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Original post by Wavinator Quote: Original post by Talroth Quote: Original post by Wavinator Adama... When did he ever leave the bridge while acting as the commander of his ship? Memory's not as good as it should be, but along with the other examples cited wasn't he walking around on a planet that had some potentially dangerous temple that lead to Earth, along with the president? And didn't he go into a supply depot just to inventory weapons, almost get killed and have to fight a Cylon hand to hand (Kirk-style) in the very beginning of the series? In fiction they don't really make this stuff make sense-- there's no way that you expose your top leaders to unknown danger.

Well, at the anchorage, it was very acceptable for him to have left the ship to insure the weapons were being properly loaded. The ship and all things on it are his responsibility. While it normally would have been left to a junior officer to deal with, that was critical war time. I know navy captains often personally watch the loading and unloading of dangerous weapons to their ship, especially nuclear weapons.

As for the temple, I think it was more an issue of a throw back to older times, and the fact that Adama is still human, and wants to see this for himself. Not like it was a mineral survey mission or something, but the path to earth.

And of course sometimes you just need shore leave. The startrek captains I often had issues with them leading away missions themselves, but all the ones I can think of for Adama were justified.

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Yet we respond to the more personal involvement-- we find it stirring, and it tends to somehow confirm our significance in an age where most of us really aren't. What's worse, if you extrapolate the kind of combat action suggested by the OP along with current trends, it's only going to get worse. Why fight a battle in ships manned by flesh that can only withstand limited G-forces when you can likely design robots or remotes that can perform better and faster? Most fiction ignores this because it's not heroic.

Sci fi mostly gets around this by 'inertial dampening' or something else like it. And then there is the mistrust of combat war machines that don't have a human at the controls. Too easy for some amazing programmer to write some virus that destroys your whole armed forces, too easy for something to go wrong, too easy for people to exploit it. And too much risk of something like Cylon development.

One aspect of capital ships and their captians is that they are more likely to be in mass fleet battles where the captain interfaces the fleet level orders into the specific actions of his ship. Within the ship there are tiers of command layers dealing with its internal operation (the captain hasnt time to micromanage) and he might only make significant decisions for exceptional situations. Rules and policies drive the behaviors/activities of his underlings.

Large ships have escorts which have to be managed and their operations accomodated (again usually standard procedures).


Now in a game you would want to have the player be able to do Capt Kirk with his tricks and pulpy overacting (punching aliens). But when that gets too hectic the player should be able to resume more normal operations to reorient himself and look for opportunities to act 'exceptional' again.

I am building upon Edtharan's post with move/action cards

The player sees situational cards and action cards. Situational cards are little bits of info on the battlespace (are you being chased, ammo low, engines failed, incoming missles,direct path to target, etc) which appear and disappear on screen. The player can click a situation card and resolve it by using his action cards. His action cards depends on his crew/ablities/experience, etc) having scotty on the crew would give him "fix engines in 2 mins" action to resolve the "engines failed" situation or he could just "divert all powers to shield" or "fix engines in 30 min" of course the more experience you get the more actions you can use. If the player does not resolve a situation manually, the crew AI will just try their best to cope depending on the overall mission objectives (are we defending/attacking/running away,etc).

The player then tries to manipulate the battle by resolving situations to try and get better situation cards to popup. Lets say he is resolves "being chased" using "Immalmann" action to make the "fish in a barrel" situation card popup for a few secs. The player clicks this card and uses "fire everything we got" to destroy the ship.

The problem with this style is the player might be overwhelmed with the combinations if situations and actions or tracking which whether a situation
should popup or not.

A possible resolution is the player can save chains of commands like a primitive macros. He can save the "fish in a barrel"->"fire everything" as a lesson("loop and kill") to his crew so the crew might automatically fire everything when the "fish in a barrel" situation occurs so the player doesn't need to order it next time. The player could save/learn his favorite orders/ tricks as he rises in experience. Instead of using "immalmann" on the "being chased" situation he could use "loop and kill" and move on to other things. Of course if the "immalman" action did not produce the "fish in a barrel" but still "being chased" the macro breaks and the captain has to do other things

As the player rises the cards move to broader things like "hotheaded emeny commander" -> "send decoy" -> "decoy taken" -> "flank using fighters" which deals with more ships rather than a single ship.

Hope this helps.

I'm in the early stages of designing a very similar game in Flash, with a top-down 2d perspective. And I've had the exact same problem, how to make tactical space combat fun and engaging. At the same time I worry about making it too complicated. So, I'm also curious to see what people think would make real-time tactical big ship space combat fun, specifically: What choices would you want to be able to make?