I just bought the game a few months agao…and its awesome! I cant wait for this next campaign style mode!! its going to be epic!
I am eagerly awaiting the release of the campaign. I have a couple suggestions which I think would enhance the enjoyment that many people (including myself) will derive from the campaign:
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Since you can already name your ships, it would be awesome if a kill-counter feature were included. Because during a lengthy campaign everyone loooves to see how many kills their favorite mega-death cruiser has racked up, prefereably divided by ship type and race, and perhaps with an added # of battles fought/won counter.
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A retreat button. As the campaign is about grand strategy in addition to tactical battles, you really ought to be able to bail rather than lose everything. There ought to be stiff penalties for doing so, (Say, a random 3rd of your surviving ships don’t make it) but I don’t think you should have to write off your entire fleet if you make a mistake. Only most of it.
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The ability to retrofit existing ships. Do you start with all items unlocked? Even if so, I think it would be nice to be able to modify existing ships to better handle threats in their area. You’d need the money and shipyards to do so, so it wouldn’t always be efficient or desireable to do so.
I don’t know all the details about how the campaign works, so I can’t say how applicable these suggestions might be. I hopefully they aren’t too difficult to implement though, as I think they would add some interesting options to gameplay. At the least, I think the kill counter is a must have. The image of ensign Ricky with a hand brush painting rows of swarm cruisers and rebel fighters on the side of the majestic HMS Flaming Death Bringer just warms my heart.
Kill counter is interesting. Every shiop in the campaign has a ships log, and you can open it at any point and just see a list of every battle it was in, and what damage it took, if it got repaired, where it jumped to, etc. Adding additional stats here won’t be too hard. Be aware though, that as it currently looks, the campaign is BIG and you have a LOT of ships. It’s not unusual to have 10 fleets on the go, with maybe 30 -50 ships in each, so you quickly start treating them as laser-fodder.
Retreating is in, and it’s pretty cool. The ‘admit defeat’ button becomes a retreat button where it is possible (there are nearby friendly systems, and your fleet is not cut-off). It gives you 2 minutes for your ships to turn around and warp out. Beyond that, and you lose them to the enemy. They can of course be blown up as they turn, so slow0-moving cruisers often don’t make it out alive.
You have to plan ahead, so when you are losing 35% to 55%, sometimes you need to see its going to get much worse, and hit the retreat button to save what you can. Once you order a retreat, you cannot undo that order.
Retro fitting would be very very cool. Unfortunately I am swamped with stuff and determined not to have any feature creep.
Glad to see that retreat is in, although as most of my cruisers are “mobile,” so I don’t think their captains are gonna be too thrilled. I’ll have to do some experiments to see how fast a cruiser has to be to pull a 180 and move 1/3 of the map in 2 minutes.
Its a shame about the retrofitting, but I agree with your reasoning. A damn good game now is far better than a perfect game 3 years from now.
I still stand by the kill count. If it is easy enough to implement, I believe that even in the midst of an epic war of attrition it would be worthwhile for tracking statistical anomlies and standout ships. Having that one Buck Rogers fighter which somehow survived two whole battles in a row and bagged a cruiser for example. The few ships that survive and/or excel become special, and that encourages you to treat them different, making the center of their own formation, and generally do fun and cool things that can help alleviate the potential monotony of ceaseless bloodbaths and the generic heartlessness of purely efficient formations. So, I’d understand if its not doable, but I’m really hoping for it, and it more than any other individual thing, would really make the campaign for me.
Thanks for your hard work, and keep it up!
I would like to see all kinds of system bonuses in the campaign mode. Stuff like nebula’s that restrict fighters. But more of these are needed… Like gravity anomolies, astroid belts (were astroids may be able to block line of sight or at least grant a negitive to tracking bonuses), planetary rings, binary stars, pulsars, black holes. Each having some kind of drastic and diffferent effect. Some good… Some bad.
Also, the ship hulls, would be nice to have a more varied… Many are very much the same. Probally for another update but still… More diversity between the races would be really really nice…
Hmm, was just checking in and saw this. Awesome stuff cliffski.
I imagine fighters get a bit silly with losing all of them every battle. :^)
I love this idea. I hope it happens in October though. (I’ve bought my game this month, but it was all the DLC for this!)
All the hulls are made by a professional freelance artist, so ordering completely new hulls would be pretty expensive.
I mean in regards to hull bonuses and stuff. Not the GFX. Though adding more ships is cool. But make the existing ships more distint.
I just heard about this as I investigated (and bought!) the Nomad expansion (which I just learned about from the email). I think I can safely say, Cliffski, that as soon as this comes out, I shall snap your hand off buying it… (Heck, I haven’t actually even played most of the last expansions yet, and I’m still hyped up!)
This game was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. When the Campaign is out, I will definitely support you by buying a copy.
:]
I agree. My cousins and I have really been enjoying the game and cannot wait for the Campaign to come out!
Plan on buying two copies. Keep up the great work Cliff!
I am unsure as to whether this has already been suggested! My idea concerns the retreat function. In a real battle it is possible (although not always honourable) for an individual ship to flee the battle if it is sustaining heavy damage. I was wondering if we could have an option to instruct an individual ship to retreat, and still have the other ships continue battling. This would enable the player to defeat as many enemy ships as possible, whilst fighting a battle that is UN-winnable. I would also suggest that out of the current speed settings, a single speed 1.2 etc. is chosen to reflect the normal real time speed. and if the player drops below the normal speed the option is removed from the table. If there is a penalty to reducing your speed below the decided norm, it will prevent players from slowing the game to closely monitor when a ship needs to leave and therefore ensure there is a chance for the ship to be lost.
The first question that must be asked is: why do players slow the game down? My thoughts are that players do so to either better manage their fleets caused by the user interface disconnect or more likely to enjoy the beautiful details of exploding metal tubes in a gravity-less vacuum. I don’t believe the object of any game is to punish or frustrate it’s players. Having said that, Cliffski said there was a two minute delay before ships are prepped to warp out to safety.
“The ‘admit defeat’ button becomes a retreat button where it is possible (there are nearby friendly systems, and your fleet is not cut-off). It gives you 2 minutes for your ships to turn around and warp out. Beyond that, and you lose them to the enemy. They can of course be blown up as they turn, so slow0-moving cruisers often don’t make it out alive.”
That time interval should be sufficient to eliminate weaker or slow moving vessels while still allowing others to survive. I like this approach as it does not hinder the user experience.
TY for your reply, having read your response I tend to agree that there is not a need for any penalty. However I must stress i only included it to illustrate that I understand their may be mechanical problems with allowing individual ships to leave. Although I agree, I am still unsure as to whether you or others would approve the idea of individual ships leaving when being attacked.
I would appreciate any comments relating to this, and i am fully open to criticism and improvement.
TY
Myrate
Instead of a realtime retreat… Why not just simple include a retreat command into the interface… Not on that can be envoked but one that is part of the ships orders like ‘Vulture’ ect. You can set a group of ships and when there’s a certain % of them left they are too retreat, a full retreat mind you. Would make thing interesting as you can setup frig screens for your Cruisers but after they take too many losses they head on out and let the crusiers duke it out. Considering the Frigs usually can’t take too much punishment. Anyways, would be an interesting game mechanic and would stay true to GSB’s hands-off style gameplay during the battle.
I think this a great improvement upon my idea, and i think it would work well with the game! (Hint! Hint!).
Ty for your input, 
I have had another thought, I was considering what i have read about crew numbers etc. and was wondering would it work to allow escape pods to leave when the ship blows up? if it will work we could even go so far as to assign ranks per crew member based on the number of battles fought. this would add an additional mechanic to the game and allow for ships to improve further than the design/modules allow.
what are your thoughts?
Another idea! Would it work to have a module that would for a short period of time be able to force enemy target locks onto itself in order to give the rest of the fleet more time to escape?
This is the “Cautious” order. Ships that take enough damage to trigger that order (player sets the percentage) retreat to the map edge.