Hello everyone:
I've been playing this since the initial tech preview last year. Overall it's definitely going in a great direction, but I can't help but think that the game is completely missing out on an enormous opportunity- the additional tactical depth and emergent gameplay that would come from greater use of tactical maneuvering.
Specifically, I'm referring to the feature that Sins II has in which individual turrets, missiles, etc. are tracked. This is a great idea in theory, but I feel like in practice it's primarily of graphical rather than gameplay value.
In pre-WW2 naval warfare, the victor was primarily determined by who was able to maneuver their fleets into a position from which they had an advantage. For example, one such maneuver called "crossing the T" involved aligning all of your ships such that they were in a line with broadsides (where the guns were) facing the enemy, while the enemy was perpendicular to your line (hence the "T") and therefore unable to fire back. This maneuver proved decisive at the Battle of Jutland and the Battle of Tsushima, among others. During the decisive Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, victory went to the British in part because they were able to cut the Franco-Spanish battle line through superior maneuver.
Opportunities for this to enhance gameplay seem boundless. Where is the button to arrange your capital ships and titans to take missiles to their broadside and defend the rest of the fleet? Where the option to orient my ships such that lasers, or point turrets, are brought to bear against the enemy in one direction, perhaps leaving another open to attack? Why can't I order my cruisers to go out of plane in the z direction so that I can fire my lasers past the line of heavily shielded vessels the enemy has lined up in front?
It would seem that, for example, a simple set of buttons could enhance the tactical options greatly. Just as for example in Sins I there were buttons for tight and loose fleet formations, you could imagine buttons ordering ships to turn turrets in a certain direction, to line themselves up in linear formations in 2 or 3 dimensions, line up capital ships in front, hide them in the rear, etc.
The possibilities for emergent gameplay are boundless. Rather than being based primarily on who can arrange the largest deathball, battles would be far more tactical in nature, where an extra element of strategy has to be brought to bear in order to win. Slipped that destroyer between the enemy's capital ships? Now they can't easily fire at for fear of hitting other friendlies (My Conquest is the Sea of Stars is a good piece of science fiction that shows this exact situation and how difficult it is for the enemy to combat the tactic even in a three-dimensional battle). "I was going to lose that Titan but was able to send my flak ships in a line in front of it, soaking up the missiles and giving the Titan a chance to use its ability to and turn the tide of battle". The enemy has a formidable fleet of battleships? Good luck attacking your cruisers as they arch over them in the Z dimensions and they have to make big lumbering turns to bring their weapons to bear.
I love the direction the game is going but the lack of this emergent gameplay, this just feels like a huge missed opportunity to me, especially since the underlying plumbing has already been done in the game engine. I think something as simple as adding a few tactical options such as buttons and tweaking the directions in which certain weapons could fire would a lot in this respect. Much as the simple two-dimensional movement of planets and moons in the solar system add a lot of strategic depth, fleet positioning and maneuvers relative to the turret and missile direction should do so as well and, again, the hard part is done since that movement is already coded into the game. It just needs a few more linkages between the UI and the underlying math/simulation going on for the player to be able to enjoy it and bring a whole new level of tactical gameplay into the picture.
A really interesting post and one that touched on the "bringing weapons to bear" subject that I had considered posting earlier now that we have tracking turrets but thought it too much to ask from a game like this and so abstained. Another thing that stopped me posting was that ships have one thickness of armor plate all round for this game and thus flanking or aiming for weak points in armor by approaching the enemy from different sides is largely redundant. I remember homeworld allowed you to disable engines and things like that which I thought would be nice with trackable turrets. Disabling vessels might even allow you to capture or intern them. Ransom them perhaps or force an alliance. A pacifist faction might even prefer this. I digress.....
Ok back to your point on emergent gameplay. I also think players should be able to go deeper than they could in sins1 especially in a tactical way. However I do not think we will get full 3D Z axis movement. but we may get 3D formations that work well. Those would still work in a flat gravity well model.
Here are some ideas I had about formations:
Wall formation - Kind of a space broadside to beat an approaching enemy with maximum turreted weaponry facing the enemy who should if they are silly approach the middle of the wall allowing the most guns brought to bear.
Pyramid - An breakthrough formation. The tip would be the toughest ship which would presumably take all incoming fire while the rest of the formations weaker ships stayed alive enabling them to contribute their fire to the breakthrough.
Hollow Box formation - A moving formation that provides some all round defence. The rear most ships would have the heaviest rearward facing armament. The forward ships the heaviest forward armament. Weak or non-combatant ships would be in the middle.
Sphere formation - A stationary all round defence formation. This formation would allow all ships to point their main armament outwards and is great for fighter defence. It can move slowly on thrusters only as main engines would be facing the wrong way for a lot of ships.
Line Formation - Used to weave a small cross sectional path through a gap in the enemies lines. Follow the leader so to speak.
Rectangle formation - Surround and protect weaker ships while following a path.
Escort Formation - Nominated ships travel up and down the line protecting weaker ships which will not stop to engage.
Obviously all of these formations rely on the ships using the slowest ship in the formation as their speed AND are most effective when ships cannot fire through each other. I am not sure if ships can fire through each other in this game?
It would be good as well to be able to design formations so you can determine what ship type goes where in the formation. Which are more protected and which less.
Homeworld 1 had formations and they attempted to bring it back for homeworld remastered (which combined hw1 & 2 in multiplayer) but the code was not working properly iirc because they were using the homeworld 2 code and trying to shoehorn it in I am guessing.
I think stellaris just chooses for you? Your missile ships are at the back... because all that's going to happen is we are going to form a big furball and do some calculations that gradually wear down fleets via big fleet taken as a whole statistics formula.
SES Jutland had a complex formation builder in the campaign mode. IIRC each fleet on the campaign map was allowed to determine its formation and have it adjusted as new ships were built. Then when you sallied forth you would be using that formation?
So yeah. Like you, I'd love to see emergent gameplay that made the sins2 more complex for both the combat and 4x core elements of sins2. Gameplay that allow the player to explore different strategies and tactics rather than following strict simple rock paper scissors.
As a note, missiles really can be body blocked already in the game. If I were to guess, I suspect this may be a core part of what the Guardian does, projecting a shield ahead of it that directly tanks the blows.
Armor weak points are something that I don't think would work terribly well because you'd always target the weak points of a ship unless we want to introduce accuracy. Ships in Sins are also just too numerous and expendable for this to work out super well, I think.
That said, some amount of formation control would be nice. I've seen cases where Gardas could have brought all five guns to bear if they'd just angled themselves a bit, but instead they only had two. If that could have been deliberate, that would have been great, but it was only dumb AI pathing.
If we want to see emergent maneuverability gameplay, i think we really just need more maneuverable ships with fewer guns studding them on every side. I'm not saying I'm fully on board with that, but I do absolutely agree that we should have better formation control than we do.
Yes, you get it exactly and are also way ahead of me in thinking of specific tactical formations of this type that could be useful.
Good to hear that their is already some blocking protection other than simply depending on the AI to target the closest ships to them.
With regard to weak points. I agree that those just become learned META, unless the homeworld system is introduced. Incidentally I think you would be surprised how many people do not learn and impliment that learned META. I would be more worried about the AI assuming the human will be appl,ying the weak points gameplay and making sure it used it as well.
In homeworld you don't have weak points so much as the option to aim at either components like the engine, hangar bay, resource collection bay, construction module XYZ, turrets, missile launchers and such. Targetting and eventually disabling these barely affects the enemy ships base hull points. This means that shooting at the components costs you time that could have been spent wearing away overall hull points to destroy the ship. In Homeworld this used to work particularly well when you took out a Hiigarian battlecruisers top turret which was it's main armament. You could then stay on top of the ship and destroy a much more powerful ship while it floundered about trying to bring it's lower main armament to bear. In short this large flat ship needed escorts or it could be disabled through component destruction. Disabling the engine in addition to the turret meant that it was that much easier to stay on top of the hiigarian battlecruiser and while away it's hitpoints.
Homeworld Target subsytems is at 3:48 here if you would like to see what I am talking about.
I'd go as far to say with relation to my formations post above that:
* THe Ceilo Command control and communications cruiser is needed for formations
* Formations give buffs according to formation type
* Minimum number of ships is needed for a formation (as well as needing the Ceilo command cruiser)
* If the Ceilo is taken out the formation and buffs / debuffs dissolve and cease causing confusion and a debuff for a period.
* Each formation is researchable so it can be used.
* Formations are a tier 3 tech
* Each formation has a debuff. For example the wall formation leaves the rear vulnerable because they will not turn to fight a rear attack. The whole formation must turn which takes time. Unless the player dissolved the formation from the command cruiser causing a debuff for a period.
* Formations do not get buffs until they form after leaving phase space. After they "lock" into place. Perhaps large gaps blown in them could also debuff them until the gap is closed?
Formations would look cool as well as signalling the defender about how to defeat the formation while buffing the fleet using the formation according to formation type.
If done correctly this mechanic could introduce some mid game emergent gameplay.
I was hoping a Sins 2 would go from huge fleets to maybe a fleet at a time battles that could downscale and utilize your thoughts into the game.
You mean you had hoped that fleet battles were not simply blobs but consisted of deliberate sub-formations or squadrons carrying out their orders. Left wing advances to flank, rear reserve squadron is ordered to intervene only at a particular time and centre splits and goes up and over or under. A small squadron is also detached to go for the planet bombardment craft or escort them... that sort of thing? I seem to remember that endless space 1 or 2 had a combat system that was beautiful but like watching a video that you could not control, before you started the battle you chose tactics, but could not react to any developments on the fly. It kinda looked interesting though but was a little arbitrary in that contact with the enemy without the means to adapt was painful to watch. However my point here is that I think that system had a lot of tactical options for similar thiongs you are asking for... but wow it's been a long time since I basically tried that game and because it was single player and because of that system I let it be and dropped it.
This is exactly what I had in mind, at least, articulated much more clearly than I was able to.
The more I think about this, the more I wish we had the ability to out-of-game design formations that we could pick from in-game, with the formations also defining AI targeting behavior. Obviously, the game would come with a few default options, but I am confident the community could do better to stay aligned with the meta.
From my own experience modding the AI, even mild improvements can go a long way, and being able to change that in the middle of battle would be great.
In my experience game developers in general seem to baulk at a lot of advanced human freedoms to structure forces and organise them unless it is in an abstract way (e.g. a +2 buff to armor). If freedom to organise forces is done in a physical way it means the AI has to know how to use the formations and if it does not do so then the human has a distinct advantage. If the AI uses formations with perfect efficiency then the human has a disadvantage.
So most games end up like blob fests rather than battles ending with statistics winning the day rather than tactics.
In Sins1 we were able to get ships to:
Jump together - all grouped, not grouped, some grouped
Form fleets - group ships together in an easy one click unit
Engagement range - helped ships stay repairing etc
Cohesion - how close ships stay to each other. Which helped escort scenarios
Retreat - a quick button that got all ships to drop what they were doing and retreat to the nearest gravity well. Great if you are occupied or the game was chugging and things were hard to click.
Auto Attack - off/on for all ships with one button
Leave Fleet - In a pinch you can be sure, absolutely sure you have detached a ship and will not drag the whole fleet somewhere unintended
At the time I considered this one of the most advanced space RTS tactics systems around. Homeworld had formations but Sins1 had more functional commands that meant something. I distinctly rememeber as sins expansions came out or an update added these commands that their was relief and happiness at not having to wasted time manually mucking around with the function these toggles did with a quick click.
In Sins2 we have a much leaner selection of fleet management tools
Move with formation - abstracted by needing a second key to disable it
Hold Position - used to be engagement range with 3-4 presets iirc
Leave Fleet - Hidden in a submenu with scuttle. I hope this submenu will eventually include some even more impressive fleet commands than sins1
Part of my problem with these is that they are not toggles. It's hard to remember exactly what command a ship is following. You cannot see by clicking on the fleet.
But the main problem is that instead of something even more advanced for the player to play with and learn how to use we have an uber modern simplification that means sins1 is by far more advanced.
In Sins2 currently ships just do whatever they want. My support ships like my repair cruisers tend to end up a long way from the capital ships I want them watching over. There are ways
I see and read all the formation comments, however I just want to address the fleet comments. Sins2 fleets are much more sophisticated than Sins1 and are simultaneously easier to use (and they aren't done yet).
Super easy to create multiple fleets and send each as a group or not. Have the secondary fleets follow the primary fleet if you want to maintain more coherency. This was very clumsy and confusing in Sins1. It’s also faster and more fluid to hold a hotkey to send them in one of 2 modes, rather than having to toggle the button. Also, there is a setting to pick your preferred default movement mode.
Its not one click as you have to open the menu and click the button. Sins2 is easier, and more importantly, more fluid. Band box your units (or select/group whatever way you prefer) and right click the left side (or a main view fleet icon) to either make a new fleet (or add to a new fleet). Probably add a hotkey to make this even faster for advanced users.
Likely coming in a future update. Code already exists as that is what the Derelict guardians already use.
All fleets are on the left. Click it and right click to any location - even easier if you have planets on the left as those icons are stable and easy to click even if the game is chugging. Same number of operations without the interface bloat.
In Sins1 this meant don't move and don't attack. We figured the 'don't move' is useful to keep but when would you not want the ship’s weapons to fire? Hold position became its replacement and made more explicit than doubling up the duty of the attack button.
See above under Jump Together.
See above under Engagement Range and Auto Attack.
Leave Fleet - Hidden in a submenu with scuttle.
In Sins2 ‘Leave Fleet’ is hidden to same the extent as Sins1 (Advanced menu vs Tactics menu). But, in Sins2 you can bind a direct hotkey to it making it even easier but typically I just select the ship(s) and right click them into their own fleet – this also has the added advantage of keeping the removed ship(s) quickly accessible for whatever else you had planned for them to do.
It's hard to remember exactly what command a ship is following.
Press space bar (likely changing to ALT in the future) to see the command lines or read the tooltip (says exactly what its doing).
My support ships like my repair cruisers tend to end up a long way from the capital ships I want them watching over.
Select the repair ship(s), right click the capital ship(s) to follow. If the other capital ships are nearby he'll heal those too.
Fleet Reinforcement:
Extremely clumsy in Sins1, far far superior in Sins2. This addresses our number one complaint with Sins1 ship management.
Sins2 fleets allow you reinforce the fleet in a far easier way than the clumsy 'select a factory->build->rally' system in Sins1. Too many steps, too much micro if you want ships to rally to different fleets, confusing behavior about when and which fleet a ship entering a gravity well will join, etc.
Sins2 reinforcement allows to see the current composition, request ships to reinforce, auto researches ships that aren't unlocked yet, auto selects the best factories, handles the rallying and auto adding to the correct fleet. In Sins1 this was extremely frustrating to manage.
Summary:
From my perspective the only regression is the loss of engagement ranges but I feel the new Fleet Reinforcement system adds much more to the game than the loss of engagement ranges takes away. Net win. In either case, engagement ranges may make a return.
Jump together - all grouped, not grouped, some grouped My main point here is that we no longer have the visual aspect that was the three green arrows in sins1. In sins1 I distinctly remember people being frustrated when their fleets did not jump together and being able to point out the green button, which from that point onwards was something to check for each fleet. For me it was about checking AFTER something went wrong if I had indeed set the correct jump together or not settings. So it's not just about the current command you are giving. It's about what you want to do with that particular fleet in future and preparing for it as well as something visual for people to associate types of movement with and what they are currently set to. It does not matter what the starting default is.
I agree that the new system is better although it is largely academic that two clicks instead of one are needed for such an important one off event. I do like the new system better. I included this command in my original post for completeness.
Sounds good. I would just add that we get at least the original number of options here for distances.
The point of the retreat button is more one of a panic button when you realise your fleet is almost dead or you have made a major mistake entering a gravity well and need the nearerest exit plotted by the computer. I used to use it and more importantly was able over voice coms to tell new players to use it without too much complexity. They are looking at their fleet and it is already selected... I am not looking to send them to a different part of the interface and then click it and zoom out to select the closest retreat point which may take some time to find. Meanwhile the retreat button already has your ships doing an about turn.
I would want to toggle weapons off when traveling through a friendly gravity well that did not have a treaty with yet OR a faction I did not want to upset with escalation. I guess another reason might be to preserve antimatter, but you can toggle all your ship skills off one by one for that. I guess another reason would be to allow skills to work with minimum damage to the enemy infrastructure with minor factions. But I would not want to stop ships while holding fire, I was not aware it froze ships while they held fire
I simply meant by glancing for future reference at what I had my individual fleet presets set to for jump together, keep close to each other or spread out, engage at X range only etc Toggles are visual and a record of what happened and is to happen. The player can see what they did wrong in other words and does not have to keep remember to use hotkeys every time they move a fleet that may always need the same settings.
My point here as above is that I do not want to fix the problem after it has happened, I just want the fleet to stay together more closely when I want to use repair ships in an upcoming fight. I want them to enter the gravity well like this and to stay like this in close formation until I release them for the chase when the enemy is beaten.
Love the sins2 fleet reenforcement system
Engagment ranges are much more important than the new reinforcement system and I am not sure why one has to be removed to enable the other? Engagement ranges stop my fleet from chasing things too far off especially when I want them to remain mutually supporting each other or something they are defending. Not to take the enemies bait so to speak when they try to distract my fleet with a small force. Remember I may be looking at the other side of the map when all of this happens. Stay near the starbase you woulded fleet
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Apologies for the way this reply is structured. I had all of this in a spreadsheet to sort out what was what and tried to paste it all in here which clipped half of it out. Lots of copy pasting in the above reply and the original text by you missing Blair
I think the crux of the matter might be the way people want to use the sins1 buttons and that people learn in different ways and have different systems for doing things. Me. I like systems that I can automate and check without pressing the keyboard and then when it all goes wrong remembering back to what I did 15 minutes ago with a particular unit.
A technical support call goes nowhere if the customer has no idea what they pressed or in fact might just be plain ignorant of the options they had because they were opaque - hidden behind invisible hotkeys that their is now no record of.Hotkeys might be more efficient in the moment, but for standing orders that can be checked in the record/logs and given as recorded/logs it is different. In fact we might be facing the reason orders are written down historically instead of verbally given. We might be looking at the difference between strategic games and tactical ones which live in the moment.
I am not a fan of the minimalist interface trend that has been in effect encouraging control at one end and not the other. Funneling the customer or user into one path. It looks nice of course and has the nack of teaching casuals the basics fast, but for deeper play it imho can become a burden as many things are hidden or not even included for the sake of cleanliness.
Thanks for the explanations. Myself, Jamie, and Steve all interpreted your original comments quite differently when we discussed them internally but you've made them much clearer. Now that we understand it'll improve our evaluation and potential next steps.
Just one point regarding:
Engagement ranges are much more important than the new reinforcement system and I am not sure why one has to be removed to enable the other?
They aren't mutually exclusive (one isn't trading for the other). I was just trying to illustrate that Sins2 fleet management had some upsides even if we lost something from Sins1. There is no causality/correlation between adding reinforcement and removing engagement ranges.
Thanks Blair. I appreciate that you read my post at all. You guys are probably the most receptive, polite and responsive devs I have ever had the pleasure of interactings with.
Sorry for the confusion.
Same!
Thanks, and we very much appreciate the detailed feedback. Its the best way to improve!
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