The Second Antarean War is a multiplayer team-based real time strategic battle simulator. It simulates battle between spaceships in fully accessible 3d space. As an admiral, you can call in different types of ships for different situations. The game aims to be played against other people, not the game itself. The 3d navigation, order queues, smart orders and no limits on build queues aim to hide the visible user interface completely and allow you to focus on the battle at hand. You can join any battle in progress at any time. Some battles start small and grow in player size and in their importance to universal scale. The universe is persistent. Each battle has an impact on how well your faction does. Winning battles progresses the war and earns you medals, rank and respect from people you play with and strikes fear into players you fight against. Good hunting.
One way I tried to combat this zoomed-out problem is making the weapon ranges and view ranges on ships shorter. Shorter ranges mean that I wont zoom out as much in order to properly place my ships. I can see the ship and its fire range on a single screen, It looks a little unrealistic that a ship could fire only such a short distance but at least you get to see the ships and splosions.
no keep it the same, its like supreme commander was, i spent so much of that game just positioning my units without ever really seeing them and just using the icons, but when a really big battle got going i'd just zoom in and admire it, but for me rts's have to complex and about larger plans than just a few units at a time, my brain needs to be taxed!
i know the brain-needs-to-be-taxed feeling :| but id like to positions my units AND watch the fireworks at the same time.
this looks good
I still think the HW attempt could work great if tweaked correctly.
The large scale SenMan screen is ideal for giving out large scale movement orders and checking the general status of your fleet, especially if it is scuttled all over the map... erm all over space. I was thinking that it would be good if both SenMan and close view both had their unique traits that made them worthwhile to use.
I.e. units would automatically be grouped together into larger icons if they were close together, permitting the player to oversee them more easily (the icon would indicate group composition, health, fuel reserves or whatever else helpful information could be displayed about the ships within the group), a menu would give the player access to special commands such as auto-docking and repairing of damaged ships/strike-craft and similar things, making it easy to maintain the fleet from the high up position.
The close view on the other hand would permit the player to execute more complex combat orders, such as setting up custom formations, assigning target priorities and activating special abilities (if you planned for such things). It would also be possible to see the health of individual ships (allied or enemy) as well as effects that are currently "casted" on a ship (like a disabled engine for example), making it easier to pick targets or see what ship needs to retreat from the front lines.
I like the range rings feature, when I first read this the first thing that popped into my mind was the artillery ship in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. You could try making artillery ships like that which support your smaller destroyers from afar. Just a thought.