Battle System

Final Fantasy VII battle system is quite fun, where it’s semi a cross between turn-based and real time: where you’ll need time to fill up your action gauge before you can attack or cast spell. RTK2 is nice where you can move your generals around the enemy and perform a simultaneous attack, and later RTK allow archery unit to attack from far. Master of Orion automatic battle is where two rows of ships moving and shooting each other until total annihilation. Tower Defense game is nice to play, but it get bored after a few hours. There was a game (which I forgotten the name) where the automatic battle system queue the Carrier and Drone ships in front as “shield”, while other high power ships shoot long range beam from behind (those with more “shield” usually wins).

I like a passive battle system (automatic mode) with some kind manual intervention for added advantage. The reason for passive battle system is that it allows you to showcase the awesomeness of the army or ship which you had been building all these while, and the manual intervention add some really simple but fun control so you don’t feel bored watching.

But now we are in RPG, and we only have a main character (the mother ship) most of the time (perhaps some secondary ships later as helper). It will be like a tower defense game, where the mother ship shall be in the center (movable) will being attacked from various angle by enemy forces. Each action requires power to sustain, and the power recharge at a certain rate. We can choose to enable shield/auto repair, fire laser or torpedo, or deploy fighter drones as long as we have enough power to sustain them. We can conserve power when we are not attacking (store into battery), but you need to disable certain weaponry when we are low on power. All weapons will auto fire once enabled (doesn’t require manual control), and we can launch special attacks (worm hole, EMP, etc.) as long as we have the power to burn and it’ll take time to recharge. Thus, power recharge rate and battery size play an important role to support advance weaponry; while module which consume less power is critical as well. The strategy to select the right balance between fire power and power consumption is very important.

At more advance level, we shall have AI controlled supporting ship or battle station to lend us more firepower; or nearby planet which assist us with their artillery or star defense system, or channel additional power to the main ship. Ally might jump in to lend firepower to us half way through, or use cloaking ability to buy time to recharge battery in between waves of enemy. Nearby asteroid, comet, solar, moon or nebula (like the effects of Terrain) shall play a certain roles which affect our battle. We can move nearer to a Solar to recharge energy faster through solar panel; or the asteroid can we used as a shield to protect our ship.