FTL Discussion Thread

[Mandemon]

Yes I read that Dev Diary and thought "its not about the systems, its about the ships," just me I guess.

The word tactical just reminded me of how much was lost when Real Time games took over from turn based ones. Real time combat is just a blob of ships shooting at another blob.
That change in game engines is not Paradox's fault - the industry just changed. Now I can't even pick the FTL type and am left with the simple ship design in Stellaris - again I blame real time combat engines for forcing this simplification.

I think you are wrong to blame real time engines for "simplication", it's about balanced and interesting gameplay.

Take combat for example. On one hand, you got Stellaris where you just tell who to attack and fleet takes care of it. On the other hand, you have Homeworld, where you manage individual ships, their positions on 3D plane, fuel consumption for fighters, etc. etc.

It's the matter of scale. Could each battle in Stellaris theoretically be modeled as detailed as Homeworld? Yes, but you end up with player having to pay focus to too many things, never mind lord help you if you have several battles going on at the same time.

Real time is not "cause for simplication", it's the scale and balancing.

 

[GhostInTheMachine22]

I think you are wrong to blame real time engines for "simplication", it's about balanced and interesting gameplay.

Take combat for example. On one hand, you got Stellaris where you just tell who to attack and fleet takes care of it. On the other hand, you have Homeworld, where you manage individual ships, their positions on 3D plane, fuel consumption for fighters, etc. etc.

It's the matter of scale. Could each battle in Stellaris theoretically be modeled as detailed as Homeworld? Yes, but you end up with player having to pay focus to too many things, never mind lord help you if you have several battles going on at the same time.

Real time is not "cause for simplication", it's the scale and balancing.

I am more thinking of Turn based tactical combat v Real Time combat and its effect on the detail available in ship design. On a 2D specialised Combat screen, you could have I go you go combat turns using complicated designs that power ships of completely different roles and hull sizes - while Stellaris is sort of 2D in the main star system view it is most definitely Real Time and simplified Design.

Homeworld is more of a flight sim for pilots who can process information in 3D terms and manage the combat - way, way beyond my capabilities to be honest.

Stellaris makes for a pretty fireworks display in combat (not a bad thing at all) but once combat is joined my participation in the battle is limited to pressing "Retreat" if my boys are taking
a beating.

I suppose I come at Stellaris from the point of view of loving the ships much more than the diplomacy, and 2.0 was like going with an old friend to get on a train to a totally new and unexpected (to me anyway) direction. Most will probably like the new destination, especially those who just got on the train at 2.0

I miss tractor beams and boarding parties, raids and ship capture, fusion beams, AF,Co,Sp. Phasors, Neutron beams and Disruptor cannons all modified and multiplied by banks of
special modules. But I am showing my age now That game has passed into history now, and so must the hope I had for Stellaris. But you *cannot* please all of the people all of the time, not with limited time and resources. Paradox had to focus on what they thought could be done best and they have done that.

Good luck to all.

 

[Mandemon]

Homeworld is more of a flight sim for pilots

Yeaaah... I think you don't really know what you are talking about. Homeworld is about as much "flight sim" as Command & Conquer was an economic simulation.

I miss tractor beams and boarding parties, raids and ship capture, fusion beams, AF,Co,Sp. Phasors, Neutron beams and Disruptor cannons all modified and multiplied by banks of
special modules. But I am showing my age now That game has passed into history now, and so must the hope I had for Stellaris. But you *cannot* please all of the people all of the time, not with limited time and resources. Paradox had to focus on what they thought could be done best and they have done that.

I am not sure, but I think you refer to Master of Orion 2 (Man, I remember getting that game free with a magazine and I loved the shit out of it. Psilon FTW! BURN THE GNOLANS! SALT THEIR PLANETS! PURGE THEIR TREACHEROUS KIN!), but that games combat was... boring. Like, seriously. It was very slow "one-by-one" ship movement and with larger fleets it would take forever to process even a single turn.

 

[Overclocked1]

I'll be honest with you: I don't have the foggiest idea how those FTL-drives impacted perfomance, nor do I particularily care. However, the other reasons that were quoted above are true. I enjoy them, and so do many others. Cherry introduced many new features, and has made Stellaris a better game. They didn't even slash the other FTLs, just reworked them. They still exist and define gameplay.

So yeah, I do applaud the devs for that. It took balls, but they delivered, and they did so in a free patch, too.

Every change could have been implemented without the ftl rework. But that would have meant more working for them so they took it out. Thats simply how I see it.

 

[DragonShadow]

Every change could have been implemented without the ftl rework. But that would have meant more working for them so they took it out. Thats simply how I see it.

The three FTL types were a cool idea. But, as they've already made clear, they could not have been balanced against each other. Ever. They are too different, unless you buff them all so much that the differences become cosmetic (in which case everyone would be complaining again).

 

[Knight of Orthus]

Every change could have been implemented without the ftl rework. But that would have meant more working for them so they took it out. Thats simply how I see it.

A very simple view indeed. For starters, they could have just left as was, for no amount of work. Instead, they chose to adress the obvious and glaring issues that 1) made every game ever into a warp game (Jump drives rendered FTL-choices utterly meaningless) and 2) made Warfare a meaningless grind.

The complaints from the community were massive, and they've actually done something about it. It just so happens that it was caused by the design choice of 3 FTL types - so they replaced it with something better! Wormholes are still there, Gateway Travel is way better than Warp, and Jump Drives are way more awesome since they now offer new tactical options instead of just being "super-warp".

Seeing how certain of your judgement you are, however, would you care to enlighten us how precisely "Every change could have been implemented without the FTL Rework"? Let's start with FTL-Inhibitors, for example: How would you have added options to defend against FTL? I mean, you must have 4 different detailed options ready to be implented to ensure proper balancing in order to postulate your opinion, right?

 

[PK_AZ]

Let's start with FTL-Inhibitors, for example

Nah, thats boring. I would prefer to hear how to keep both warp and unique tactical options coming from new jump drives.

 

[Mandemon]

Every change could have been implemented without the ftl rework. But that would have meant more working for them so they took it out. Thats simply how I see it.

So how would borders work with 3 different FTLs again? How would the sensor ranges work? I mean, why would warp based civilization measure sensor ranges or border ranges with hyperlanes, if they don't even use them? How would new defensive starbases work, since non-hyperlane based empires could just skip over them?

Nah, thats boring. I would prefer to hear how to keep both warp and unique tactical options coming from new jump drives.

Well, FTL inhibot is the classic example, but I would love to hear this option too

Then again, so far track record of this thread, response will be "there are options" but we are never actually told those options...

 

[Overclocked1]

So how would borders work with 3 different FTLs again? How would the sensor ranges work? I mean, why would warp based civilization measure sensor ranges or border ranges with hyperlanes, if they don't even use them? How would new defensive starbases work, since non-hyperlane based empires could just skip over them?

Whats so hard to believe here? Boarders would work the same way they currently do with planting outposts and colony's for expansion, and with colony's and starbases providing sensor range based on your tech at the time. And starbases come equipped with FTL inhibitors currently. Why cant something like an FTL snare be added to the starbases? Similar to the older defence platforms but with an actual range beyond its installed system based on its technology level. This would force re-direct enemy fleets to the starbase system if they come withing range while trying to skip past your systems. Of course this can only work against war decked empires and within your own boarders.

This is me just spit balling some basic ideas. Of course this is mostly to help defend against warp. As for wormholes, well its simple, don't let them install wormhole stations in your space.

 

[DragonShadow]

Whats so hard to believe here? Boarders would work the same way they currently do with planting outposts and colony's for expansion, and with colony's and starbases providing sensor range based on your tech at the time. And starbases come equipped with FTL inhibitors currently. Why cant something like an FTL snare be added to the starbases? Similar to the older defence platforms but with an actual range beyond its installed system based on its technology level. This would force re-direct enemy fleets to the starbase system if they come withing range while trying to skip past your systems. Of course this can only work against war decked empires and within your own boarders.

This is me just spit balling some basic ideas. Of course this is mostly to help defend against warp. As for wormholes, well its simple, don't let them install wormhole stations in your space.

So every single time a warp occurs, the game has to check on whether or not the 3d vector of the fleet will intersect either a 2d-defined zone or a 3d zone of effect for every singly FTL snare on the map?

 

[Mandemon]

Whats so hard to believe here? Boarders would work the same way they currently do with planting outposts and colony's for expansion, and with colony's and starbases providing sensor range based on your tech at the time.

So Warp and Wormhole, neither which are tied to hyperlanes, have their sensors and borders tied to hyperlanes? How does that make logical sense for warp based civilization, which doesn't measure locations by hyperlanes but rather jump distances, would use hyperlanes to track sensor data?

And starbases come equipped with FTL inhibitors currently. Why cant something like an FTL snare be added to the starbases? Similar to the older defence platforms but with an actual range beyond its installed system based on its technology level. This would force re-direct enemy fleets to the starbase system if they come withing range while trying to skip past your systems. Of course this can only work against war decked empires and within your own boarders.

Ah, and now we get back to good old snare problem. First of all, how does the snare work?

• Does it merely snare ships within the system or does it present a bubble? If it's only per system, then it offers same effect as 1.9 snares... AKA nothing. Systems where you have snares are places enemy was planning on staying and fighting anyway, so snare is entirely pointless and just takes a slot you could use for something else.
• Does it work by preventing them from leaving entire, or can ships leave by returning to the system they came from(as they currently can)?
• If it works as a bubble, how does it determine if something is pulled? If someone is merely crossing over the bubble, are they pulled in, or does the destination need to be within the bubble? How do you prevent ships being pulled too far away from their course (For example, wormhole ships pulled too far away from any wormhole generators)?
• How does this work with Wormholes, which are point-to-point, rather than traveling on the galaxy map? Since the fleet doesn't actually travel within the bubble, how is it intercepted?
• Do you have a single component that does everything or three different systems?
• Should hyperlane ships be pulled off the lane?
• How do display data to the player, so they can easily see the range of the inhibitor bubble? Should player be able to see it before building a station, after building the station, or should the bubble be invisible to everyone?

And so forth.

 

[Ek1]

I know I'm just hopelessly kicking a dead horse, and I should probably just write one definitive post and put a link in my sig or whatever, but... I wish they would just do what Stars! did and let me move where-ever I wanted to, since, you know, it's space, and because in Stars!, this made for very interesting gameplay. I can only do this while in a system in Stellaris, and star systems are so small there is little space to maneuver. Would make far more sense to for example be able to station a battle fleet in-between two or three worlds I want to protect, and then pounce on enemy fleets as needed.

Stars! also let ships move at different warp speeds, and consume fuel, so most of the time your ships would "cruise" at warp 4-6 or so, if memory serves. This allowed warships to pounce on them by going at warp 8 or 9 for one or two turns. In Stellaris, your ships always move at the same speed, and have infinite fuel, which reduces micro-management, admittedly, but also removes a lot of depth. Then in order for enemy ships to be able to catch you, there's a wind-up and wind-down speed for inter-system engines, which just feels "unfun". Catching an enemy fleet because of clever ship design and maneuvers is fun. Catching them, or being caught, simply because ships have to sit still for x seconds ever so often isn't.
[...]
"Space roads" that force players to only engage each others at choke points is definitely an abstract concept, and one that doesn't make much sense to me. I can't really think of any other genre that does this, and don't really understand why 4X space games all ended up on this same solution. They certainly don't feel a need to do this in their other games, to the contrary, Hearts of Iron has tens of thousands of provinces and sea zones between important locations.

I am jumping to the discussion after ~116 pages and as safe-keeper points out, space is three dimensional and space should let you to boldly go where no man has gone before. Or reptilian. Or avian or whatever you identify yourself you rock eating silicoid.
In the mentioned game, Stars!, you indeed could send your ships to any point of space and/or order them to take another set of course IF they were still in communications range. Since from playing Orion 1 that free space travel has been one of my 'good game' indicators in 4x. The 3D space combat would be another and flexible ship design third. This hyperlane only FTL tune kicks the chair under the concept of space, moving the strategy in the game from protecting strategic points and mobility to choke points. That's really great if this would say to be 2D strategy game like Civilizations and not a space strategy game. There is no intercepting enemy fleets or protecting colonies, just sitting on crossroads with huge guns and there is nothing to be done. Jump drive might bring some space strategy back to the game except using it neuters the fleet.

The FTL charge up time might to some extend reflect mass and acceleration except it does not. One day to FTL and get engaged to combat with enemies that just arrived from FTL and all the momentum goes *puff* magically to dev/null/. If entering warp does not need acceleration then only reason for the wait up is warming up engines or collect a energy spike but it feels quite flawed design to create such drive as that would leave the ship without power to its weapons and shields. Or if the energy amount needed by the warp is just fraction of what other systems need, then why no captain has ever used that huge energy pool to supercharge weapons or researcher got a idea to create a weapon that harness that huge energy spike?

What are hyperlanes? Are they some kind of weak spots in space? Apparently they are as wide as needed so why not warp a moon to a enemy planet devastating it? (like in Stars!) Fuel does not seem to be problem as warping does not use any energy anymore.

Answering 'its magic' moves the game from sci-fi to fantasy and that's cool as long as it is true to what it says it is.

 

[Suicidal Civie]

Feels more like being inside a dungeon than in space now. WTF

 

[Mandemon]

Apparently they are as wide as needed so why not warp a moon to a enemy planet devastating it? (

And why isn't this problem with any other FTL method? Out of interest, what is preventing you from taking a massive asteroid, slapping FTL drive on it and setting it on collision course with the enemy planet?

Why does this "logic" become problem with Hyperdrive only?

 

[_Sohei_]

Sensors do not have their own hyper drives to travel independently of ships and stations. They are limited in range by the vessel they are installed on and this should be euclidean distance. Likewise with snares and other range based effects.

Claimed territory and borders do not need to conform to ease of ability to travel, even under the new forced hyper lanes. Whether an increasing cost conforms to travel distance or hops or euclidean distance is largely irrelevant. The arbitrary choice of method for making such cost calculations is a weak excuse for eliminating other FTL methods. The increasing cost could be based on euclidian distance and it would have negligible effect on game play. Some would prefer it that way and others would not but it would work fine. Or systems could have costs unrelated to distance but instead by resources present or even just a fixed cost for all systems.

 

[Tavior]

Entirely different things. You are referring to an AI that is being taught to play a game, rather than AI that is used to run a game. So your argument falls flat by the sheer fact that you are talking about entire different thing. Kindly read what you are about to post next time. AI doesn't path the route, it just gives orders and it's not being run on home PC.

Please refrain from making assumption to what I meant to said or not.

For AI, think of starcraft 2 lousy skirmish AI that can't overcome a bunker rush on normal difficult as one such example. If you wanted to be political correct terms. Then it would have been "expert system" via if-then logic. But that is not really relevant to this discuss and AI would be the more common parlance to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system


AGI would have to perform pathfinder solutions because it need to know where to look on the map in the SAME manner as the players themselves. Do I scroll north to order my worker/marine to scout for enemy or is it south? Otherwise you would have to change the game itself so that it was simpler and more accessible to AGI. However by that point it is no longer a game for human at which point you might as well give up and go with an AI/expert system solution which is clearly not the goal of DeepMind project at any rate.

The key difference is that AGI has to think ahead of time to find where and how to get to a particular objection. Meanwhile AI/expert system can just order their unit to move toward a target and use the same pathfinder algorithm that player use.

 

[Kappenloch]

That's easy to achieve when when all criticism is quarantined and ostensibly ignored, most people disgusted by the change just left the community so no wonder the main forum has turned into a circle jerk of pro 2.0.

You may check the current steam reviews of the game and the last DLC, this is by far the largest "pocket of resistance" this game have had since its release. Of course this is just a slugfest of pro vs anti, and only those who have access to the real sales figures will know in a month or two how bad or good those changes were for the game.

AFAIC, This was the last frak I had to give about this game, I'll just wait for DW2 and skip any future release from pdx in the future. The game wasn't really good to begin with, it had some originality in it's gameplay and filled a niche that was in desperate need of some new blood, all of it was removed in 2.0, so it is just another 4x now, and not even a good one.

Very well said, that's pretty much the situation I'm in now too. Stellaris was always a flawed gem right from the beginning, but it was original, groundbreaking and innovative too. Now its just flawed, glacially-paced and about as unoriginal as you can possibly get, all with one disastrous patch.

Lets hope Matrix releases Distant Worlds 2 soon to compensate for the complete and utter mess that Paradox have made of Stellaris.

 

[Knight of Orthus]

I am jumping to the discussion after ~116 pages and as safe-keeper points out, space is three dimensional and space should let you to boldly go where no man has gone before.

There are 2 obvious problems with that:

1. Earth is 3D - yet we can't boldly go wherever we want to. Only now, after thousands and thousands of years of human evolution have we reached a point where we can reasonably explore most points (not all). Why can we do that at all? Because we have the technics, the "magic" so to speak. In space, we have what we have. In terms of FTL we aint got nothing. Stellaris got hyperlanes. That's obviously better. That's why every empire uses it.
   
2. Right now you can send a manned mission to Pluto. Why not? It's not like fuel is the problem. But you know what's the problem? The massive massive time! There are quite a few people here that complain about "glacial pace" and you want to have some way of travel that takes 1000+ years system-to-system?

If you don't actually want that, then you can stop calling it "realism":
Slingshoting an object through space at twice or more the speed of light is not "realistic"
Punching holes into space so you can travel from one point to the other is not "realistic".
Using an alternate dimension that conveniently offers shorter travel distances is not "realistic".

If Stellaris was scientifically accurate nothing but probes would ever leave your home system.

Answering 'its magic' moves the game from sci-fi to fantasy and that's cool as long as it is true to what it says it is.

Sci-Fi, by definition, offers unrealistic, currently impossible and very well always impossible technology and looks at their impact on society. It's not defined by being "scientifically grounded", but simply by focusing on technology. Star wars, for example, is not Sci-Fi because it's basically Fantasy in Space. Stellaris is, however, because it takes the invention of an FTL-Drive (Hyperdrive) and studies how that technology could affect Empire-Building. The theory behind hyperlanes is no more or less realistic than others, you could call it "magic", but then you don't understand the genre.

Very well said, that's pretty much the situation I'm in now too. Stellaris was always a flawed gem right from the beginning, but it was original, groundbreaking and innovative too. Now its just flawed, glacially-paced and about as unoriginal as you can possibly get, all with one disastrous patch.

Wow, I mean they didn't even change that much in Cherry. Clearly this has nothing to offer to the FTL discussion, since if you are complaining about the lack of FTL-choice, you should have complained since 1.0, seeing as Jump Drives merged all Games into Warp-Games anyway, even if you did pick for example Wormhole only. It was the illusion of a choice. Now we have actual, meaningful choices and you dont want to play anymore? Well, not everyone is into strategy, your choice.

Well, FTL inhibot is the classic example, but I would love to hear this option too

Then again, so far track record of this thread, response will be "there are options" but we are never actually told those options...

I'm a sucker for the classics. But yeah, one further page in and there is no viable way to "introduce all new features" - and it seems like only a single guy(or gal) even attempted to actually think about it, instead of spouting vague entitlement and pseudo-science.

 

[Mandemon]

Sci-Fi, by definition, offers unrealistic, currently impossible and very well always impossible technology and looks at their impact on society. It's not defined by being "scientifically grounded", but simply by focusing on technology. Star wars, for example, is not Sci-Fi because it's basically Fantasy in Space. Stellaris is, however, because it takes the invention of an FTL-Drive (Hyperdrive) and studies how that technology could affect Empire-Building. The theory behind hyperlanes is no more or less realistic than others, you could call it "magic", but then you don't understand the genre.

I would actually categorize Star Wars as scifi, but with the caveat that it's "scifi fantasy". It's basically fantasy, but instead of magic everywhere it's technology. It's very much on the "soft" side of the scifi.

And before anyone tries, "hard" and "soft" scifi are not defined by how "realistic" or "close to reality" they are. They are defined by internal consistency. A setting could have the most blatant violations of laws of physics as we know them, but as long as the setting has internal rules and consistency, to point where you can make a science out of those rules, it's hard scifi.

As for where Stellaris falls... I think it's all over the place, depending what species spawn, their societies and what end-game crisises get triggered.

 

[Knight of Orthus]

I think "Space Opera" is probably the best description for Star Wars. Then again this really isn't the point of this thread

I just wanted to point out that Hyperlanes are internally consistent and not "space magic".