From what I can tell after about WWII Naval tactics in the modern age have revolved around the carrier and air to sea assaults. So why are strike craft nerfed so much in Sins? I mean I like the honor harrington approach as much as the next guy(I know its not exact but go with it ). Strike craft should have the advantage of being able to do massive damage(bombers specifically). I mean 4 bombs took out a carrier in WWII at the battle of midway.(before they had damage control ) Im just saying, carriers seemed nerfed to me.
The Dominion War footage was pretty awesome...but have you noticed how hard it is to kill a Star Trek ship on any regular day? It was pretty funny how fast ships were dying in those fleet battles during Dominion Wars episodes.
That is very easy to explain: Plot Armour. We wan't pretty explosion in our sci fi tv shows so when some fireworks are needed then the most convenient ship goes kaboom.
The reason carriers are not nearly as powerful as thier naval counterparts is a combination of two main factors.
1. Naval ships sink. Poking a hole into a naval ship is pretty easy with modern technology. One bomber could easily sink many carriers and carriers carry many bombers. Once a ship sinks below the water its gone for good and can't affect combat anymore. In space this is different. If you poke a hole in a properly designed spaceship then whatever compartment you punctured farts its contents into space and not much else happens. To have the same destructive effect you have to pretty much cut the ship in half or explode its reactor in some cheesy fashion. Look at the weapons on TEC bombers and think about how many direct hits it would take to cut a Marza Dreadnaught in half. That amount of ordnance wouldn't even fit inside the bombers!
2. Secondly space is BIG. Aircraft on earth can fly many miles, blow something up, turn around and fly home. In space this is far more difficult because the distances traveled are immense. Adding to the problem is newtonian physics. Exactly half of all energy spent to move in space is spent just slowing down. Its not possible to simply pull a U turn. If you spent X energy getting up to whatever speed you are at. You need to spend exactly twice that to turn around and go home at the same speed.
Of course neither of those issues are very important in a computer game but its a good thing to consider.
Naval battle=/=Space battle even if the ships are called same..
Comparing air battle (Dogfight) to space battle is actually more close. Everything's moving at high speeds and there's 3 dimensions usable, unlike on naval battle, if one doesn't count submarines. Besides subs tend to stay close to surface. Correct me if i'm wrong.
like stated many times already, the game has to be balanced, carrier still are to powerfull currently.... just try making carriers only in a multiplayer game, and move them away when enemy get's close, so happy that in 1.1 carriers will be made super-expensive..... as they should be, but the problem might still remain :/
as for naval tactics, theres no way you can compare naval warfare to space warfare,
Indeed. I once had to explain to someone why thier space combat system didn't work. The gist of it was that combat takes place at a maximum range of one light-second. (300000km ish). It takes 1 second for light to travel between you and an enemy target at that range. So when you see a target you are actually seeing it where it was 1 second earlier. A laser weapon will take one second to reach the target, so there is a two second gap between when you fire the laser at an enemy based on where they WERE and when your laser actually reaches that spot.
To make this easier to visualize think of it this way. Two grains of sand 300 kilometers away from each other, glued to the heads of drunk rocket propelled squirrels traveling in completetly random directions are trying to hit each other with laser beams by guessing where the other grain of sand will be in one second based on where they were a second ago.
EDIT: About the Soase carriers, would it help if bomber squadrons had to return to the carrier to reload ever so often? If the carrier does nothing but run away from the fight then it is also running away from its own squadrons which would then take much much longer to reload thier weapons and return to the fight.
You also seem to assume that humans/Vasari will be aiming. In that time period, the absolute most that an organic is going to be doing is designating targets. If they haven't yet figured out to let the computer decide when and where to shoot, they deserve to lose the war.
Its not that easy. All of your target data is going to be at least 2 seconds old, maybe more. A computer can line up shots with ease but that assumes that the target isn't actively dodging. If the ISS in orbit around earth right now never changes its orbit, then you could reliably hit it with rocks thrown from MARS and you wouldn't even need a supercomputer.
In a realistic fight your target is going to make it as hard as he possibly can for you to shoot him. At the same time he can shoot back at any moment, so both of your ships are going to be flying in erratic patterns. If the enemy changes course by 2 degrees or increases speed by 10% you could end up missing them by hundreds of kilometers. 50 kilometers off is considered a "near miss" given the distances involved.
Don't forget about the size of the ships involved in Sins though -- sure, they may be moving fast and in three dimensions, but even a frigate is large enough that it can't generate a miss very easily, becuase its accelleration is relatively low.
Sins ship scale is highly abstracted, well it has to be or it wouldn't make sense. The lasers the ships fire at each other would be wider than most towns in Canada if you measure them by the size of thier gun barrels. At the current scale it takes a fighter craft less than 10 seconds to travel from the earth to the moon. The game engine is missing out a lot of things, the most obvious being gravity.
Not that Sins isn't fun in its simplicity. Lots of games make a point of being realistic, but if you go down that path you have to carry it all the way to the end.
Almost never. You're asking for a quick death if you're a submarine near the surface. A sub's saving grace is stealth and that's only accomplished by running quiet and running deep. The only time a sub should be at the surface while in transit is for however long it takes to suck more air and then it's time to submerge again.
Several things wrong with this idea. First, WWII is not MODERN. Carriers may still be the most important ship, but guided missiles now dominate modern naval planning. Also, battleships were not useless in WWII. If the Japanese had used their battleships when we had those 3 carriers, Midway would have been irrevalent. It took 17 bomb and 20 torpedo hits to sink Musashi at the battle of Leyte gulf. If they were willing to risk them early in the war, the US wouldn't have had the air power to sink them.
Second, exactly how effective force fields are, if they are ever invented, will define how space warfare is fought. If they are really good, strikecraft will be rendered useless as you'll need bigger sized vessels to store the weapons required to destroy them. If they are not, then carriers will keep their place as the most important vessel in warfare. Of course, as no one has any idea how these will work, sins can basically do whatever it wants with the combat system.
3 words, rule of cool.
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