So if the AI was better, you wouldn't really have anything to do?   

Good thing you added the smiley, before I saw it the post gave me the creeps.

But YES, you are correct and this illustrates the issue quite nicely. The battles were supposed to be simultaneous etc., so the AI should be so good one could concentrate on other things and only participate in the battles he has particular interest in. As it is some want to see and lead ALL the battles ALL of the time. And as you said - if the AI was smarter you wouldn't have anything to do. Meaning no strategy to think about and manage. That is what the game seems to be leaning to.

I'd really like to be able to send my fleet on a mission of lesser importance and forget about it. I'd go and check if the mission is done when I have everything under control and no bigger issue arises. If not, I'd check why not and if neccessary send another fleet and forget about it.

That's epic in my book. Untill a game surpasses it and my expectations rise.

This is sadly not possible anymore this late in the game... but what would have helped allot is instead of building 1 ship at a time, ship yards built an entire coherent 'fleet' of X ammount of all needed ships.

Tell the fleet to go attack a place and it goes and does it just fine, using all the right elements, but the best part would be its a fleet and acts coherently, and you order it as one unit. Then you save allot of time worrying about enough money to build 20 frigates (and quing it) and having enough of this or that. It would reduce tactics slightly by automating it into the build, but would allow you to quicken the pace of movement dramatically.

Let me put it a different way: The problem is scale, right now we are using a RTS scale in commands and construction, but a chopped up 4X time scale, research scale, and map scale. These need to match closer, and it seems to me that we could actually speed the game up quite a bit, and give the 4X player the much vaunted strategy by dumbing down tactics a little.

Making sure your flak frigs don't go too far ahead is wasting the 4Xers time, and isn't of much value to the RTS player either. In the big fleet = unit system, you never worry about making sure you build enough, fleets have basically prescribed ammounts, or can be tailored by having 'fleet types' that your purchase.

This means you don't need to spend soooo much attention to a battle, which means you could quicken the entire pace of the game including research and resources. If it took me only 3 minutes of build time to assemble a fully capable battle fleet and send it to assault a system. Then the game could be only 2 hours on a medium galaxy with multiple stars (say 4?) and I wouldn't be harried for time. Small games could be an hour easier this way too.

So what is the loss for this time? Instead of losing 4X elements (you now have much more time for these) you are automating allot of basic RTS strategies, but not the more valuable ones; IE have 2 fleets, one does X, the other Y, assaulting systems from different directions, baiting and timing, etc. As opposed to focusing on 'targeting' and making sure that stupid siege frigate stays behind!

Perhaps you don't need the fleet as a unit, if the AI gets thouroughly improved. Notably the 'admirals' from Conquest Frontier Wars, basically managed fleets intelligently, often splitting it up in system to destroy targets more efficiently...



So Lets pray to god that at least we get competent AI, the biggest problem holding up speeding up the game is we can't handle much faster battles competently because they require constant Baby Sitting!

We're definitely working on #3, but you won't really see this until Beta 4.

actually, you should get on IRC/ICO and play a game w/ me

having skimed over idk if this idea was posed already....  

what some games have done is have 4 diff options, start from a certain teir with X # of ships or resources and fight it out or a "battle of the G-ds"    in which the techs are all researched and you have to build up you fleet buildings and such and go fight...

this way offeres many options and i like the slider idea as a way to bring customization into the game, also a "expected end time calculator" would allow people to decide if they really have enough time to play or not   

Scaling cost seems... silly. To make game pace faster, I would scale tax income instead. The modifiers mean that your capital will outproduce the rest of your empire early on. It's really the start that's a problem for multiplayer after all. That drooling income rate before you have a large trade network is impressively slow. Later on, things are already fairly inexpensive and easy to mass produce. There's really no benefit to the late game that I can see. It already paces fairly well from the production aspects, it's the glacial pace with nothing to do between transits that bites it then.

Scaled research would be nice of course, independent of pace concerns. Of course, I don't like the research system to start with, feels contrived. I'd prefer research stations contributed to a research rate and there were no requirements to research this or that technology, just time. The way it is now allows for no long term research choices unless you have the space to research far up the tree. If you're going past the 7 needed for the command cruiser and 5 for the trade networks on a small galaxy, you're either mentally retarded or like spending another six hours while the income you could have boosted crawls along.

Some of you seem to be labeling anything to do with game pace as a twitch gaming rts desire. It's not exactly fair. The game is boring, this is completely independent of how combat works. If it is dumbed down twitch rts contraption, micromanaging every battle would be the best way to win, that happens to be the case now. If income came in at a much faster pace and you couldn't physically micromanage every battle you ran into, that wouldn't be the case. As such, a substantial increase in the pace of combat will move in the opposite direction of a micro whore game. There simply isn't anything else to do right now, so the only thing there is to do is micromanage your combats. I'd like a real time version of master of orion, I'd also like to be able to stay awake while I played without needing something else to do, like write this post. The depth as a whole needs to increase, a lot. This includes but is in no way limited to the frequency of combats. If you do happen to think slow enough that you wont be able to think and play a faster paced game at the same time, well...

I like this a lot. Others have made good points for not eliminating the other resource costs for research but maybe this idea could replace the hard # of research stations requirement. Instead of needing a fixed number of research stations to research topics on each tier, you would only be required to have enough research points. This way you could, in theory, research a tier 5 tech with only 2 research stations but because you only have 2 it would take a long time to amass enough research points to afford it. With 5 or 6 stations that time would be considerably shorter.

This is kinda similar to the Homeworld 1 system where research doesn't cost any RUs, but does take valuable time. You can invest in more research ships to research things faster. In Sins the time it takes to actually research a given topic is fairly trivial but that isn't necessarily the case for the time required to amass the necessary resources.

The thing I don't like about the current tier-based system is that if you are only interested in a very select few research topics you are still required to build a ton of research stations to reach the higher tiers which can seriously curtail your other efforts both in terms of the logistics slots that they take up and the resources spent on building them. With a point based system you would be able to pick and choose (a smaller number of) research topics that are relevant to your strategy without going crazy building research stations. This allows a research-lite strategy to be possible. And people going for a research-heavy strategy would have something to gain by building more research stations in that they would amass these research points much more quickly and thus be able to do a lot more research in the same amount of time giving them superior ships, economy, culture, etc.

The research points granted by each additional research station might even be on an increasing scale where each additional station gives you more additional points than the last. This would help encourage you to build more without actually forcing you to. - but that's an issue for the balance team to work out.

psy, try not restricting yourself to cobalts then -- two military research stations plus a little research gets you LRM ships; three stations plus some research gets you carriers.

There is a really good point in there. The research limit being tied to the number of research stations means you're stuck and stalemated if you can't expand. You can't research your way out of the hole so you're really stuck just grinding it out.

In my current medium sized game I've been blocked from expanding very far and thus my research is extremely limited. I'll never get out of this hole by grinding, but if research was opened up, I might have a chance.

If stations gave research points and there was no artificial limit based on the number of stations, it would open up the game to having small but technologically advanced factions.

I think this would greatly enhance the game.

Well, all of my posts take into assumption that the game will be sped up a bit without drastic changes. And actually, the current production model fits 'across solar systems' much more than single planet empires. Because if you have one planet, one source of income you'll produce much slower than if you have several planets with a trade network. If you drastically speed up the start of the game, that does a pretty decent job of trivializing expansions because you could be very viable with just your home planet, and that shunts the game into the generic RTS category more than it should.

Like I said, it's a fine balance. Yes, it takes some time to set up the economy, and that could be sped up a bit without overhauling the research system (and it sounds like the devs are already looking into ways of doing this), and that's fine by me. But overhauling the research system would change more than just the pace of the game, just like any other drastic change to game mechanics.