Comments - UrbanLogicGames

Thanks Erayser, that's really appreciated :)

Hi,

For me the entire selling point of the game is being able to play a space strategy game in first person aboard your own ship. That's the core idea I started with and it's what people seemed excited about back in 2014 when we released our first trailer. Granted, many people were also very interested in the possibilities for gameplay outside of combat, and many of those people like yourself were disappointed when we cut that stuff, but it was never the primary selling point.

Based on what your saying, I'm not sure Flagship was the game for you even before we removed the asset management mechanics, which as I explained in the last news post were not deep enough to justify their existence (and making them deeper would mean expanding the scope of the game beyond our capabilities). In any case, you do seem to have already made up your mind so you'll have to forgive me if I don't spend much time trying to change it.

I appreciate you following the game this long, and I do hope you'll check out the game when it's released, but if you don't that's totally fine.

We're still working on it. I know we haven't posted an update for a while but I do tweet about what I'm up to from time to time - you can see all Flagship-specific tweets at Flagshipgame.com

Hopefully I can find the time to write a full update at some point in the coming months.

Yes, we're still working in it. We haven't posted a full update in a while but I occasionally tweet about the game, those get posted up at Flagshipgame.com

Thanks for the kind words! I think we probably disagree on the definition of the word 'fleet' though. As far as I'm aware 'fleet' is a somewhat fluid term that refers to a collection ships under the same ownership, or any number of ships sailing as a group. A fleet can be divided into 'squadrons' (or in our parlance, simply 'groups') but even as few as 2 ships could technically be considered a fleet (albeit an unusually small one).

In any case, I think what you're driving at is how many ships will you be seeing in the battles in Flagship?

While we haven't decided on an upper limit yet, I doubt it's going to be 40 per-side simply for performance reasons. We do know a lot of people are in this for the spectacle though, so we'll try give you as much as we can to hit the enemy with. :)

Hi, thanks for the kind words! In answer to your questions:

1. Flagship is just single player I'm afraid. As much as we'd love to add multiplayer, it increases the development of the scope of the game beyond what we'd be able to deliver at this point.

2. Our latest news post covers this, but Flagship is now an authored, linear campaign that would be the same every time. While I use procedural generation to create the planetary systems the game takes place in, the gameplay itself is mainly focused on tactical ship-to-ship combat over a set of missions making up the main campaign. However, we are hoping to ship the game with a mission editor that will allow players to create their own scenarios and campaigns, and there should also be a skirmish mode.

3/4. Building static defenses is not necessary because of how the game now plays. You're largely attacking enemy outposts (where you would not be able to build turrets) or defending allied positions (where turrets would already be established). You control a single fleet that you maintain throughout the main campaign. These ships will rank up, while lost ships will be replaced with novice ships.

4.1. There is no limitation on the size of the fleet, but there will be limits on how much of your fleet you can deploy on any given mission. From a lore standpoint, deploying ships costs resources and you should only be using what you need. From a real-word practical standpoint, I want to keep the game challenging and ensure the game runs smoothly. :)

5. There may be other factions in the game, but their alliances would probably be dictated by the plot of the main campaign. Any control we give the player (if any) would be fairly limited to be honest.

6. Flagship is at this point entirely linear, the chances that we'll introduce any kind of branching storyline or optional 'quests' are very slim, but we haven't ruled it out entirely.

I'm sure you've gotten the picture by now, but I feel should stress that while Flagship was originally intended to be a more open 4X-style game, this is no longer the case. The latest news post goes into why this is and what we we gain from the new direction.

Hope that clears things up!

There aren't any plans to reintroduce the 4X elements I'm afraid, at this stage it'd pretty much mean designing a second game.

Thanks for the kind words about the aesthetic, it's all still rough art though so things are still going to improve. :)

I'm afraid there is no public build of the game available at the moment. Feel free to sign up to our mailing list at Flagshipgame.com if you want to find out as soon as the game is available. :)

Probably not I'm afraid, adding this functionality would require more resources than you might think (assuming we wanted to do it well) and it's just not within the current development scope. Another thing to bear in mind is that individual fighters are fairly weak in the Flagship universe, and staying alive in one is actually pretty hard.

That said, there is already code that teleports you into a flyable fighter, we could maybe tie that to a console command for fun, it just wouldn't be part of the main game.

The answer is pretty simple, the game isn't out yet. :P

We're not ready to talk release dates yet unfortunately.

Not as part of the main campaign, but there is a console command that lets you spawn ships, so you could do it that way. You will hit performance issues if you get too carried away though. :P

At the moment the plan is to have ship persistence between missions, with surviving ships ranking up and lost ships being replaced with rookie ships straight out of drydock. Each mission would have a pre-determined limit on assets you could deploy, with each ship type having a different deployment cost. This does pose potential balancing issues though as some players would near the end of the game with a fleet of high ranking ships, while less careful players may end up with a load of rookies. We have some ideas about how to solve that though.

If we can't make that work then our other option is to just have each mission specify which ships are available to you, leaving you do just decide how they're deployed. I think this is less interesting, but we might have to fall back on it if we can't make the persistence work to our satisfaction.

We aren't planning to do any kind of mission branching (I'd rather not pour our limited resources into story beats many will miss), though we have the flexibility to have a battle span a solar system if we want. It just comes down to whether that's actually exciting in practice. Missions will probably be replayable once unlocked, but only in skirmish-mode outside the main campaign.

For now our sole focus is on the bridge and what you do there. However, depending on where the story goes there may be other parts of the ship to see, we just can't promise anything at this point.

If we did do another Kickstarter, it'd probably be a much smaller one to help pay for voice actors and maybe some 3rd-party modelling work. But to be honest the time investment required in setting one up, plus the ongoing maintenance and backer follow up required after a KS has completed isn't something we'd take on lightly. Thanks for the kind words though! :)

As much as we'd love to, we just don't have the resources to build full mod support in. We are hoping to ship the game with a mission/campaign editor though.

It's still alive, yes. :)

I said I was hoping to get an update out in the next month or so. We'll post an update as soon as we can.

There is a slim chance that sending commandos to take over enemy ships is something we'll still include, but to be honest that's currently on the chopping block. Even if it does make it in, it's not something you'd be doing yourself on-foot or anything like that.

It's a skirmish/mission editor that lets us create missions for the game. I'm really only getting started on it so not ready to talk specifics yet, but the hope is that we'll make it available with the game so people can create their own missions/campaigns. That really depends on how much custom scripting we end up doing outside of the editor though, if the editor isn't flexible enough on its own there's a chance it won't be included on release.

The player is deliberately a blank slate and we're leaving you to fill in the gaps and decide who this person is. There aren't really any perks or attributes to choose from, but you will likely choose your own name and name your own ship.

Look a bit harder. :P

If we ever cancel the game we'll announce it here and on the main website, I promise we wouldn't just disappear quietly into the night and leave people guessing. :P

In any case, definitely still working on it. :)

Sorry, this got overlooked somehow! I haven't technically read the Lost Fleet series but did listen to the first 6 or so audiobooks. I quite liked the them, but his tactical model is very different to ours as combat in Flagship takes place at much lower speeds.

For instance, formations make much more sense in Geary's universe since ships are only in combat for a fraction of a second and need to maximise their offensive/defensive abilities over a very short amount of time. In Flagship, battling ships can pace each other so tight formations actually become restrictive after the first shots are fired. You also have to carefully time your shots, it's not just a case of 'fire everything' and hoping for the best. :)

That being said, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't inspired by the books. The whole thing with Navy tradition surviving long after we leave the seas is brilliant. The giddy excitement of leaping into the unknown every time they go through a hypernet gate.

Getting the itch to return to the series now...

The plan is to support both Vive and the Rift eventually (along with any other major PC-based hardware). The snag is I don't actually have the Vive hardware yet, but once I do adding support should be fairly easy.

We're planning to post an update in the next month or so, but trust me - a news post simply saying 'Hello! We're not dead' will not make people happy.

In the meantime, I posted this on Twitter a few weeks ago.

Twitter.com

To quote myself, "Flagship is still being made until we say otherwise."

We won't be this quiet forever, there's just a lot in flux at the moment. :) We'll start releasing new material once we've started finalising the new direction, to be honest the whole website needs a reboot as a few key things have changed.

I actually bought Pulsar a while ago but haven't had a chance to give it a try, it looks great though. If I remember correctly they actually announced their game before we did, so we can't take any credit for influence there. I think the confluence of tool maturation (Unity in particular), Kickstarter and the general boom of the Indie scene meant that those of us who've been dreaming of bridge simulators just started building them ourselves. There are others in development too, Solitude springs to mind, I'm sure there's others I'm forgetting.

Targeting subsystems is already in, ideally we want the player to be making decisions based on ship class and situation. In practice, making those decisions interesting and dynamic has been a challenge, but that's what we're aiming for.

The next update might be a while, but rest assured we're still working on the game.