See, a 3x3 "grid" order system would improve things if you had discrete orders within that grid, and there was a wide enough vocabulary of options on a per order basis. I'll give a quick conceptual layout of how a potential mid game battle layout would look -

3 Flotillas - Flotilla "A" - Sniper config with lots of Torpedoes, Flotilla "B" - Laser+gun boat with shields, Flotilla "C" - Defensive ships with guns

Phase 1 (Long) - Flotilla A - Hold Distance (Gains 20% damage to modules on any ship hit) , Flotilla B - Hook left (Gains 20% damage to Flotilla B and C), Flotilla C - Screen (Gains +50% Flak Defence from guns)

Phase 2 (Medium) - Flotilla A - Drift (Gains 20% evasion against lasers and missiles), Flotilla B - Flank left (Gains 40% damage to Flotilla B and C, takes additional 20% damage from flotilla B and C), Flotilla C - Blockade (Redirects 33% of incoming fire from all flotillas, takes 10% less damage overall)

Phase 3 (Short) - Flotilla A - Evade (Gains 33% evasion against all fire, rate of fire reduced by 20%), Flotilla B - Cross (+15% damage to flotilla A and C), Flotilla C - All in (+50% to weapons damage, +33% to damage received)

These completed multi-phase order setups could be saved in a "playbook" for custom fleets and then used for specific fleet comps, but the idea that I'm driving at should be clear, this would allow for a much wider degree of expression in the planning phase, and allow for a much greater degree of customisation and tuning before the battle begins, as well as more dynamic outcomes during the battles themselves.

I agree with the most ideas here, but why isn't this thread in the "game design" part of the forum?

Bracus wrote:

There are already roles for ships. 1 def and 1 att ship from the small and med classes. For the def ships you can put more def and sup modules on them.

Yeah but all that really does is change the layout and possibly the ship hull buffs. What he's suggesting is that they have unique targeting priorities. Though if that was automated that would be not so good, put that with automated flotilla distribution and the like and you'd have a real mess of a system where you'd have to constantly micromanage your fleets.

There are already roles for ships. 1 def and 1 att ship from the small and med classes. For the def ships you can put more def and sup modules on them.

I mean, most counter systems are going to seem like RPS, are they not? But I propose taking this from a different angle.

Rather then having the weapons define a ships purpose, you could have a ships purpose tag define what it's role is suppose to be on the battlefield.

So the current ship listing is:

2 small ships, 2 medium ships and 1 large ship.

Now I don't own the early access, so I can't speak to their currently designated roles but I'm guessing they aren't very distinctive.

What we could have:

Large ship: Space superiority

Attacks the enemies largest ships first.

Medium ship 1: Counter artillery

Attacks the enemies most damaging ships first.

Medium ship 2: Guardian

Attacks any ship that attacks other ships in it's flotilla.

Small ship 1: Flak screen

Attacks any ship that attacks with missiles and fighters, shooting down craft and missiles as it goes.

Small ship 2: Bomber

Attacks the enemies with the most defence first.

This is a basic system, and more of an adaptation of the current set up but it could be the idea of a system where ship roles are determined by the ships themselves, letting the player modify this role by equipping them with a number of weapons.

I'll try to come up with somthing more comprehensive a little later.

To that I'm going to say, it's not too late, people need to fill this thread with thoughts, ideas, commentary and votes, this needs to be the place where everyone makes their voice heard on where the combat system could go. Where it needs to go. If we're going to get Amplitude to listen to reason on this one, putting our heads together and coming up with useful ideas and suggestions here would be a great start.

I wish I had seen this thread sooner and that it had more attention given to it. There are a lot of excelent ideeas here for creating an actual decent and strategicaly satisfying combat system that still demands minimal to no micro from the player. Shame really that the lastest dev post made it obvious they are sticking to their oversimpliefied rock paper scissors countering system with no real input from the player. Alas, perhaps it's not too late for things to change? Because the curent combat system suffers greatly.

And to tulip: we have autoresolve for multy player scenarios, and we have a deeep combat system for single player. There has to be something for the single player that fills in the void the presence of other living players and the greater focus on overall campaign and backstabing create compared to the multy player component.

mezmorki wrote:

vahouth wrote:

My suggestions to improve the combat system are:

• Choice of battlefield especially for the attacker.
• Different plans for each group in the fleet, not a single one for all (for example group A is medium range, group B is sniper, group C is short range). 
• The player should be able to assign ships in each group, or divide groups based on range of engagement, role etc.
• Manual fleet placement mainly when we have more than 1 fleet group.
• Manual placement of reinforcements (rear or flanks of the enemy), as well as time of deployment. 
• Battle plans for reinforcements (sniper, hammer & anvil etc).

Pretty close to my suggestions - all of this would be great.

I'd love the idea for multiple fleets in the same system being able to become reinforcements so that we actually get big large battles with more than 10 ships on a side.  

Add that to my idea concerning ship maneuver orders and we'd get to a point where Ship Micro would be pretty decent. These ideas definitely would add a great deal. For choice of battlefield, an extra button what offers a set of three visual choices to the attacker along with some minor buffs / debuffs as to what they'd be fighting in would be pretty much ideal.

I have actually on multiple occasions cared more about the card bonus than the optimizations, but its usually when I expect to have to fight more than one battle and am looking for the "heal my ships after battle" card

vahouth wrote:

My suggestions to improve the combat system are:

• Choice of battlefield especially for the attacker.
• Different plans for each group in the fleet, not a single one for all (for example group A is medium range, group B is sniper, group C is short range). 
• The player should be able to assign ships in each group, or divide groups based on range of engagement, role etc.
• Manual fleet placement mainly when we have more than 1 fleet group.
• Manual placement of reinforcements (rear or flanks of the enemy), as well as time of deployment. 
• Battle plans for reinforcements (sniper, hammer & anvil etc).

Pretty close to my suggestions - all of this would be great.

I'd love the idea for multiple fleets in the same system being able to become reinforcements so that we actually get big large battles with more than 10 ships on a side.  

My suggestions to improve the combat system are:

• Choice of battlefield especially for the attacker.
• Different plans for each group in the fleet, not a single one for all (for example group A is medium range, group B is sniper, group C is short range). 
• The player should be able to assign ships in each group, or divide groups based on range of engagement, role etc.
• Manual fleet placement mainly when we have more than 1 fleet group.
• Manual placement of reinforcements (rear or flanks of the enemy), as well as time of deployment. 
• Battle plans for reinforcements (sniper, hammer & anvil etc).

Stalker0 wrote:

As the OP mentioned, I think a key issue is that the range decision right now is not a decision at all. You always want your ships to engage at their optimal range, regardless of the secondary bonus of the card. So I think that is the wrong decision. I think the decision should be similar to Lo_fabre's idea, but even simpler: 

1) Hold Back: All ships stay together at the longest optimal range for some of the ships.

2) Optimal Range: All ships move to their optimal ranges and stay there as best they can.

3) Charge In: All ships stay together and move towards short range.

Now since Optimal Range is likely the best tactic in general, you could then give the other tactics some secondary benefit....or simply make that one more tactical choice the player selects.

Not a problem to me, but not sure if everyone will be comfortable with this 3 choices system (look what's happening with actual system).

Lots of good ideas all, thanks for the comments.

I agree that a full blown Dominions's style combat is overkill - and that wasn't what I was advocating for.  Something closer to Gratuitous Space Battles makes a bit more sense to me.  

Given that, according to the GDD, combat is already structured around three phases, I like what Hobbesian is working towards (now that I understand it better).  Essentially, the are three phases and three movement orders to assign to each phase.  Rather than call them "short, medium, long", I'd simply call them "Early, Mid, and Late" stage, or "Opening, Middle, Closure" phase or something like that.  This would really help. 

Then maybe the bonuses could likewise be attached as a second layer to the phase orders.  

This would also make heroes more worthwhile. They could have unique tactics or options they can do with a fleet... would make battles more interresting, and have some visible impact rather than just buff stats. 

As it is now it is basically just rock paper scissors and the guy with the better tech wins. No choice you make or amount of crew xp you have over your enemies really matter. This makes for boring repetitive gameplay that does not offer anything. I really do think this is sad considering the fact that the visuals are really quite beautiful to watch. 

Even with the camera system working, the fact that the battle system offers so little vocabulary for expression in the battle space means that there's no point actually -watching- the battle, you're better off simulating it and then parsing (when that becomes available) the data. If they want to make the actual viewable combat meaningful they -need- to increase the complexity of language that's offered in the battlespace, which means improving Ship Micro massively.

Either that or disposing of Ship Micro altogether and focusing on Empire Macro, but they need to make their decision now.

Let's think about attention and time budgeting.  By "attention budget" i mean that a person's mental capacity and focus is limited and should be directed towards what the vision of the writer/director/designer views as the core and most interesting parts of the experience i.e. we can only do so much. By "time budget" I refer to the proper time expenditure of actually sitting through the designed experience i.e. we only have so much time.

A significant strength of Endless Legend in its current iteration is that my friends and I can fire up an MP game on fast and credibly complete it in one sitting, two if we want to call it an early night. However, this is only really possible if we generally agree on not manually fighting out the majority of battles. Even with EL's relatively cut down 6 phase TBT system, each manual combat resolution justifies a minor break for all non-involved players, and constitutes a minor frustration just by occurring. You can see that not only does manual combat resolution interfere with our time budgetting, it also interferes with our attention budgeting, because attention spent on tactics is attention not spent on critical tasks like making sure the building and technology queues match up, that our diplomacy is being engaged, that our timing on empire plans work, etc.

I can't speak to Starbase Orion, but I can to Dominions, and a competitive turn of Dominions can take as long as a competitive match of Endless Legend. Dominions' scripting and spell system are so arcane that individual battles can involve hours of scripting. I do not think that a Dominions level complexity is in keeping with Amplitude's vision for any of its games, which are all designed at a deep level to be limited and tight. Endless Legend has a more complex vocabulary of tactics than its main competitor (Civilization), but much less so than Dominions. Dungeon of the Endless has a much more complex vocabulary than, say, DoomRL, but much less so than NetHack or Angband. Contra the name, Endless games are designed to end on a scale that fits into a busy person's life (after all, the Endless are the fools of the series). 

All that said, ES2's system is currently much too simple. Even a simple EL-looking map interface where you manually place blocking ships and whatnot would be a massive improvement, or even a return to Disharmony's card-pick system. Such design must be made with attention to the player's budgets of time and brainpower.

I do think OP's insights about the camera and feedback system are spot-on. Currently I feel like i have no idea which parts of my fleets are working well and which parts are mistakes.