Hi,
yeah combat in Diaspora hasn’t worked out as I expected. My original plan was for the game to be distinctly “small unit actions” and have much more tactical decision making to make, but unwilling to impose arbitrary limits on fleet sizes I have always ended up with huge stacks of ships which makes the original idea of manually targetting things essentially impossible. Some of my first major forays into serious gaming were roguelikes such as Moria and later Angband. The turn-based combat in Angband is gripping when you’re in a tight spot and trying to work out what spell to cast next to improve your chances, or taking a punt on a phase door/teleport and hoping it doesn’t make things worse. I’d like combat in Diaspora to get a bit more like that; at least additional unit/effector types that might be able to boost shields etc…. Unsure about changing combat to be “real-time” as you state it, my main Sci Fi influence was Iain M Banks “Culture” where I imagine combat is over in the blink of an eye, with munitions displaced to targets and taking effect instantly, so technically the combat here is already “real-time”, it’s just slowed down into turns to give humans/players a chance to see what’s going on, but yeah right now there’s no point doing anything but sticking everything on Auto and seeing what happens, and combat tends to end up “biggest fleet wins” (assuming equivalent tech levels) with no chance of clever moves to save a fleet that finds itself at a disadvantage; i’d like to fix that.
No, the AI does not play by exactly the same rules. I had intended to use the agent infrastructure for AIs to use and be 100% simulated, but it’s just too CPU intensive for any non-trivial sized cluster. As it is the game simulates too much (all the systems are AI populated and grow in the background even if you’ve never visited the system), factions can be wiped out without ever seeing them. The AI does not have infinite resources, each system has a certain carrying capacity that the AI will not exceed so they can be worn down.