[Magitex]

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 😀

[Magitex]

Just a word on #8, I don’t seem to have this issue in 1920×1080. Are you running text scaling higher than 100%?

Lots of good suggestions here, I’m still just at 0000.07 myself – too much micro-optimization 🙂

[Magitex]

So just continuing to talk about combat design (more of an unsolicited rant), I think having huge stacks of ships is fine in turn-based if ships have specific group roles that overlap, like:

Frigates assigned to anti-fighter/area defense.
Brawlers with high armor designed for anti-capital and damage soak.
Fighters for catching fast-movers attempting to flank and damaging key capital systems.

In the midfield behind these, you might have heavy artillery ships with the highest general damage, featuring no armor, no sensors, packed with volatile ammunition locations and vulnerable damage boosting modules.

To the rear you’d maybe find rearm and supply vessels, tasked with bringing ships back into the fight, these could be specialized for module repair, salvaging, ammunition regeneration/rate of fire boosters etc.
Finally, the command and sensor vessels providing the fleet with superior target acquisition and tracking, without these your fleet either can’t track specific targets or aim accurately. Perhaps you can’t even pick your preferred targets without them.

These roles just by themselves require a fair amount of specialization mechanics, as there needs to be a good reason not to just have every system on a single monolithic ship. Right now I don’t think it matters at all what a combat ship in Diaspora is comprised of, and each faction looks like it has rather even spread of everything so it’s difficult, if not impossible to strategize against. You’d bring a bigger fleet and not a more specialized one to every encounter which leads to battles feeling similar.

Three options I can think of to help with specializing ships in Diaspora:

Non-linear scaling for modules (larger modules better than more modules, for instance: 2x shield (+10) and 2x damage (+10) versus 4x shield (+25))

Value efficiency (making it logistically cheaper to build one module category on a ship and dedicate its entire purpose to that, sort of like the dredge vs infrastructure is now, but extended to combat or technical fleet abilities)

Booster/assist modules (one ship provides functionality for the fleet – i.e targeting, sensors, electronic warfare) these type of ships give huge advantages to fleet efficiency (by not having to build these subsystems for each ship individually) but as a side effect it also introduces an actual weakness into fleets that can be interesting to exploit or defend against.

And I think that’s still really the start of more interesting combat, at least from my angle. Each of these roles then need multiple choices in the midst of combat that could tilt the battle, otherwise it’s just more of the same.

To take the examples earlier to an extreme:
Frigates could switch bonuses during combat between evasion or targeting (prediction modules). They could function as a temporary defense screen for a ships retreat, or ambush smaller evasive ships and fighters targeting a valuable capital ship in the rear.

Brawlers could have an overdrive module where they are able to advance sooner in the turn order, either to reposition at the front or the rear quickly, while negating their evasion or hit chance. You could theoretically bolt these overdrive modules to the frigate if you wanted more of a limited strike craft that hits a specific enemy quickly and gets out before being locked (if relatively small).

Artillery might have fire-control modules that boost the chance to hit specific enemy systems, rather than boosting general to-hit chance, these might hit shield generators or engines or specific modules the player specifies. This sort of thing allows you to execute strategies like eliminating enemy AAA targeting before striking with small ships.

Opposing these system could be ECM modules which reduce the chance of fire-control modules working, you could put ECM directly on the ship you don’t want enemy hitting modules, or on an ECM projection ship where you can choose to counter specific EW attacks but the effectiveness is not as high.

Back to Diaspora:
So I think if you want more gripping turn-based battles, fleet design needs to be a bit more detailed than it currently is, with more clearly defined roles for ships or fleets. Perhaps it’s best to think of the ships themselves as skills or spells in a roguelike. You use each ship or subfleet for a specific task or to overcome a specific problem. Right now, it’s a bit hard to pinpoint what these problems actually are in Diaspora, which in turn makes it hard to design interesting combat.

Here are some of those factors:
No tactical movement, range or facing, eliminates a lot of strategy right off the bat. It’s not necessarily a minus, but you have to be creative to keep choices interesting in combat. Basically it’s like going from an overhead rogue-like or submarine warfare, to a round-based MUD.

Time is a little too tactile. It’s hard to have any difference between a large, slow ship, and a thousand fast drones when most things have very similar turn cycles for targeting and movement. It’s not always a drawback, especially if you have complex abilities like a card game, but in something of a war game of numbers it doesn’t provide much granular detail.

No logistics system can provide any benefit to combatants. If you’re not carrying all the correct tactical tools, fleets, ammo you need in advance, you lose. Meaning you (or the AI) cannot adapt to problems and there is little advantage in fighting in defense. You could rebuild an entire fleet when you lose to a specific strategy, but ultimately things are more limited without logistical aspects and a lot more binary for outcomes. You can’t for instance, perform a fighting retreat to buy more time for reinforcements, and you can’t bank on the enemy running out of munitions before you do.

And finally the strategy at the tactical level. Although we can target specific vessels, no specific vessels matter in a fleet. We need reasons beyond DPS optimization for targets. I already touched on this earlier, but it’s one of the limiting factors for making combat more interesting. Faction specific modules could work here possibly with several factions fielding trademark technology on very specific ship designs (might be fun to provoke some faction vs faction warfare, especially if you have to trade to win). Bonus points if we can roll over their homeworld to illegally produce tech ourselves (or trade for them I guess!)

That’s about it from me about combat, hopefully at some point others will chip in as to what kind of combat they want to see or if I just missed the point entirely.

I should mention although I was baffled at first about the soul element of your ships, I think they’re a pretty cool feature and it’s nice having a defining advantage we have over the other factions. Although the souls don’t quite feel impactful enough because they automatically gain experience and there isn’t much you can do to enhance them, I like the idea they are bonded to specific ships. Having ship modules or research centers dedicated to the development of souls would be cool.. or some way of mutating/merging/breeding souls haha!

Well, hopefully that was enlightening or useful in some way. I hope if or when you decide to work on the combat side of things you can pull some inspiration from this rant 🙂

I think the AI seems pretty cool so I’m not too bothered about it not being 100% simulated, there’s something to be said for the epic scale that Diaspora has achieved. I like that it feels something like an actual space opera and not just kill on first sight (yet), not many games can get to this scale without getting bogged down by one thing or another.
On the other hand, if the AI did have unlimited resources I’d probably throw in the towel, just from looking at just how stellar their empires are compared to mine!

Just a question at the end of this, what the heck determines how fast structures are built and can I speed it up with more population or something? Shipyards are equally a mystery, should I simply build more ships simultaneously?

I can see there are building skills for souls (I think?), but there’s no way to capitalize on those because there’s no mobile construction vessel or any way to transfer souls. Construction fleets would be nice to see if there’s currently no way to speed up constructions, it feels a little odd we can develop an infinite amount of structures but there’s no research or anything we can do to speed it up directly.

Thanks for taking the time to read to my overly long posts.

[Author]

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