V3PR - Fleets, Special Abilities and Maps.

posted on June 20th, 2008, 12:10 pm

Hey.

Came back to playing Fleet Ops (still a quality project lads, but its been a while, hell! I've even matured in the time its taken you to release Version 3 :p), good fun.. but after broadening my RTS horizens I can't help but notice now that you've got some real nice special abilities that are nigh on useless because of the sheer volume of ships, in general.

I tried increasing the global build cost to 2.00 but this did nothing but cripple me in the early game with the cost of both mining colonies and shipyards.

I tried playing with it at 1.50 and found that to be a much more encouraging way to play, the biggest ships are far more expensive, and all of a sudden there is a much improved use for units such as a the Remore class (with its shield lowering ability) and other support vessels.

Resources come in way too quickly for the price of even the most expensive ships, spam is rewarded while "intelligent" construction doesn't even seem to exist (the height of intelligence in FO right now seems to be, as it has been for ages, spam destroyers).

Support vessels barely support anything, they may have great abilities, but why waste your resources getting an ability to beat your enemy with cunning when you can spam a dozen more units and overwhelm him with brute force with barely any effort whatsoever?

I think its important to have many resources all over the map, but the pricing for everything is just a little too cheap, FO negates all abilities because of the "mass and bash" style of play, once a player establishes the biggest fleet its pretty much game over.

Higher ship costs would reward good play, rather than just the player with the best build order.. people would be encouraged to keep ships alive rather than just feed them into the meat grinder.


So, my questions are these:

1. Do the FO team have any plans to change the gameplay?

2. If not, would they consider adding a "competitive" mode where players can choose a more sophisticated game over the 2 dimensional Command and Conquer style?


Congratulations on still working on the game lads. Anyone else get the feeling that Optec is a lil' 4ft tall purple monk? o_O

posted on June 20th, 2008, 1:57 pm

Yah some nice points from you there mate 
I think they have changed pretty much everything from preV3 to V3 so Im not commenting on the gameplay b4 we actually get the full version out
But still your post made sense.

posted on June 20th, 2008, 8:29 pm

The overall balancing has been completely redone again. the balance between unitsizes and the overall fleet balancing has been redone.

Fleet Operations is designed for human vs human multiplayer games, but we are of course working to give you a most exciting game experience in singleplayer, too. v3 is much closer to the goal then the p3, where balancing was rather "crude"