hi,
thanks for the detailed thoughts. I’m definitely considering a lot of what you said. Even after the first post i did start wondering whether real-time combat would work/fit… it kinda could since fleets might end up barrelling towards each other at such relative speeds that even with displacement munitions they might not be in range for too long and have a quick mutual exchange of fire and then have to twist and turn to get back in range… OTOH if a fleet is fleeing then the relative velocities would be lesser and easier to keep in range so would hopefully not penalize asymmetric combat too much. I’m definitely considering it.
for the turn-based combat, i decided that if there is such a thing as teleported/displaced munitions and AI are in control then the amount of incoming munitions you’re going to have is so overwhelming that whoever had the “longest range” would generally win so bodged that into being a universal physical constant and everyone gets exactly the same range so mutual bombardment at all times. With that in mind i’d avoided multiple range stages and everyone just ends up in a single bucket that can launch things at everything else. It’s pretty crude and could certainly be adjusted to have multiple “buckets” and some rule such as each bucket can hit things in the same bucket or adjacent ones, then you might have something like -3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3 to play about in… would like some kind of support functions in the game, so limited only by imagination at the moment, could imagine most of the combat happening in bucket 0 but support ships in bucket -2 throwing “friendly” munitions (shield regen? warping space-time to deflect munitions? sensor fusion/triangulation for targetting bonuses?)
In the end i might end up doing both (enhanced turn-based AND real-time), and then just have a flag so you can pick what style you want (maybe other flags for modifying the flavour of turn-based too)
The “Souls” in-game are a rip-off of Iain M Banks “Minds” from the Culture series. I’ve thought about doing more with them, having them develop personalities (bonuses) over time that might have certain beneficial (or negative) interactions with other souls in the same fleet for “set” bonus type stuff. It’s come and gone in the dev branch for years now as i worry it might end up too micro-managey… oh damn this idiot has gone and turned eccentric now i need to ship it back off home and replace with other.. jiggle jiggle etc. Have also gone to- and fro- over whether to make souls transportable between ships, possibly being able to back-up their “state” somewhere as a snapshot in case they get wiped. In conjunction with getting “quirks” it might work where the Soul of your most prized ship/station goes a bit wonky and would be better off swapping it out…. if it goes ahead it might be another one to put on a flag so players that find it tedious can turn it off.