Avoiding the Tank Rush

posted on May 18th, 2003, 12:42 pm

I still find myself in a tank rush mindset with the Fleet Operations mod. Are there ways, from a game design persective, to minimize this?

For example, Fleet Command doesn't seem to have any chain or large scale weapons. While overused in Armada II, and intellectually inconsistant, there may be some common ground. Maybe a virus prgram could disable some system, and chain from ship to ship. I can easily imagine a Klingon suicide vessel, with an old ship being stuffed with explosives.

Could turrets be designed not be able to hit small ships? Could they slip past?

Anti-cloaking technology should be the hardest to acquire, not the easiest.

One role that might be good for turrets is the slow reload, big explosion and/or peristant radiation cloud system.

Any other thoughts?

posted on May 18th, 2003, 7:31 pm

I still find myself in a tank rush mindset with the Fleet Operations mod.  Are there ways, from a game design persective, to minimize this?

For example, Fleet Command doesn't seem to have any chain or large scale weapons.  While overused in Armada II, and intellectually inconsistant, there may be some common ground.  Maybe a virus prgram could disable some system, and chain from ship to ship.  I can easily imagine a Klingon suicide vessel, with an old ship being stuffed with explosives.

Could turrets be designed not be able to hit small ships?  Could they slip past?

Anti-cloaking technology should be the hardest to acquire, not the easiest.

One role that might be good for turrets is the slow reload, big explosion and/or peristant radiation cloud system. 

Any other thoughts?

[Actualy, the map pack I sent to doc has 2 maps witch seems to fix that. WarFare4 has the spawns walled in and extremely difficult to access, seems the current AI is wary of breaching the perimeter as there is no easy escape if things go badly, plus the "resource" fields of 6 moons each keeps the AI's attention, many battles are fought over them rather then a base. War of Hell is the other one, I used the mutara type nebula to seperate the map TvB, even with the wormhole connecting the two the AI is somewhat unwilling to blindly rush in with the majority of its fleet, usualy a handful of B'Rel's to test things out.

I agree the total lack of large scale weapons is a bit overkill, A2 stock ahs too many and FO has too few. Some of the special's made sense, the borgs nanoprobe attack, the holding beam(wich all borg ships have) and the assimilation beam. Feds should have one mass weapon to use against each playable race, a anti-borg special and a anti-klingon special that can be purchased with credits, same as the Borg and Klingons.

Again I agree that the platform accuracy is a bit high, atleast for pulse based weaponry. Phaser armed defence turrets are naturaly highly accurate against any vessel, though for balance I would suggest lowering the accuracy by ship size/class.

While A/C tech should be harder, it should not be the hardest. One game in particular that has no A/C tech is Bridge Commander, when a ship cloaks its completely gone untill it decloaks and it makes the game impossible in some cases, and at the least kills the fun in it when your opponenet decloaks only long enough to fire off a few toprs and disruptor bolts and cloaks before you can return fire.

Turrets dont usualy much that can explode, unless its a torpedoe armed platform, and energy based platforms dont have a reload time. Now a torpedoe turret would be perfect, made powerful and accurate the downside would be a large explosion and a persistant radiation wake, not the turret to use right next to your starbase.

posted on May 18th, 2003, 11:37 pm

I still find myself in a tank rush mindset with the Fleet Operations mod.  Are there ways, from a game design persective, to minimize this?

For example, Fleet Command doesn't seem to have any chain or large scale weapons.  While overused in Armada II, and intellectually inconsistant, there may be some common ground.  Maybe a virus prgram could disable some system, and chain from ship to ship.  I can easily imagine a Klingon suicide vessel, with an old ship being stuffed with explosives.

Could turrets be designed not be able to hit small ships?  Could they slip past?

Anti-cloaking technology should be the hardest to acquire, not the easiest.

One role that might be good for turrets is the slow reload, big explosion and/or peristant radiation cloud system. 

Any other thoughts?

[Actualy, the map pack I sent to doc has 2 maps witch seems to fix that. WarFare4 has the spawns walled in and extremely difficult to access, seems the current AI is wary of breaching the perimeter as there is no easy escape if things go badly, plus the "resource" fields of 6 moons each keeps the AI's attention, many battles are fought over them rather then a base. War of Hell is the other one, I used the mutara type nebula to seperate the map TvB, even with the wormhole connecting the two the AI is somewhat unwilling to blindly rush in with the majority of its fleet, usualy a handful of B'Rel's to test things out.

I agree the total lack of large scale weapons is a bit overkill, A2 stock ahs too many and FO has too few. Some of the special's made sense, the borgs nanoprobe attack, the holding beam(wich all borg ships have) and the assimilation beam. Feds should have one mass weapon to use against each playable race, a anti-borg special and a anti-klingon special that can be purchased with credits, same as the Borg and Klingons.

Again I agree that the platform accuracy is a bit high, atleast for pulse based weaponry. Phaser armed defence turrets are naturaly highly accurate against any vessel, though for balance I would suggest lowering the accuracy by ship size/class.

While A/C tech should be harder, it should not be the hardest. One game in particular that has no A/C tech is Bridge Commander, when a ship cloaks its completely gone untill it decloaks and it makes the game impossible in some cases, and at the least kills the fun in it when your opponenet decloaks only long enough to fire off a few toprs and disruptor bolts and cloaks before you can return fire.

Turrets dont usualy much that can explode, unless its a torpedoe armed platform, and energy based platforms dont have a reload time. Now a torpedoe turret would be perfect, made powerful and accurate the downside would be a large explosion and a persistant radiation wake, not the turret to use right next to your starbase.

Phaser armed defense turrets are far more effective than the torpedo or pulse phaser turrets. Pulse phasers do less damage againts larger targets, torpedos are less accurate against smaller targets, but phasers are no less accurate or damaging against a large or small target. Like I said in another post, phasers should be less accurate againts smaller targets.

I think it was Doca Cola who I saw say that battles would be fought with very few ships. However, it is almost impossible to destroy any well armed base without an enourmous fleet, as I have observed. A Borg base managed to take out about 4/5 of my 60 ship fleet when I attacked them.

The damage of weapons used by starbases and defense turrets isnt highm but they shoot multiple beams/pulses/torpedos at once. I suggest those weapon's damage should be lowered, or they should shoot less beams/pulses/torpedos at a time.

posted on May 18th, 2003, 11:47 pm

Hmmm-
maybe your torpedo turret could be a full scale sensor/defense outpost. Maybe the romulans could have it, with cloak, to defend important stuff, but not a base, like a passage through an asteroid field. But make it expensive, or maybe 1 credit, so you can't build a bunch of cloaking border defense sations and just blockade the border

posted on May 19th, 2003, 1:54 am

Anyway, you cant avoid the Tank Rush, in any real time srategy game. No matter what you do, the game will always end with either player sending a large fleet of ships into their opponents base.

posted on May 19th, 2003, 4:59 am

wh have done best to avoid a tank rushes and bring more strategy into the game. Perhaps we will do something against this in the future.. let's see to it :-)
Beam weapons do hit every target with the same accuracy and do the same damage to all vessels, but they do less damage then a compared pulse or torpedo weapon. Perhaps I chould rebalance this a bit, i will see to it.

You're right, the fleets become to large sometimes. We're aware of this and i will discuss some mthodes to avoid this with the stuff.

Mh, the moe i read the forums, the more i think beta2 will be a nw FleetOps itself

posted on May 21st, 2003, 11:29 am

While I am making as many suggestions as any, I never want to lose a gushing tone. This mod is fabulous in so many ways, and so much better captures the Star Trek experience. I was just marveling yesterday at how much better the nebula looks. And the torpedos!

posted on May 21st, 2003, 12:31 pm

some news:
- Tachion Detection Grid now costs 400/400 instead of 100/100
- Borg Adaptor can now be produced as soon as an Incubation Complex exists. It's torpedo weapons have been enhanced

i'm actually thinking about reducing the damage of starbases to make early attacks possible..

You should try to play without infinite money.. Fleet Operations has been designed for standard settings :-) perhaps this is more likely what you want

posted on May 21st, 2003, 10:03 pm

Another thought: Could there be a shield generator? This would be a researched and, when completed, would add shields to every turret/base. That would provide a strategic failure point that, if destroyed, could take down/weaken a lot of an empire.

posted on May 21st, 2003, 10:13 pm

some news:
- Tachion Detection Grid now costs 400/400 instead of 100/100
- Borg Adaptor can now be produced as soon as an Incubation Complex exists. It's torpedo weapons have been enhanced

i'm actually thinking about reducing the damage of starbases to make early attacks possible..

You should try to play without infinite money.. Fleet Operations has been designed for standard settings :-) perhaps this is more likely what you want

IMO, Tachyon Detection should cost 1000 D/T. Because once it has been researched, cloak is completly useless. I think cloak should be something that can be used for most of the game, and not just in the beginning.

posted on May 21st, 2003, 10:54 pm

I agree that the research costs of cloack detection should be very high - in the top tier of research. While I agree that one of the weak spots of BC was sitting around waiting for a ship to uncloak, I don't think it will be a problem here. For one thing, the Romulan base can't cloak, and conceivable one could destroy the cloak capability there.

I also think that only one Klingon ship should have a cloak (I will leave it to people who know the program better than I to determine which it is).

Can it be made such that researching cloaking technology is much higher from Klingons than for Romulans?

posted on May 21st, 2003, 11:13 pm

is there any feasible way to make a cloaking field that could cloak anything in it.

posted on May 21st, 2003, 11:48 pm

Can it be made such that researching cloaking technology is much higher from Klingons than for Romulans?

If you are asking wether it is possible or not, then yes.

posted on May 22nd, 2003, 12:43 am

the romulans invented it (i think) so they would know exactly how to build it.

posted on May 22nd, 2003, 12:56 am

Exactly.
But that was a long time ago. In the TNG timeline, cloaking devices for Klingons are just as common as they are for Romulans.