Interview With Aaron Hall

[Nyx]

Thought you'd all be interested to see this one: http://www.twingalaxies.com/cgi-perl...w_aaronhall.pl It's a good read, he had a lot of interesting things to say about Space Empires and game design. Some teasers for SE5 are included as well. Enjoy.

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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

[Mephisto]

A very nice and interesting interview. Good questions, good answers.

[ColdSteel]

QUOTE:
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AH: There are a ton of items on our wish list. Real-time rendered 3D graphics for ships, tactical ground combat, completely script-driven AI, orbiting planets, animated graphics, voice-overs for the races, random quests and plot lines, more detailed external events, real-time tactical space combat, those sorts of things.
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Yes, nice interview but it's the "real-time tactical space combat" in that Last sentence there that makes me shudder. Any other game I've tried with this feature was just awful to play. Anyone else feel this way or is it just me?

[Drake]

Maybe it'll be in the future persistant, massively multiplayer game they're working on. You'll have your leaders (us) making the strategic decisions, and sending off our teammates to fight our battles in real-time space combat. I can just see it... "You lost your battleship doing WHAT? That's it, I'm bumping you down to escort, go patrol the perimeter!"

-Drake

[Seawolf]

Nyx,

Is it too late to get in that tourny?

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Seawolf on the prowl

[ColdSteel]

Actually Drake, that's only way real-time would really work worth spit. One man, one ship. Otherwise it quickly becomes a jumble of incoherence as one person tries in a futile fashion to simulate the tactical thought of many in real-time battle. No way, no how. Boy, do I ever hate that click-fest stuff (can you tell?).

FPS games like Unreal Tournament and the Quakes I love, on the other hand. Real-time they are but it's just you making the decisions for you.

[geoschmo]

March 7th is the deadline to turn in your scores.

[geoschmo]

I could see a functional "real-time" tactical combat along the lines of the combat in Age of Empires.

You would have your various ships and you would click on them and click a point to give them commands such as "move to this point, Defend" where it would hold position and fire on anything that came into range. Or "attack" would hold position until something came into a certain range and then it would fire and persue if the other ship fled.

You can right click and drag a box to cover a group of units, ships in this case, which would then move in formation.

It's hard to describe, but if anyone here has played AOE you should know what I am talking about.

Not saying I would like that, I prefer Turn based myself. But it would be tolearable for the tactical combat part of it. It does get very messy when you have more than a dozen units or so. I would think fighters would have to be automated or you would have brain-freeze.

[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 08 February 2001).]

[ColdSteel]

Personally, the very best tactical combat game engines I've ever seen have been the ones that were turn based and used a fixed number of "action points" for each units round of tactical combat. Each action peformed took a specific number of a units' allocated points per round. As units got more experienced, they got more action points to spend per round. Using specific types of equipment also reduced or raised the number of action points you had to spend. The best examples of this that I can think of offhand are the classic games XCOM and both of the 'Fallout' series RPGs. I've often wondered why none of the 4x games ever adopted this approach. Seems it would have been a natural fit for the tactical combat (shrugs).

[Instar]

X-COM ruled man! It was aweomse!