What does EIRRMod do when...

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[skyblazer]

EIRMOD what sort of models r u after? I haven't done any real 3d modeling for like a yr or so but i still got all my software on my computer to do it. Was never good at making textures though but i can take a model from the basic stage all the way through into the import stage for most gaves ive ever modded.

[Nevyen]

The best space combat table top game that i have ever played was Full Thrust by Ground Zero Games.

It has the capacity to be translated in full to this game type.  The key component that made that game so challeneging is that both players mapped thier moves and then simtaneously moved thier ships according to thier orders.

Id made very entertaining turn based space combat and challenging to boot.  If this is turn based to a point then this would be a very very cool game on the PC.

[EIRRMod]

Ok, well heres the game in a nutshell.

Its a Multiplayer game, which is psuedo-single player.

Let me explain

You login to the server, and are placed into the lobby.

Heres where I create an interesting choice.
1.  You can enter the Universe, and fly your character around the Galaxy, entering battles, trading, upgrading your ship, joining the military/pirates etc etc etc - see games like EV Nova, or Space Rangers for the game style.
OR
2.  You can enter a currently raging battle as one of the ships that are being controlled by the AI.  Depending on your account settings, you can control just a small frigate, or even the entire AI side!

So, atm here are the game environments:
Lobby
Universe
 -Solar Systems
   --Encounters (Battles)

Each Universe has multiple Solar systems in it, where the player flys around doing his trading etc - or... getting into encounters.
These encounters show up to OTHER players if they are in that solar system, and can *JOIN IN* to support one side or the other, or even avoid the battle entirely.
(Note:  Encounters are done in a 30sec turn type fashion, giving orders to ships - and the entire encounter is done in a different 'area' of the game, so, not fought at the SolarSystem level)

The other part of this is, that I will build in the ability to 'just' play space battles.  Either joining into encounters that are occuring on the Roleplay server, or creating huge force vs force scenarios.

I plan for it to be customisable, but atm this is low priority because it will be multiplayer.

[Schultz]

Looking good.
How about a game on WWII with a persistent campaign :p
Dont we need to plan ahead on the possibility of a world without coh ?..

[Mysthalin]

Men Of War would seem like a good enough new base-game....

We'd tweak the unit balance system to be exactly like CoH, the UI to be like CoH and gameplay to be like CoH(graphics as well), then we'd mod in EiR.
Alright?

[brn4meplz]

If you make me a promise that Pirates/Military will have a troop ship or something for boarding actions to take other ships then I will find you a picture of a person with Razorblades for elbows...

[Malevolence]

Ah, good ol space combat.

Actually, if you want to think about it realistically, the fleet thats not moving at high speed will lose. Lets say ones ship is sitting still in orbit. An enemy wants to make an attack.

Lets say they start their acceleration well outside the orbit of the planet, as in, 2-3 AU from your position at least.

The ship in orbit has long since detected the red hot object against the 3 degree kelvin backdrop of interstellar space and left the system when you arrive.

They accelerate the entire way. They launch payload.

Your target is gone.

They will be gone before you can truly react, probably at speeds your missiles will never reach and your lasers will not have enough time on target to deal any real damage.

Assume for a moment the ship in orbit wished to fight. Speed is relative, so they are stationary according to the planet, right? Your ship is going blazing fast? Maybe 30% light speed?

Guess what happens when the ship in orbit launches a missile going at 3 km/second at you? You hit the missile going 30% light speed and vaporize. It can go the other way around, sure, and your missile hits them going 30% light speed and THEY vaporize, but the opposite is also true. Speed is relative, and in space there is no reference point that determines who is "going faster" than who - if you're going fast and the other guy is standing still, you may as well be standing still and he's going fast, because you're BOTH going really bloody fast in reference to the other.

So, yes, if you let your ship get attacked blindly from millions of kilometers distant, allow your assailant to accelerate for what is probably going to be DAYS before he's within light second range (the only real feasible combat distance for non-missile weapons), and do not fire missiles and other munitions/lasers/whatever armament you have on an intercept course against his now-incredibly-massive-and-hard-to-maneuver vehicle barreling down on you at 30 percent the speed of light or however fast he thinks he's going, then yes you will end up being demolished horrifically.

But space combat doesn't work like that because people aren't inept.

Realistic space combat is downright boring.

I can agree with this. It'd be weeks of nothing followed by a few seconds of LOLWAT MISSILE SPAM DUEL ended by the person with the superior missiles in quantity, quality, and targeting computers. Human involvement = minimal.


Imagine this analogy for space combat if you would.

Two really bright flourescent orange painted super fast sports cars on an infinite plane (see: world's biggest parking lot, times ninety trillion billion umpteenillion) armed with guided missiles, and guns that shoot powerful but really slow (compared to the cars) bullets mounted on the front, sides, wherever.

They'd see each other immediately, maneuver at high speed to wherever they wanted, and the only ways to hurt each other would be incredible amounts of long range missiles, or zooming past each other at a gajillion miles an hour close enough practically to bump mirrors firing all the guns (which would otherwise simply miss entirely due to the speed disparity between the bullets and the vehicles). That's really the only two ways about it in terms of harming the other party involved, and both ways would basically come down to luck and computers.

[Draken]

lol wut, it's future so there will be something like gravity blockers ( or just make wall of space trash near bases) , I can imagine that, fly in that in 1/3 of light speed, sure epic pwn :p.

ofcourse we can continue that with "what if..."

[Malevolence]

I'm basing these assumptions off our current knowledge of physics, Draken. Of course if it turns out we're wrong about something in physics that makes a star destroyer make sense of course we'd use star destroyers.

Otherwise it's pretty close to what I'm describing, if it came right down to it.

[AmPM]

Male, they could even accelerate well outside your sensor range, and hold course with engines off. I huge block of concrete on the front of a ship would prevent any meaningful heat signature.

Either way, space combat would be a war of opportunity with planets and stationary facilities being the likely targets and ships being the launch platforms for weapons. Two shooting at each other would really just be opportunistic.

And remember, at 30% light, that's less than 30min from here to the sun. Not a lot of time to get up and accelerating. Also figure that anyone flying in a straight line is not so smart, a ship going 30% light and moving at an angle relative to its target would not only launch its payload at insane speeds and hit first, it would be the only one hit unless the missile can accelerate to relativistic speeds in a short time with its limited fuel stores.

I would actually imagine something more like a long arc being the preferred method of attack, keeping you safely away from the targets weapons.

Also, extreme long range missiles would be useless without the ships already up to speed, they would stand little chance of actually hitting before the other ship was gone or shot them down.

Either way, boring for a game.

[Piotrskivich]

Actually it's a great method of a game, if you don't take things too seriously. Ever played Critical mass? it's a 2d space game with 3dish looking ships and asteroids.

In Coh things aren't realistic either so making a space game isn't weird, it just depends on your prospective.

[AmPM]

I would actually kill for Battlefleet Gothic....sure its not realistic space combat, but its pretty good naval combat.

[EIRRMod]

Funny thing AMPM, Nevyen and I were talking about a good 'base' for the combat, and guess what?  Battlefleet gothic was the one that looked like a good idea

It'll be moddable too, custom ships and whatnot.

[Malevolence]

I get what you're trying to suggest here, AmPm, but lemme illuminate a bit of background information here (for this purpose I'm going to be quoting snippets of an essay on the same subject wherein I've gotten a lot of this theory from) -

Well, the thing you really have to remember about space is that it’s big, dark, cold, and empty, and, paradoxically, you have perfect visibility. This brings us to our first realization: there will be no stealth in space. Any source of radiant energy in space will be very obvious. Since any spacecraft will be emitting a lot of radiant energy (your vessel will usually need to keep its habitation module several hundred degrees warmer than the external environment to prevent your crew from freezing to death for starters) it will stick out from the cold darkness of space like a campfire in the desert at night. Surprise attacks will be rather difficult, to put it mildly, when the enemy can see you coming halfway across the solar system. One possible solution is to try radiating all your heat in the opposite direction from whatever you’re trying to sneak up on. The problem with this is that it can easily be countered by the enemy scattering monitoring stations (basically just satellites with infrared scopes in them) throughout the solar system, something that would cost relatively little and that a militarized spacefaring civilization would be foolish not to do. A better idea is to try storing your waste heat in an internal sink until you’re on top of your target. This might work, but this approach runs into another problem: in order to sneak up on your target you will at some point have to put yourself on an intercept course with it, and when you do so you will reveal your position and your enemy can determine exactly where you’re going and when you’ll get there with a little college level math.

That's roughly the problem with stealth in space - you're going to stick out, and any attempt at hiding it will almost certainly not work simply due to the incredible obviousness of a spaceship flying around in what is, otherwise, entirely empty of both heat (roughly) and objects (at least objects the size of a spacecraft).

It then continues to discuss various methods of propulsion, all of which are almost certain to be ion drives (detectable, but not obvious to the naked eye - still obvious against the backdrop of utter emptiness, however) or simple reaction drives (big ass plume of fire drives, in other words) which will DEFINITELY be VERY visible.

The other thing to consider about space is that it’s big. To travel across space in reasonable time frames you have to be moving fast. Really fast. Just to break out of the gravity of Earth you need to be going at 11 kilometers per second. And at speeds like this you’re still stuck puttering around in Hohmann orbits, taking months or years to reach even the nearest planets. To cross the solar system in months you’ll need some kind of high-performance nuclear rocket capable of accelerating for days or weeks on end and getting your ship up to speeds of dozens or hundreds of kilometers per second. This means that in combat your spacecraft will be moving very fast relative to each other. This has serious implications, most notably the fact that a missile travelling at 3 km/s will impact with the equivalent energy to its mass in TNT.

So yeah, if you're gonna get anywhere, you're not only going to be noticeable, anything you launch that hits anything you're fighting is almost certainly going to result in a kill. Fun fact: a fish stick going at around 85% the speed of light hits with a force equivalent to the tunguska meteorite. Now maybe you won't be fighting at 85% the speed of light, but if you throw a fish stick out the window at even 5% the speed of light, whatever it hits is TOAST.

Eventually it winds its way through how at extreme ranges and speeds missiles are more useful whereas at closer ranges and slower speeds (preferably both for either scenario) a ship's lasers would be more effective. Et c. et c... after that it begins to describe how a ship that can go faster will probably dictate the battle, but given the fact that space is basically stealth-free, being snuck up on (and thus being unable to utilize your engines in "time" to position yourself strategically for an upcoming fight) is relatively low. Besides which, the speeds between the two spacecraft is more important than their speed in relation to a certain terrestrial body or whatnot, after all, the planet isn't launching missiles, the spacecraft are.

Then there's the problem that any ship with a powerful enough engine to get anywhere has a powerful enough engine to turn it into a giant WMD - once an object hits 3 kilometers a second it might as well be made of dynamite, as mentioned earlier, et c. et c. big ship with big engine being crashed anywhere = big boom. Ships would probably be under strict government control, et c.

Anyway after that point it goes off the topic of "fighting between ships" other than to say that space fighters realistically wouldn't exist, and neither would space pirates (lack of stealth means the pirates would be found, and lack of proportional engine to life support would make manned fighters worthless, and the inability to carry a high payload to engine ratio would make unmanned fighters not cost effective. Kinda kills the whole Star Wars thing, eh?)

Anyway, case in point, combat in space is basically a giant game of global thermonuclear war, except the travel times for the missiles are longer, and the US and USSR are zipping around the planet at breakneck speed instead of staying put. One hit means defeat :p

As for THIS game (which is thankfully nothing like a realistic space simulation and a lot more like science-FICTION) looks awesome

[AmPM]

Either case is unlikely to use live humans either way, we just are not built for the velocity changes combat in space would require.

GO GO ROBOTS!

BFG is possibly the best tabletop space game I have ever played, Fullthrust was fun, but BFG just felt more epic.

[Nevyen]

I have to agree there i just felt the game mechanics of full thurst where very well thought out.


But bfg was indeed way more fun.

[EIRRMod]

I think you will like the comprimise I will take.

Im a very big fan of Babylon 5, so I will more than likely shape the technologies / space-combat-esque gameplay from that.

Im also planning on drawing heavily from earth-based Naval combat as a guide, so if anyone who knows their DD's from their BB's give me a PM, cos I sure as hell dont

Also, big thanks to Skyblazer who has sent me a couple of nice models (of ships, not busty blondes unfortunately) that look REALLY good, even with just a basic texture on them.

I will have a semi-playable alpha Next week sometime, no combat, but the 'Meta-game' part.

(Note:  Yes, I am still devoting time to finding a solution to EIRR, but atm, I cant get past a roadblock....)

[Nevyen]

OHHHHHHHHHH!!!

[gungunx]

Im also planning on drawing heavily from earth-based Naval combat as a guide, so if anyone who knows their DD's from their BB's give me a PM, cos I sure as hell dont

i did play navy field,  does that count?:p



edit:

Space in ruins?

summary :

an CoH persistency mode gone wrong and went into space...... follow the daring heroes as one of the germans that explore space in their V1.
Be the first to fight and colonize!  (note : bundle grenade pack NOT included! instead you will have proximity mines)

[skyblazer]

EIRMOD heres that missile u asked for