Moonshine Fox

Also @AD: That's a lot of assumptions you're making right there.

Wait what? I haven't been following this closely enough, no time. But seriously FOUR SOLDIERS??? That's just annoyingly bad. Even JA had more than that. *rage*

Speaking of which, the Combat GUI Mockup pictures you showed here, are they aimed for v9?

Ooh! Have to check this out when I get home. Fighting on that indy area is starting to get a liiiiittle bit old

Hey I had a blast in Syndicate too before RAZOR Alliance decided to put up shop there. OSS was one of our local enemies we traded potshots with You had that high-valued pocket down south that we just couldn't get into. Bastards

I believe you missed the ":P" in his post.

Something that is incredibly odd is that if one of your soldiers walks into the open in an area, gets fired on by reaction fire and gets hit, there's a long delay where nothing happens. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, your soldier slumps to the ground and dies. There can be as much as 5-10 seconds from being hit to actually dying. It makes you sit there wondering "Okay, did he get wounded? *click* Wtf? *click* *click* Huh? *soldier dies* Oh...right..." If those delays could be cleaned up, it would be great!

Aye, it sounds credible enough, and I believe we gunning for the same-ish kind of system. Which is cool

Aye, it would honestly not make sense for the prime anti-alien force not to have access to at least basic gear in "unlimited" amounts.

Yeah, the biggest argument against EVE, even more so than most MMOs, is the time commitment required to actually make it fun. MMOs are designed to capture you and then devour your soul

Wouldn't that be "simple" to add by using the header marker length for speed? Make it so that the header pin cannot be longer or shorter than max/min speed and use it to control airplane speed? That way you are using present GUI elements without adding unnecessary complexity. Or am I completely in the dark here?

The "PvP is all about ganking" is, I think, something that's on the current drawing board at present for the devs. They've already done a lot to that end though, by buffing logistics and electronic warfare ships, introducing stealth-type gangs (Force Recons, Stealth Bombers, Black Ops), covert cynos and similar. EVE has become a more interesting place, combat wise. It's still absolutely rubbish for the solo pilot however I'm just shy of 80 mil SP at the moment. I mostly make my money doing planetary interaction and trading. When I feel like it a throw in a mission or two in low sec and make faction ammo out of the LPs and sell on the market. It keeps me reasonably afloat without putting excessive effort into it. I wish they'd fix mining. It was the industrial part of EVE that caught me in the first place.

An interesting read, now that I had the time. It's somewhat similar to Chris' approach in AI:War with one "squad commander" (that is invisible), yet individual "intelligence".

Just be prepared for a massive jump in difficulty. TFTD is HARD Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Frozen Synapse, for instance, has this segmented turn based-realtime and it's absolutely fabulous. As were Laser Squad Nemesis, which was also segmented realtime.

I'm sorry to say that you should avoid the Afterxxxx series. They were a very valiant attempt, (heck the beginning of Aftershock is actually quite good), but they are very sluggish and imbalanced. I finished Aftermath, tried Aftershock and Afterlight, but as far as enjoyment go, they were more frustrations than anything else. Aftermath was buggy as hell on release, Aftershock was excessively unbalanced and Afterlight was so bad I quit it after the very first mission.

Think I need to bump this for my question here. Soz

I'm sorry if I came across as rude, but the OP was kinda rude, so I guess I just replied in kind out of habit.

I didn't actually read the opening post that much in detail. I guess I should've. Subjective opinion. To me it isn't. For you? Likely. That is more your fault than the games to be honest. If you cannot find anything worthwhile to do in the game, why are you paying for it? It's one of the very few games in the world that puts ALL the power in the hands of the players. YOU, and you alone, are responsible for what happens to you. Got blown up? Your fault. Got scammed? Your fault again. You did not properly safeguard your property. You did not properly consider the offer that was laid out before you and as such you lost. Everything, absolutely everything in EVE is in your hands. We're quite a few (around 320k now) players that absolutely love that power. Sure it stings when we get lazy, but hell, it's worth it! Gaming is by definition time consuming. It's up to you what you want to spend your time doing. This I agree with. It's gotten 1000% better in later years, but it still needs a bit of work. But at the same time it comes down to Darwinism. You learn by doing in EVE. Hell, learning PvP is dying 100 times over and every time try to work out "Why did I die?" and then not do that the next time. If you can't handle that..."Survival of the Fittest". This is absolutely disagree with. EVE looks absolutely stunning. I really can't see where you are coming from with this complaint. As far as story goes, EVE has some of the deepest and most sprawling lore there is, if you bother to look for it. But you didn't, did you? Tell me one MMO out there that has any cool storyline (except for KotOR 3. Sorry, I mean SWToR.) Revelations, Revelations II, Red Moon Rising, Trinity(!), Apocrypha and Crucible all disagree loudly with you. I'd like to see which other MMO decided to completely overhaul their graphics engine and remodel/redraw all the assets in the game. You can't think of any? I could say this for absolutely any MMO out there, so your point is rather moot. Sure, the Butterfly Effect is an unlikely scenario but it is entirely possible. I find myself getting back to this point a lot: If you're a dot in the Universe and you do not like it then it is your fault for not doing something about it. There are players out there that are leaders over thousands of players, combatting over vast swathes of space with other alliances. If you're not there and you're not happy with what you are doing, why didn't you change what you were doing? Sitting in high sec mining 24/7 is fine. If you like it. If you don't, why do it? There is SO much to do in EVE! If you don't like what you are doing, do something else! No one is going to stop you. Only you.

Chris decided against a learning AI for a few reasons. One being the excessive space required for the AI's learning database, another being that a learning AI either have to be flawed, or is destined to become flawless, leading to a very non-fun game. Instead his idea was to design an AI that could "look" at any given situation and act "intelligently" with the current state of the board. Kind of like how chess-masters can play against 40 simultaneous opponents. They can't possibly remember every game, so instead they analyze the board when they see it and act upon it. This, coupled with his decentralized swarm intelligence (every ship having its own intelligence), makes for a very interesting opponent to play against. I've played a lot of AI: War and the AI is really something extra. It can do some excessively devious things that a scripted AI would never "think" of, simply because it "made sense" at the time for the AI. It also very rarely falls prey to the "gap in the wall" exploit or rarely does something blatantly stupid. But it's not really "intelligent" as in that it "plans" anything or "learns". It simply analyzes the given state and acts upon it. You can have a situation where 200 ships enter your system 50 of them immediately get caught by the defenses, but the remaining 150 ships split up into three groups to simultaneously hit three different vital targets in the system. One group encounters heavy resistance from your defensive fleet and decides to withdraw. The other two groups successfully accomplishes their goal and leaves the system. The AI did not defeat you. It did not "win" the game. But it did harm you. Severely. This behaviour is not scripted, but decided "on the fly" by the midlevel local commander. (Strategic AI -> Local commander -> Ship swarm AI). I've also ha cases where the AI completely avoided my defenses and hit me where I was weakest simply because it was the "path of least resistance". It was a case of me having absolutely gargantuan defenses on my home planet, but not a single tachyon detector (detects cloaked ships), so the AI hit me with EyeBots, a small very mobile cloaked ships that can pass through forcefields. Me, as a human player, had not even considered that approach, and before I understood what was going on, 400 Eyebots where tearing a hole through my command station and I lost only seconds after. I sat there gaping at my screen. Never before has a game "outsmarted" me so much as AI:War. Usually you get ROFLstomped by an RTS AI simply because it macros (plays the overarching economy game) better than you. I'm not sure this type of AI would even work for a game such as Xenonauts, but to me it's a fascinating experiment, and a blast to play against. I just wish I had more time to sink into AI: War As far as your question goes, no I'm not really into programming AIs at all, even though AIs as a concept intrigue me and I do read a lot. There's also the distinction between gaming "AI" and a real AI. One must have a goal with what the AI is supposed to accomplish, otherwise one is fumbling in the dark. In Chris' case it was simple: His AI had to be able to play AI: War "intelligently".

What Minispace said. EVE is very much MMO in the sense that you simply cannot (okay, a few can) play it solo or you will get bored out of your skull. There are a few successful soloers (such as Chribba for instance) but most of them get burned out fairly fast and get bored with the game. EVE is, at the very core, designed as a group game. Be it 5 people or 5000 people, doesn't matter. Very few things in EVE is successful if you do it solo. So if you approach it like you would any other MMO: "This is a solo game where I see other people in the world and I can group up with them if I wish" then you'll likely not like it at all. EVE takes commitment and time, and it does get more rewarding the longer you play (heartily agree with you on the Learning skills btw. Worst design decision ever) and if you have good people to play with. In contrast to what I said above I have to add that in the last 2 years I've been solo, and I've quit twice due to boredom. With Crucible (the latest expansion) I've found new fire for the game and also expanded into new areas to have fun in. In closing; EVE is not for everyone. Clearly. But way too many people just try it for a few hours and throw their hands in the air claiming "this sucks!" without really giving the chance it deserves.

Just a note on "learning AIs". They can be exploited so hilariously that it's not even funny. Even moreso than scripted "gap-in-the-wall" AIs. It's also a crapton of work to code a learning AI, because the AI needs to understand what is good and what is bad somehow, and value its decisions. I much prefer scripted, but fuzzy-logic type AIs for RTS play. For some more insight into AI-programming, I'd happily refer you over to Chris Park, the head of Arcen Games: Designing Emergent AI: Part 1

I'm on my sixth year in EVE, so I can honestly not see where you are coming from. If you're part of the console ADD generation, then sure, but if you like really building something and being part of something massive, EVE is definately worth a look.

Well I for one will not hate on this attempt on the simple grounds that it competes with Xenonauts. I genuinely hope they make a great game so I can enjoy TWO awesome strategy games this year. But as with most AAA studios, they're likely to completely botch it because hey, the old mechanics must be "reimagined".

Yep, this is definately just a rumor so far. Will be interesting to watch, however. Especially now that JA:BIA turned out to be such a massive epic fail.

Rumours ahead! Read it yourself at RockPaperShotgun