Sweet, thanks for the Christmas video 😀

Questions / comments :

- A ship dash at 0:36. Is that an ability ? if so, did you target some coordinates or is the dash straight ahead ? Do you intend to have actual ballistics for missiles or guns, which could be avoided with the dash ?

- The red circle at 0:45 look like an ability AoE target. If so, it may be a bit confusing in 3D. Could you make it a sphere ? Add a Enlightenment FX on ships inside it ?

-  The explosion FX at 1:33 looks great 😀 There is also a reddish ship. Is it an animation / wreckage or do you intend to have overheating mechanisms ?

Sweet, thanks for the Christmas video 😀

Questions / comments :

- A ship dash at 0:36. Is that an ability ? if so, did you target some coordinates or is the dash straight ahead ? Do you intend to have actual ballistics for missiles or guns, which could be avoided with the dash ?

- The red circle at 0:45 look like an ability AoE target. If so, it may be a bit confusing in 3D. Could you make it a sphere ? Add a Enlightenment FX on ships inside it ?

-  The explosion FX at 1:33 looks great 😀 There is also a reddish ship. Is it an animation / wreckage or do you intend to have overheating mechanisms ?

1. Yep that is an ability, it is just a Jump (FTL) across a very small distance. I activated it by setting coordinates for a sublight move and then clicking the jump icon. If I clicked the jump icon standing still I would be prompted to set the coords using the movement protractor.

2. That's the weapons range circle, I did try with spheres and wireframe spheres but it looks a mess on-screen. I will add a glow to the ships in-range but it's worth noting that the range finder hides itself if there are not ships in range.

3. The explosions aren't finished yet really, I want to take them in a slightly different direction as they don't feel 'epic' enough. Once the Kickstarter is out the way and we (hopefully) have some funds, i'll be tasking the guys to create something a little more imaginative. Wreckages get brought up a lot so we'll be writing them in also with a resource reclaimation ability, but the focus has shifted into making the battlefield much much bigger (early prototype pic:  )

Thanks a lot for the interest buddy, much appreciated! 🙂

You are welcome ! What I have seen from the game is very promising and makes me think of Ryk Brown's Frontier Saga 🙂

The new "macro" battlefield suggests that the game is heading towards a realistic space sim. A dynamic solar system can be a great source of interesting game mechanics :

- Long range FTL limited on Lagrange Points

- Fuel management when travelling between planets

- Gravity assisted macro movements (slingshot)

- Stealth achieved through hiding behind planets / close of a sun

It's limitless ! Btw, as a fluid physicist I'd be glad to share insights concerning matters as dynamics, heat transfer, energy/power scales... I also got a Aircraft engineer background and some knowledges about laser, plasma, electromagnetics if you want to go beyond classic SciFi green energy bolts and all-powerful shields :p

Question : is the macro battlefield played together with tactical fight (as an improved tactical map), or is a completely different stage of the game (as the Risk-like map in total war games) ?

You are welcome ! What I have seen from the game is very promising and makes me think of Ryk Brown's Frontier Saga 🙂

 

The new "macro" battlefield suggests that the game is heading towards a realistic space sim. A dynamic solar system can be a great source of interesting game mechanics :

- Long range FTL limited on Lagrange Points

- Fuel management when travelling between planets

- Gravity assisted macro movements (slingshot)

- Stealth achieved through hiding behind planets / close of a sun

It's limitless ! Btw, as a fluid physicist I'd be glad to share insights concerning matters as dynamics, heat transfer, energy/power scales... I also got a Aircraft engineer background and some knowledges about laser, plasma, electromagnetics if you want to go beyond classic SciFi green energy bolts and all-powerful shields 😛

 

Question : is the macro battlefield played together with tactical fight (as an improved tactical map), or is a completely different stage of the game (as the Risk-like map in total war games) ?

It's looking like the "Tactical" battlefield is going to be a different stage like the Total War games. I would LOVE to have it all one persistent area, but sadly, computers these days can't really handle something like that. 

I don't know if we're going to have things like fuel management or gravity assisted slingshot type stuff. All of those things sound cool, but it's very important to not make a game too complex. Particularly RTS games. People play RTS games for the combat, not fuel management. 

Maybe we'll change our mind, but at this point, it's unlikely. 

We are definitely going to have limited FTL jumps and probably a buildable jump gate so you can cross the battlefield quickly once you get your gates setup. There's a lot of balance consideration we're gonna have to do for that and we haven't ironed out the details yet. We don't want all games to end with someone building a jump gate right next to an enemy base and game over or something like that.

I guess all depends on the type of gameplay you have in mind... resources management is an important aspect of many great RTS. Large scale RTS like Sins of a Solar Empire or Suprem Commander can be also quite complex in my opinion 🙂

There is also Planetary Annihilation. This one have dynamic planetary system and use it quite well :

 

We are definitely going to have limited FTL jumps and probably a buildable jump gate so you can cross the battlefield quickly once you get your gates setup. There's a lot of balance consideration we're gonna have to do for that and we haven't ironed out the details yet. We don't want all games to end with someone building a jump gate right next to an enemy base and game over or something like that.

Good to ear that 😀

The two videos below illustrates what are L-points. They can be great locations for bases / jump gate points 🙂

You're right, resource management is very important, but it must be done right. Some games put a huge emphasis on all sorts of other things. While it's not an RTS, the Civ series is a nice example. There's lots of complexity in the various resources (happiness, money, production, luxuries, etc). However, in games like that a lot of a player's time, possibly even most of a player's time, is spent on resource management. 

We want this to be a game focused on combat rather than resources or even getting from point A to point B. 

As for Planetary Annihilation, I am quite knowledgeable about it. I run PA Matches, the largest PA Fan site on the web. PA doesn't really compare to this at all because all space combat takes place in orbit around a planet. No combat in deep space. So it's quite easy to just tell units to go from one planet to another. What's more, Orbital gameplay is pretty dang crappy right now. 

And those two videos seem to illustrate my point even further. Having to deal with that level of complexity simply won't work for casual players, probably even most players. Make the game too complex and it simply becomes too complicated to be playable or enjoyable. 

Don't get me wrong, this is a Real Time STRATEGY game after all. So depth is very important, otherwise there wouldn't be little to no strategy. But there's a difference between depth and complexity. 

This video does a great job of explaining what I'm trying to say

Hi guys, and Happy new year !

We want this to be a game focused on combat rather than resources or even getting from point A to point B. 

Yes, and I completely agree for the RTS phase of the game.

You're right, resource management is very important, but it must be done right. Some games put a huge emphasis on all sorts of other things. While it's not an RTS, the Civ series is a nice example. There's lots of complexity in the various resources (happiness, money, production, luxuries, etc). However, in games like that a lot of a player's time, possibly even most of a player's time, is spent on resource management. 

However, I had the tactical phase in mind, In many games with "grand campaign"  (Civs, Total Wars, Endless Legend), there is actually a cost for getting from point A to point B (action point of armies) and this is a core gameplay feature. Do you consider something similar or motion is going to be "free" ?

As for Planetary Annihilation, I am quite knowledgeable about it. I run PA Matches, the largest PA Fan site on the web. PA doesn't really compare to this at all because all space combat takes place in orbit around a planet. No combat in deep space. So it's quite easy to just tell units to go from one planet to another. What's more, Orbital gameplay is pretty dang crappy right now.

Quite right

Well, resources management are really important and fun as long is mostly keep on the strategic layer of the games and is done right. For most RTS where both the strategy and tactical phases are one thing resource management often gets limited to gathering one (ore/tiberium), two (vespene gas and minerals) or four (food, wood, gold, stone) at most, in order to keep it simple and manageable because the focus of those games is the tactical combat, while the small strategy part is only the means to amass an army on the field and give you options on how to do so, as opposite to bring the army as it should realistically be.

The way most RTS works would be like both parties of the United States civil war sending a few workers and officers to Gettysburg to start recruiting soldiers and taking weapons from the nearby farms and towns. On real life it would be idiotic or desperate at best. However as computer games are that, games, that is entirely justified and in fact it can be really fun when done right. But those points I have made all over again the internet and this forums too, so don't mind my rambling.

On the game at hand, having a fluid transition in real time from a strategic overview of one or more star systems and a tactical battlefield interface would be not only demanding beyond reason for most (if not all) current computers, but I could dare to say it would be even more demanding for a human player, unless assisted by a pretty powerful AI. Not that it would be impossible, but it would be really hard.

Personally I wouldn't mind if the tactical part of the game is separated from the strategic one, and in fact I prefer it that way. I think that is the best method to better define each one. The Total War series serve as the perfect example of successfully employing this scheme. Granted, they have a rather bland strategy part, choosing to focus on the tactical battles and pretty graphics mostly, but the campaign map has been there all the time, serving to coherently connect all the battles you play trough.

On the movement over an hypothetical strategic layer, if this layer would be turn based a implicit cost would be associated be it amount of squares/hexes/cuadrants/regions or whatever a fleet/ship can traverse in a turn in a Igo-yougo system, or the speed of such movement on a wego or real time system. However over this more requirements can be added. For example Space Empires V (which also had turn based strategy map and real time tactical battles) had it's fleets/ships range/speed determined by the level of their engines. The more advance your engines were, the further you could go in a single turn, but there was also the matter of fuel (in the form of "supply") if you ran out of it, then no matter how advance, your ship would crawl to a single hex per turn until resupplied and if attacked it would be very slow and weapons wouldn't fire, I also recall crew members dying but that could have been a mod, anyway, I digress.

The thing is that if you separate the game into two pretty well defined sections of strategy and tactics, where the strategy layer serves to create the world and as a bridge to the tactical battles then you can add as much complexity and resource management to the strategy layer as you want, while leaving the tactical part as straightforward, dynamic and sleek as desired. Basically you can have a classic RTS game inside a grand strategy game (be it turn based or real time too).

What most people fail to see when pointed out is that you could have both in a game and still have each part working separately if required. A bright example of this is Empire at War. The grand campaign was exactly what I love on strategy games, you build outside battle, you maneuver armies, fleets and resources and then you do battle. However the skirmish mode was exactly what most modern RTS games are, you collected resources and build a force in the middle of a battle. So people that wanted RTS battles keep playing skirmishes and people that wanted a strategy could play the grand campaign.

/agree

The way most RTS works would be like both parties of the United States civil war sending a few workers and officers to Gettysburg to start recruiting soldiers and taking weapons from the nearby farms and towns. On real life it would be idiotic or desperate at best. However as computer games are that, games, that is entirely justified and in fact it can be really fun when done right. But those points I have made all over again the internet and this forums too, so don't mind my rambling.

And this made my day

You've made some great points LordBaal. 

And... 

Well...

I think you're going to be quite happy with what we've got in the works. 

I REALLY want to tell you more about it, but we're not quite ready...

So stay tuned...

Expectations intensify!

Any ability to ramming possible? 

Any ability to ramming possible? 

Just about anything is a possibility at this point, but, probably not. 

Ramming is a very very micro intensive ability and I'm not so sure it'll quite fit with what we have in plan for the gameplay. 

Seriously, I cannot wait to show you the massive leaps and bounds Shallow Space has taken. But that probably won't come until the KS announcement trailer. We'll see.

Maybe modable if that comes to pass?

Maybe modable if that comes to pass?

We eventually want to get modding into the game, but we gotta make the game first.