Warty Goblin ships out to space

[warty goblin]

I just posted a new article to EvilElitest's blog that I thought might interest the community here and wanted to draw your attention to.

Here be the link. (http://evilelitest.blogspot.com/#_ftn1).

So give it a read, post a comment and let me know what you think! Any features you'd like to see, or things you don't like?

A bit of background about the idea. This really came to me when playing the Battlestations: Midway ship challenge mission where you have to take the Japanese battleship Fuso (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Fus%C5%8D) through wave after wave of American and British warships. It's a very clean mission, there's no airplanes or submarines to manage, just dodging torpedoes and being able to land long range artillery volleys on the target, and is probably my favorite part of the game. This got me thinking, why are there so few games focusing on capital ships? I mean there's lots of flight sims, but why would you want machine guns when you could have 14 inch guns? Then I played a bit of Sins of a Solar Empire and thought how awesome the capital ships looked, slugging away at each other with beams and plasma and cannons, vomiting fire and atmosphere before dying in cataclysmic explosions. This was followed by me thinking "damn, I want to play just a capital ship in space." Again there's plenty of space games that allow you to fly a fighter around, but why settle for 30mm plamsa when you can have 1 meter lasers? Hence the idea.

[Triaxx]

Battlecruiser AD, or 3000. Flying a: Battlecruiser...

Freelancer had numerous mods that let you fly captial ships of various sizes. Not all were as manueverable or flyable as you might have hoped, but it was designed around fighters to start with.

I'm not sure what Dark Star One counted as. That's all I can think of for now.

[SmartAlec]

I remember Independence War, or I-War, which was a space sim focussed on a small capital ship - the equivalent of a modern navy destroyer, I suppose, and probably about the same size. Possibly not quite what you were thinking of, but the ship itself handled nothing like a fighter.

[Fri]

One of my dream game is this.

Something like freelancer, but we control a small carrier of some sort. Ever watched Cowboy Bebop? A game where we don't control Swordfish (the fighter), but the Bebop (the team's big ship).

So we play as a freelancer as usual, but the twist is, we play as a freelancer TEAM. At first we only got maybe, two member on the team. So one can control the carrier, and one can control the fighter. Then we can get new members for the team, get new fighters, upgrade existing fighter, upgrade our carrier, etc, as usual space sim.

Well, it's not really controlling a capital ship, but controlling a carrier. We can control the carrier ship manually, control the turret and leave the piloting on ai team member/auto pilot, or jump into one of the fighter ourself.

The closest thing we got is the space wolf series.

It's really close to what I imagine, but it's not a space sim, but more a... 3d (in homeworld sense of 3d) space rpg/strategy game? where we only control a carrier and up to 5 small fighter. We can upgrade the carrier, buy new fighter, recruit new team member like any rpg, and use exp to got new skills. the idea is really cool, but they don't really do it well.

The second game is a bugfest that eat my computer. Too bad, from what I seen it might be a real improvement from the first game.

if you want to check it you might want to check the first game. NOT THE SECOND GAME. IT CAN BLOW YOUR PC OUT.

It's kinda boring though. Not too much that we can do except ordering team member to attack one or other thing, use different weapon, or built in tactics (like defend or attack). And (maybe it's just me) you'll need to abuse the save and load screen. For me the coolest thing is the carrier ship itself. it's huge, got a lot of powerful weapon (we can equip it with fast firing machinge gun or slow moving cannons or powerful lasers that can blow fighter ships in one blow). it's definitely hardier than your fighter, but in the same time, most of the time you pull your hair trying to keep the carrier alive. since if it blown up, it's game over. it's huge and not exactly manueverable, so it can't dodge enemy shots. and torpedoes, oh boy. when the enemy fighters launches their salvo of missiles, you can only pray that a. the point defense can shoot some of them and b. you'll have some hp left at the end. because THE CARRIER IS SO FREAKIN SLOW. IT CANT DODGE AT ALL. But it got a lot of gun and can mow enemy's fighter! should we keep it out of battle or bring it to the heat of it? that's our decision.

The second game that's close enough, is Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/nexus/index.html

We play as, at first a captain I guess. But as the story goes, we got to be an admiral.

It's really pretty, with real looking space ships, especially at the first part of the game where we control earth's ship. It's definitely something that we can build in 100-200 years. The ships use thruster to maneuver, turrets to shoot depleted uranium slugs, etc.

Later, we got something... more sci fi.

It's straightforward game though. Basically, we control a fleet of customizable ships through a series of story driven missions.

They'll give us a few of ships for each mission with different class. Sometimes we only got our flagship, sometimes we got our flagship and two light cruisers, and sometimes we got full fleet, that is a few cruisers, destroyers, carriers, and everything. But never more than a dozen ship I think. We can customize the ships armament, like what kind of shield we use, what kind of weapon we equip, since different class of ship got different slot and different weapon do different things.

there are solid weapons that do hull damage but not much for shield

pulse weapon that make shield dissapear but not much for hull

missiles that can make huge explosion that can engulf your own ships if you use it badly

emp torpedoes that can make a lot of ships (including your own) lost their shields

lasers that hit precise things. like ships generator, engine, or weapon.

we can also launch fighters, gunboats, torpedo boat, or space marine to take control enemy's ship.

The freakin problem of this supposedly good game is...

WE CAN'T MOVE OUR SHIP TO A PRECISE POINT IN SPACE!

Or at least I don't know how to do it.

How to say it... we can't point an empty space and say 'move there, please'

we can only point at say, another ship or an asteroid, and order our ship to move toward it. we can stop at any point of course.

Or maybe I'm wrong/an idiot. It's been quite some time since I play it.

[Icewalker]

Sounds awesome. As were the Horatio Hornblower books.

I'd play it.

Sounds quite a bit similar to Escape Velocity: Nova, actually, except with better interaction with regards to you and officers instead of just wandering and finding missions. Also, slightly more complex gameplay.

[KnightDisciple]

This only proves we need an Honor Harrington video game. :smallamused:

[factotum]

Try X2, X3: Reunion, or X3: Terran Conflict. They ALL let you control and fly capital ships. This is the Fight trailer for X3TC, which gives you some idea:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kX4fbsdpjQg

[Nerd-o-rama]

If the thread title is true, why are you still here? Don't tell me you get wireless connectivity in space. I can barely get it at freakin' Starbucks.

[Maxymiuk]

*long post*

I agree, stay away from Space Wolves 2. You can really tell it's a cash-in game that got rushed out the door.

In the first one, it's really too bad that your carrier eventually takes the back seat in fights. In the first few missions, when your pilots are still poorly armed and unskilled, you pretty much need to use it as a meatshield, but as the game goes on, it takes the back seat to fighters, since the shields/repair systems you can equip it with don't really scale with the advances in enemy weaponry.

Fortunately the Luck ability still works on it.



When I first started playing Nexus: The Jupiter Incident it was like achieving Nirvana. Equipping and controlling your own cruiser? Full control over all subsystems if you choose to? Fighter bays on each ship?! Awesome!

Warning, rant:
Then the game's faults started getting to me. One, there's what Fri already mentioned, namely the bit where you can't actually freely control your ship. If you want it to move anywhere, you need targetable reference points. Most of the time you hardly notice it, since, you'll be moving towards the enemy anyway, but then comes the mission where they drop random ship wrecks in a cross pattern to let you get about...

Two, the difficulty curve. There is none. What you get is a difficulty obstacle course. The first few missions start out as you'd expect - you take part in progressively harder fights, with the "chapter" culminating in you taking control of a small fleet to fight off another small fleet.
Then you get the Angelwing and everything goes to pot.
There's missions that are quite literally plot delivery devices - you can't lose unless you're really thickheaded, and sometimes there's no fighting at all.
There's missions where you're constantly made to feel inadequate - you're alone, against overwhelming enemy forces, and after fighting tooth and nail to achieve your objectives, the cavalry shows up and taunts you (often quite literally - damn you Admiral Nodwick!) with their bigger, better, far superior floating penis extensions.
The few missions where you're accompanied by the two destroyers under your command are few, far between, and over far too quickly for you to actually get a good handle on how to coordinate a fleet during an attack.
Then there's the missions where you get the command of a literal fleet dropped into your lap and are told to salvage the fight. And then it's time for active pause and a crash course in what the ships you suddenly command are actually capable of.

Three, they completely botched the customization aspect of the game. It starts out looking really neat: between each mission you can go to your fleet screen and tinker with the kinds of guns, shields, engines, support systems, and fighters you want to bring along. The problem? You get a fixed (and often criminally low) point pool for changes. No room for experimenting, barely any to create ships that at least in theory can fulfill different roles and support one another, and if you chose a suboptimal setup that let you scrape by in one of the "easier" missions, you may find out that you don't have enough points to rearm for the upcoming hair-puller.

Four, fighters are of very limited use. In theory, they're there to attack a ship's subsystems with their precision lasers, and to support your own ship's PD in taking down incoming torpedoes. In practice, most fights take place with so many ships, on such short ranges, that the poor things get cut down by PD fire in mere seconds. There's a very small handful of missions where they're actually useful.
And why didn't anyone tell me they get destroyed when attempting to cross a Fort Shield!!!


So in conclusion, I'm still waiting for a game that lets me fly a capital ship, but wasn't made by an inexperienced team, like Nexus was (excellent concept, great ideas, very poor execution, if you skipped the above rant), and won't require me to grind for hours to get a ship that can actually shoot down something, like X2.

[factotum]

and won't require me to grind for hours to get a ship that can actually shoot down something, like X2.

It's a lot easier to make money in X3:TC, honest. :smallbiggrin:

[Fri]

snip

Huh. I agree on every word he said, starting with his thought on space wolves and ending with his words on X2.

I tried X2 once, back then. I felt like a chore to me. I want to shoot things at space damnit, not staring at my pc screen watching my pathetic ship doing fed ex job for a week.

[FunkyJeff]

You should check out Starshatter if you haven't already. It's a space sim with a dynamic campaign, and you can start as either a fighter pilot or a frigate captain and earn promotions which let you transfer to different ships or squadrons. Fighter pilots can even take planetside attack missions with a different set of physics. The game is also easily moddable, so you can have ships from entirely different series like Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5.

Starshatter (http://www.starshatter.com/)

[UnChosenOne]

Well. You could try the freeware rts called Battleship forever (http://www.wyrdysm.com/games.php). It's realy enjoyable and more than match to those "real" spaceship battle simulation's.

[Fri]

Battleship Forever is awesome. I spend hours designing ships and made them fight each other. Lasers, flak guns, missiles, colourful explosions.. pew pew pew.