Combat really needs to be less confusing

Those "flashes and sounds" are probably the AI ships fighting it out, you just happened have the screen set close to where they where battling.

You should be able to see your own battles

/Flemming Madsen
VP Lidium
www.lidiumonline.com

If one of your ships is attacked an event will be listed in the event list (lower right corner) and clicking on such an event will position your screen to that battle's aftermath.

What are your options settings for watching things?

The combat does need to be play balanced. I was early-mid game when the dregins declared war on me and I met their frigates with my battlecruisers and almost got wiped out because the frigates have 70 hit points. I actually like the idea of frigates having a lot of hit points, but it seems out of balance to happen so early.

I remembered the old civ unit setup. First there was the phalanx, then the pikeman, then the musketeer, then the rifleman, then the mechanized infantry. There needs to be some sort of setup like that. I think frigates would be more like a rifelman-level or mechanized infantry level ship. a progression of defensive ships to protect systems would be good. You could even add them in the Battleship/Ranger/Avatar Techs as defensive replacements.

Plus the civs should protect certain upgrades and not be willing to trade them.......such as military techs...that are the most recent.

Frogboy: Everything related to combat is turned on (including the view combat option).

I brought something like this up a couple months ago. It does seem to get a little confusing watching all the combat take place and not knowing for sure where it is or which ships are involved. Part of the reason is it happens rather quickly.

I am also having a problem where the focus of the main screen changes to another battle a split second before the results of the last battle are shown. I have to check the mini-map to see if my ship icon still exists.

When I brought this up before, I suggested there could be another indicator to what has happened in the battle, such as floating numbers showing the damage a ship has taken. (If people don't like this or they think it takes too much time, maybe there could be an option to turn it off.)

I would also like to see the ship information screen (bottom of the screen with the info button) updated for the battle I am currently watching. Sometimes this does not change or it shows the information for the AI's ship.

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Something I just thought of that could be very helpful and wouldn't be too hard to implement (I think)-
Could the "ship list" be open during the movement phase and have the ship that is being watched, centered and highlighted in the ship list? When the ship is damaged you see the HP change and when the ship is destroyed, you'd see it removed from the list.

This could also be applied to planets and the planet list. When a planet is invaded it would be highlighted. You could also see the change in population or if it is taken.
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Another thing, not so much related to battle, is the focus of the mini-map. If it is zoomed in and the action being watched changes focus to another area of the main screen, the zoomed in mini-map should center itself on this new location. Right now it does not. The only way to get it there that I have found is to click on the main screen a couple times, then the mini-map shift over.

Scott

I have been having conflicting feelings about the changing focus in the main screen also, and not just with battles.

If I check the option boxes to watch my autopilot moves (and the enemy moves as well) I think that I would like the option to have the game pause, after each ship move, before flitting off to the next ship to move. That would let me see the results of that ships new discoveries. Then after hitting a key (space bar for example) the game would continue on to the next ship.

As it stands now the screen jumps around so quickly that I can't see what is happening and have to check through each ship by hand afterwards to see what happened. Did my survey ships find any new goodies? Are my autopiloted ships passing anything of interest? Are my autopioleted ships indeed still moving (Beta versions only)? etc. etc

When I am moving many ships about for various nefarious reasons it is almost annoying to have the game automatically jump to the next ship it has in its list. It more often then not breaks my train of thought.

Maybe the option to have to choose the next ship by hand would be better. For example, if I have a few ships (or stacks) in one area I would just choose the ship to move by chosing it and giving orders. If I am finished with all the ships that I can see in the main window I can just hit the "FIND" key and contunue from there.

It is almost like I would like the option to disable all the automatic focus changing that goes on.

Maybe it is just my inexperience with the game, and as I get more familiar with the controls I will see the error of my ways, but currently I am often confused by what I am looking at.

Elrikk

PS I sometimes wish that the Main and Mini maps could be switched by hitting a key. (or having a zoom on the main map too) This would probably cause to many problems though, with the sizing of the ship icons.

I am really enjoying the game though.

Elrikk,

Some of your comments strike close to home with me, even though I am a long time Galciv player (since 1993 on OS/2). It gets so that I just turn off the "watch" options and hope. With the vast number of ships one can have moving arround on autopilot on a gigantic map it gets too distracting trying to watch ship movement, so it has gotten to the point with me that watching ship movement is now just a novelty (gee whiz, look at those suckers go!).

So maybe there were some good intensions behind the "watch" options, but I can no longer remember what it was. Is it really still worth while? It does, after all, have a respectable processing penalty. Would, perhaps, having more "stop autopilot" reasons (or options) would be better?

Lucky Jack,

Thanks for the reply.

If I understand properly the "FIND" button will find the next ship (on the computers list) that doesn't have any orders, and being on auto pilot constitutes having orders.

So maybe turning off all watches and then just manually checking through the "FIND" list is the best answer.

What I would like (excluding overhead consuderations) would be a per ship (or stack) AutoPause flag that controls the watching portion of the turn so that I could just flag the ships I am particular interested in seeing at the end of their move (mostly for survey ship goodies).

The game should (as a global option) always AutoPause after any battle reguardless of the AutoPause flag setting. That way I would not have to scan through the ship list to see what ships dissapeared. (:(

Elrikk

PS. If by "stop autopilot" options you mean things like stop when seing "new" enemey ship or new "interesting" thingees, then yes that would be great, but that would entail a lot of processing.

Elrikk,

A ship on autopilot is supposed to drop out of autopilot when it "sees" any enemy ship (an enemy ship is within its sensor range). I think this obviously has to include when they get attacked. I haven't checked lately to see if this is working so you may wish to try it out and report a bug if it does not.

Having ships with "survey" capability drop out of autopilot or autosurvey sounds like a good idea to me, but maybe others would want to be able to turn this on or off as an option. And I think the autopilot "pathfinding" code already has to check for obsticles, so I don't think the cost in processor power would be significant, but then, since I don't know the code I am just speculating.