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[miauw62]

I was ninjad by you but too lazy not to just press submit again :v

[Shadowlord]

If you want actual space, then you have to have relativity, and then any FTL travel or FTL signalling results in travelling (or sending messages) backwards in time as a practically unavoidable consequence, which means causality does not hold. :V

Its fairly easy to construct an FTL scheme in which time travel is almost impossible. Wormholes, depending on how you lay them out. Warp drive, if you don't pair them with engines capable of shifting your frame of reference significantly.

Temporary wormholes, for instance. If they appear just long enough to enable them to be used for a jump drive, and then disappear, I think it's safe. I think that's more like just taking a shortcut than FTL at that point, though. As long as you can't move the shortcut's ends through time (which is the normal problem with wormholes and relativity) there's no time travel possible.

Sergarr:
1. I tried THANCS, but there was no way to do a test battle for a ship or test anything, really. That's not really pertinent to this discussion, though.
2a. Weren't we talking about a theoretical 4x? A strategy game? You'd want calculations to predict how many turns it would take to reach a particular system. If you're using something like a hyperdrive which has acceleration and velocity in hyperspace, you could either burn as much fuel as possible to get there faster, or burn less, but either way you'd burn fuel on the way to the midpoint and then burn fuel in the opposite direction once past the midpoint. The main point is the user and AI need some way to specify how much fuel to burn or how fast they want to try to go, and that the math isn't anywhere near as straightforward as a fixed-velocity drive. (I assume you can do it with integrals or derivatives or something. #JonSnow)
2b. If it's like Master of Orion or Sword of the Stars, for example, there wouldn't really be any pathfinding. Well, except for tactical battles, I suppose. Are you thinking of something with hexes or tiles?
3. vOv
4. It shouldn't be a huge deal with a 4x (You can see what your ships are doing, and understand easily), but I remember the confusion everyone seemed to have with (the original) Frontier in the 90s, which had a newtonian flight engine. Players would tend to end up 'jousting' with enemy ships, as they'd accelerate towards them and then stop accelerating when they got close... only to fly past them at high speed because newtonian flight. Then they'd do the same thing again, and again, and again. Some people would even try to blame the AI for "flying past them repeatedly."

[Sergarr]

2a. Weren't we talking about a theoretical 4x? A strategy game? You'd want calculations to predict how many turns it would take to reach a particular system. If you're using something like a hyperdrive which has acceleration and velocity in hyperspace, you could either burn as much fuel as possible to get there faster, or burn less, but either way you'd burn fuel on the way to the midpoint and then burn fuel in the opposite direction once past the midpoint. The main point is the user and AI need some way to specify how much fuel to burn or how fast they want to try to go, and that the math isn't anywhere near as straightforward as a fixed-velocity drive. (I assume you can do it with integrals or derivatives or something. #JonSnow)
2b. If it's like Master of Orion or Sword of the Stars, for example, there wouldn't really be any pathfinding. Well, except for tactical battles, I suppose. Are you thinking of something with hexes or tiles?

1) That's needless complexity. The game would work just fine with a drive providing a limited acceleration for a limited amount of turns after refueling. Then you just always use the fastest possible route to the target which leaves you at zero velocity at the end, as a default movement order, which would be easily calculable by a variation of A* pathfinding algorithm. For advanced users, of course, you can add the possibility of just using the fastest possible route, without slowing down at the end, which would be even easier. Or maybe even specifying the end velocity directly, A* can support that, too.
2) I was thinking along Galactic Civilizations line. It has tiles in space.

[hector13]

'scuse me guys but this is the Gaming Pet Peeves thread, not the "how to make a 4x game that's scientifically accurate" thread

[Shadowlord]

We could make a "Bay 12 attempts to design a 4x by committee" thread, just to see how much we all disagree.

On topic, tiles in space 4xes are one of my peeves, but that's due almost entirely to GalCiv II, so I'm willing to consider the possibility that they're not universally bad. After all, I don't consider research or tech descriptions peeves just because they were awful in GalCiv 2.

[itisnotlogical]

Now I want to see a starfighter game with Kerbal Space Program-style rules and mechanics.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Now I want to see a starfighter game with Kerbal Space Program-style rules and mechanics.

You mean Kerbal Space Program with the multiplayer and weapons mods?

[Dutrius]

Now I want to see a starfighter game with Kerbal Space Program-style rules and mechanics.

You mean Kerbal Space Program with the multiplayer and weapons mods?

Bonus points if you have to build and launch a rocket to get them up there.

[MrRoboto75]

Now I want to see a starfighter game with Kerbal Space Program-style rules and mechanics.

You mean Kerbal Space Program with the multiplayer and weapons mods?

Bonus points if you have to build and launch a rocket to get them up there.

May as well get that extraplanetary launchpad mod and turn minmus into some sort of military base

[Bohandas]

I feel it's unrealistic the way research in 4x ganes seems to occur in a vacuum. (which is to say that one civilization's discoveries don't propagate to other civilizations like one mifht expect. Consider the real world example of the internet; it didn't have to be invented independently multiple times; other countries can't keep it out

It happens, but I always feel like 4x games happen in a vacuum anyway. It's a constant power struggle in universe, completely incomparable to what happens in the real world. It's like what happens when a bunch of North Koreas try to inflate their ego in an area the size of Louisiana.

Honestly the problem here is that space is 99.99+% empty. It doesn't help that people don't really try to model space in 4x strategies as actual space, instead preferring to make it sort-of-like-sea. You'd think that someone would remember after all these years that space has, like, gravitational wells and almost zero friction, which would allow your spaceships to actually accelerate over time, which would be a first truly innovative game mechanic in 4x genre... but oh no, that's too innovative. Can't allow actual innovation to reach 4x games, how else would we then be able to sell the same game several dozen times under different labels with some slight changes?

Don;t forget that it also has three dimensions. You can move up and down, not just forward and backward or side to side

[NullForceOmega]

Sequels that radically alter basic mechanics from previous games.

There.  That's all, it just bugs the hell out of me.  It's one thing to fix something that doesn't work or isn't fun, but altering the fundamental gameplay of a game without reason is asinine and infuriating.

[Greenbane]

On topic, tiles in space 4xes are one of my peeves, but that's due almost entirely to GalCiv II, so I'm willing to consider the possibility that they're not universally bad. After all, I don't consider research or tech descriptions peeves just because they were awful in GalCiv 2.

I suppose the problem with tiles in space 4X games is that they severely downplay the vast volume of space between star systems, at least in GalCiv. Everything floats, static, in a rather cramped "map" of sorts, with systems extremely close to each other, as far as cosmic scales are concerned. Distance is completely abstracted, perhaps too much.

Tiles themselves aren't bad: MoO uses them exclusively in tactical battles, for instance, and that works. But they shouldn't be used as an absolute measure.

[Arbinire]

Sequels that radically alter basic mechanics from previous games.

There.  That's all, it just bugs the hell out of me.  It's one thing to fix something that doesn't work or isn't fun, but altering the fundamental gameplay of a game without reason is asinine and infuriating.

^

sometimes it isn't too bad, like wasteland to wasteland 2(good reason for that though) but like the Sonic games trying to make the leap into 3D

[Bohandas]

On topic, tiles in space 4xes are one of my peeves, but that's due almost entirely to GalCiv II, so I'm willing to consider the possibility that they're not universally bad. After all, I don't consider research or tech descriptions peeves just because they were awful in GalCiv 2.

I suppose the problem with tiles in space 4X games is that they severely downplay the vast volume of space between star systems, at least in GalCiv. Everything floats, static, in a rather cramped "map" of sorts, with systems extremely close to each other, as far as cosmic scales are concerned. Distance is completely abstracted, perhaps too much.

You might want to try the Space Empires series which lpshades this by having interstallar travel occur solely by naturally occuring wormholes  with no actual faster than light or deep space travel per se

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Sequels that radically alter basic mechanics from previous games.

There.  That's all, it just bugs the hell out of me.  It's one thing to fix something that doesn't work or isn't fun, but altering the fundamental gameplay of a game without reason is asinine and infuriating.

If only there was a perfect example of a freshly released big budget game that cut a ton of mechanics from the previous games to make it more accessible. Hmmmm...