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I haven't played many space combat games except BFG. I always wonder why no game has involved the 3D aspect of it. Broadsides in space is cool but you know a captain should have the ability to float above another ship and rain fire on the top of the enemy. Which would cause said enemy not to be able to return fire, unless it had armaments in the upper floors as well.

A lot of games have tried to incorporate 3d... The problem, generally, is that it ends up being too complex to be fun to a sufficiently large number of people.

Even hex-based games like Starfleet Battles had options for stacking,w hich is a kinda-sorta-pseudo-3d in one sense (as well as acknowledgement that hexes are a lot of volume).

Pael wrote:I haven't played many space combat games except BFG. I always wonder why no game has involved the 3D aspect of it. Broadsides in space is cool but you know a captain should have the ability to float above another ship and rain fire on the top of the enemy. Which would cause said enemy not to be able to return fire, unless it had armaments in the upper floors as well.

Except in 3D, up is relative. So while one ship is floating 'above' the other, the other ship is simply going to do a barrel roll and broadside anyway. 3D rules for space combat are completely pointless and just needlessly complicated matters gameplay. I have never seen a 3d space combat ruleset where the 3D gameplay added any value to the game, usually the opposite.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Except in 3D, up is relative. So while one ship is floating 'above' the other, the other ship is simply going to do a barrel roll and broadside anyway. 3D rules for space combat are completely pointless and just needlessly complicated matters gameplay. I have never seen a 3d space combat ruleset where the 3D gameplay added any value to the game, usually the opposite.

It could matter if the game had the right depth. If ships had weapon, armor, and shield ratings to top / bottom / fore / aft / starboard / & port & had 3d maneuver, it could lead to some interesting situations.

For example, lets say you've pummeled the target battleship's starboard armor and he rolls to present his port side to you. Unfortunately for him, you have totally out maneuvered him and have ships above and below the battleship, so which ever way he rolls will present the damaged side to another group of ships.

Or, you have the edge in bombers and frigates. You use your smaller, faster craft to get behind the enemy cruisers and present them with a problem. Do they turn to engage the smaller ships attacking their weaker aft armor, or do they press forward into the battleship in front of them, which is waiting to take advantage if the cruisers tur to engage?

Search for 'Saganami island Tactical Simulator' if you want a game that is supposed to model 3d, or at least stuff like ships rolling to present fresh guns to an enemy, well.

Another big issue is that most science fiction settings are doing either "Age of Sail" battles absed around ships of the line, sometimes even with analogs to 'Crossing the T' and similar. Star Trek often does this. Others do more of WWII dog fights and carrier clashes in space (Star Wars, a lot of Babylon 5) while a few do something different.

"Real" space combat would probably be very tense 'one shot kills' similar in some ways to submarine combat. If you are detected, you're dead.

Balance wrote:
"Real" space combat would probably be very tense 'one shot kills' similar in some ways to submarine combat. If you are detected, you're dead.

It would probably depend on the effectiveness of space weapons vs space defenses. If weapons are so powerful that technological equivalent armor is useless, you could be quite right. Stealth and countermeasures could be the way that space combat ends up -- carrier groups could end up being feasible in this type of setup as well, assuming a single fighter could carry enough firepower to cripple or destroy a ship. Of course, if the capital ships are extremely maneuverable (I.E. size doesn't matter for speed, turning, etc) you may not see fighters at all.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could have some form of super armor or shield that makes weapons nearly useless except at point blank range, requiring intense concentrated firepower to damage a ship. In this setup, you may have lines of ships like the age of sail, complete with boarding parties, as boarding may be more effective at neutralizing a ship than directly shooting at it.

You just never know how technology will change things.

Endgame wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Except in 3D, up is relative. So while one ship is floating 'above' the other, the other ship is simply going to do a barrel roll and broadside anyway. 3D rules for space combat are completely pointless and just needlessly complicated matters gameplay. I have never seen a 3d space combat ruleset where the 3D gameplay added any value to the game, usually the opposite.

It could matter if the game had the right depth. If ships had weapon, armor, and shield ratings to top / bottom / fore / aft / starboard / & port & had 3d maneuver, it could lead to some interesting situations.

For example, lets say you've pummeled the target battleship's starboard armor and he rolls to present his port side to you. Unfortunately for him, you have totally out maneuvered him and have ships above and below the battleship, so which ever way he rolls will present the damaged side to another group of ships.

Or, you have the edge in bombers and frigates. You use your smaller, faster craft to get behind the enemy cruisers and present them with a problem. Do they turn to engage the smaller ships attacking their weaker aft armor, or do they press forward into the battleship in front of them, which is waiting to take advantage if the cruisers tur to engage?

Yeah, I've heard this argument before, and truth be told it doesn't do anything for me. For the most part, top/bottom/fore/aft/port/starboard can be represented with just fore/aft/port/starboard. Setting by setting it may vary, but I would think (given what I know about engineering) that space vessels would probably be equivalently protected from all angles. The top/bottom, ironically enough, would only really come into play in traditional naval wargaming setting, where the tops/bottoms AREN'T equally well armored, and ballistic trajectories (and submarine torpedoes) pose a threat to them.

Attack Vector: Tactical attempts "true" 3D using custom stands for their figures.

Simplest example:


Looks like more effort than it's worth in my opinion, but who am I to argue. A lot of other games use elevation or a Z-axis to simulate 3D.

Aside from 3D combat being very hard to simulate, it doesn't actually add a lot to the game. When people play space games they want to re-live Star Wars, not have an accurate representation of combat. As was mentioned true space combat wouldn't be the "knife fight" range you see, it'd more likely be shooting from super far away at scanner blips until the scanner blips explode.

I think most games settle for frictionless space as their injection of realism, and some don't even bother with that.

Either way, Attack Vector should be a good starting point if you want to try 3D.

I was going to post this game! Here is the Starship Combat News page on it:

http://www.star-ranger.com/AttackVector.htm

I, too, think that it looks like a giant PITA. Everytime I hear people pine for a true 3D game, I think of this one and want to slap some sense into them .

Serieously though, I think trying to integreate 3D movement to this degree would require a level of book keeping beyond what I would find enjoyable. However, there are other games out there that make nods to the 3D relm. Firestorm Armada, for example, allows your ships to go "belly up" to use their starboard guns on the port side, and vice versa.

Balance wrote:"Real" space combat would probably be very tense 'one shot kills' similar in some ways to submarine combat. If you are detected, you're dead.

Well, submarine combat isn't exactly like that; the biggest thing is that even the most advanced torpedoes can be easily decoyed/avoided in the right situations and environments.

Ruckdog wrote:I was going to post this game! Here is the Starship Combat News page on it:

http://www.star-ranger.com/AttackVector.htm

I, too, think that it looks like a giant PITA. Everytime I hear people pine for a true 3D game, I think of this one and want to slap some sense into them .

Serieously though, I think trying to integreate 3D movement to this degree would require a level of book keeping beyond what I would find enjoyable. However, there are other games out there that make nods to the 3D relm. Firestorm Armada, for example, allows your ships to go "belly up" to use their starboard guns on the port side, and vice versa.

If this is the game I'm thinking of, then its even worse than that. Not only is it 'fully 3d' but look at the name... vector movement. The direction your ship is facing has little bearing on the direction you are moving in. If you applied thrust in one direction, and then turn, you will continue moving in the direction the thrust was applied in. And the system for applying thrust is, IIRC, fairly complex. So if you apply enough thrust in one direction, and then decide to go in a different direction, it might be several turns before you cancelled out the initial thrust and got it moving in a new direction, all the while, the direction of movement is changing (in terms of the angle/heading) because you're applying thrust in a different direction.

Ruckdog wrote:

Balance wrote:"Real" space combat would probably be very tense 'one shot kills' similar in some ways to submarine combat. If you are detected, you're dead.

Well, submarine combat isn't exactly like that; the biggest thing is that even the most advanced torpedoes can be easily decoyed/avoided in the right situations and environments.

Fair enough point. I did say 'similar in some ways' more than 'identical.'

I've also seen the idea that stealth in space is likely to be nigh-impossible for anything useful barring uber-tech. Engines will likely give off heat, there's no real 'terrain' to hide behind in a practical sense, nuclear weapons are likely to be plentiful (so a near-miss may still be lethal). Ugly. Probably not 'fun' unfortunately.

Lots about stealth in space here.

The computer game Mass Effect tried to reason out stealth capabilities, which was a nice effort on their behalf.