Registered55
Posts: 52
Joined: 8/1/2010 Status: offline
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SR for me was a bit to arcade in the sense of how many ships the player and AI starts to spam..... Tens of thousands of ships scattered all over the place.... for me to unrealistic and far to chaotic DW in my opinion suffers the same problem at the moment too, although not as exaggerated as SR.... in DW the player and AI can have hundreds of huge ships which only cost money.... nothing else seems to be an equation when it comes to how large fleets can be, money is not everything when it comes to fleet operation size (SR and DW doesn't seem to take in account LOGISTIC limitations) SR had some great potential, and there is a couple of mature MODS available for it, but two annoying things for me was, the ARCADE (cannon fodder) feel towards what felt like endless amount of ships being created, and for me I did like the movement system (Newtonian laws and all that pony) it just felt weird, and also I found the system quite clumsy when it came to battle.... it was like thousands of marbles being let loose down a hilly road or another way of looking at it, 50 ice-skaters trying to fight on ICE!!!! for me so many games do not take into account that a real empire would not be using mouses, keyboards and the like to control an empire, further more an empire like running a country would be staffed by many to achieve the goal of running an empire...... what that means is that game developers must take into account these very debilitating and limiting aspects of control and support the player must contend with, DW with all its automation still leads to chaos because the automation only helps alleviate some of the size and scale of the games systems, but unfortunately the number of military ships is still too high, the interface and single individual at the helm (pardon the pun) becomes overburden. SR is even worse, because the number of ships is 10x more than DW, yet SR has less automation than DW, and the automaton it does have is quite basic (the game engine would be over taxed because AI scripts can eat so much CPU cycles if they grow in complexity or numbers (sometimes both even)) ES, first any game of today that is turn based in my opinion must loose points for that fact alone, turn based games are in them self based on concepts that was born from board games, yet the player plays against the AI instead of other human players..... but this system is old and very antiquated and for me quite boring from the get go, having to click a "end turn" button in today’s world of gaming is so..... OLD.... behind the times. anyway, with that said, ES does a good job in its GUI, very polished and quite innovative upon it initial release.... however like has been said it's got some fundamental flaws with it, a couple of them I don't think will be fixable without redesigning the game (patches don't do that) so those flaws will ultimately remain (movement for one, endless battles needing processing before player can complete the turn), the fleet system though hopefully will be addressed, there are too many small fleets in the game, again like mentioned before leading to CANNON FODDER. now I wish to emphasize that I am aware that cannon fodder is a fact of life, and has always existed in state of wars, but in reality there are many forms of command and control, also large administration and logistical support that goes with it, RTS games must simulate that aspect or chaos quickly consumes the interface limitations that we have to use (mouse, keyboard, VDU..... even our own body limitations such as one brain, one set of eyes that kind of thing) My point is, all the games above, ES, DW, and SR all suffer the same problems at the moment..... far too many ships for a single player to MANAGE (ES being a smaller game by galactic size does a better job, but looses out when there are 30 battles queued the player has to process..... yeah pressing "AUTO" 30 times ..... that’s fun!), in fact DW has got some threads on this subject already, there has been requests asking for a way to increase the maintenance of ships, if they cost more, than an empire must have less One last issue for me regarding DW, I have said before, too much of its development foundation is based on Dotnetframework..... because of this it has this sluggish, jittery feel to it, even though it runs fine, the FEEL is sluggish (a bit like how a webcam records in a way) if feels like a couple of frames are being dropped from time to time. However, DW wins hands down, but I must iterate that DW has had two expansions...... For me, DW would be so much better if there was less ships.... not because that would be realistic, but because I am just one PLAYER with a mouse and keyboard trying to keep tabs on hundreds if not thousands of ships amongst dealing with an entire empire..... although I do strongly FEEL that DW does not emulate all the important factors needed to account how large an empire (countries) fleet can be, although money of course is the most important factor.... things like SKILLED personal, Command and control and logistical support is definitely missed if DW and would help to reduce the number of ships DW has right now. (please forgive me, the above is only my 2nd draft..... something has come up, no time to finalize the draft.....sorry)
< Message edited by Registered55 -- 8/4/2012 11:58:54 AM >
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