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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#31
Revoke wrote:Wouldn't it be better to have good fleet management tools (squadrons, fleets, various formations, standing orders, good AI, etc) so that the game is playable at a faster pace? Not that I necessarily want that part of the game to be fast paced, but would probably enjoy a pace faster than completely stopped!
That's the ideal outcome.
You have human-like assistants that can learn to follow your orders just the way you want them implemented.

You order an admiral to assemble a fleet to assault a star base and...
  • he automatically includes a marine element in the fleet as well as their equipment and supplies, enough ships to cover them, and of course the actual fighting ships to get there.
    Packs some extra ammo and repair supplies because there are several pirate infested and potentially mined regions of space to cross to get there and back again as well as ships to cover the supply train.
    Fighters and bombers are equipped primarily with long range armament (which needs to be produced and brought with the fleet) because the target faction generally fields excellent point defense weapons. The admiral also brings 30% more fighters/bombers/carriers than the estimated requirement because that's one of your standing orders since you have a massive production pipeline for those.
That would play like a strategy game and there would not be a great incentive to pause the game and micromanage.
The problem is getting to that blissful level of AI competency. =)

Orders while paused is basically the workaround for an AI that is not as intelligent and flexible as a human assistant.
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#32
Gazz wrote:Orders while paused is basically the workaround for an AI that is not as intelligent and flexible as a human assistant.
Yes, exactly! Well said. Although I'd broaden just 'AI' to fleet management tools in general, although I suppose AI is a big part of it. I can issue orders to five battlegroups as easily as I can to five ships. But the battlegroups need to behave sensibly, or I'll want to dive in and order the ships individually.

I might be going off on a bit of a tangent here, but has anyone played a game called Starsector (indie, in development, previous called starfarer)? It plays a bit like mount and blade in space; you directly control your flagship, and fly into battle with your fleet. I bring it up because of the interesting way it handles ordering your fleet; you have a limited number of orders per battle, and they're all quite broad. You pretty much can't tell individual ships to do specific things at all, just some general control over the flow of the battle.

At first I found this needlessly restrictive. Looking at blog posts on the subject though, one of the chief reasons for the restriction is to keep the focus on personally flying your flagship. If you had total control over your fleet, you'd spend all your time issuing orders to micromanage it. With the restrictions on orders, you tend to issue to few orders here and there, and then focus on flying your own ship. Now, I'm not saying the implementation in that game is perfect, or appropriate for LT, but I think the line of thought is valuable. Restrictions in gameplay can sometimes be good (that is, increase fun!).

Translating this concept to something LT-suitable, you may, for example, limit the number of ships that can be in a battlegroup. Then, allow the player to issue orders to individual ships only in their own battlegroup. Other battlegroups can only receive orders as single entities. Something along those lines might address the scaling issues that were mentioned.
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#33
Revoke wrote:Translating this concept to something LT-suitable, you may, for example, limit the number of ships that can be in a battlegroup. Then, allow the player to issue orders to individual ships only in their own battlegroup. Other battlegroups can only receive orders as single entities. Something along those lines might address the scaling issues that were mentioned.
I would probably already treat each fleet as a unit to save time, just pack enough firepower to offset the utility loss of micromanaging, so it changes the semantics but not the scaling.
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PAUSE !

#34
Hi guys just throwing more thoughts in.

So hi, i am personally a heavy RTS player (go see Planetary Annihilation) and one of the things i love about those games is that you can Pause, then issue commands, builds etc, now this is useful when handling a ginormous battle.
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#37
Ownez wrote:Oh, sorry giving work to the moderators....
I had checked a few days ago if that had been said but had to do things..
People can read minds....
Don't worry about it. It's what we're here for. :)
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#39
Talvieno wrote:Part of me likes the "Pause" idea - specifically while you're giving orders.

The rest of me doesn't. :P
Yo be fair, back in one of the tech demos, there was a pause function. :shh:
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#40
Idunno wrote:
Talvieno wrote:Part of me likes the "Pause" idea - specifically while you're giving orders.

The rest of me doesn't. :P
Yo be fair, back in one of the tech demos, there was a pause function. :shh:
I'm assuming "Pausing as a gameplay mechanic" means along the same lines as they do it for Mass Effect - where you can turn around in the blink of an eye to shoot at someone just by pausing and then turning. Basically, pausing and still being able to do all the things you could normally do. If the AI can't do it, you shouldn't be able to.
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#42
I play games to tell myself stories with an interactive visual aid, and sometimes my stories can get quite elaborate so I pause what is happening while I go off and imagine conversations and journeys taken by characters in ways the game mechanics don't allow for, because Sid meier didn't imagine I would turn his game into the basis of a romance spanning a dozen empires and court intrigues that would topple kingdoms...

Needless to say, the lack of a pause feature would severely reduce my enjoyment of the game, and I may very well not play it at all after a very short time, it would make the game no matter how pretty or how ingenious almost entirely worthless to my play style.

I do however have an idea which may solve all issues with pausing which people have brought up. The idea comes from Crusader Kings 2, how the game has multiple speeds so that you can play fast when you want, slow when you want, and pause it altogether when you want.

Said simply, the perfect time controls for me would be customized to my play style, your time controls would be customized to your play style. If you simply allowed for different interfaces to have different timeflow rates with player defined conditions and rates. Considering that time is not real, and what constitutes "real-time" is an arbitrary number of ticks per second , you can pretty simply alter the number
ticks per second and change how fast time moves.

By tying this rate to particular workspaces or UI Windows, and allowing them to bind the rate to the mass of their ship, the number of ships they own, the size of their bank account or whatever, each player can choose how fast they want their game to play for any particular situation, and their reasons for changing that rate are their own business. They don't need anyone forcing them to play by certain rules, not even the developer's.
Flying could happen at rate 1.0 (whatever Josh likes for that speed) fighting could happen at 1.0 for small ships, 0.6 for carriers, 0.2 for commanders, 0.01 for emperors, 2.0 for traders, 5.0 for historians, and 20.1347 for the bored who want to watch history fly by like a time machine.
Or perhaps, you want to be an almost omnipotent god who can alter time whenever it is convenient, and time rates could be hotkeyed because why not?

Certainly Josh can create some defaults or put the rate manipulation controls in a menu that can be locked in for a particular game. This method will not however tie anyone's hand to a particular way of playing unless they want to.
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#43
I think you misunderstand. I'm all for pausing. I really, really want to be able to pause the game. I just don't want it to be a gameplay mechanic - at all. Pausing is good. Pausing as gameplay mechanic, not so good.

For example. You have a squad of three enemy fighters coming at you. You pause the game. You reorient the camera to face the three ships and unpause briefly. Your ship spins rapidly to face the direction the camera is facing, and then you pause again. You notice a barrage of weapons are coming at you, so you raise your shields to the maximum (lowering power to weapons and thrust), and orient your ship to fly perpendicular to them. You unpause. Your ship takes a few of the hits, but you fly out of the line of fire quickly and your overboosted shields are barely scratched. You pause the game again, and reorient your ship. Now out of their line of fire, you lower your shields to the minimum, raise your weapon power to the maximum, and fire. A couple shots, and a few pause/unpauses later, and all three ships explode, one after another, with you having taken zero damage.

Welcome to "If Limit Theory was Mass Effect". Pausing as a mechanic is good only if the enemies have different capabilities altogether. Josh has stated that the enemies will behave as much like human players as possible - and thus, they won't be doing this kind of thing ingame. We shouldn't be able to either.


I like the idea of timescaling, though, but not quite to that extent. I still think everyone should see time advance at the same speed, unless you're accelerating the universe specifically to see it evolve.
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Re: Pausing As A Gameplay Mechanic

#45
As a default, I fully agree. but I don't think you should be prohibited from playing like that, if that is how you want to. If you want to make fighting as simple as fallout, where you pause, load up a queue of hits and unpause to watch your enemies ripped up by that perfect accuracy, I see little reason why you should not be able to do that. Some people might think it cheating, some people might think it boring, but in a single player game, the goal is not fairness, it is entertainment, with custom time dilation, tied to various aspects of the game, you simply increase the ways in which the game can be played, never forcing someone to choose a way they don't like.
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