Why use phase jumping all the time? / and more

1. This has been addressed a lot in the history of the forums. Using the default move speed "anywhere in the galaxy" would be too slow as to be useless, and if it was increased it would be too difficult to balance. I believe one of the IC guys said they tried it early on and decided to stick with the phase lane model.

2. There is a known issue with attacking structures.

3. You can record the game for a second or so, then hit play recorded game -> show all.

4. Yes they stack, but beware of the 3 ship/extractor limit.

5. Yes. Using the Sins Plus mod I had 13 trade ports on an Urban planet and got 35cred/s from it alone.

Remember in real life (well when we get ships into space with guns) I would rather jump as fast as I can and surprise the f out of the planets defense while there ships are still busy attack a planet. Remember if they spot your phase ships jumping and they are jumping slowly... it would give the enemy time to get a defense up to fight you.

AI sucks period. Its CALLED internet that gives a real challenge.

Thats easy... no period can't really do it. Well I don't really care about previewing a map.

yes trade ports do stack. But make sure its a cruddy planet with no significant importance or out of the way of any threat.

Refineries were great in the older patches as planets had 3-4 asteroids.
Now I only use them on ice planets and volcanic becuase they have 3 asteroids of one type.

On some rare occasions I have had planets in extremely close proximity. On the huge map I'm playing now, I have one planet significantly higher up than another, but from a top down perspective, there is very little space separating their gravity wells, although they are indeed separate. Personally, I think it's very cool when something like that comes up.

Anyways, this is a good situation where moving from one planet to attack another without phase-jumping could be a useful strategy, taking no more time than it would to simply cross the well.

Am I to understand that I cannot force this move?

It's not important, but I'm still interested to know.

How so? If they have distance on the Z axis, that's still distance that needs to be crossed one way or another.

With most space games I have tried all the maps are very small. I am guessing but the lanes are a way to simulate a large universe when in reality it is just a set of small maps. If the universe was one large map I think it may be too large to load into memory.

But then again I could be wrong.

The lanes thing seems to work very well and makes the game very playable. It also seems to give some order when rotating and zooming the whole galaxy. Without those lanes patterns I think it would be harder to keep track of the system. In a true 3D universe the size the game can generate I would hate to think of how to keep track without some sort of aid, especially in real time.

Cheers MarkL

why only phase jump?
well reason number 1:
the planets may seem to be close to each other but if you think about it, it is most probable that in truth the planets are far from each other, like 1cm between planets = several hunders km. is like in GalCiv2, lets call it space deformation
reason number 2:
take the speed of the ships inside gravity well....
lets say they move like 10000km/h for instance, ok? [its like 10x speed of sound]
now take the thrue distance between 2 planets is like 500 000 000km
the time to travel at max normal speed would be +-6 years.
those were number and facts
reason number 3:
its a game, it was beta tested both way.

In my current game I'm playing, orbital refineries are giving me 3.2 metal and crystal per second, thats after my 68% fleet upkeep. They are more than useful especially medimum and large maps vs AI.

About phase lanes, it might be nice to have the option not to use them, but I could just see the frustration if one of your planets were under attack and your fleet was stuck between 2 planets. As a matter of fact, that was a bug in one of the betas. Fleets would travel without using phase lanes. It was ugly.

As soon as a larger map got down to two players, if they had the ability to jump behind each others' lines, they'd just frigate-spam and keep annihilating each other's already-conquered territory by constantly sending new waves to different spots within each others' empires. The end-game would turn out to be a massive stalemate and a great big mess.

-- Retro

It would be a nice addition for us RPers, but I doubt that'd ever happen without a mod.

A man can dream, can't he?

Ohio - how many refineries do you have? I usually place them on planets like volanic that are close to other planets with astroids and receive very little resources. For their cost (several hundred), it seems that placing one refinery would take atleast an hour to make up their initial cost.

Others - I understand that the planets in the game are not set at a real length, heck I won't even bother pondering why you can have ice planets adjacent to the sun, or why pirates can start the game with more ships that all empires combined. However, to me (which may be incorrect) it seems as if the phase lanes were meant both for strategic and to give the 'gravity wells' some purpose. So by having a gravity well, each phase jump goes from one gravity well to another.

What gets me is that if you look at the top of this forum, you see "Real time strategy. Unrivalled Scale." But by the response here is that everything is scaled down. Ironic.

The initial thought on this process would be that you could leave a gravity well and travel at above sub-light speed. As we all know, gravity reduces the maximum speed obtainable - thus the reason for escape velocity. However, every object in the universe is theorized to have unlimited gravity potential, thought it might be infinitely small. The idea would have been (if implemented correctly, which seems to be the problem here), is for ships to travel anywhere, although slower, and be able to phase jump from their position to the closest gravity well (or not at all).

I asked the question as to why it was not put it and it seems the general response is that the planets are scaled down in distance. I don't think this is a fair assumption because if you zoom in between planets - there is a ton of distance that a non-phase jump ship would have to travel. It was also meantioned that it was tested and it didn't work out - care to explain why?

As for strategy - this is the whole point. Being able to send ships 'undetected' behind your enemy adds what this game is truely lacking - paranoia. Being able to stack 200 ships on a single planet because it is the only phase lane jump between you and your enemy is not strategy.

I am not saying this game is flawed - it just could have more. But what game couldn't?

I place enough so just about every asteroid gets its maximum 3 refineries.
on average 1 per planet, but that can vary.

I look at "unrivalled scale" as a reference to the ability to mousewheel all the way from a bird's eye view of a complete star cluster to a close-up of a single tiny fighter as it fires its missiles at the enemy, in a couple seconds. I don't think any other real-time game had such a grand stage where you could easily see the megamacro-picture and the micro-picture.
. IMO what it would add is empire micromanagement. I'm not interested in playing an MP game where I have 20 planets that I think are safely behind my own forces' lines... and then the other player who is insanely good at grouping and organizing his forces simultaneously attacks all of them with anywhere from 1 to 6 frigates, some with capship accompaniment. Being a single-player fan, I actually *like* that the game is only simultaneously played on 1 to 3 chokepoint fronts at the same time.

Now, that being said, what would be *really* interesting is a tech that allows you to create a new and permanent phase lane between two systems that were within a specific radius of each other, and the cost increases exponentially the greater the distance between the two objects. That could allow you to penetrate in an unexpected vector, and the increasing cost would make it difficult for players to go appearing at the very back of your enemy's territory without warning.

-- Retro

It's not much distance. The total distance I would need to travel, diagonally, is about the equivalent of a grav well and a half.

I have had this too and unfortunately half my fleet got stuck in between the planets. They just kept flying around looking for a spot to jump, but yet from my view they were already inside of the other planets gravity well. So half jumped and the other half did nothing but fly in circles. ;[

Phase lanes really indicate where your ship can travel really really fast between planets. The planets are most likely a lot farther apart then just a gravity well or two distance wise. Representing all that space on the map would make things a lot more spread out and harder to follow.

I don't know if any of you realised this, but orbital refineries only give you the resources from extractors on NEARBY planets. Meaning, building a orbital refinery on a volcanic planet is almost useless (unless it has multiple phase lanes to other planets). Try and build refineries on planets with many phase lanes, away from enemy space. Say you have an asteroid with three phase lanes going out of it, each to either an ice or volcanic planet. The ships from the orbital refeniry on the asteroid would go to the ice and volcanic planets, not the resource asteroids on the main asteroid.

Trade refineries do stack.

Zero phase lanes = zero strategy. IE: Player one, builds 5 scouts, finds enemy homeworld. Then, spams huge amounts of ship and goes straight to fleet supply, builds a massive fleet, and the game is done in 10 minutes. = pointless.

From a game designer's perspective, it's probably a lot easier to design the AI for this. Pathfinding especially can suffer on huge maps for most games.

You don't want to be able to fly without phase lanes.

One time I had a Subverter with the intercept ability chase down an enemy ship that just jumped through a phase lane. He followed the damn thing halfway through the lane. When he stopped he was in between the planets, but not in the lane. It was moving at the speed he would be in a grav well. Guess how long it took him to get back, half a distance from a planet to another planet? ONE HOUR!

Well, I kinda agree with the "unrivaled scale" thing and how we have this enormous playing area where most of it is unusable space. I don't consider it "huge scale" if most of the game area can't even be used.

I think the ability to not use phase lanes would be interesting, perhaps as an optional mod. Phase lanes would have to remain for a fast travel option, but in my opinion if a player really wants to wait two or three hours for a fleet to fly between planets without jumping, let them. Also, since that fleet would be outside of a gravity well, instead of being stuck halfway down the phase lane it should be able to go ahead and jump if the player changes his mind and needs the fleet elsewhere NOW. The ability to map or create new phase lanes sounds like an interesting mod as well.

No, refineries DO gather from their own planets as well as adjacent ones (confirmed with testing). We have a pretty extensive guide to them going on the wiki here.