the player specifies the type of fleet they want, the budget (as a percent of income or credit value per second), and the shipyards at the admiralty’s disposal, and the AI begins automatically building a fleet to match those specifications.

Available fleet types may vary based on race or research level, but could be expected to include main battle groups, carrier task forces, and planetary bombardment fleets. The fleet type itself would be defined in an external resource file as composition conditions and a sequence of build steps: These might take the form of explicit build commands (5 PsiHeavyCruiser), percentages that the game will attempt to bring the fleet in line with (i.e. .15 PsiLightFrigate), and technologies to be researched. The definition would also include “stopping points”, points at which a fleet can be considered complete. If the player has set procurement to auto-cast, then the admiralty will continue building as long as possible (until the file ends or there is no more fleet cap), but stopping points allow incremental upgrades on the player’s timeline and protect a player from unintentionally losing all their money building 200 Krosov Siege Frigates.

If the Admiralty needs to build or research something which costs more than its budget (say a fleet definition calls for a capital ship but the Admiralty only has a budget of 15 credits / second), then it will take as much as it is allowed to, stockpiling the funds until it can afford the item in question. If the player needs that money, they can reclaim it from the Admiralty with no further consequence than delaying whatever the Admiralty was saving up for.

One possible complexity is a player building multiple admiralties, specifically determining how they interact. The simplest answer is that they can easily coexist but do not normally interact: Each ship an admiralty builds is automatically assigned to a fleet corresponding to that admiralty, so if two admiralties are both given use of a shipyard there will not be a problem determining which admiralty commissioned any specific vessel.

Tactics

The ability of the admiralty to change a fleet’s tactical behavior is predicated on the idea that for each fleet there exists one controlling AI in the game’s code. Subsequently, a change in tactics corresponds with either the loading of a new AI or a change in the current AI’s parameters.

Fleet AIs would ideally be externalized like fleet definitions (though unlike the definitions, AIs would be code rather than configuration files). An example tactic is raiding:

1.       The fleet should avoid enemy defenses and ships

2.       The fleet should retreat if engaged by an enemy which poses a serious threat

3.       The fleet should attack logistical structures in the following order:

a.       Trade ports

b.      Shipyards

c.       Culture centers

d.      Research centers

e.      Others

4.       The fleet should not attack the planet

5.       The fleet should leave when all targets are destroyed or when an enemy fleet at least half its size enters the planet’s gravity well.

To take advantage of this behavior, a player would set the fleet’s tactics, then order the fleet to attack a planet. At that point, the player is free to focus their attentions elsewhere and let the AI conduct the attack (although micromanagement is obviously still a viable tactic).

Edited because copying from MS Word was a huge mistake.

And yet, when you play a truly difficult game with an AI, you find yourself pretending that there is one.  That gives Sins the ability to function as a toy, rather than a game, vastly improving its potential.  I'm not necessarily against a campaign, but I don't think we need it.

What we do need is more management depth IMO.  I don't want you controlling individual cities, or ground forces for invasions as that would be insane.; no one can multitask that well.  We all know how big of a flop EaW was and it tried that system.  

What I want are more interactive tools.  For instance, your allegiance isn't just influenced by culture.  Taxes could also have a big impact.  It could be incorporated easily..  Just have a private_sector variable that is passive increasing on planets depending on population, type (Terrans generate more private income than asteroids) and orbital structures (such as TP's).  Taxes then take a portion of that amount (basically income tax).  Simply put, the greater the private_sector value per individual population, the richer the populace and the happier they are.  Being rich and successful increases allegiance while being poor does the opposite.  To really exploit this, you should be able to levy taxes, temporarily increasing them to fund something.

Also, planets should interact better than they do now.  If your planet gets bombed, its allegiance should skyrocket until it hits about 10-15% health at which point the populace just wants it to stop and so give in.  Also, you should be able to cede a planet to an ally, but of course the planet would take a bit of a hit to allegiance for a while.  Declaring war on an ally with whom you have a peace treaty should yield a decrease in allegiance.  Having war declared on you should increase it.

Perhaps the best thing would be a bit of a human element to this currently cold and heartless game.  I have no idea if this would be good or bad, but what if every ship built was linked to the frigate factory that created it which was in turn linked to the planet that created it.  Thus, when a ship get's a kill, the allegiance of said planet goes up ever so slightly, but if it dies, it goes down.

Allegiance simply could be so much more than it is now, but I don't know what would actually improve gameplay and what are worthless ventures.

At any rate, another thing I want is better mitigation mechanics.  I'm not asking for shield cells (I'll get to those in a minute).  I just want some ships that are heavily reliant on shields such as the Guardian to either reach maximum mitigation faster or have a higher peak.

The two things I want most are pipe dreams, but I'll say them anyways...

1. More weapons.  Its not mandatory, but think about it, capitals currently get shredded by SC because they have no defense against them.  They should.  They should have a lot more weapons than they do.  There are frigates in EVE with more guns than the Kol.  There is something wrong with this picture...  Think Battlefront II if you like.  Some heavy cannons and some small ones for SC.  Its just kinda bad how few weapons there are right now.  That's part of why capitals are so weak.

2. Shield cells.  This is the best thing that you could do to represent shields.  Basically split up a shield into however many hundred parts, each having its own health bar.  When one cell loses health, the health from those surrounding it decrease to increase the health of the one in question.  If a single cell loses health continuously, the computer would learn this and temporarily increase the maximum local shield amount to compensate.  This of course means draining it from somewhere else, which the computer would pick the lowest usage ones (generally the shields on the backs of ships).

This also allows for "shield drilling" where you have everything fire at one spot to punch through to reach the hull.  Most importantly, it allows for flanking and other unique maneuvers that you can't do with a static barrier, but could with a fluid one such as this.  This would make shields seem more like plasma bubbles and less like walls while increasing the strategy used to kill a ship.  For instance, you could position your fleet on one side and fly your Radiance around to the other because shield points have been drained from aft shields to power forward ones, thus allowing Cleansing Brilliance to cut through their shields (or what's left of them) and hull like butter.  There is so much you could do with this, but it has one serious drawback.  These calculations would cause immense drains an lag on any computer.  Shield cells could not be represented accurately until about when Sins IV would be coming out (assuming there is a II and III) because of how long it would take get processors up to that sort of calculative power.  

All I know is that if a game ever comes out to go along with the books I'm writing, they will have shield cells.  I don't care if I have to program the AI that runs it myself.  They are going to have them.

A lot of the ideas being tossed around here are awesome and I might as well throw in my opinion.

Fist of all, I personally would be very dissapointed if a SoSE sequel included land-based battles; however, if this was included I would prefer to see it very very simple and small-scale, with the main focus remaining on the feature for which I fell in love with SoSE in the first place: the epic, huge space battles. Few things in gaming give me the same satisfaction as watching the massive SoSE fleets with massive ships, on a scale that I haven't even seen on TV, bash the crap out of each other with the variety of weapons that SoSE provides. Most RTS games I know of are already land-based, anyway, and to change a game like this into just another one of those would be extremely dissapointing.

One thing that I would love to see, however, is a single-player campaign, especially one that at least provides some more clues as to what is chasing the Vasari across the galaxy, if it doesn't reveal it completely.

I also like the whole idea of ship design and specific weapon choices on ships. Although if this feature turned out to be too complicated it could be annoying if the player is not provided with already-good default ships. I would not enjoy spending a bunch of time designing a ship just so I could have a chance to compete online and in single-player. Ironclad has done an amazing job of ballancing the game, however, and I would certainly not expect a problem like this to arise... just throwin' out some ideas.

Finally, the last main idea that has been thrown about is a larger variety of ship types, which I support whole-heartedly .

That would be interesting and would give a new meaning to flagships if combined with what I am about to say...  Who is to say that you couldn't have some campaign, but give that campaign some RPG style by giving a player a flagship.  This is a capital ship that can level beyond 10, and with a far wider range of customization, even beyond SB's.

This ship's level would be carried from one game to another, allowing it to become more powerful over time, but to a certain limit of course.  Then, at the start of each game (if only in SP), you would just start with it and it would count as your free cap.  If it is destroyed, you could give the player an option to salvage it, at which point, it would reappear at the homeworld after a minute or so with a fraction of its health and would auto-level to where it was before over a long period of time.  The other option is to make it more or less immortal by doing what they did with heroes in AoE where they just get incapacitated for a while before coming back with part of their health.  In MP, you would still get one, but it would start at level 1.

This could be interesting for campaign especially.  There could potentially be levels where the sole purpose is to protect the ship.  

Perhaps that could even be the first mission.  You get an intro video showing your ship retreating from a planet that is clearly under siege by a far larger force and then end up on some asteroid/desert planet with a small task force and a colony frigate and are tasked with repelling a few waves of enemy units coming from the world you just left.  These would be the only two planets on the map and would be connected.  A friendly (probably female) tutorial voice would help walk you through the process of colonizing the planet and would tell you how to defend.  Once the first wave comes in, it would tell you how to attack and a little about unit types.  Eventually you would win.

The next mission opens up the rest of the system and that same friendly female voice tells you to colonize other planets so you can launch a counterattack.

Over the course of missions, the scale increases until you are essentially handling the entire war personally (with fleet capacities far above 2000, try 8-9000).  On this scale, space is divided into sectors.  When you zoom in on a sector, the data from that sector is loaded from memory, to display planets and stars as you currently see them when you zoom out all the way.  If you zoom out, data from that system is stored in an array and placed in virtual RAM (or could be kept in actual RAM if you have a ton of it).  All things when not shown would simply be stored in an array.  All ships, structures, planets, stars, and anything else not directly represented would be stored in this way.

Anyways, on this scale, the research tree is far larger than the current ones with let's say 25 tiers.  This would give players the ability to not just buy the whole thing quickly.  At this final stage, the game is more or less a gargantuan skirmish.  If you win, you get an achievement that says you won the war for <insert faction here>.  This sort of a scale would be mind boggling, but I believe that the Sins engine with a few minor tweaks could handle it.

On this scale, automation would be paramount.  Maybe you can manage nearly 10k FC worth of ships, but I don't think I can unless I'm playing as Vasari with phase gates.  This sort of a scale could give a point to declaring admirality as was mentioned earlier.  Give them a budget and an objective.  They in turn would be competing against enemy admirals which would be controlled by a central AI.  Essentially, you tell your admiral to attack this admiral owned by the TEC/Vasari/Advent (there would only be one true AI player per race on this scale).  You can still manually override anything the admirals want to do.  In fact, if you want to, you can simply get rid of them once they do what you want.

This sort of a battle of attrition would be quite interesting to watch and would take days if not weeks to complete.

If you really wanted to, I suppose you could try to do this sort of thing over LAN (I don't think anyone would even try to do this over the internet as the lag would be horrid and then some), but the lag would be really bad unless Google makes good on its claim of gigabit optical data transport speeds...

Either way, I think it would be cool to play like this.  Maybe I'm the only one, but ehh... This sort of ultimate conquest is really what I would love to see Sins do...  Currently you are basically just one lone admiral dropped off by yourself in the middle of nowhere.  With the campaign, you could have some contact with the leaders of your race and get some benefits that way until later when you are that leadership and the roles are reversed.

Why did you more or less duplicate your post?

What I'd like to see in a potential SINS 2:

Cosmetics:

Map scale:  The current focus is on a scale of planets - you can play a game contained in one system.  They should, for realism's sake, move the scale up one level to the scale of systems, where a single game may be contained in a galaxy.  This avoids the entire "50 habitable planets around one star" goofiness while having the game play out in an almost identical fashion - where the sun is would be a galactic core, where the planets are would be star systems.  Gravity wells of stars would be the battlefields as the gravity wells of planets are now.  Rather than mining asteroids which happen unrealistically orbit every single planet in nice, noneccentric orbits, you'd mine asteroid belts, which are much more commonplace.  Overall it would just be a lot more coherent from a sci-fi standpoint while having minimal effect on the game itself.

Ship scale:  I realize this may be limited by computer resources and functionality in gameplay, but really, there is too little variation in scale between, well, everything.  Capital ships make planets look tiny, while frigates are way too big compared to capital ships.

Turrets:  Turrets should be able to rotate on the higher graphical settings.  It's very immersion-breaking to see bullets coming out of a gun at an odd angle.

Maneuvering:  I'd love to see ships move realistically in space - no more wide, sweeping turns or engines only placed in the back of the ships.  Also, it'd be very nice to see ships move a bit while fighting.

Gameplay:

Directional shields:  It would be nice to see there be some benefit to positioning your forces well in a battle.  Positioning is engaging enough that it adds to the experience of the combat but not demanding enough to turn it into a tab-click-tab-click microfest (*cough* blizzard RTS *cough*).  This is already done to some extend with the positioning of weapon batteries on ships, but it's not major enough to warrant any serious consideration.  Directional shields would work thusly: As a ship takes fire from a certain direction, its shields adapt to deflect fire from that direction - much like shield mitigation currently builds up as a target takes damage, but only for damage from a certain direction.  This adaptation takes time, though, and comes at the cost of protection on the other side of a ship.  Thus, positioning of ships in combat would become much more important.

Programmable tactics:  If you've played DA:O, you know you can assign each squad member battle tactics to reduce the need to micro.  This would work much in the same way, except for groups of ships.  You could set target prioritization, ability usage, fleet positioning (on a more specific scale than the current tight/normal/loose), etc.  This could be implemented in a multi-layered fashion:  Anything from a single ship to a class of ships to a fleet could be set tactics, with the user dictating which tactics take priority.  For example, you could set a target prioritization for all your light frigates, yet have those same frigates in a fleet which you have set a different target prioritization, and through an interface option dictate which of the possible sets of logic those specific ships should use.  An easy way to break it down would be as follows: For any specific set of tactics, you could set the scope, with the first designation being whether it applies to all ships or to ships of a given fleet, then whether it applies to all ships in that group or to a specific type (or multiple types) of ships, and then, finally, if the user wishes, which exact ships to which tactics should apply.  The user could then prioritize which tactics ships should default to.  Obviously, sets of tactics should be able to be saved so they don't have to be re-created every game.

I've done enough typing for now, I think.