Ship designs...

I just saw Gratuitous Space Battles on Youtube and I must say that the concept is awesome!

However the ship designs are very lacking! They look more like Space Invaders on steroids or something from Star Control on the AMIGA and the PC from the early 90s. They should have adopted a more awe-inspiring and imposing design, like the immense star ships from Macross, Macross 2, or Gall Force and should have even added the devastating Planet-System destroyers from Gall Force - Destruction and Gall Force - Stardust Wars.
Also the ships need more fire power with larger laser beams and missile barrages like the ones you see here:

Macross DYRL Battle
youtube.com/watch?v=0qUxZj2o … re=related

Macross 2 Battle
youtube.com/watch?v=sA5fB6FP … re=related @ 5:17

Macross 2 BAttle
youtube.com/watch?v=ai_6joaj … re=related @ 5:09

Gall Force Battle:
youtube.com/watch?v=gjKYSUl9 … re=related

Gall Force Battle:
youtube.com/watch?v=Lk1wRdP3 … re=related @ 1:37

Gall Force Compilation:
youtube.com/watch?v=p9HyaGxy … re=related

Japanese Missile Barrages
youtube.com/watch?v=c7GaqoXz … re=related

Huge spaceships & destruction - for animation reference.
youtube.com/watch?v=t8OwY86Pd5c

Cool Laser Beams:
youtube.com/watch?v=c3Tw31hD-0o

Now that’s what I’m talking about! :wink:

hi,

those are the ugliest space ships i’ve ever seen.
but well, 20 years old japanese anime. what to be expected?

as for those effects: more psychedelic doesn’t mean it looks better, quite the contrary.

however, the game is very mod-friendly. you may create them of your own if you like to see them ingame.

greetings
driver

The missile barrages are already possible in GSB. Just equip a cruiser with 8 slots of missiles and watch the fireworks.

It would be nice to be able to set an order to tell a ship to wait until all its weapons are ready to fire before firing, a ‘salvo fire’ order. It wouldn’t work so great with ships that had a variety of weapons, but it’d look great for missile ships. I’m not sure whether this would lead to balance issues - they’d be more likely to overwhelm PD, but then they’d also tend to fire significantly less often (you’d pretty much always have to wait for a miss to finish missing.)

As for the beams… Trouble is with a lot of these super beam weapons, is that they don’t work at all well from a gameplay perspective - if your weapons are so awesomely awesome that they devestate enemy ships in a single salvo, then there’s a danger of the gameplay reducing down to ‘who fires first’.

EDIT: Wait, what… The end of the first video… Are you suggesting we need a new Gratuitious weapon for the largest of fleet battles? “Singing Japanese Girl”?

If your fleet was full of Macross cannons, I’m sure they would need tremendous power requirements, crew and recharge times. A pile of small ships in a slow carrier, too slow to bunch up with the rest of the fleet, could easily move in and rip the thing apart up close.

That’s why the SDF-1 needed fighter squadrons, yes? =D

Similarly nasty Star Blazers combat with “wave motion guns” is probably not great strictly speaking from a gaming standpoint. The Star Blazers miniatures game (literally I have no played in decades) toned the wave motion guns down, and required that they fire VERY infrequently.

Basically, you’d get a volley, then hope the smaller units held the enemy at bay while your ship was out of energy afterwards :slight_smile:

Spinal mounts in traveller are also pretty nasty. Too nasty in many ways (in High Guard, anyway, combat was so deadly you’d think they’d give up fighting, lol).

GSB is definitely on the “nasty” side given the rate that ships get wiped out, even on the winner’s side :slight_smile: