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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI47Kit4G48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_unjiJXm3c&t=25s Children of a Dead Earth is a project that aims to be a space warfare simulator that is as scientifically accurate as possible. It is very similar to KSP, but makes considerably fewer concessions to gameplay for the sake of scientific accuracy. The maker of the game has written a rather detailed blog on the background and the decision making process here: https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/ It's also actively in development, and the maker is quite open to discussion about the mechanics. Right now its 25$ on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/476530/ It operates with n-body physics by default, meaning all orbits are impacted by all gravity wells nearby.   The weapon systems are utterly ridiculous due to the amount of projectiles needing to be sent to have a hope of hitting anything.     And the above are not lasers, they're projectiles with tracers. Lasers appear as blinkenlights in the distance, and as sparks of your ship's armor ablating away.   You also get to design your own ships.     As well as your own guns.    Nukes.    And other bits.  
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Oct 15, 2016 17:42
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What's the learning curve like?
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Oct 16, 2016 01:17
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Hey Mithaldu what's up How does the actual combat work? Do you control the ship or is it AI automated (or can it be?) Can you control more than one ship at once?
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Oct 16, 2016 04:31
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drilldo squirt posted:What's the learning curve like? It eases you into the getting around part by having you do a bunch of tutorial missions, all accompanied by blobs of text explaining the mechanics involved, as well as with "Read More" links to wikipedia on each topic, since the physics in the game are built after what is described in the materials on contempoary science. For combat it gives you a few missions where you're well-equipped and over-powering and the most tricky part is getting a useful encounter (more detail in the next post) and after that it gives you default fleets that are mediocre at best and expects you to build better fleets as you work out what tactics work against the different types of AIs and enemy ships you encounter. That part drops you fairly deep in the pool as that's where the "simulate and find out what works" begins. Building fleets and ships is unlocked fairly early, you get a little guidance on that, but it's largely error and trial, as you figure out what makes and breaks a ship design. Building modules is unlocked a substantial part into the game and you get dropped into gun design screens like shown above, with no guidance other than "fiddle around". However, the game error checks everything you do and throws up hard and soft warnings about problematic parts of your designs. (your crew's gonna die of radiation, this laser's gonna melt itself, etc.)
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Oct 16, 2016 09:42
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I ended up getting this, because it looks like it's extremely my kind of  , and so far it's delivering.drilldo squirt posted:What's the learning curve like? It's actually surprisingly gentle (so far, at least  ). The campaign serves as a decent tutorial that introduces you to important concepts one at time. I.e. the first mission just shows you how to translate from one orbit to another to intercept stuff, the next has you match orbital planes, the one after shows you how to conserve delta v, another's all about using missiles, and so on. The UI seems pretty straightforward and helpful as well. Basically if you've ever played KSP you should feel right at home.Capntastic posted:Hey Mithaldu what's up Basically to initiate combat you first need to set up an intercept course in the orbital view. Then when the two fleets come close enough the game switches to a separate combat view where things play out in real-time rather than turn-based. The unique thing is that due to the orbital mechanics involved, the two fleets usually pass each other by at a fairly high velocity. So many combats are essentially high-speed fly-bys with both fleets blasting the hell out of each other before being flung out of range again. That means there's not a whole lot of room for fancy maneuvering, so as a result your controls are fairly broad as well. You can set general behaviours for your ships, manually deploy ordnance like flares or missiles, and set target priorities on enemy ships. The actual shooting and moving is then taken care of by the AI.
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Oct 16, 2016 09:54
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Capntastic posted:Hey Mithaldu what's up You can see some of this in the very first youtube video i linked above. Combat occurs in four phases, roughly: 1. First you organize your ships into fleets, which can mean touching nothing, or splitting select numbers of ships off your main fleet, or launching drones/missiles and having those split off in groups you determine. 2. Then you try and get an encounter between one of your fleets and an enemy fleet in a simultaneous turn-based environment. This means using orbital mechanics to get close enough to be in weapons range. Encounters always begin at the maximum physically useful range either fleet can field against the other (gun accuracy, laser power diminishing with range, all that against ship cross section, etc.). While setting up an encounter you determine the parameters at which it happens, i.e. at which speed, relative angle and how the nominal minimum distance between the two fleets when they pass by each other. You can do this either fully manually, or use provided automation buttons that try and solve for fuel/time/gravity concerns to either get a most-slow encounter (intercept) or just *any* kind of encounter regardless of relative speed (fly-by). (Note the combat itself does not care which you do, the names are just for the solving algorithms.) The parameters you set up are important for the type of battle you wish to have, e.g. slow for ranged slugging matches, or fast for ramming some nukes up their chutes. Important to know here is also that depending on which target an enemy fleet is going for it may use orbital mechanics to evade your planned encounter. 3. When the encounter happens you get dropped into a paused battle control screen with both of your fleets facing off each other. You can give your fleet movement commands which involve either crude "go that way" or more ai-based "home on enemy" or the most important "swing to broadside". You can also inspect the enemy fleet and set specific ships or ship parts (that are visible) as targets of priority. Launching drones/missiles can also be done at this point, but usually you want to do that before, because it takes time. And lastly you can configure the weapons on your ships, i.e. which ones to disable/enable and which ones should ignore distances or not. You can give commands either to all ships, groups of them, or single ships. Sadly the target priorization is for the whole fleet at once. You can't tell one ship to shoot a specific ship. There's also automatic dodging, but i've not seen crafts usefully employ that yet. 4. Once you unpause the above, the realtime combat begins. Ships try to fulfill your orders and shoot. You can still give all the orders above. However depending on encounter speed and enemy behavior that may be futile, since a 15 second flyby doesn't leave a lot of time to make decisions, and even if you start at a distance of 25 minutes, if the enemy's burning towards you you can only counter that and still slug them if you put all your guns on your ship's butt. Mithaldu fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Oct 16, 2016 |
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Oct 16, 2016 10:12
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Perestroika posted:So many combats are essentially high-speed fly-bys with both fleets blasting the hell out of each other before being flung out of range again. That means there's not a whole lot of room for fancy maneuvering, so as a result your controls are fairly broad as well. You can set general behaviours for your ships, manually deploy ordnance like flares or missiles, and set target priorities on enemy ships. The actual shooting and moving is then taken care of by the AI. It was also really funny to see all the enemy missiles and drones suicide by burning at you with all their delta-v and running out at a distance of 150km. 
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Oct 16, 2016 10:15
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It's a shame it suffers from flyby syndrome (which makes battles short with limited scope for tactics, one of the main reasons Star Ruler 1 was bad to play) but I guess you can rectify that by intercepting them in the same orbit from behind and do a much slower flyby. Bought it anyway, lasers and KSP in an engine designed for combat and rockets? Sign me the gently caress up.
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Oct 16, 2016 18:47
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Well, reality suffers from flyby syndrome. Otoh, if you have the delta-v and the necessary acceleration, you can approach enemy ships on a retrograde orbit and just do a massive counter burn just outside encounter range. There's also generally no "approaching from behind". Enemies have just as much information as you and know you're coming, so generally are pointed in your direction, as are your ships. (Unless you tell them to orient broadside before encounter is initiated.)
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Oct 16, 2016 19:03
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I got really into this game when I saw the module design section and the Newtonian "flight model." I played it for about four hours right off the bat and enjoyed the heck out of it. Currently, though, it feels more like a puzzle game like SpaceChem or something (right down to giving you stats on 'record' mission duration and delta-v expenditure in comparison to your own). I haven't unlocked module or ship design yet, so I imagine that will increase the scope of options, but what I really want is a solar-system wide dynamic campaign / operation strategy layer. I'm not sure if the dev plans on adding that, but it'd make the game a lot more fun in the long run. Not sure how easy it is to get an AI to be able to handle orbital mechanics on a system-wide scale though. Probably not very.
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Oct 18, 2016 19:30
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The very start of the game is highly tutorial-like, and in fact the entire campaign is mostly a tutorial before sandbox mode. However even there you only get to choose a specific body and its satellites, but not Sol. In terms of ship-building you get to go hog-wild though. Strategic layer isn't there at all, and i don't know if it's planned. You might want to ask the developer though, he's quite responsive.
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Oct 19, 2016 14:17
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I work with laser operators and I showed one the game's writeup on lasers and he actually learned something new
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Oct 19, 2016 14:32
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What's the trick to get in-plane with an orbit without burning all my dv? I feel like my fighting is with controlling trajectories and fighting the UI more than tactics.
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Oct 21, 2016 16:58
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In space trajectories are a giant part of the tactics.  Also, i'm not 100% sure, but i think you can effect the biggest changes to your orbit when you're the furthest away from the orbited body, i.e. the Apoapsis. And well, for matching inclinations there's nothing you can do but intersect the plane of the orbit you want to get on, then burn against it to avoid leaving the plane. This is necessarily expensive.
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Oct 21, 2016 17:55
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Mithaldu posted:In space trajectories are a giant part of the tactics. Velocity is always the greatest at the periapsis and lowest at the apoapsis. To change your angle α, the formula is Δv=v×sinα. So yeah, apoapsis is always the best location to change your inclination.
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Oct 21, 2016 18:13
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in orbital combat can't you fire a projectile from just about anywhere and hit just about anything?
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Oct 21, 2016 18:30
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LegoPirateNinja posted:in orbital combat can't you fire a projectile from just about anywhere and hit just about anything? Then accuracy itself is tricky. To aim at something you need to actually move your barrel. And the further away you're aiming, the higher resolution in *moving* your barrel is required. Like aiming at a thing a mile away requires much finer muscle control than 20 feet away. Machines are a lot better, but even they have limits and you may have trouble even actually getting the barrel on target at all. Far shots are very tricky since it's very easy to spot incoming projectiles. Even if you can hide the shot, and even if you make the thing vantablack, it can be spotted by how it occludes background objects. Which leads to the last point: Enemies can dodge. If your shot's gonna be on the way for a long while, they have the same long while to move 50 meters over and be fine. To hit you'd need to saturate an area enough such that their delta-v isn't plentiful enough to escape the target area in time. CRIP EATIN BREAD posted:Velocity is always the greatest at the periapsis and lowest at the apoapsis. To change your angle α, the formula is Δv=v×sinα. So yeah, apoapsis is always the best location to change your inclination.
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Oct 21, 2016 18:56
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Mithaldu posted:In space trajectories are a giant part of the tactics. Yeah I just wanna make sure there's not some secret pro-strat I am missing
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Oct 21, 2016 20:10
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Maybe this is my problem: When you make a trajectory is it always one burn? Maybe splitting it up over time can smooth things out?
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Oct 21, 2016 20:31
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As long as you're dealing with only 2 bodies the stuff is quite simple and straight-forward. The pro strats come up when you get into combat encounters where you actually have to design your fleet.
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Oct 21, 2016 20:32
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Capntastic posted:When you make a trajectory is it always one burn?
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Oct 21, 2016 20:34
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Mithaldu posted:Exactly. Alright, I should have an easier time getting stuff precisely where I want it 
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Oct 21, 2016 20:38
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I was looking around online and apparently missiles aren't working quite right in the latest patch? Nukes are supposed to penetrate and then explode, and flak missiles are supposed to explode before impact, sending shrapnel everywhere. I've gotten a little bit better at the orbital mechanics stuff, and I do enjoy how useful drones can be if set up right.
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Oct 23, 2016 22:21
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Capntastic posted:I was looking around online and apparently missiles aren't working quite right in the latest patch? Nukes are supposed to penetrate and then explode, and flak missiles are supposed to explode before impact, sending shrapnel everywhere. Capntastic posted:I've gotten a little bit better at the orbital mechanics stuff, and I do enjoy how useful drones can be if set up right.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:03
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Mithaldu posted:Got a link to that? No link handy but Scott Manley mentioned it in a video this week where he was having to manually detonate nukes and people on the COADE reddit mentioned it. I am really wondering if the game will be getting more content. A long form strategic campaign would be neat, or even just a space trucking campaign where time and delta-v management in the long term equate to outfitting better ships. The idea of an open world sandbox scenario is interesting in general.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:09
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Mithaldu posted:Enemies can dodge. If your shot's gonna be on the way for a long while, they have the same long while to move 50 meters over and be fine. To hit you'd need to saturate an area enough such that their delta-v isn't plentiful enough to escape the target area in time. The mass of the projectile is far less than the mass of the target. If I fire a tiny rocket, it can accelerate with very little delta-v. The target is big, so it needs to expend a lot of fuel to get out of the way. Isn't it going to run out of fuel before I run out of rockets?
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Oct 27, 2016 17:12
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Capntastic posted:No link handy but Scott Manley mentioned it in a video this week where he was having to manually detonate nukes and people on the COADE reddit mentioned it. They discuss this a bit here: http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/279/give-scott-manley-advice Also more specifically missile talk: http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/205/missile-guidance Capntastic posted:I am really wondering if the game will be getting more content. A long form strategic campaign would be neat, or even just a space trucking campaign where time and delta-v management in the long term equate to outfitting better ships. He's active on the forum daily: http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/user/1/activity Or you could try poking his twitter: https://twitter.com/QSwitched LegoPirateNinja posted:The mass of the projectile is far less than the mass of the target. If I fire a tiny rocket, it can accelerate with very little delta-v. The target is big, so it needs to expend a lot of fuel to get out of the way. Isn't it going to run out of fuel before I run out of rockets?
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Oct 27, 2016 17:39
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I absolutely love the concept behind this game, but I can't even get past the main menu. Like, literally. It takes over thirty seconds for the menus to respond to mouse clicks. I'm not the only one with this problem, so I'll wait another week and a half to see if he manages to get a patch out, but if it doesn't get fixed then I'll have to get a steam refund  .
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Oct 27, 2016 19:29
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Psawhn posted:I absolutely love the concept behind this game, but I can't even get past the main menu. Like, literally. It takes over thirty seconds for the menus to respond to mouse clicks. I'm not the only one with this problem, so I'll wait another week and a half to see if he manages to get a patch out, but if it doesn't get fixed then I'll have to get a steam refund Also, try lowering your desktop resolution *before* starting the game, as it defaults to your desktop res.
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Oct 27, 2016 19:37
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Mithaldu posted:Talk to him and get him logs, otherwise there won't be poo poo he can do, since he can't mindread other people's computers. I've already opened up a thread on the technical support forum, with all the relevant information I can find. He's a single dev, I'm not going to stalk him and harass him with my issues. Lowering desktop resolution was a good idea, but it only brought down the UI response time to about 10 seconds.
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Oct 27, 2016 22:49
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Psawhn posted:I've already opened up a thread on the technical support forum, with all the relevant information I can find. He's a single dev, I'm not going to stalk him and harass him with my issues. Psawhn posted:Lowering desktop resolution was a good idea, but it only brought down the UI response time to about 10 seconds.
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Oct 27, 2016 23:28
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Mithaldu posted:That's all i meant, and only because i see lots of people who think reviews or well, other forums, are a useful venue to mention issues. Ah, right. Gotcha. Yeah, I see that around too. Disabling Steam overlay seems to have no effect, though.
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Oct 27, 2016 23:34
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drat. That is super mysterious. Hope he responds. :/
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Oct 27, 2016 23:45
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Just had a look at the 4th scott manley video and i see him using the automatic intercept a lot, even when he already HAS an intercept going on, and zero zooming and fine-tuning and speed-adjust. Don't play like Scott Manley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atLitxZbEmE
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Oct 28, 2016 00:23
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Mithaldu posted:Just had a look at the 4th scott manley video and i see him using the automatic intercept a lot, even when he already HAS an intercept going on, and zero zooming and fine-tuning and speed-adjust. He's also not targeting enemy systems
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Oct 28, 2016 00:26
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To be far, missiles don't target systems, and when he had 20 drones pointing at the enemy ships there was no need to aim for anything. Also, the worst comment from him so far: "The enemy fleet has split up in an effort to confuse me."  No, you loving set up nukes on one of the ships, destroyed their engines and now they're drifting off.
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Oct 28, 2016 00:56
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Mithaldu posted:To be far, missiles don't target systems They don't? I feel like my flak missiles have been pretty accurate at going where I will them
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Oct 28, 2016 01:02
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I may be wrong. From what i know they just point at the hottest energy source.
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Oct 28, 2016 01:29
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Mithaldu posted:drat. That is super mysterious. Hope he responds. :/ Yeah. I just want to spend 30 hours designing space nukes then spend another 30 hours designing my nuclear space ship and maybe spend 30 minutes blowing up nuclear space ships with my space nukes before I spend another 30 hours in the designer  .
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Oct 28, 2016 01:38
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New patch! Patch 1.0.8 - Parallel Rocket Staging, AI vs AI, Combat Pausing, and more! Highlights: - External Discardable Propellant Tanks - Allows parallel (but not tandem) staging rockets. - Combat can be paused at will. - AI vs AI combats can be set up in the sandbox. - Fixed point (unturreted) lasers can be made. - Lasers can be frequency quadrupled now. - Timers/fuses on nuclear and explosive payloads. - Basic sensor inaccuracy now affects all weapons. - Projectile shot pattern reworked to be more realistic. Full Changelist: - Pause on demand in combat with spacebar. - Parallel Staging: Propellant tanks can be made external and discardable. Added a few stock designs which use this staging. - AI vs AI battles can be set up in sandbox. - Lasers can be fixed point rather than turreted. - Lasers can now be frequency quadrupled by using two frequency doublers in series. - Explosive and Nuclear Payloads can now have timers/fuses set on them which do not require remote controls to operate. - Added targeting sensor inaccuracy to all weapons fire based on sensor diffraction limits. Has little effect, except at extreme ranges (hundreds of km). - Reworked the shot spread pattern of projectile weapons. - Added in beam truncation factor to lasers. Could break some existing laser designs due to aperture size. - RP-1 is now based on dodecane, bringing its performance in line with real world results. - Added Osmium's thermoelectric sensitivity, fixed water's viscosity. - Added a quick reference chart in laser design for intensity at selected ranges. - In sandbox, can see basic info on AI behavior. Can change AI factions in sandbox. - Fixed MPD thruster info not updating. - Auto-launched missiles leave the launcher in the correct direction now. - Exploit of teleporting missiles past point defenses via camera tricks has been removed. - Numerous crash fixes, other minor bug fixes.
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Dec 17, 2016 23:25
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