And most importantly can I intern with Y'all this summer?
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
I mean, even light takes 8 minutes to get from Sun to Earth (1 AU), so getting out to the 50 AU range of the Kuiper Belt has a lower bound of ~7 hours at the speed of light. And accelerating to the relativistic speeds even at a killing 10 g's is on the order of weeks/months. So unless we go totally fantasy and add inertial-less drives, warp drives, or some sort of unlimited wormholes, it's just going to take time.Add a week of coasting in the middle and you're at Jupiter. Saturn is about three weeks' travel, and you can reach distant Eris in 6 months.
Drive power output of our upgraded torchship is now 4.5 TW, about a third the current power output of the human race. Which in itself is no argument against it. Controlling the reaction and getting rid of the waste heat are more immediate concerns.
Not substantially, actually, I think most of the baseline assumptions that we have over there have quite a bit of leeway built into them. So extending any phase any number of years by fiddling about with technologies, numbers, and attack plans actually does change it a bit. The real question comes down the lethality of weaponry on both sides. If it's too big on one side or the other, a very real question of how the population sustains such losses does come into play (or at least Earth's population).Andor wrote:Well see that completely changes the assumptions in the Alien motivation thread. If you don't have to justify small scale combats characteristic of X-com it alters the baseline assumptions significantly.
The trouble with that kind of long span of events is two fold.Amineri wrote:We haven't ruled out tactical completely, but we want to add more depth to the high-level strategy. In terms of gameplay and flow (as well as trying to keep a campaign a bit more manageable than the 150+ hours people were reporting for LW), it's really hard for the player to keep track of a long-term strategic plan if it's being constantly interrupted by 20-30 minute tactical battles.
We're also thinking of a much longer conflict time span -- something that justifies calling it "grand strategy". My current "strawman" is that a campaign would be somewhere around 50 years long. So something more on the order of the 30 Years War or the 80 years of the Dutch Independence war, and less like World War 2. If we trigger political stuff on Earth once a month (kinda sorta like a council report), that's roughly 600 "turns". In comparison, a standard campaign in something like Civ 5 is 500 turns if you drag it out to the end.
Ah but consider. If you're positing an alien base in the Kuipier belt, with 10 year travel times, that's a maximum of 3 full return trips in the course of a 60 year game. Aside from a lot of "next turn" clicking, what was gained by the long travel times and vast distances? Not to mention the thought of actually trying to find something in that vast a sphere of space...Amineri wrote:One reason to make the time span longer is that it just takes time to flit around the solar system. Even with something like a torchship (which basically has power output equal the entire Earth's current real-world power generation), it still takes weeks/months to get from Earth to outer solar system. With lower-tech stuff, it's going to be months/years. For example, the New Horizons mission took 9.5 years to get from Earth to Pluto with early 21st century tech (and without enough fuel/remass to stop and orbit). Not to mention New Horizons is hardly a vessel of war.
You don't need to get even close to relativistic speeds however. I'm too tired to math right now, but if you can do a continuous burn , even at a piddly .1g the solar system gets pretty small. 10gs is only for take off/landing or combat. If you could burn at 1g continuously I don't think there is anything in the solar system that takes a month to get to. No wait, I found the chart on your torchship site. At 1g Terra to Pluto is 35 days by Brachistochrone orbit, 111 days for .1g.I mean, even light takes 8 minutes to get from Sun to Earth (1 AU), so getting out to the 50 AU range of the Kuiper Belt has a lower bound of ~7 hours at the speed of light. And accelerating to the relativistic speeds even at a killing 10 g's is on the order of weeks/months. So unless we go totally fantasy and add inertial-less drives, warp drives, or some sort of unlimited wormholes, it's just going to take time.
It sounds like logically it would be a multi-phased war/story. Starting on Earth, with a war for dominance/survival then moving off into the solar system and then finally pushing the aliens out, or achieving a political end to the conflict. (Which would make more sense, since you don't want the Aliens to just destroy the earth out of spite as they go down.) Any starship that doesn't suck makes a dandy planet killer after all.Anyhow, with 600-ish turns, there's no way the player could even do one 20 minute tactical battle per turn/month -- that would add up to 200 hours just for tactical (let alone the strategy-level gameplay!) which would be only for the most hardcore. So, we either have to streamline any such tactical-type stuff (i.e. stuff in space), or have fewer such events, so that many turns/months go by without any such happenings.
And of course a lot of this stuff is in flux still. We might trim the timeline down to 30 or 40 years (so 360 or 480 turns), or even make political stuff happen every 2 months instead of 1.
I am still breaking off time here and there to do work on Terra Invicta, although still the bigger share of my time is making sure LW2 is ready for release.nth degree wrote:While the focus may be on the strategic instead of tactical layer, I do hope the roster management aspect translates to that strategic layer.
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wow, your basing it off of realistic things? will there be like, orbital mechanics and etc too worry about? i know that children of a dead earth has a very realistic representation of space combat, being like a simulator, but thats going a bit off topic.Amineri wrote: snip
Very heartening for me to see a link to Atomic Rockets, you have great taste! One of my favorite sites and if you're doing near-term realistic-ish space warfare you could have no better reference.Amineri wrote: One reason to make the time span longer is that it just takes time to flit around the solar system. Even with something like a torchship (which basically has power output equal the entire Earth's current real-world power generation), it still takes weeks/months to get from Earth to outer solar system. With lower-tech stuff, it's going to be months/years. For example, the New Horizons mission took 9.5 years to get from Earth to Pluto with early 21st century tech (and without enough fuel/remass to stop and orbit). Not to mention New Horizons is hardly a vessel of war.![]()
From http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... hships.phpI mean, even light takes 8 minutes to get from Sun to Earth (1 AU), so getting out to the 50 AU range of the Kuiper Belt has a lower bound of ~7 hours at the speed of light. And accelerating to the relativistic speeds even at a killing 10 g's is on the order of weeks/months. So unless we go totally fantasy and add inertial-less drives, warp drives, or some sort of unlimited wormholes, it's just going to take time.Add a week of coasting in the middle and you're at Jupiter. Saturn is about three weeks' travel, and you can reach distant Eris in 6 months.
Drive power output of our upgraded torchship is now 4.5 TW, about a third the current power output of the human race. Which in itself is no argument against it. Controlling the reaction and getting rid of the waste heat are more immediate concerns.
+1Andor wrote:Given the somewhat abstract nature of the conflicts you're planning to portray, as well as the very multi-modal nature of the conflict. (Small unit tactical, mass unit strategic, air combat, space combat, alien world combat)
Perhaps the model to go with would be a unit + hero style where one of your main tasks will be managing a pool of named "hero" units who serve as commanders, researchers, politicians, commandos, what-have-you. Each would have their own strengths and weaknesses, and would age and change throughout the course of the game, even developing their own friendships and rivalries. They can tie into both the proposed human faction system and if there are multiple alien factions. (Kirk is a fine diplomat when dealing with Vulcans but not so much with the Klingons, since they killed his son.)
Sample games with this style include King of Dragon Pass, Crusader Kings and to a lesser extent the Heroes of Might and Magic series.
Personally, I'm not that big of a fan of Grand Strategy Games that require microing of units. Like Hearts of Iron 4 which I like-okay and think it could be great feels like it's struggling between wanting to be Macro and Micro focused. You have macro/abstracted concepts like air combat, naval combat and more but the land combat requires constant microing because the AI keeps making dumb decisions like sending a freaking tank division into a swamp instead of the plains or when the AI detaches 3-5 divisions to surround a pocket of enemies but just stand there when most of those units could be continuing the main offensive. So you're busy just babysitting the Land Units and yeah, it's not really fun. In fact, I kinda wish they went back to States being capturable like in HOI2 as opposed to every single little province since HOI3.MechPilot524 wrote:Just to dump my thoughts on the matter here...
The thing that disappoints me the most about many grand strategy games is that you don't really get to have much control over your units when you go from macro to micro. In Wargame: Red Dragon's campaign modes, you can auto-resolve but you can also go directly into the battle. Of course, I think it's unrealistic to expect for Terra Invicta to have that level of unit control, that's even more complex to me than that of XCOM. But at the same time, I still want to see some sort of direct influence on a battle's outcomes instead of clicking the "fight" button and praying you made the right decisions earlier.
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