Originally posted by Kovah
I think the current system is fine. Its realistic enough to not be arcadey. If you really want to get realistic then no ship would have a max speed. You'd just keep going faster until you applied opposite thrust, like in Elite 2/3. Hell, I'd be a big fan of that, but it would totally change the way the game is played. Hard to say if it would be in a good or bad way, but it would definitely be different.
Right, instead of a capped speed limit, different ships would have different rates of acceleration. It would be a whole different game.
From a game design standpoint, a speed cap does keep combat more "exciting" because you can never get very far from other ships (no massive Delta V). It's been a fixture of this type of game since Wing Commander. Independence War 1 and 2 did have a sort of in-between flight mode where you could build high speeds and quickly damp them down again, and I liked that better than this fixed speed limit, but it still wasn't quite full Newtonian combat.
If we had realistic inertial/Newtonian combat, then combat would play out more like a submarine sim, where it would take hours (or days, or weeks) to match course and plot intercepts. Weapons would work differently... you could fire a homing missile at long range if it was fast enough with enough range. But you couldn't target a laser at a ship doing evasive maneuvers if it was more than a few light-minutes away, because you wouldn't be seeing the "real" location of the target, due to lightspeed delay for your sensors. You'd have to get closer to fire energy weapons.
So it's not as easy as just removing the speed cap in a game like this. There would have to be a lot of changes in the weapon functions, targeting, and how the AI dealt with the tactics. It's probably much easier to write combat AI for short range dogfights, instead of long-range tactical planning. You'd never have any combat close to a planet or station because anything moving slow enough to dock or land would be a sitting duck for a fast mover. All combat would probably be in deep, deep space. We'd need a better Nav map too.
I still wish someone would try making this type of game one day. For some of us space geeks, it might be more fun than the furious close WWII dogfight model we've been stuck with for years...
especially because i'm more a space combat adept )
