Superfleet solutions

posted on May 13th, 2013, 9:35 pm

Hey!

So I was thinking about FleetOps late gameplay. As we are all aware, eventually fleets in fleetops become less micro-manageable when they hit a certain mass (fleets at this mass are sometimes called 'superfleets'.) This isn't a big deal for some races, like Borg and Dominion, but is more dangerous in other races, most notably Romulans. It would be great to discover a solution to this problem via debate on this forum.

In my opinion, the solution is not to create a new 'super unit' for each race, but rather to create a way that huge fleets can quickly and effectively destroy other huge fleets, thereby leaving each side with a smaller and more manageable fleet. These solutions would represent the highest tech available to the different factions and also the largest demonstrations of their representative strengths.

The Borg already have a solution in development, the Command Cube.

Here are some ideas off of the top of my head for the other races:

Federation: Sector Defense Warp In

- This would warp in a very large federation fleet comprised of a random set of 15-20 warp in vessels

- The units cannot be controlled by the player, they rather attack any enemies that venture into their 'perimeter'.

- To balance the fleet, the fleet cannot be warped into an area anywhere near an enemy station.

- The fleet is exorbitantly expensive, costs a gigantic amount of supplies to both research and summon, and are capped at 1: all units must be destroyed before another fleet can be summoned.

Klingon: Heavy Weapons Platform

- Inspired from the TOS mission in Star Trek: Legacy, the Klingons can build large weapons platforms.

- These weapons platforms are essentially miniature 'death stars', they have a decent range and cause area of effect damage.

- Cost exorbitant amounts of money, also cannot hit units within a certain range of the weapon itself (ie. a dead zone.) Building the station would probably be a part-by-part process, where you would have to research different parts of the frame before the entire platform became operational.

- Once again, these cannot be built in range of enemy stations in order to balance gameplay.

Romulan: Classified Omega Research Staryard

-This station gives the romulans access to the Shadow Class (from Aramda II.) The Shadow is now equipped with an extremely dangerous reverse polarization ability which destroys multiple subsystems in every ship surrounding it. When used against borg, a random amount of damage is dished out to each borg ship.

- The ability has no limit on ships affected and a gigantic radius, unfortunately, the Shadow is destroyed when the ability is used.

- The phase cloak ability also returns, allowing the ship to phase through obstacles.

- Abilities do not work against stations. Abilities have to be individually researched, and individual Shadows are prohibitively expensive.

- This idea is rather lame, please replace this.

Dominion: I have no idea!


Just to restate this: these abilities would be extremely expensive and not used in the majority of gameplay. The primary use of these abilities would be to whittle down gigantic fleets into more managable sizes. Each ability would be balanced so it could not be used against fortifications (mining installations, bases).

Also, if this is all a horrible idea, that's OK too.

Thanks for reading!

Ywingdriver

posted on May 14th, 2013, 12:16 am

Hmm...

I do not like this....

Games i played, or seen, was sometimes with one or two big fleets, but in that time, surely some battle happens and only victor is left.

Your idea is for single Ai games with large spam of units.

Its DOOMs Day weapon.

And this game is about fleets operations....

So i like to see , what others have to say....

posted on May 26th, 2013, 9:14 am

Indeed, but as he originally stated, he sees a flaw within the micro-manageability of races like the Romulans. I for one completely agree that the Romulan and Klingon races certainly seem much weaker at the late stages of the game... Usually being the last races I go for becasue they pose a much lower threat than the Borg or Fed which I'm better off rushing.

(Deliberately didn't mention the Dominion because I am speaking pruely of AI games and we all know the Domi AI is broken)

posted on May 26th, 2013, 11:47 am

I remember there used to be a Romulan answer to lategame...they were called Generix Spectres and Generix Supports.

I do agree that we need more AoE abilities that can damage large fleets if the player controlling them isn't careful. But we'll see what we get, in general the Devs' opinions have been that certain races hit their stride in the early game and should work to defeat the enemy without the late game ever coming.

posted on May 26th, 2013, 7:30 pm

I would suggest overhauling the autonomy system and create advanced autonomy controls for both ships and fleets. If you set special ability autonomy to Y or R, you can't predict how effective it'll be, especially since you don't know when the AI decides to use that ability. When I had Intrepids out front, they all fired their tri-cobalt warheads on one scout. Then came the heavy-hitters. If the configuration becomes too complicated for setting in game, then maybe incorporate saved autonomy presets that follows a player and then allow for multiple preset patterns. The concept is similar to LoL's preset abilities that allow quick switching between different attribute-booster layouts. You could also apply the concept to the AI customization as well.

When you consider ships with multiple abilities, or when you want the timing right, you're either stuck with manual control or just pray for the best. While timing may be difficult to set (maybe use when range = x), it would be nice to prioritize one ability over another.

Same with fleets. Set ships within the fleet to protect damaged ships, or strictly support ships while they use supporting abilities and protect other ships. Using this idea, you could set one fleet having frigates and/or destroyers to attack enemy supporters while battleships and dreadnoughts protected them. A second fleet could be prioritized to target battleships and dreadnoughts first, and then frigates and destroyers. A defensive fleet could do the same, but it'd be nice to set how many of ship types to target at one time as well. With just a few options, the possibilities are endless.

The Newton, for example, produced from the Klingon experimental yard has a combat tractor beam (CTB), but you still want it to repair everything before using the CTB. Prioritize repair over CTB, and there you go.

As for avoiding large scale battles to begin with; when a conflict between two skilled opponents reaches such a large scale, everything turns epic. Games that can create epic experiences are precious in my book.

posted on May 26th, 2013, 8:01 pm

I like your way of thinking Jinseta, but I would also really like a setting that allows me to decide if my autonomy should only be used on classes of ship bigger or smaller than mine. Eg right click the Borg holding beam icon and three boxes appear above it... pick 'crew' '<' '200' and the borg holding beam will be used automatically only on ships with a crew under 200.

That would make fleets a hell of a lot more intelligent.

posted on May 27th, 2013, 6:05 am

We in fact have no such desire to limit any faction to any given stage of the game . We value all stages of the game and strive to give each faction a variety of options they can deploy at any point. One of the most important guiding principles of version 4 is that a player should have the possibility to control gameplay not just on an individual battle's perspective, but in the long term. If you want to macro up and seize a later advantage, that should be equally viable to someone who banks on a quick tech up, sacrificing some economy.

posted on May 27th, 2013, 12:18 pm

Ah, the familiar feeling of being thrown under the bus again. Guess I'll just... go take a walk or something, I dunno. See you guys around...

posted on May 27th, 2013, 4:03 pm

Tryptic, you are welcome to your opinions - we will never take issue with them - but misunderstandings about game direction should be clarified . We don't aim to constrict factions to single glory moments as we want gameplay to become more labile, not less .

That isn't to say certain paths of a faction might favor an early or late game strength however. Each faction of v4 hopefully has several of these paths open that allow a player to mold the faction more or less in a preferred direction. The warbird route for Romulans for instance certainly has less of an emphasis on small steady expenditures.

posted on May 27th, 2013, 4:50 pm

Indeed, but as he originally stated, he sees a flaw within the micro-manageability of races like the Romulans. I for one completely agree that the Romulan and Klingon races certainly seem much weaker at the late stages of the game... Usually being the last races I go for becasue they pose a much lower threat than the Borg or Fed which I'm better off rushing.

(Deliberately didn't mention the Dominion because I am speaking pruely of AI games and we all know the Domi AI is broken)

Actually the Dominion AI is the only really good one. The cost ration is bonkers because it can spam ships like no ones business but the Doms are the only AI that consistently expands and rebuilds itself. I have routinely seen other races especially the Klingons just sit in limbo forever and if you destroy one of their research stations they never rebuild them and expand again. The Dominion is the only one that seems to do this all the time. Just wish I knew the setting to slow down their ship building and increase their costs.

posted on May 27th, 2013, 9:36 pm

for federation I think you can put several heavy defense stations and more upgrades for shields (for terran empire you can put upgrades for weapon and shields and some new interesting ships maybe big black enterprise from Star Trek II movie) and for both ships from warp in should be buildable too but you can still build warp in fleet but more ships and stronger ships will be in fleet and you can chose between defense and attack fleet

for klingon (in star trek online you have interesting ships for klingons) you may put in late game that klingons can build refit upgrades for every ships after this upgrade old ships cant be build but we have new stronger ships (new look) for example: norgh bird of prey and norgh bird of prey refit, neghvar battle cruiser and neghvar battle cruiser refit (this refit thing you can have for federation and romulans too)

for romulan their ships can attack while is stealth is active

for dominion breen avatar you can put in late game stronger Dampening Missile (like in series Deep space nine)
Disables every subsystems of a hostile units for 10 seconds. And they can build two V-15 Dreadnought (this ship need to be researched)

for dominion avatar you can build + 3 Perimeter stations (but every need research), can build 4 research for S-7 Defender (with every research we can build + two S-7 Defender ships) and they can build four V-15 Dreadnought (this ship need to be researched)

posted on May 27th, 2013, 10:55 pm

I like your way of thinking Jinseta, but I would also really like a setting that allows me to decide if my autonomy should only be used on classes of ship bigger or smaller than mine. Eg right click the Borg holding beam icon and three boxes appear above it... pick 'crew' '<' '200' and the borg holding beam will be used automatically only on ships with a crew under 200.

Thanks. I like your idea as well. There are all kinds of settings different people would want to see with autonomy, but the interface and user friendliness is really the biggest part of the challenge (I've done a little VB). There's probably a core of FO users that would be able to manage settings like that no problem, but many can't. Settings like 'when crew < 200 then assimilate' would probably work best with autonomy preset save files rather than in-game settings.