Legends of Pegasus

[eRe4s3r]

Why did you pre-order this  , back when this was announced I already said with Kalypso as publisher you can expect 5 patches at best and then be dimed for pointless DLC and addons. Ok, maybe not here and in that way, but it was clear and is clear. Kalypso is not the same as Paradox/Kerberos . Kerberos can survive development sots2 for a while, but this studio that made LoP how could it? Kalypso is gonna make them work for as long as it wants, which will never be enough.

You are setting yourself up for severe disappointment if you wait for LoP to become good. SOTS2, there is a real chance, maybe Mecron is replaced by some Alien invader or something, because his ego is in the way of good gameplay.

[orzelek]

The space 4x-es are quite rare. And the game mechanics in LoP are actually quite fun. And modular ships will always get me.. SE5 was very good in that.
There is also Star Drive thats supposed to come out - it's under development now.

[chemical_art]

To update the glories of MOO...

On my second game, I was 2nd in population.

Eventually, the AI outwitted me in building good relations with all the other players while I bullied them all with my greater military...

Eventually, everyone was against me diplomatically...so I admitted defeat...

Now, on my third game, 45 minutes in, the #1 silicon race is against the #2 humans. There are 5 players total and I am #3 in this game, and the #4 and #5 players have allied with the #1 player, while I allied with the #2 player after voting for him as emperor...

The balance of power in the galaxy is unstable...it is almost 50 / 50...any spark will cause a total war...

[keith.lamothe]

The balance of power in the galaxy is unstable...it is almost 50 / 50...any spark will cause a total war...

Sounds like a job for... Nuclear Weapons!

... oh, right, nukes are the mkI pop-guns of that game

[chemical_art]

I don't know how the ai diplomacy in MOO works, but it is good enough.

To describe the situation of the #2 ai group, the (ai) humans...

Hmm. I am #2 in the galaxy. The only race to compete with me are those silicon jerks. They refuse to trade, raid my traders, and say mean things about me. The #3 race of robots (me) are so nice, giving great trade, promising to defend me in war, exchange technology generously, and vote me for emperor!

Now my robot buddies are under attack by the silicon baddies. If I lose my robot friends, I have no hope for being emperor. To war!

<The great galactic war begins>

[chemical_art]

And, as if a great space opera, I shoot from #3 to #1. Now I am the one giving away technology and rallying the minor groups while the silicons and the humans rally against me!

It aint easy be robot I guess.

[Volatar]

The space 4x-es are quite rare. And the game mechanics in LoP are actually quite fun. And modular ships will always get me.. SE5 was very good in that.
There is also Star Drive thats supposed to come out - it's under development now.

Have you played Star Ruler? I would like your thoughts on the ship customization in that game if you have.

[chemical_art]

And the MOO game comes to a close.

Close to 4 hours in, the #1 race has fallen to a minor race, the #2 humans climb to #1, the #3 robots (me) climb to #2, and we keep a tremulous relationship. We keep bashing the smaller races while avoiding direct war, but do espionage since neither of us really want to fight.

Inevitably, the humans get mad that my robot spies cream their human spies, and they declare war. At this point we wield about 90% of the power in the galaxy, so the minor races are not important. The two juggernauts wage war.

The humans are like Russia: numerous, owning many worlds, having a large fleet, but not strong in any one point. My worlds are fortress worlds, designed to crush anything but an all out assault, and my navy is cheap but effective with its teleporting fighters and bomb laying frigates both of which crush shields.

It seems this will be a typical MOO game, where a large map comes out to taking at most 5 hours.

[orzelek]

The space 4x-es are quite rare. And the game mechanics in LoP are actually quite fun. And modular ships will always get me.. SE5 was very good in that.
There is also Star Drive thats supposed to come out - it's under development now.

Have you played Star Ruler? I would like your thoughts on the ship customization in that game if you have.

I played it for some time and even modded it a bit later.
It is a fun game but for me it had no lasting appeal.. how many times you can foll around with ships larger than stars etc.
Ship design there is quite original and allows for tons of options. It didn't appeal to me as much as SE5 or the one in LoP - that round designs with round components look like abstraction of design a bit.

[chemical_art]

Two things:

On Star Ruler:

There is almost no guidance of any kind in the game. This results in the game feeling...loose?

It's cool to be able to handle a galaxy of planets. Unfortunately, a dictatorship is hard for a country, let alone a planet or solar system, yet alone a galxaxy. Automation is needed bad.

On MOO:

After a full game of MOO, what makes it shine is that following the same time you have so many outcomes. Especially early on there is a degree of randomness. Sometimes you'll come out really ahead and have it easy, other times you'll be behind and be doomed to not being emperor. This would normally be a weakness, but MOO is made to rapidly progress in turns with both short turns and streamlined decision making with sliders. That leaves you to big decisions. How to research? How to design ships? When to align, when to spy, when to war? This, combined with each race getting access to like 40% of the total potential research means that unless trade or spying or conquest is done a race can miss key technology, and in every game some research will never become around, which sometimes like teleporting can change the impact of the game.

[Volatar]

Two things:

On Star Ruler:

There is almost no guidance of any kind in the game. This results in the game feeling...loose?

It's cool to be able to handle a galaxy of planets. Unfortunately, a dictatorship is hard for a country, let alone a planet or solar system, yet alone a galxaxy. Automation is needed bad.

I totally agree, but in the end this wasn't the deal breaker for me.

What was?

Well, the ships had Newtonian physics. REAL Newtonian physics (though in a 2d plane).

This is not a bad thing at all. It's pretty cool actually.

What is bad is when you give your game Newtonian physics and then don't give it enough intelligence to FIGHT with said physics. Battles would drag on forever while the fleets charged past each other then slowly turned around again and again. It totally threw everything else out the window. All your ship designs didn't matter. The AI had no idea what to do with them.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, in Star Ruler the ship AI thinks "turnover" refers to a form of pastry that's very nice with apples in it

[Volatar]

Yea, in Star Ruler the ship AI thinks "turnover" refers to a form of pastry that's very nice with apples in it

It fights like a pair of bulls. Etheral bulls.

[eRe4s3r]

Yeah but you try and do a proper AI or intercept resolver for a newtonian fleet simulation. The problem has been talked about there a lot, but at the end of it we found that there is no resolver for 2 ships gracefully meeting in a newtonian movement.

There is no way to predict where a ship in a curved trajectory is going to be, because where it's going to be is literally unpredictable, as long as it applies thrust all the variables constantly change, if you have a resolve it is going to be wrong the next millisecond.

You could approximate but then Star Ruler ran at 0.01fps. And you can't multi-thread this calculation because where ships are going is a physics/movement thing. And that need to be synced at all times!

Or basically, if you want newtonian space battles you have to wait until the cpu speeds per core get a 0 more, 30ghz or there about....

only way Star Ruler even ran at all was by limiting the intercept to a linear - snapshop intercept. That means, when you give the order it calculates the intercept that is valid... unless the other ship moves. Then you are going to overshoot and experience space ballette (the bull situation comes from the fact that due to precision issues ships can not take into account braking distance properly, you might laugh, but the precision issue was so drastic that ships could miss an half a solar system on a large map depending on the speeds.

I often tried to get predictive target resolver into Star Ruler but you won't believe it, there is nobody around in game development who has a clue how to code one that doesn't crawl down into a slideshow when more than 50 ships are involved.... It is why newtonian physics do not work for 4x games. They will never.

By the way, the problem was compounded by the fact that BOTH ships could accelerate or de-accelerate at any time, so not only could you never intercept, but the ship could only possible intercept if it could instantly change it's vector, which it can't. So no matter what you code, your fleets will never gracefully meet in space.

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah but you try and do a proper AI or intercept resolver for a newtonian fleet simulation.

Yea, I didn't mean that I could do any better or that the fault is in the AI, really, the fault is that the game design (combination of newtonian simulation and lots of units) makes a good handling by the ship-AI impossible.  If you can't solve the problem, don't get into it, or back out of it if you're already in it.  Or, if that's not feasible, make fun of the feature