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dostillevi -> RE: Just an observation.... (6/19/2013 9:11:03 PM)
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Its really a fundamental problem of game design, although I think this and most other games find a decent balance. Realism vs gameplay.. I love the idea of realism but, lets face it, we aren't actually immortal interstellar emperors, or in other games knights or wizards. Most modern games turn our limited capacities into entertaining experiences that use what skills we do have in an engaging way to simulate imaginary events. We don't have the capacity to spend 300 or so years building a galactic empire in real time, so the game is sped up. Unfortunately we would miss many entertaining events if the entire game proceeded at breakneck speed, so instead we compromise some realism for gameplay and effectively layer a 2d top down spaceship combat simulator on top of an interstellar empire management game in such a way that both "minigames" benefit from their interaction. Other games take the approach of having "instanced" combat, like the total war games, where combat happens in real time and asynchronously from the rest of the game. This can work as well, but it means the player must actively participate in each combat or instead allow the ai to play out the combat for them. Usually the player is vastly most capable than the ai so it isn't very fair to give the player a choice between having to participate in another boring cookie cutter fight so as to not lose units, or instead move on to something more interesting at the cost of lost units.
Anyway, returning to this game, I've considered at length the compromises that must be made in space empire management games in order to make an entertaining and relate-able experience, and really there are no games that come even close to realism in any way, and there's very little point in complaining about it. Either you enjoy the gameplay as it is presented or you move on to a game that you do like (or make your own!). Accurate realism in a space game requires, just for starters, the high likelihood that there is no possibility of faster than light travel, followed almost immediately by the possibility that no biological race will ever travel the stars, replaced instead by intelligent machines due to the huge complexities of hauling biology all over space. If you can get past those two likelihoods and have a game with both faster than light travel and green tentacle aliens in space, then you have to deal with physics 101; momentum, impulse, inertia, mass, acceleration, and more. That's just to get your ship moving realistically in a vacuum. Weapons are a whole other story.. remember that any object moving at any significant portion of the speed of light is massively destructive.. any ship becomes a weapon able to wipe out whole cities if not more, and if you can make a ship go fast, it would be even easier to push a mass of steel or hell, even a few asteroids, onto a deadly trajectory, and once at a significant portion of the speed of light there is almost nothing that can be done to stop such weapons. If your ships can travel faster than light, than so can your weapons, and if that is possible you won't even have any warning before you explode, as even light will be outpaced by the weapon. I could go on. Suffice to say that the sort of space strategy game you might be familiar with is extraordinarily unlikely to be anything at all like reality.
However, they also tend to be a lot of fun!
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