Category: gratuitous space battles

Yikes, this has turned into a really complex and confusing beast. I am very happy so far with the improvements, but I need to publicly brainstorm the details. Simply put, the orders system in Gratuitous Space Battles was a mess, and I needed a much better one, PLUS I wanted to add new orders to take into account the new gameplay style of Ridiculous Space Battles.

In GSB there was a whole bunch of orders, and they all apparently pretended to work together to come up with an opinion on which ship a weapon should target. Orders are per SHIP, not per weapon, which frankly is a whole other story, but I think it would be stupid overkill to have the player assigning different orders to every weapon. My whole unique selling point is BIG fleets with LOTS of ships. Anyway, the original game had orders like Attack Fighters and Co-operate, but it was never clear how they all worked together.

RSB introduces three new orders entirely. Raider (race ahead of the fleet up to a given distance to engage enemies) which is used by Fighters, Last Defense, which concentrates fire on the enemy ships that have got the furthest through our lines, and Breakthrough, which is for punching a hole in enemy defenses, and only fires on ships right in front of you (or in that row anyway).

Here is my new current implementation:

So the big things here are categories, color coding and priorities. OH YES. To explain, this ship has one ‘Special’ Order, which is to engage enemies at 2 squares range. Thats a movement order, so independent of all the targeting stuff.

The next order is ‘co-operate’. Its one of a class of (blue) orders I’m tempted to call ‘Discriminators’ or ‘Tie-breakers’. There can only be ONE of these (Co-operate, Vulture, Retaliate, Breakthough or Last Defense), and essentially they are used at the end of the process to choose which out of a series of potential targets is picked.

The Green and yellow orders are Target Criteria. They describe a target size class or a defense status (shields up, or shields down but armor intact, or down to naked hull). These orders are special because they are in priority order. (I realize now I should show the numbers!). So when the ship decides who to shoot at, it first builds a simple list of all enemy ships in range and fire arc, that match any of those criteria. (You can delete one to make the ship NEVER target those ships). Once that list exists, it then goes through the target criteria from top to bottom seeing if any ships meet that criteria…

And this is where I have a decision to make…

I can either stop the processing once it has one or more targets, then pick the best using the discriminator OR I can then keep filtering down through the list as long as I have 1 or more targets and THEN use the discriminator. I cannot decide which. Are you confused? I suspect so:

Example 1: Using the above orders, I scan my target list and find 4 cruisers and 12 frigates in range. All of them have shields. Cool! So I stop there, and evaluate them all using Co-operate, firing upon the one that is the most under fire right now.

Example 2: I scan my target list and find 4 cruisers and 12 frigates in range. All of them have shields. The NEXT criteria is Fighters. There are none in my list so I ignore. The next is armor. All 16 have armor so again I ignore. The next is Frigates. Wait! only 12 are frigates, so I prune the list. The next is Hull, all check. The next is cruisers, none found. I finally use co-operate to evaluate which frigate to fire at…

Is this dilemma even making sense, let alone deciding on a system? Its very involved. My game IS a complex strategy game, but I don’t want to rely on crazily complex tutorials. Now to be fair, Gratuitous Space Battles had a completely opaque system that nobody understood and was poorly explained and it sold a bazillion copies, so maybe I am overthinking it. But I would like to do a MUCH better job… I know SOME players would be happy to literally write code to control this stuff, and might suggest I add conditional clauses and other complexity but I think that makes the game seem more like work and less like fun…

Looking at it now I KNOW I need to add priority numbers to those yellow/green strips. Maybe they should be called Filters now Criteria? Who knows. I may need to think about this a LOT.

By the way add the game to your wishlist :D Or pester a news website to cover it! Or share a screenshot somewhere you hang out. That stuff all helps :D.

In case you missed it, I am doing a total re-imagining of Gratuitous Space Battles, 15 years after the first game, and calling it Ridiculous Space Battles. This is a sort-of-hobby semi-retirement project that I have got super into. I thought it worth laying out what I think is to be gained from re-doing the game.

Firstly,. yup its still a 2D top-down game being made using directx9. I know a lot of developers will think it mad not to go 3D, and mad not to use unity/unreal and to use directx 12 or whatever the latest version is (I don’t care), so let me address that first. I do not think 3D games are automatically better than 2D ones. In fact most of the time I think they make a game hugely worse. Having enjoyed the Company of Heroes and Age Of Empires games over the years, I can attest the the fact that when really enjoying the game, rather than posing to get screenshots for magazines, the best approach is to just leave the camera locked and play them as 2D games.

But oh noes! the horror! How can I not want to zoom in and see the game in a first person POV? Well I have the Battlefield games for FPS views thanks. Playing a big strategy game in 3D is just deliberately making things hard for yourself. People who make promo videos may enjoy letting the camera strafe around one of their units because ‘its cool’, but in terms of actually playing the game and working out whats going on? No. Humans are still basically 2D thinkers. Most strategy war games still work best in 2D, even if you want to use 3D meshes and 3d hardware to draw them. I prefer RSB as a 2D game.

As for Unity/Unreal. Ha. Fuck off. No. I do not want to spend these happy hours when I’m working on my dream game working out what bullshit combination of middleware actually compiles or works. I do not want to be begging developers on middleware forums to explain why their API crashes or beg for source code. I do not want a random ‘engine update’ to totally break my game, give me random crashes or just not compile, or trash the performance. I want to OWN and CONTROL all of my code. And the idea of paying a percentage of revenue? LOLZ. Its that real? I cannot imagine people being so beholden to some 3rd party. I’m typing this on a logitech keyboard. They don’t ask for a cut…

So yup, 2D and own-engine it is, at which point TBH the effort of switching to Directx11/12 is not really worth it. DX9 is the ‘sweet spot’ for 2D stuff for me, because I know it inside out and backwards. I could maybe take advantage of some newer API stuff, but the tradeoff is relearning enough code that it would become frustrating and no fun. So no. Besides I’ve made it look quite good just with directx9:

So thats the tech stuff. What HAVE I changed and why? Well basically the big changes are as follows:

Grid based deployment.

Gratuitous Space Battles had a ‘deployment zone’ but let you do pretty much what you liked inside. As I recall I ‘tried’ to prevent you putting ships on top of each other, but people managed to hack it. The result is a huge ‘scrum’ where people stacked massive capital ships into tight bundles. Little dense islands of spaceship that were insanely hard to defeat. Thats fine, thats a player prerogative, but it went against a core design principle of mine: ‘In play, the game should look cool’. When ships overlap it just looks bad. I call this ‘total-war gameplay’. The total-war games always had great setup formations, but once battle was jopined they all just looked like a punch-up in a bar. I hate that. So now ships stick to their assigned grid formations. Except fighters, that can raid ‘ahead’ of the fleet.

Fixed squadron size.

GSB let you have any combo of anything, but RSB lets you deploy units into a grid square. 1 cruiser or 4 frigates or 25 fighters. Those are your options. This simplifies gameplay a lot, and I think 95% of players never adjusted fighter squad size anyway. It also means its super easy to place really organized looking fleets. This also contributes to the ‘huge battle formation’ aesthetic.

Simplified Orders & movement

RSB units have a ton of orders, but they do not retreat to repair, nor are there any escort orders (they are no longer required with fixed formations). This simplifies things, and makes the game more clearly a game of ‘design ships and place them in a group’, rather than ‘chain together some complex orders like you are doing shader programming’. It might allow for less esoteric combos but I think it is much easier to understand and control. GSB players often wondered where the hell half their ships were going and why. In RSB its simple: The lead ship maintains the fleet position, and moves forward as enemies are destroyed. Movement of ships is only on the X plane.

Defend the line gameplay

This is the one I am not sure of. The win condition for the player is to destroy the entire enemy fleet. The lose condition is triggered if any of the enemy fleet makes it to your (left) side of the screen. Its done mostly so you have to have a proper distributed ‘line of defense’ which looks cool, but it might be too arbitrary. I will likely tweak this and solicit feedback from players when the game goes into early access eventually.

So there you have it. I made a bunch of changes from GSB. I will be doing a challenge system online just like GSB. This one will use the latest version of PHP and be way more stable! I have not started work on that yet. There are still a ton of things to be done in the single-player version yet.

By the way, if you think this game sounds interesting, it would be super cool if you added it to your steam wishlist: