I have to admit I don’t quite understand the concept of instantaneous combat especially when range, speed and firepower are still very limited. I can’t really come up with a sound strategy that isn’t jousting or just avoiding engagement.
Just a thought on the souls, what you could do is allow manual migration to only larger vessels (30% larger than the last or there abouts), and each time you do so, it creates new quirks (perhaps based on scale of their upgrade and the previous skills). There could be a skill for migration so you can’t just swap souls until about a year or so (or a milestone required) but the process would be ultimately endless until you could not physically create larger ships (or the quirk maluses are too much to want to).
So it doesn’t affect general gameplay, particularly of any first generation soul born with a ship, but the player could create some monster flagships over generations.
It could get micromanagey but I think it’s a pretty fun concept to explore. It’d be cool to have our ‘own’ homebred ancient hulks with minds of their own a couple of hundred years down the track, perhaps even spawning their own twisted empires. I also love the idea of having ‘set bonus’ fleets, I would have never thought of that, although I understand it could get tedious to manage at times.
As for the real-time side of things, I took the liberty of mangling a real-time prototype as a mod of Diaspora if you want to take a look at it. I’m actually still using the turn-based battle interface, only now you can minimize it and fleets continue about their business (they can also flee out of range or have more fleets join an on-going battle). The player is informed about the battle progress through reports on the alert system, so one can intervene still.
So far I like it in real-time but it doesn’t actually address combat in itself, it just lets me up the scale of conflicts by having multiple combat fronts, and it makes combat a bit more organic. I also have the player set a fleet strategy by changing formation prior to starting battle just to try and inject more player agency into it (+damage, +evasion or rotating damaged ships to the rear automatically etc). My next idea was to try and add sensor/target systems and buff mountings (fleetwide resistances/debuffs etc) like you mentioned, but I feel like the AI would need to adapt or I’d have to reduce the players combat potential somehow. I guess throwing ECM ships and other tricky ships into AI fleets at random might be fun though.
I’d love to go whole hog on positional combat, i.e submarine warfare style with formations but that sort of thing requires a ton of AI work so that the player can’t just run rings around it, so it rarely works well in larger scale conflicts. Having jousting passes in real-time wouldn’t be the worst option, but the question is how many ‘turns’ of combat is a single pass and how long does it take to turn around.
If there’s one good thing about Diaspora’s combat right now, it’s that the only real advantage(or disadvantage) over AI is actually your own empires growing build power (although there’s no reason not to build a singular giant doomstack, but the AI is generally huge enough that it’s not a game-winning strategy in any sense of the word). You currently can’t easily side-step the AI like in most games, for better or worse.
I’m not sure about splitting it between turn-based/real-time myself, from a workload perspective, although it doesn’t work too bad just dragging the turns out in real-time. It’d be difficult to be able to create an extensive combat system for both, assuming that was the goal. I can’t complain about having the option though.
I guess these are not getting shorter 😀