A rant and a suggestion about "formations" and fleets

from Sins Forums

First of all sorry if this has allready been mentioned a gazillion times, but for now I just want to get this "annoyance" of my chest.

 

Coming from the homeworld series it was a delight to finally see a good sci fi RTS again and I do like sins... However I've probably been spoiled a bit in that regard. Homeworld gave us many options befitting of it's 3d setting (perhaps too many at times?), but less can do for sins even while still giving the players a more practical choice.

 

The annoyance so far is that... the options we do have... doesn't really seem to work that well. Fleet cohesion tight, normal or spread out? Seems kinda irrelevant... If you want the ships in wall and do the wrong thing... in they go in a bundle... Want to put a certain ship type in front? Sorry, can't do. The game has allready picked that... And so on and so on.

 

My suggestion to enable and bring in formations and fleets as a real aspect of the game consists of the following:

 

1: A "move as a formation" option, that forces every ship to stay in its place at all times, lets no ship move individually, while only regrouping when out of battle.

 

2: A sort of "fleet editor" gui that lets you do the following:

   A: Lets you add and set rows of depth and height of the wall formations.

   B: Lets you select ship classes to the row you want them in.

   C: Lets you set distance between ships in each wall and between the walls.

 

Imagine the possibilities with this. You could make your own formations like this:

 

                           Support  Long Range

Tanky Battleship.               Long Range Empty row Empty Row Empty Row Carrier

                          Support   Long range

 

Or:

                     

Heavy Cruiser               

Heavy Cruiser Support Longrange Carrier

Heavy Cruiser

 

For simplicity I kept the options down somewhat, in that you cannot pick, how each individual row of wall formation will end up if you mix different classes, but it would be possible to add those options too.

 

From a users perspective I could it imagine it looking a bit like this:

1: A formation button when grouping a fleet, this opens a new "page" on the fleet gui part.

2: This new page has 4 buttons.

   A: A select ship class to add to a "row".

   B: A button to set height of the "row". Ie. 4 ships high.

   C: A button to add a new "row".

   D: A button to select whether individual ships in that "row" should be tight, normal or wide.

3: The regular fleet tightness button would instead set distance between the "rows" of wall formations.

4: An option to let the game sort the fleet automaticall for those who want that or maybe this should be the standard thing.

 

 

 

Granted. I don't know if any of this is possible, impossible or if it would just be too expensive in development money and maybe my occassional annoyance at the lack of options in this department in the existing game would never be enough to justify this...

 

However... Personally? I think it would add alot of tactical depth to the game and I'm pretty sure they could lure me to buy something that added this to the game. :)

10,693 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Actually the formations you mentioned are already done in Sins through programming somewhat. Each ship has in its entity file a line for formation position 0 - 2 with 0 being front and 2 being rear. Kol (and other battleships) is in formation 0 while Sova (and other carriers) are in formation 2. If you study the way the ships hold their positions they also show this. Mind you, when action starts the formation breaks up but that is somewhat natural and can be controlled somewhat through hold position and attack parameters.

Now what you are purposing is nice as well but the devs have stated that aside from support they are done with adding things to Sins. Hopefully that means that soon they will begin developing a Sins 2 that could have this.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Ryat, reply 1

Actually the formations you mentioned are already done in Sins through programming somewhat. Each ship has in its entity file a line for formation position 0 - 2 with 0 being front and 2 being rear. Kol (and other battleships) is in formation 0 while Sova (and other carriers) are in formation 2. If you study the way the ships hold their positions they also show this. Mind you, when action starts the formation breaks up but that is somewhat natural and can be controlled somewhat through hold position and attack parameters.

Now what you are purposing is nice as well but the devs have stated that aside from support they are done with adding things to Sins. Hopefully that means that soon they will begin developing a Sins 2 that could have this.
End of Ryat's quote

 

Yeah I do know they have certain presets... but, for my tastes, there isn't enough options and consistency in those. Even if you try to mix in hold position and so on.

 

Ah ok, well I haven't really kept up with the news about sins, but I thought as much. :)

 

Well Hopefully it's something they will consider in any kind of successor. :)

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