Tides of War

Good and wellthought post, Duma.

Because I, and a lot of the people I play regularly online with, came into the onlinegame market because of simulations like Warbirds or it's predecessors it was the other way with me. Online because playing a sim with and against others provides more fun. As the provider of Warbirds in Germany stopped service I took a glance over the border of onlinesimulationgames and tried a few MMORPGs the last years. I didn't played the 'big ones' Ultima Online or Everquest though, only a bit Shadowbane and some others I forgot, but the turnbased or 3rdperson style isn't the way I like to play this type of games (besides that I prefer 'modern' environments over fantasy) so I tried and stayed in Neocron, even it has some flaws.

Tesseraction has to balance double, because there are planned two online modes. A battle mode for the quick battle and a warmode, maybe with more realistic settings, in which ships travel realtime and stay ingame even if the player logs out At least in the last mode ships have to be build from supplies and according to the build capacities of the country and probably larger ships are only given to playergroups, partly to ensure a higher probability for a player to be online as I guess. Playing a career at the wargameserver a powergamer has not such much advantages over the casual player because he still is limited to the speed of his ship and I hope the performance of the whole taskforce dependents the rankrating of every single player after returning to port.

There is a need for a minimum runningdistance until the torpedo is sharpened, so the sub has to get itself into a firing position first instead simply firing a torp which hits and explodes a few meters after leaving the tube (which would damage the sub too) and a better chance for the destroyer to spot and evade it. Destroyer vs sub is the fight between time, speed and maneuvreability as the advantage of the destroyer against the visibilityadvantage of the sub. With the new damagemodel the damagerange of the waterbombs could enlarged a bit and the effectiveness of the torpedos increased a bit, but on the whole this has to be based on the experiences made in the beta.

This has to be my favorite thread on these forums. The analysis being provided here is truly impressive. Game balance is indeed our biggest challenge for MP.

We're in the middle of some stuff right now, I'll return for a longer discussion soon. Perhaps we can take the multiplayer into the upcoming TeamSpeak conference that Capt. Maxim will be hosting.

--East

I'm glad that some of my off the topic analysis of Enigma Rising Tide has been intresting. For the most part I think TesserAction Games can make this work and I have some hope's that more companies when they see this game, will follow through and join in the genre.

My preference has always been to strategy game's. I did get into game's like Everquest, Planetside and for a short time Dark Age of Camelot, mainly due to my friend's joining those game's. But I have always perfered game's that took simulation to a higher level and added more strategy to your gameplay.

The problem of course was that for many player's in this genre, perfer the arm chair general approach. Which is good for RTS and turn based game's, but not good for MMOG's in general which is why strategy game's in general has been slow to go into the massive online game's.

Even World War II online went for the FPS way so they could maximize their market share. Which was a pity since I am sure many player's wanted to take command of a tank instead of getting 3 player's into one to move it around, or take charge of a warship.

I am hoping for more game's like ERT in the future, and even a napoleonic era ship's of the line type game would be cool to see.

So here's more to game's like Enigma Rising Tide for the future.

Duma

I am hoping for more game's like ERT in the future, and even a napoleonic era ship's of the line type game would be cool to see.

Maybe TAG can contract to do a game version of "Master & Commander"?

/bux

DAoC had a smooth launch. Granted very few are that lucky, but it does happen if the companies involved are on the ball...

The biggest complaint I have with the other games is customer service. Everyone makes all these promises and then breaks them one after the other. That was my biggest gripe with EQ and mostly with DAoC. EQ nerfed the crap out of everything, whether people liked it or not, under the God pretense ("We know what's best for you") and that soured me despite my love for the game. DAoC promised they would never nerf classes, only upgrade the others to bring them inline and that they would never make changes unannounced. They broke both of those so quick and so hard, it broke my heart as I really loved the RvR aspect of the game. Promises still count for something to some of us, and today, I play neither of those games nor will I ever buy/play anything those companies produce.

I don't expect CS to bow down to every little whine and complaint that everyone has but I do expect them to use some common sense and be careful what they promise

Nerfing is an interesting point. We shall have to see how the individual factions' ships fare against each other in open combat.

Obviously, I'd expect some tweaking during the beta period - that's what its for. Some ships will inherently require more player skill, which is how it should be (ever played an Iksar in EQ, you'll know what I mean).

However, I have faith TAG won't ignore their players the way the folk running EQ/DAoC did.

/bux

Excellent discussion here.

About the control of ships, I was thinking you'd normally take command over pre-built ships that are awaiting an able captain. Later if you so choose, you can have a personal ship constructed for yourself, but generally your mission is to help the war effort and simply take command of the nearest ship.

This keeps the game moving without people with duked out ships, and will require more wit then brawn. It would be nice if you would fear a ship more from the person commanding it then the number of its guns.

As for the "realistic world" mode of play, would it be at all possible for there to be some sort of a program that runs on your desktop, similiar to a streamer, that let's you know things like how far your ship is to it's destination, how much fuel it has, anything its encountered, and most importantly of all, whether you've been attacked. Heheh, I got it, in-game, say that you're "retiring to your cabin", and your first officer is taking command. Then the game minimizes and (optionally) dumps the texture and model cache, and clears the ram. It may take a second for it to reload all the data, but of course again this is optional.

Quite simply, I'd prefer not to have the game minimized while my ship is taking a three hour trip to find out a Destroyer convoy blew my ship to dust. crazy:

And... I guess that's all for now. Anywho, I'm greatly anticipating this game. Planet Side's gonna lose a soldier when the multiplayer Enigma arives.

enigma!: