True Size of the Universe

I think the gameplay videos will explain alot of your questions, but ill answer them anyways

1. Atm we are limited to 10 solar systems, but can be modded to the size you want. Here is a 100 solar system game that was modded, but expect it to require a good PC for a 100 and above solar system.

2. Each planetary system is sorta like one map in supreme commander. so its quite huge

3. no loading, you travel to other solar systems as you would from planet to planet.

4. watch the gameplay videos

1. You can arrange the number of systems and planets as you like (you can have lots of solar systems and few planets per system). However, as of the new patch, the custom galaxy editor is temporarily disabled as it conflicts with some multiplayer material we are preparing.

2.Each planetoid has a gravity well which may link to other planetoids (planets, stars, asteroids etc). These phase jump lanes are where you can make valid jumps to other planetoids. Stars have phase jump lanes to other stars allowing you to make the long journey to a new system.

3. The entire game, including transitions, are seamless. The entire game exists at once and you can zoom out to see ALL the solar systems at once or soom in (seamlessly) to see the smallest thing in the universe (currently a missile from a TEC bomber). The missile is about 1m long and the distances between star systems are on the order of 250,000,000m.

4. Check out multianna's beta 2 videos (not beta 1): https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?forumid=402&aid=148534#1285319

5. If you preorder now you can get in on Beta 3 which we hope will start mid-sept and include multiplayer. If you purchase tokens at totalgaming.net you can get into beta 2 right away.

Edit: argh multi beat me to it

the beta 2 videos were made from the v0.76.018 version so they are up to date see here

Not up to date by my version

haha so true, release the v0.76.019 already wanna see that new added pirate base

1. Basically it's limitless. (Although it's limited by playability. Too large isn't really fun anymore. )

2. Jump between stars is the same as jumps between planets.

3. Waiting until your fleet arrives, nothing else.

4. Your wish is an order to me:

A light frigate in front. Behind it some fighters and a capital ship.


The same from above.


Zooming out we see our capital planet and some mines/other structures.


The blue shaded area is a grav well. This is basically the "map" of a planet. In this area your fleet can operate.


Zooming further wee see the whole solar system with two unexplored planets and the star. Ships can move from planet to planet/star to star/planet to star, along those jump lines.


Still zooming we see some neighboring stars. Our planet from before is still shown as a symbol.


Zooming out we see even more neighboring stars.


Even more stars which make it hard to differ between the individual stars.


This game was created with a thousand suns and 5'000 planets.


The light of a thousand suns is nearly unbearable to the naked eye.


A symbolized scout in front of a green star.


Zooming in we almost can't see the scout ship itself.


A little bit nearer.


Still going nearer.


It's a very large star.


A very nicely playable map with one star and a hundred planets.



As you can see, gigantic maps are quite possible, the only thing limiting will be your processing power. And the amount of time you've to spare, of course.


Btw. as a side note. Please Ironclad, change the star system abstraction if zoomed out to something less galaxy like. It makes large maps really ugly when zoomed out alot.

Your imageshack photos aren't working there, vandenburg

Yeah, I know, but I don't know the problem.

You can watch them individually just fine, but I wasn't able to make it work in the post.



Does somebody know how?

WWW Link

Ok, found out, I think.


A light frigate in front. Behind it some fighters and a capital ship.


The same from above.


Zooming out we see our capital planet and some mines/other structures.


The blue shaded area is a grav well. This is basically the "map" of a planet. In this area your fleet can operate.


Zooming further wee see the whole solar system with two unexplored planets and the star. Ships can move from planet to planet/star to star/planet to star, along those jump lines.



Still zooming we see some neighboring stars. Our planet from before is still shown as a symbol.


Zooming out we see even more neighboring stars.


Even more stars which make it hard to differ between the individual stars.


This game was created with a thousand suns and 5'000 planets.


The light of a thousand suns is nearly unbearable to the naked eye.


A symbolized scout in front of a green star.


Zooming in we almost can't see the scout ship itself.


A little bit nearer.


Still going nearer.


It's a very large star.


A very nicely playable map with one star and a hundred planets.



Grrr. I fricking hate Imageshack. They're unable to give you some decent linking code. Grrr...

Thank you all for the informative details.

While this game sounds very interesting and good there are a few ideas that spring to mmind as mods that would improve the game considerably.

1. Free roaming interplanetary travel, allowing movement from one planetary gravity well to any other visible in the system.

2. Sensors detecting incoming enemy fleets.

3. Slowing of interplanetary travel, at present it is WAY to fast, a fleet can cover an entire multi-planetary system in a few minutes.

4. Free roaming interstellar star to star travel, I like the idea of limiting the arrival location to the star since it creates a threatrical focus point at the heart of the solar system. It stands to reason to make the star the heart of system since it is the major bottleneck point for defenders and invaders.

Control of a solar systems star pretty much hands the system to the controller, since you will limit others travel on a vast scale.

5. Increased planetary playfield size, I think it should be twice as big. Allowing for real movement and positioning of fleets.

6. Binary or Trinary stars, why not open a can of worms and allow travel from 2 intersystem stars.

7. Interception of approaching fleets, if gravity wells are the key to FTL why not have a gravity well ship that allows a fleet to pull other ships out of phase space before they arrive at their intended target, i.e. A fleet with a gravity well ship can leave a solar system to move to intercept an approaching alien fleet and when the two get close enough to one another the gravity well ship disrupts both fleets engines to drop both back into normal space in deep space in a specially created playfield where battle commences, if either fleet as a gravity well ship of their own they can try to use it to simulation a stars/planets gravity well to force a retreat. Which returns the ships to the origin star/planet.

This would kind of open the entire galactic map up to combat without having to force the game into render the vast expansives between planets and stars.

Its hard to explain I'll illustrate with an image later.

-J

Hi jpf190279, let me try to help with your questions/comments.

1. Free roaming interplanetary travel will not be implemented in the basic game. Ironclad wants to have strategic defensive zones within star systems (kinda like key defensive fortress planets). They will allow travel from 'any star to any other star' though.

*It seems extremely likely that modders will be able to make free interplanetary travel within star systems by simply attaching phase lanes from every planet to every other planet (and then making the lines invisible).

**If we are very lucky, we might even be able to mod each star so they have several functional planets within thier gravity well (of course, we would need to make the stars gravity well much bigger). This would make all inner star system travel 100% open. Please make this possible Ironclad, all modders are begging you.

2. Game has sensors detecting incoming enemy fleets.

3. Right now, travel between planets/stars is pretty well balanced. Any shorter and the game loses its epic feel. Any more and the game takes too long to play. Ironclad is really trying to balance travel speed so as to best satisfy all potential players.

*Keep in mind you can always mod ship speed and gravity well size.

4. Already being implemented...I wish all my answers were this easy.

5. Hopefully we will see some increase in gravity well size but we haven't heard anything from Ironclad as yet.

Personally, I would like to see asteroid gravity wells stay the same, planets be 150%-200% bigger and stars being 200%-300% bigger. Not only would it increase the scope of the battlefield, it just kind of makes sense that these bodies would have much bigger gravity wells.

6. See my #1 answer at the end about wanting to be able to put more than 1 fully functional star/planet/asteroid in a single gravity well. Also, I get your point about binary stars, there are an awful lot of them in our Universe. Hell, our closets star might be part of a trinary star system

Let's hope that Ironclad allows for this. A lot of mods are counting on it.

7. Last I heard, there will be ships that have the ability to stop enemy ships from using Phase Space...although I don't know how that will work or what use it will be if Ironclad now allows enemy ships to jump back the way they came.

As for making interdiction zones, Ironclad will likely not be using them. They would only have limited use as is since enemy ships can always just turn around and jump back the way they came. Even with the old style 'enemy ships can't jump at all' type phase space inhibitor, you could simply interdict enemy ships at the gravity well they are travelling to (no real need for an out in the middle of nowhere gravity well interdiction zone).

Internal testing told them that this idea amounted to a very boring "wack-a-mole" type of game.



Research tab has "PSIDAR", to detect incoming enemy fleets



Um, game already does just that. Its just that the expanse between stars is empty

Quite right too, a lot of what you said about the star and planetary gravity wells makes perfect sense, so in theory at least, we should be able to mod planets to display functionality of a star in such ways as to allow interplanetary and interstellar jumping, and if all planets are actually stars then it makes it a lot easier to implement.

But I think allowing free roaming in a system is actually move important than free roaming in a galaxy. I have and so have many played games with "limited" galactic movement, but with limitless interplanetary travel. It seems silly to say you can have one being free roaming and the other NOT.

Think of it in real world terms its like being able to go to any country on earth from any other directly but then not being able to going from one city to the other directly using the same mode of transport. That is just silly.

You can realise that since interstellar travel needs such an enormous gravity well to help with phase space then it is logical for interstellar travel to be between two stars, but to then say when you're in the system you can't jump directly from one gravity well to another directly just doesn't add up.

I really hope Ironclad see the illogic of this 2 tier travelling inbalance and correct it. You can't have 1 being free roaming and then the other being limited travel.

If they do decide to go through with it, then I suspect it will be incredibly hard to mod around to get it to a 2 tier free roaming.

On another matter, I have heard complaints about the fact captial ships are available from the start of the game and they smaller more dedicated sizes are researched through out the course of the game. I also noticed the game had a rather low unit limit.

I have been playing Supreme Commander and I am hoping this game turns out to be the Space Combat version of SC. The idea that you should hard a limit of size when play is something I will definitely be interested in "adjusting"

2 fleets of several hundred sizes clashing in orbit of a star... Oh My !!!!!



-J

Actually, they can. They have it that way right now! And gameplay > anything else



Well, that complaining is over with the next patch



Just play on a hundred star galaxy, with several thousand planets

Noooo. What I was talking about was making a custom map. First you place a star on the map. Then you could add planets to that star's gravity well (obviously, the stars gravity well would be greatly increased in size). The planets don't have their own gravity well since they are inside the stars gravity well. This effectively makes for an open inner star system map.

Of course, this will only work if Ironclad allows modders to make multiple fully functional stars/planets/asteroids that can be placed inside a single gravity well.

Also keep in mind that your logic for going from any planet to any planet doesn't include Phase Space mechanics. Sure, we can go from Earth to Mars directly, but we will take months doing it. Phase Space might force us to go to Venus first, but we will still get to Mars months earlier than if we went directly from Earth to Mars.

*I am pretty sure you will be able to mod in all stars/planets/asteroids are fully interconnected. You can also mod the tech research tree to put capital ships higher up if you want.

If you absolutely need fictional physics that make some sort of sense for the Phase Lane system inside star systems, I kinda like the following. Phase Lanes can be connected through heavily warped Space/Time (ie, in deep gravity wells). So, all stars are interconnected. However, planets have much smaller gravity wells than the stars they orbit. So, much of them are eclipsed from one another and this is why we have to leapfrog around inner star systems so much.

Capital ships are supposed to be more reasearched in the upcomming patch.

There are no hard limits on ship numbers. It depends on how many planets/asteriods you have (support points) and how developed they are as well.