Space warfare xv rocketpunk manifesto series#

The thing that got me was that I was finding myself checking loadouts and capabilities of new vessels very thouroughly as they became available, and was more looking at them with the interest I would read about real live battleships or fighter planes. Spacecraft design is pretty realistic, and therefore visually boring and very samey at first glance (there's only so many ways to design the hull of an effective combat spacecraft), but strategically the vessels have very specific roles, and you'll have to get familiar with those.

Space warfare xv rocketpunk manifesto series#

Story is in quotes because it's really more of a series of briefings and after-action reports than a story, but thanks to copious amounts of flavor text for factions, their motivation, and all the politics going on while you're doing the fighting, I found it quite immersive. The setting is reasonable enough if a bit stereotypical at times, but the author has a clear understanding of how armed conflict actually works and why it is fought (no gung-ho save our civilisation crap here, as an admiral you are informed about reasons, necessities and predictions, not fed propaganda), which makes the campaign 'story' quite enjoyable. you assign targets, whizz by and see if you made a good decision), but in general that's just the moment you see whether your plan was any good. You can still give a few simple orders once your vessels make actual contact (though in a retrograde intercept, just forget about it.

In fact, planning an encounter is what you do most of the time. although that, too, is finicky work, adjusting your trajectory half a dozen times. Which of course leaves plenty of time for evasion, which the AI doesn't make enough use of (it'll still be a lot of readjusting trajectories, which can get a bit annoying), and AI controlled missiles react to trajectory changes of your ship way too quickly, so you can run them out of dv rather easily.

Not on their final approach, that's just fine, but missiles are usually launched days before an encounter, and you plan their trajectory and intercept just like you plan them for your actual ships. The interface can be a bit knotty, and missiles have a bit of a guidance problem. The physics are top-notch, even simulating such things as the angle at which projectiles hit the hull. There's already a thread about it somewhere.