Ships battle graphics and animation suck! Don't you agree?

With all respect I sadly agree. Mass drivers that float like dandelion seeds and change direction?   

Ships nodding their heads up and down like bobble-head dolls?   

Ships shooting THOUGH friendly ships?    

In DA weapons will individually fire on different ships... so your battle ship with 20 Phasor III's won't blow the crap out of a fighter by unloading all of its firepower on that fighter....Which will be good for the warmongers(me)!  

Here is the link

WWW Link

Well, graphics wise, I love the game for its strategy (infrastructure, sciences, economics, etc). If better graphics came at the price of crashes or affected gameplay, no thanks. If not, sure, nicer battle graphics would always be welcome. They remind me a lot of a game I played and loved, Star Control.

Related: I'd sure like more strategy options. I recently had a battle where two large fleets went head to head, my 11 Terran Alliance ships against nine or so Korx vessels. The bulk of their fleet were smaller fighters, with one dreadnaught-class battleship. I wiped up the fighters easily until only two remained, and their battleship. I had about five or six ships left. To my dismay, I watched them try to destroy the battleship - they could barely dent it due to its superior armor - while their fighters, which we could easily destroy, were ignored and free to fire on our rear. Needless to say, I think had they mopped up the fighters and then concentrated on the battleship, I stood a chance. As it is, we lost.

I kept madly clicking on the fighters trying to redirect my ships fire to them, but no dice, heh.

I'm sure its also been asked elsewhere, but I'd like to see a "Retreat" option. If you've got better engines, or smaller ships, you should be able to run. Does ship mass slow vessels at all (that is, put heavier requirements on engines?)

In the original galciv2,  you should see multiple weapons from the ship when it attacks.  If the weapons are close together, it may look like only one weapon.  If I recall correctly, it was 1 weapon animation per 2 weapons on the ship.   This is done to lighten the load when generating the animations. 

In Dark Avatar, a lot has been improved in the battle viewer including targeting, ship motion, animations, etc.

The Dark Avatar battles are much improved. They could probably use some work, especially on the cameras, but the sounds and graphics look better and line up better with special effects (explosions, deaths). Also, the ships move much more convincingly, with engine trails to boot. It can actually be a bit of a treat to watch now, which is a welcome improvement.

It stills needs work. The camera often glitches out at the end of a battle, for instance, and all mass driver weapons fire off in some bizarre direction (yet still manage to hit). Sometimes the camera simply refuses to show the interesting parts of the battle (in cinematic mode). Overall, though, its a huge improvement, and it's still in beta, so there's tons of room for them to be resolved.

Considering this is a game by a small developer, is fairly inexpensive, even includes the feature which has basically no gameplay value at all (although I like it), I'd be happy with it.

I tend to switch between normal and full. As far as system requirements go, I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the complexity of this game than the battle scenes.

In Dark Avatar, a lot has been improved in the battle viewer including targeting, ship motion, animations, etc.

CodeCritter, can the battle viewer improvements be applied to a DL update?

I enjoy the battle screen.

Only two things seriously bother me;

Some of the projectiles are too slow. I don't like waiting so long for the weapon to impact the hull.

Also i don't like the red damage display. It gives too much of a 'vague' approximation of the damage occuring.

Some other minor things are noticable but generally don't bother me.

It would be complicated, but it would be cool if a ship had vital points. Say, hitting it in the engines compared to hitting a well armored point. Put simply, a ship would have weak points.

I was actually pretty impressed with the viewer when I first got the game, since I was just coming off Civ IV it was a bonus. Over the long haul though, I turn it off half the time just for the purpose of speeding the game up. Still for something that the devs could of just passed on doing because it's just eye candy, the viewer does a decent job of representing a battle. Just don't expect an epic Star Wars battle to unfold in front of you.  

since I was just coming off Civ IV it was a bonus

CivIV.... that's not saying much. I have played all the civilisation games and was always delighted until playing civIV. What a flop! Mainly because artilery units got turned into bombardless uniks (however you spell the word).

I have Civ two through four on my PC right now and I have to agree four was not the expected sequel I thought it would be. I still enjoyed it for a while, though it didn't keep me interested for as long as the other two did.

I think they are done fairly well and could use a bit more, but not really necessary.

However... If anything in the graphics area needs to be addressed, it would be the ground assaults.

Blech!

Ok,thanks everyone for your comments and feedback. I can safely conclude that the ship(s) battle is made simple for performance constraint but for those with very good graphics card and system, I hope there could be a feature to provide better animations. Well, I guess it's in DA now and I can't wait to try out DA!

And yes, I agreed with Avenger that if there are some control or AI that the ships will take out the weaker ships first, it'll be great. I played Master of Orion before and if I remember correctly, it does provide player with some control to move the ships about in fleet battle like a chess board but the ships are in 3D isometric view.

I wonder..should I expect much for an award winning game or not (coz it's from small developer)?

Overall, I like the battleview very much. For a couple of games I made 'game-examples' and made screenshots for important battles. Especially when spending a lot of time on designing new ships it's very nice to watch them in action.

I hope that with the pending improvements the battleviewer will only get better!

the original galciv2, you should see multiple weapons from the ship when it attacks. If the weapons are close together, it may look like only one weapon. If I recall correctly, it was 1 weapon animation per 2 weapons on the ship. This is done to lighten the load when generating the animations. In Dark Avatar, a lot has been improved in the battle viewer including targeting, ship motion, animations, etc.

Ooooo goodie! I'm getting very happy.

Most of all the Mass Drivers bothered me in GCII because they really should behave like bullets fired from a gun; straight trajectory, fast moving (faster than missiles or at LEAST the same speed).