Let's Play Dominus Galaxia

[Reformations]

Thanks for a great message from Jeff, I've also learned that the Power mechanic of ship design has been removed. Although I think Power was tied to the wrong engine type (should be based on combat speed not warp speed) and was presented in a horrible way to the player, I think it was a pretty cool mechanic that has potential to heavily influence ship design options. Specifically the tactical turtle.

What do you guys think will happen without power calculations? My predictions are long shelf lifes of the Heavy-X weapons as their high power requirements kept them in line. I think the propulsion tech tree will matter much less as higher propulsion tech levels will no longer equate to larger space savings of engines.

Of course the items/weapons will have updated initial costs and sizes but not tying these to propulsion tech seems to asking for trouble (also assuming miniaturization and cost reduction is in place).

[Jeff Graw]

Really?  You've never seen an early crit take out a large, heavily armed and shielded ship that wouldn't otherwise have been lost?  The individual crit might or might not feel like a big deal in the moment it happens, but the carry-over effects in the course of a battle can be enormous.

Of course, and we've all seen something similar in just about every 4X with tactical combat, MoO 1 included. All I mean to say is that actually playing the current implementation you don't get the impression of success or failure hinging on criticals, far from it, just as you don't get the impression that success or failure in MoO 1's combat is largely due to the luck of to-hit rolls either.

That 5% chance of a huge damage boost for enemy ships you have completely outmaneuvered (and larger but still smallish chances of a huge damage boost in most normal situations) basically just gives the AI an unusually-visible artificial combat boost because there are more of them, so they have more opportunities to get lucky and slag a ship they had no business hurting seriously if at all.

I don't understand what you're saying. I think you reversed the examples of normal situation and outmaneuvered? That's what I'm assuming, but then I'm still not sure what you mean about giving the AI an advantage, since for all intents and purposes we treat them the same as human players (and even if that weren't the case... still don't see how it follows that crits give the AI an advantage. Mathematically it should make no difference. If anything, any increase in variance benefits the player who has the ability to save scum, although that's looking at things from a more meta level)

Possibility 2: Roll to crit.  If crit, then increase the damage of each hit by 50% before applying shields.

This is the one I was assuming you meant, and it would mean effective damage against shielded targets would increase enormously.  A hull with shield 6 isn't immune to Ion Cannons in MoO, but it can largely shrug them off - and it should be able to; that's a huge amount of shielding against one of the earliest fighter weapons!  Let's say you have a big cloud of ion fighters that can still pling it down in four or five turns if it ignores them - but it's heavily armed, with excellent targeting, so they'll lose a bunch to attrition and the shielded ship will survive easily.

Until they get a lucky crit on their first attack and kill it immediately.  Depending on rounding, "+50%" in this system would be between +380% and +480% to actual damage output for Ion Cannons against shield 6 - and of course +(divide-by-zero-error) damage for basic Lasers against Shield 4.

2 is how it works. Of course, if you have a design with 6 DR against ions or 4 DR against lasers you're still in a very, very good place, just not quite as overwhelming. While I don't see what you the scenarios you describe as problematic (the usage of big numbers makes things sound scary, but in itself isn't an argument, and of course going from any amount of damage to no damage possible can also be represented as a big change), but I do see a problem when a design can be completely immune to others. The equivalent of an I-WIN button is never interesting in my opinion, and I don't think it's particularly strategic either. For example, in the situation where one side's designs are completely ineffectual the single obvious choice is to scrap those ineffectual designs, even when unable to build anything better. You also shut off any number of interesting scenarios where, from a narrative perspective, it might be good to have a large but technologically deficient force go up against a small but advanced one (eg. Antaran raids in MoO 2). Looking at an even larger picture, there's a certain sweet spot when it comes to variance when you want to maximise strategic depth: A completely deterministic and predictable outcome devolves into a puzzle, while a situation that is so random as to be totally unpredictable robs the player of agency. Ideally, there should be enough uncertainty so that a player might feel the need to have a backup plan, or take a gamble against long odds with some chance of success instead of quietly going into the night. While it's an innately subjective thing, I'd say that we have, if anything, not enough variance from the perspective of finding that sweet spot.

Or "The auto-AI let itself get flanked after I hit Auto; ugh do I seriously have to manually control every ship and watch for flanks in every combat round of every fight where I have a ship I care about?"  Or "they rolled that 1 in 20 chance, which is by no means negligible, as the designers must know or else they'd have made it zero, when I wasn't flanked at all."

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the auto-AI, and you can count on Alex to try to address any flaws people find. Of course, the 5% base chance is just a number. It could just as easily be 15% or 0%. There's a very good chance it will change. There are still a lot of numbers that are the result of (somewhat) educated hunches that haven't been refined through A-B testing yet.

While respectfully disagreeing with flanking as a game concept, I could suggest: What if you only get the bonus for flanking when your target is also "pincered" by another of your ships?  I would hate this mechanic (like everything that adds tactical complexity ~independent of the strategic game) but again that doesn't mean it wouldn't be fun for others.

Certainly something I've thought about, either as an alternative or as an addition. The issue I have is stacks. For one ship or one thousand, the flanking bonus makes sense. But getting a big pincer bonus would feel rather silly if it was granted by having a single small on the one side of the target compared to the thousand mediums on the other side. So you would need to apply some formula that at least deals with the number of ships in each stack: the one being pincered, the one attacking, and the one applying the pincer. Do you take size into consideration as well? It could get complex and difficult to grasp fairly quickly.

Ref has hit on a lot of reasons why I think crits are more dangerous than flanking.  There actually is a small bit of positioning that influences damage in MoO1 combat: a defender gets +1 DEF for each range beyond 1 he is attacked from.  Is  this present in DG?  If so I wouldn't mind seeing it exaggerated a bit more where basic weapons have range of 2 but firing from far away is quite inaccurate through ATT/DEF calculations.  However, I would still suggest leaving angles (flanking) out of it.  Close should be dangerous no matter which side of ship you are facing.

Each hex distant does indeed lower attack by one point. However, in DG a one point difference between attack and defence amounts to a 5% change in to-hit, down from 10% in MoO 1, since we felt that att/def rating had too extreme of an impact relative to other considerations. Min and max to-hit chances remain at 5% and 95% respectively.

The ALL or NOTHING crit of a weapon bank also threw me for a loop.  What a weird way to do it (besides satiating the desire for big numbers).  How does streaming damage work when it crits?  What about enveloping?  Do multishot weapons cirt on all of thier hits.  OOOOOWWWW!! (Multi-hit weapons are particularly resistant to shields and hence the damage increase of a multi-hit crit is getting obscene).

We had it the other way initially, calculating crit on each individual weapon. It just didn't work good in practice, I guess you'll need to take my word for it. Generally not fun, and could be difficult to understand why certain hits scored the way they did. Having everything tied together feels better, has more emotional impact, adds (to me at least) a good amount of variance, and lets us give better visual feedback.

Thanks for a great message from Jeff, I've also learned that the Power mechanic of ship design has been removed.  Although I think Power was tied to the wrong engine type (should be based on combat speed not warp speed) and was presented in a horrible way to the player, I think it was a pretty cool mechanic that has potential to heavily influence ship design options.  Specifically the tactical turtle.

What do you guys think will happen without power calculations?  My predictions are long shelf lifes of the Heavy-X weapons as their high power requirements kept them in line.  I think the propulsion tech tree will matter much less as higher propulsion tech levels will no longer equate to larger space savings of engines.

Yup, I also mentioned that we removed it in the previous page - And oh yeah, I forgot to mention we also removed the cloning slider. It made colony management very math puzzle-y with adjusting the ratio between cloning and factories all the time. Lack of cloning also makes population more of a strategic resource - Heavy weapons actually aren't that good in the current meta though, and probably need a bit of a buff. Propulsion still matters quite a bit, and I think a lot of that is down to the AI. Having more mobile fleets is a big advantage strategically.

Of course the items/weapons will have updated initial costs and sizes but not tying these to propulsion tech seems to asking for trouble (also assuming miniaturization and cost reduction is in place).

Yes, a lot regarding sizes, costs, hull scaling, miniaturisation rate, etc. has been rebalanced. I think it feels fine already, but of course there's still some room for improvement. The way power works in MoO 1 was just too complex to have any reasonable hope of conveying it properly to players. I doubt more than 1% of MoO 1 players ever understood it, despite the UI showing it.

[Reformations]

Always more questions Hope you see this a reasonable feedback.

Does an extreme +ATT difference result in removing the lower damage ranges from a weapon? For example, in MoO1 a +10 ATT bonus guaranteed the damage roll would come from the top 2/3's of the damage range. I've always thought that was incredibly clever and wished other games would follow suit. MoO1 does not have a 5% minimum.

I also enjoy the simplicity of modified dice rolls for ground combat. Any plans on changes to that system?

I'm ok with removing cloning. Please keep that streamlining approach in mind when it comes to people asking for planetary buildings and planet-specific leaders....

Any links to where you mentioned removing of power?

[Jeff Graw]

Does an extreme +ATT difference result in removing the lower damage ranges from a weapon? For example, in MoO1 a +10 ATT bonus guaranteed the damage roll would come from the top 2/3's of the damage range. I've always thought that was incredibly clever and wished other games would follow suit.

There's support for overflow, but iirc it's not actually hooked up right now. It was improving crit chance though, since that's much simpler to convey in the UI.

MoO1 does not have a 5% minimum.

Reading the OSG again (page 115) my error appears to be the maximum (100% in the OSG), not the minimum (still 5%). Did the OSG get that wrong? I know it's not perfectly infallible.

I also enjoy the simplicity of modified dice rolls for ground combat. Any plans on changes to that system?

Right now the only difference between DG and MoO 1 ground combat is the lack of an animation, and the ability for more than two sides to take part (this is always a free for all though). We may or may not try something more involved later on.

I'm ok with removing cloning. Please keep that streamlining approach in mind when it comes to people asking for planetary buildings and planet-specific leaders....

It would be determined on a case by case basis. In general, we're fairly skeptical of adding new buildings for the obvious reason of keeping colony management streamlined.

Any links to where you mentioned removing of power?

Sure!

I'm also a mechanics minimalist, as is the rest of the team! We actually did things like getting rid of colony ships, explicit waste cleanup, research interest, the power attribute, and even reserve fuel tanks.

[Reformations]

Yep. Table on 115 shows that a high defender still has 95% to be miss. However a low defender does not have a 5% chance to get hit, this actually goes to 0 as a guaranteed hit.

Interesting choice for having a high att bonus increase crit chance. MoO1 high attack bonus decreases variance by generating damage from a smaller range of values. DG high attack bonus increases variance by generating damage from (50%) larger range of values.

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At first glance I'm optimistic about the lack of research interest. Can you talk a bit more about how research allocations take a few turns to absorb the changes? I *think* that gets around min maxing? Do you still have a % chance to complete a project after the RP have been covered?

[RefSteel]

Of course, and we've all seen something similar in just about every 4X with tactical combat, MoO 1 included. All I mean to say is that actually playing the current implementation you don't get the impression of success or failure hinging on criticals, far from it, just as you don't get the impression that success or failure in MoO 1's combat is largely due to the luck of to-hit rolls either.

Outside of early game battles between very small fleets, MoO isn't about the luck of the to-hit rolls.  It's about designing, building, and deploying a better fleet than the enemy.  When the number of individual shots fired in a battle become large, the randomness is smoothed out, and this happens quite quickly in MoO.  It takes much longer for this to happen when crits affect an entire stack of weapons!  Thus, combat becomes more random and remains so for longer and in more situations.  This can feel good!  I happen to hate it.

I don't understand what you're saying. I think you reversed the examples of normal situation and outmaneuvered?

You were talking about crits as something that happens to you when you "let them flank you."  This implies that there is something you can do to avoid being flanked (and there is, at least for a single stack with others to support it, and in other circumstances depending on the enemy fleet or how important doing so is to the player) short of one-shotting every enemy stack before it can shoot at you.  If I make this effort to outmaneuver the enemy, making a flank completely impossible, they nevertheless can get lucky and slag my carefully-flank-protected ship with a crit.  Which in combination with the rarity of the situations when you even can prevent a flank makes the feeling of "Ugh, I let myself get flanked" completely illusory.

I'm still not sure what you mean about giving the AI an advantage, since for all intents and purposes we treat them the same as human players (and even if that weren't the case... still don't see how it follows that crits give the AI an advantage. Mathematically it should make no difference. If anything, any increase in variance benefits the player who has the ability to save scum, although that's looking at things from a more meta level)

I think a lot of our disconnect comes from a difference in focus: You're looking at an immediate, local, tactical advantage, and I'm talking about a strategic advantage.  Don't worry about save-scumming; cheaters will cheat, and if that's how they want to burn their time in a single-player game, meh, they're not hurting anyone else.  Assuming everyone plays fair though, randomness on the tactical level favors the AI on the strategic level - which isn't a bad thing; it's just a thing.  I've posted on this before, so I'll put it in spoilers here.

The reality is however that (outside of a no-barbs duel, but who duels the AI?) the pRNG really does favor the computer in a single-player game. I don't mean that the random numbers fall in their favor more often than they should; of course that's silly. I mean that randomness itself favors the AI in two important ways: First, randomness tends to favor less-skilled players. A chess grand-master will pretty much always beat (say) me at chess, every game. But if we flip a coin for every piece before each game begins, to see if it gets to stay on the board, we'll eventually randomly get a game where the grand master starts with such a huge handicap that even I can beat him. (If nothing else, I probably win by default in the 25% of games where my king is on the board but the Grand Master's isn't.) Second, randomness favors the crowd. In order to win a game of Civ, I have to defeat lots of different AIs, and if I'm trying to win through combat, I have to "defeat" each one of them separately. Now, the AIs might fight each other, but it doesn't really matter which one wins - they're all just AIs; all that needs to happen for me to lose is for any one of them to defeat me.

...
Note by the way that I'm not complaining about this; the game isn't supposed to be "fair" to the player - it's not a showcase for [Alex's] AI; it's a game. In fact, in MP games, the rule of the crowd still applies: Whoever you are, whoever your opponents, you're likely to have some poor, low odds results against somebody ... who in turn is likely to have some against someone else. It might not seem fair to any individual player - but over enough games, the unfairness will pretty much even out for every individual player. The RNG really does favor your opponents, but that's just part of what you're up against. It's part of the game.

While I don't see what you the scenarios you describe as problematic (the usage of big numbers makes things sound scary, but in itself isn't an argument, and of course going from any amount of damage to no damage possible can also be represented as a big change),

...

I almost didn't bother including the numbers because they weren't the point; it just emphasizes that "50%" is false in most game situations.  One lucky crit in the right circumstances (as I described) can turn what "should be" (and usually is) a flawless victory for one side into a flawless victory for the other side even when large amounts of production are involved. Worse still, it specifically favors the ship types that were most powerful already (unshielded smalls) and require the least forward planning.  (More on this below.)

but I do see a problem when a design can be completely immune to others. The equivalent of an I-WIN button is never interesting in my opinion, and I don't think it's particularly strategic either.

You are trying to say that decades of research, scanning opposing fleets, and then designing and deploying ships to take advantage of that research and information advantage - even designing sub-optimal ships (fitting shields has a large opportunity cost in weapons etc.) because they perfectly counter your enemy's fleets - is an "I-WIN" button?  When your new ships can in turn be countered by an opponent researching and building literally any other weapon?  Again, I think you're thinking about the battle screen while I'm trying to talk about the impact on the larger game.

For example, in the situation where one side's designs are completely ineffectual the single obvious choice is to scrap those ineffectual designs, even when unable to build anything better. You also shut off any number of interesting scenarios where, from a narrative perspective, it might be good to have a large but technologically deficient force go up against a small but advanced one (eg. Antaran raids in MoO 2).

If giant technologically backward fleets are competitive with fewer but much-more-advanced ships (especially in the case of fleets specifically researched and designed to counter giant backward fleets) - if they are remotely competitive - then they are an "I-WIN" button.  The resources that you wasted teching semi-worthless shield technology, I can pour into a fleet of laser fighters and nuclear bombers, deploying them long before you even have your technological edge.  This causes problems for me in a game like MoO where my failure to spend on research means my other or new neighbors now have fleets that can wipe the floor with my ancient junk and I have to race to research better techs from my new, wide population base if I'm going to survive.  But if my big huge fleet can dust smaller, more advanced fleets as long as I keep pumping more of them out, I now have more territory than anyone else and an effective starfleet - certainly enough to defend and put my land advantage to good use, if not to press my attack on more enemies who wasted their resources on technology.

Also note MoO2 Antarans specifically had weird and different technology in lieu of (and incompatible with) standard shields.  Versions of this are always possible for special narrative additions.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the auto-AI, and you can count on Alex to try to address any flaws people find.

No, I actually am assuming Alex's AI is terrific. But when I hit auto-resolve and a lucky crit wipes my stack (or a lucky series of three consecutive crits on unavoidable flanks; the problem with whole-stack crits is that the number of die rolls is small compared to their impact) I'm not going to say, "Argh, I shouldn't have let myself get flanked." My decisions had nothing to do with it. It's just that the game mechanics are incredibly swingy. Which can be fun! I'm just not a fan in the case of a strategy game.

Certainly something I've thought about, either as an alternative or as an addition. The issue I have is stacks. For one ship or one thousand, the flanking bonus makes sense. But getting a big pincer bonus would feel rather silly if it was granted by having a single small on the one side of the target compared to the thousand mediums on the other side. So you would need to apply some formula that at least deals with the number of ships in each stack: the one being pincered, the one attacking, and the one applying the pincer. Do you take size into consideration as well? It could get complex and difficult to grasp fairly quickly.

True. Also, can bombers help pincer a ship even though their armament is ineffective except against planets? Missile boats that have already expended their payload but are sticking around to tank damage and help with pincer effects? I continue to believe the tactical combat screen should be the place where you watch the fruits of your strategic decisions play out, not a place where you try to beat the AI at spaceship chess, but tactical puzzles can be fun, and of course there are ways to balance them.

Each hex distant does indeed lower attack by one point. However, in DG a one point difference between attack and defence amounts to a 5% change in to-hit, down from 10% in MoO 1, since we felt that att/def rating had too extreme of an impact relative to other considerations. Min and max to-hit chances remain at 5% and 95% respectively.

For the record, max to-hit chance in MoO is 100%, and bonuses bringing the total above 100% increase the chance of dealing maximum damage and decrease or eliminate the chance of the lowest damage rolls. Also, the switch from +/-10% to +/-5% is yet another way that the effect of advanced tech on combat is nerfed. One of the first things I discovered when trying to design a strategy games of my own years ago was that the impact of new technologies on combat need to be very large or else combat techs become boring and frankly pointless - again because combat fleets are better than combat tech in the short term, so if they aren't much weaker in the long term, there's no reason to tech.

Having everything tied together feels better, has more emotional impact, adds (to me at least) a good amount of variance, and lets us give better visual feedback.

This is all valid. I'm not a fan of the things you're talking about tying together, and I don't think crits tie together well with the rest of the game, but that's one player's opinion, I'm not the one making the game, and many people will be fans of the very things that annoy me.

I think the propulsion tech tree will matter much less as higher propulsion tech levels will no longer equate to larger space savings of engines.

This effect is pretty small, and the transport = colship mechanics make Propulsion the most important field for the early game regardless, while the late game wants Prop's strategic (and tactical maneuvering) speed, plus special effects like HEF and Teleporter (if they still exist) so the field will always be a focus even without Power and with the nerfed to-hit penalties from shooting at high-maneuverability targets. I guess trading for obsolete propulsion techs will be less attractive, but I think the game can live with that.

[Reformations]

I think Ref and I are self aware enough to call ourselves old Moo fuddy-duddys. It will be interesting to see how crits/flank are responded to in the KS. Are we voices in the wilderness? Has your internal team struggled with the same?

Maybe instead of just being negative, I will write up my version of streamlined moo1 combat. Hint: no vertical dimension.

[Jeff Graw]

Outside of early game battles between very small fleets, MoO isn't about the luck of the to-hit rolls.  It's about designing, building, and deploying a better fleet than the enemy.  When the number of individual shots fired in a battle become large, the randomness is smoothed out, and this happens quite quickly in MoO.  It takes much longer for this to happen when crits affect an entire stack of weapons!  Thus, combat becomes more random and remains so for longer and in more situations.  This can feel good!  I happen to hate it.

Yes, that's right, there's still some smoothing, but it's more limited.

And I think you, I, and Reformations can all agree that having no randomness at all in battles would be bad, while having randomness overpower everything else to the point that you cannot predict battles on way or the other would be similarly bad, or worse. There's a sweet spot in between the two extremes, and our preferences lie along different points of the continuum.

That said, in a more general sense is the progression from more randomness in small encounters to less randomness in large encounters in MoO 1 actually a good thing from a design perspective? Sure, it's an interesting dynamic from an intellectual level, but why wouldn't I want to target what I see as the sweet spot for all battles? Taken to its extreme, MoO 1 style smoothing will eventually remove almost all semblance of randomness, decreasing strategic depth. Of course, in MoO 1 when you're late game enough to have such size fleets you probably have specials like BHG which can be overwhelmingly random regardless of fleet size. I strongly dislike the BHG from a design viewpoint, and I assume you both share my opinion. If not, I'd be curious to hear your reasoning.

You were talking about crits as something that happens to you when you "let them flank you."  This implies that there is something you can do to avoid being flanked (and there is, at least for a single stack with others to support it, and in other circumstances depending on the enemy fleet or how important doing so is to the player) short of one-shotting every enemy stack before it can shoot at you.  If I make this effort to outmaneuver the enemy, making a flank completely impossible, they nevertheless can get lucky and slag my carefully-flank-protected ship with a crit.  Which in combination with the rarity of the situations when you even can prevent a flank makes the feeling of "Ugh, I let myself get flanked" completely illusory.

We could of course remove the chance to crit when not flanked at all, and/or lower the flank angle. A lot of tweaking will be done once we start work on the combat system in earnest. While the current values feel fine to me already, that's not to say that different values won't work better.

I think a lot of our disconnect comes from a difference in focus:  You're looking at an immediate, local, tactical advantage, and I'm talking about a strategic advantage.

Ideally, I want to find the right balance between the two. And I think that a certain degree of uncertainty at the tactical level actually adds to strategic depth and makes the game more interesting, since it means it makes it difficult to math out the outcome of any particular chain of events. There's a significant choice between assuming the best, or planning for the worst, or anything in between, to throwing a hail Mary pass.

First, randomness tends to favor less-skilled players. A chess grand-master will pretty much always beat (say) me at chess, every game. But if we flip a coin for every piece before each game begins, to see if it gets to stay on the board, we'll eventually randomly get a game where the grand master starts with such a huge handicap that even I can beat him. (If nothing else, I probably win by default in the 25% of games where my king is on the board but the Grand Master's isn't.) Second, randomness favors the crowd. In order to win a game of Civ, I have to defeat lots of different AIs, and if I'm trying to win through combat, I have to "defeat" each one of them separately. Now, the AIs might fight each other, but it doesn't really matter which one wins - they're all just AIs; all that needs to happen for me to lose is for any one of them to defeat me.

I'm not quite on board with either premise. The first one, while generally true, doesn't just assume that the AI is a worse player, but also assumes that the particular subset of the game where randomness prevails is something that the AI doesn't excel at. For a rather extreme example, if I add bullet spray to a game, it's going to hurt the perfectly accurate aim bot much more than it does even the best human player. For the second part, I agree to an extent. For example, if there are 100 AIs and my galaxy generator isn't that good at creating balanced starts, there's a good chance some AI is going to have a better starting location than I (or anyone else) does, and will proceed to steam roll everyone else. However, I don't see that transferring over to critical hits since they will average out over the course of the game while the starting location lasts indefinitely.

I almost didn't bother including the numbers because they weren't the point; it just emphasizes that "50%" is false in most game situations.  One lucky crit in the right circumstances (as I described) can turn what "should be" (and usually is) a flawless victory for one side into a flawless victory for the other side even when large amounts of production are involved.  Worse still, it specifically favors the ship types that were most powerful already (unshielded smalls) and require the least forward planning.  (More on this below.)

The chances of a single crit turning the tide of a major battle from one extreme to the other are extremely unlikely. I wouldn't necessarily assume that DG balance will be the same as MoO balance, since it currently appears that huge hulls have an advantage based on the most skilled tester (who is an RB regular). I also wouldn't assume that the current balance of DG is anything close to the final balance, since ideally we'll have more distinct roles that necessitate multi-hull sized fleets to some extent.

You are trying to say that decades of research, scanning opposing fleets, and then designing and deploying ships to take advantage of that research and information advantage - even designing sub-optimal ships (fitting shields has a large opportunity cost in weapons etc.) because they perfectly counter your enemy's fleets - is an "I-WIN" button?  When your new ships can in turn be countered by an opponent researching and building literally any other weapon?  Again, I think you're thinking about the battle screen while I'm trying to talk about the impact on the larger game.

It's much more likely to happen during the early stages of the game than it is the late stages, but I'm not thinking about MoO 1 veterans who are unlikely to ever let themselves get into such a situation as I am to newer players who very well might. And it would be one thing for them to find themselves as outmatched (which they still would, all that effort in research and cost still bears much fruit), and quite another to find themselves completely hard countered.

Also note MoO2 Antarans specifically had weird and different technology in lieu of (and incompatible with) standard shields.  Versions of this are always possible for special narrative additions.

That's true, but is also more work, more exceptions to the otherwise established rules for one offs.

No, I actually am assuming Alex's AI is terrific.  But when I hit auto-resolve and a lucky crit wipes my stack (or a lucky series of three consecutive crits on unavoidable flanks; the problem with whole-stack crits is that the number of die rolls is small compared to their impact) I'm not going to say, "Argh, I shouldn't have let myself get flanked."  My decisions had nothing to do with it.  It's just that the game mechanics are incredibly swingy.  Which can be fun!  I'm just not a fan in the case of a strategy game.

You might have to take my word for it, and I'm not totally unbiased, but I can't remember an instance of this happening to me outside of the AI actually misplaying, which doesn't happen too much anymore. I don't think you'll find it an issue when you see it in practice.

For the record, max to-hit chance in MoO is 100%, and bonuses bringing the total above 100% increase the chance of dealing maximum damage and decrease or eliminate the chance of the lowest damage rolls.  Also, the switch from +/-10% to +/-5% is yet another way that the effect of advanced tech on combat is nerfed.  One of the first things I discovered when trying to design a strategy games of my own years ago was that the impact of new technologies on combat need to be very large or else combat techs become boring and frankly pointless - again because combat fleets are better than combat tech in the short term, so if they aren't much weaker in the long term, there's no reason to tech.

I find I still need to put a high priority on increasing attack rating in my play, but for me so far this change feels like it's for the better. It's either that or vastly increasing the size of battle computers. In MoO 1 they're practically a no-brainer for most designs. Like everything else, it's open to tweaking based on play testing though.

I think Ref and I are self aware enough to call ourselves old Moo fuddy-duddys. It will be interesting to see how crits/flank are responded to in the KS. Are we voices in the wilderness?  Has your internal team struggled with the same?

Maybe instead of just being negative, I will write up my version of streamlined moo1 combat. Hint: no vertical dimension.

The internal team hasn't struggled with it, although there are minor gripes about minor things for sure. I hate to bring it up again, but combat is one of the least developed parts of the game. A lot of time went into setting it up and developing the underlying systems, but it has seen relatively little polish and attention aside from that initial work. It's a bit... frustrating to be put in the position of having to defend it while I'm not completely happy with it myself, albeit for largely different reasons. If it was more complete and polished, and I held I high an appropriately high opinion of it, I'd enjoy debating its merits much more. Keep in mind that further work won't just be relegated to polishing, but could include major systems changes too that invalidate large portions of our conversation.

While I understand your biases, and my own biases (real time combat fan ) Do try to understand that there's still a lot of work to do, so debating very specific points (such as +10 vs +5) is largely a waste of time, and there are certain points that you'll need to take my word on until you have a chance to try it yourself. Your feedback will be much more valuable once you have actual experience with the combat system and aren't projecting expectations for how things behave in your heads, because I've heard a lot of assertions on how the various mechanics and changes will affect things that don't, in my admittedly not completely unbiased experience playing the game, actually pan out in practice.

[Reformations]

For discussion sake, what are your gripes with the combat system? I doubt you'll get much real-time love on these forums. I am, however, interested in simultaneous turn planning that then play out together.

[RefSteel]

Agh - I looked back over what I wrote earlier and see I've communicated poorly:  You shouldn't have to defend the game or one of its subsystems here just because I identify what-appear-to-me to be flaws with the game and note impacts of features that I think may not be obvious.  It seems like a really cool game!  It doesn't look like a MoO clone, but a) MoO exists, and b) Remnants of the Precursors is on the way to update the same basic gameplay.  We don't need another clone.  It sounds like what you would want to aim for is a case where tactical combat remains important throughout the game, strongly affected but not completely determined by strategic decisions.  A game like that could be really cool!  (See e.g. X-COM - the original or either new version.)  Tactical situations would have to be highly varied - exactly the sort of thing you're talking about with more complex flanking rules, terrain features, range effects, and other specials.  I'm skeptical about the tactical game holding up across a full game when it's normal to have around a hundred stars (like Alex in his video) but it can definitely be done, and it sounds like you guys have the team to do that if it's a priority!

On randomness favoring the AI:  Assuming equally good combat AI is available to both sides, if there is any situation in which a player can gain an advantage by controlling a tactical battle manually instead of leaving it to auto-play, and it is possible for the player to correctly identify such a situation, then the player is better at tactical combat than the AI by definition. (If this is not the case, then that player's best move is to auto-resolve every time.)

In effect, what increasing randomness does is to swing the likelihood of victory for any given side closer to 1/N, where N is the number of sides in a game. For a 4X game where a single human player typically faces off against several AIs, either this means increasing the chance that the winner will ultimately be an AI ... or if the game and AI design are such that there is such a thing as playing perfectly and the AI does so, a game in which the the player is very unlikely to win regardless of random chance. A highly unbalanced map, as you said, can change win probabilities by a lot, but even individual battle luck changes the balance (closer to 1/N) by a little - and if any single battle is ever of significant strategic importance, then a lucky (or unlucky) break in that battle can potentially swing the balance a lot. I want to emphasize again that this does not mean high variance is bad - it just has effects of which it is important to be aware.

(Early combat variance is high in almost all 4X games - though less so in MoO than in any other I've seen, because the granularity is so much higher - including beloved titles like Civ4, and losing an early city/colony/ImportantThing to a bad die roll can be a really big deal, where losing a recently-planted one in the late game might be relatively unimportant. In fact, one of the neat things about DG's transport=colship system is that losing a planet early, though potentially significant, represents the loss of a much smaller investment than in other games like MoO.)