Post edited 1:55 pm – February 1, 2012 by quill18
rino900 said:
This is what I had in mind: the space part is still to get from dungeon to dungeon (or to a town), but it's still important. It's where you get most of your quests and fight random encounters.
Do you fly around freely, or is it mostly clicking on destinations, like Planet Xyzzy or Jump Point Alpha or Asteroid 1231?
Do we have space combat? And again: Are you flying around freely? Remember that one of the core principles of roguelikes is that they allow a lot of time to think about tactics and are therefore not real-time. We don't want space combat to be a twitch/arcade experience.
Wall of text incoming. TL;DR: It would be "realistic" and also very "roguelike" if the player doesn't fly the ship directly, including in combat situations.
Space Combat in Real Life
Realistically, space is very, very big and relative speeds tend to be VERY high. It's impossible to stop and turn around quickly (though it's easy to change your FACING, i.e. suddenly flying "backwards"). Likewise, space is very, very empty. If ever we have "real" space combat, shots could be fired from thousands of kilometers away. It will not be like a classic airplane (or Star Wars) type of dogfight.
There will only be three possible types of weapons:
1) "Beam" weapons (e.g. Lasers), which you can point directly at your target because the speed of light is very fast. Lasers do have "spread", just like a spotlight or flashlight or "electric torch" (as the brits say), so their damage would die off over very long ranges. In practice, they will be extremely accurate but not necessarily do much damage.
2) "Mass" weapons (e.g. Bullets), which basically have infinite range because there's no air resistance to slow them down. However, they travel relatively slowly so you have to aim where you enemy WILL be (possibly several minutes from now), therefore it is possible to evade them if you can change your course. The damage that mass weapons inflict will be constant at any range, but their accuracy suffers. The heavier the bullet and the more velocity they have, the more damage they do.
3) "Missile" weapons, which have some amount of fuel for thrusters and can perform course corrections on the way to the target. Because part of their mass will have to be used for sensors, targeting computers, fuel, and thrusters, they can't just slam into a target like a mass weapon can, because they'll be too light. In fact, they'd have to be relatively light if they are going to be agile enough to steer. Instead, they would have to use some kind of warheads (including nukes) to inflict damage. They would be far more expensive than simple metal slugs, but they should have far more range than beam weapons while being far more reliable than mass weapons. However, since they would be physically large than bullet and would probably have both EM and heat signatures, it may be possible for point-defense lasers to shoot them down. Also, they could be jammed or be distracted by decoy targets.
The Honor Harrington series of books has an interesting variation on #3, where the missiles "detonate" by firing off multiple beam weapons at point-blank range (though they also use nukes as well).
Space Combat in Games
Games don't tend to work this way because it would be quite boring, but we could abstract this if you aren't actually flying your ship manually. You might have a piloting skill, which gives you a better rate of success for closing in to a desired range or performing evasion maneuvers, but you don't directly move your ship around. Instead you focus entirely on using you special abilities and weapons.
Maybe you can move around your ship during combat, and you're having to put out fires and repair hull breaches and replace broken? For an example of how this last part could work, you can check out my Sundog video or check out the upcoming game called FTL: Faster Than Light, which bills itself as a "space sim roguelike", though I'm not sure that the "roguelike" part is quite fitting. I always loved how you could fix your ship mid-combat in Syzygy, and I loved the moments in Star Trek where engineering had to do emergency re-routing of power to shields and such.
If you get close enough and/or disable the target ship and/or have teleporters or boarding shuttles, you could board the enemy ship and kill the crew in roguelike mode. Maybe you could claim the ship, or at least this way you could steal their cargo (since blowing up the ship in space probably destroys a lot of the cargo).
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