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[XazoTak]

Lots of issues in this game relate to deployment and engagement rules.
What if the battle area was indefinite in size, all ships were fielded at the start of a battle, and those ships would be sent into and pulled out of engagements as necessary?
Ships are arranged into groups, and in battle those groups are commanded around. Those groups are like fleets, they are subject to burn levels and detection rules.
Ships interfere with each other's burn drives, weakening/denying use of burn drives in an area around them that increases with size and number of ships. This also means groups have to be spread out while using their burn drives.

A new way of viewing the battle would have to be introduced for this, one that shows all the allied and visible enemy battlegroups, and allows them to be commanded about.
In early battles, the player (and any realistically-fightable enemies) will probably only have one group, so this doesn't really matter much. Player's group moves to enemy's group, and then there's a fight.
In late battles though, it becomes very important: The player will want to be sending out fast frigate groups to raid logistics ships, remaining mindful the same doesn't happen to them.
The player can only command the area of the battle that their flagship is present in, and for the sake of performance only that area is simulated in real time. Other areas where battles are occuring occupy unused processor time, they tend to lag behind the player's battle but catch up in lulls.

So a few implicit gameplay changes:
-Fleet size limits are no longer needed, as the reason a fleet size limit is needed is that the restrictive retreating rules means in an unbalanced engagement the smaller fleet absolutely has to lose ships to get away from the unwinnable fight and will always just be left with a few logistics ships. This way, an unbalanced engagement can end with the smaller fleet retreating taking fewer losses than the larger fleet.
-Deployment limits still exist in a way, thanks to burn drive interference. A huge, 300DP battlegroup would have to be spread over a huge area of the battlefield, and for all the ships to converge on one site they'd have to do it with regular engines, and crossing such a large area without burn drives would just take far too long.
-CR would have to work differently. Perhaps burn drive interference and CR depletion could be similar? Maybe CR recovery could be a thing too.
-Retreating would have to work differently, since the battlefield no longer has borders. Not sure what the retreat conditions should be, but by bringing the gameplay elements of system exploration into battle, there's a lot to work with. What's important is that a pest cannot indefinitely prevent retreat.

I think a system like this would allow a lot of arbitrary gameplay restrictions to be done away with and make combat less about attrition.

[TaLaR]

The player can only command the area of the battle that their flagship is present in, and for the sake of performance only that area is simulated in real time. Other areas where battles are occuring occupy unused processor time, they tend to lag behind the player's battle but catch up in lulls.

RIght, throwing my ships into auto-resolve meat grinder is so exciting...

[nomadic_leader]

Combat and campaign are two  games that don't play nicely just yet.  You seem to suggest adding a third layer, which might just make things more complicated

Campaign should just be a zoomed out version of combat, but this is impossible due to performance limitations etc. I suggest the following instead, also maybe impossible since the game chokes when you turn up the battle size setting:

Whenever one fleet 'hits' another after targeting it (obviously nothing happens when they just pass over each other as neutrals or whatever):

There's a quick dialogue giving options to talk (transponder fees, inspection, bribery, etc) or fight (as I discuss in the ambush thread having the outmaneuver option is lame).

Spawning
If you choose fight, then every ship in both fleets spawn rather close in the middle of a large, round map, entering at the speeds and vectors they were on in campaign map. (formation determined by order in the fleet window)

Retreating
 Ships  retreat by going to any edge of the map, and spawn as a separate baby fleet or fleets in campaign. They spawn  on the campaign map a little distance away from the main battle in whatever direction they left the battlefield. Ideally, the campaign map would keep going at a much reduced rate (like 20x slower or something) during combat, but this isn't essential.

After battle regrouping
The attacking fleet decides which if any of the retreated ship fleetlets it will attack, or tries to regroup with its own retreated fleetlets.  The losing fleet, if any is left, runs away or summons its own retreated ship fleet(s). Maybe combat or a chase ensues, depending on the results.

Needless to say, if some of your ships retreat and after the combat are caught by another enemy before you can join that combat, that combat will autoresolve.


Makes combat more tactical/ interesting.
So retreating is dangerous, and its a good way to lose a ship, because if a valuable freighter  retreats, the enemy (if he sees it) could retreat one of its own frigates in the same direction, which could then catch it. So everyone is incentivized to keep their fleet together, rather than retreating ships, and form defensive lines around civilians, etc. It would make combat a lot more tactically nuanced..

[XazoTak]

The player can only command the area of the battle that their flagship is present in, and for the sake of performance only that area is simulated in real time. Other areas where battles are occuring occupy unused processor time, they tend to lag behind the player's battle but catch up in lulls.

RIght, throwing my ships into auto-resolve meat grinder is so exciting...

It's not auto-resolve, it's fully simulated.
However, you would ideally be avoiding major battles occurring away from your flagship.

[Alex]

Yeah, unfortunately any idea that requires "all ships deployed at the start" is an absolute non-starter for several reasons. The primary is performance; consider that 1) multiple fleets can participate in a battle, and 2) the game needs to be able to run decently on lower-end computers...

[XazoTak]

Yeah, unfortunately any idea that requires "all ships deployed at the start" is an absolute non-starter for several reasons. The primary is performance; consider that 1) multiple fleets can participate in a battle, and 2) the game needs to be able to run decently on lower-end computers...

I already dealt with that issue in the OP.
Only a limited area around the player is fully simulated in real time.
Out-of-combat ships don't need to be simulated as in-combat ships, they can be simulated as moving groups (or moving points, if part of the group is in-combat).
Having every ship in a huge battle all simulated in real-time would be a very difficult scenario to create due to burn drive interference.

I could perhaps make a Java program that demonstrates how this method of simulation works, since it's so unintuitive in writing but visually makes perfect sense.

[nomadic_leader]

) the game needs to be able to run decently on lower-end computers...

If the game has to run on computers available when the game first came out, that's indeed a considerable limitation!    (I'm still using it on an 8 year old laptop)

[nomadic_leader]

Hmm, I'd rather have bigger, more interesting battles and lose all the eye candy like armor decals. Having giant fleets that you can't use them because of performance issues is a bit of a bother.

Anyway, given the limitations, we could instead do it this way, basically the same as in my earlier post in this thread except:

The rules for deploying/not deploying are the same as now, but any ships you don't deploy spawn as a little baby fleet on the campaign map some distance behind you, the way the retreating ships do as well.

As for XazoTak, to modify his suggestion, maybe just being able to order around elements of your fleet on the campaign map, and have them engage in autoresolved battles. Something like that would be nice. Right now, campaign doesn't really have an interface for this though.

In fact, next time around (starsector 2) it might be nice if there were more interface/control continuity between campaign and combat, rather than playing so much like different games. With a bit of sleight of hand and autoresolve, you could make the transition between campaign and combat be less of an interruption and more fluid.

[Megas]

Hmm, I'd rather have bigger, more interesting battles and lose all the eye candy like armor decals. Having giant fleets that you can't use them because of performance issues is a bit of a bother.

If I use big ships, I can deploy from six to ten at max battle size.  At minimum size, I might be able to deploy only two or three, and combat becomes a duel like Star Control or Mortal Kombat in space.

As for small ships (frigates and destroyers), fleet cap less than what NPC fleets have and punitively short peak performance means they do not keep up at endgame.

I can have twenty or so ships, but I can only deploy several if they are big enough to last the whole combat.  Yes, does not feel like fleet to fleet, but more like mob (enemy) vs duo or small elite group (my side).

If I want to use a fleet, I want to use a fleet, not a shonen hero with an entourage of cheerleaders on the sidelines.

[XazoTak]

People are treating this like an idea that reduces game performance.
It isn't, the extra simulation being done is done in unused processor time.
Proper task scheduling makes a huge difference to how performance is affected.

[Midnight Kitsune]

People are treating this like an idea that reduces game performance.
It isn't, the extra simulation being done is done in unused processor time.
Proper task scheduling makes a huge difference to how performance is affected.

Good luck doing that with open gl 1.1. Sadly the version that SS is using is OLD AS HELL and before you ask, no it would not be able to be upgraded without a complete rebuild of the game AFAIK

[Cik]

If the problem is bad deployment rules, why not just fix the deployment rules?

I don't really agree that there needs to be a "fluid transition" what exactly does this achieve besides setting back other, more important development tasks by a year?

[nomadic_leader]

Good luck doing that with open gl 1.1. Sadly the version that SS is using is OLD AS HELL and before you ask, no it would not be able to be upgraded without a complete rebuild of the game AFAIK

Basically, performance means the game can't fulfill the implicit promise of battles between large fleets. Instead it's just little duels. People say starsector combat is great; but the design of combat (having to show every turret, every armor square, every decal) prevents it from scaling to the size of fleets commonly found even in vanilla.

We will enjoy the game for what it does offer though. For the sequel however, it should use some autoresolve slight of hand to be less computationally expensive. Two AI ships fighting each other on the corner of the map are basically just autoresolving anyway. Bigger, more tactically complex battles would be cool.

If the problem is bad deployment rules, why not just fix the deployment rules?

I don't really agree that there needs to be a "fluid transition" what exactly does this achieve besides setting back other, more important development tasks by a year?

Well, there shouldn't be deployment rules, there should just be  deploying all, but that's impossible due to performance limits. 2nd choice is splitting some ships off into another, vulnerable fleet some distance away on the campaign map.

About the fluidity  I mean combat merely happening when you run into an enemy in campaign, rather than having to stop the action to go through all these dialogues trees about outmaneuvering and mothballs and CR  and then again after action dialogues. Combat is a minigame as it is now. I guess people are fine with it because other roleplaying games or mount and blade do this overworld/combat dichotomy; but the whole paradigm could be much improved. Getting the fundamental ingredients of the game to work better with each other is more interesting to me than another new mechanic.

[Megas]

Endgame combat is deterministic enough that I only fight if the enemy is a colony threat, bounty target, or get in my way (of my blueprint raid).

[Linnis]

Im always ok with encounters taking multiple separate engagements to resolve...