sunsetconductor :
With regards to THE COSMIC BALANCE by SSI:
The Best part of this game was that there was NO PERFECT SHIP. For every great ship, there was an equally great design to oppose it. I finally achieved what could be closest to the perfect ship and named the class "Iowa Class" when I saved it to my disk. It had high speed, fast as the fighters in the game, so if you got the jump drive in gear in time, they could pace you but not catch you. (The fighter's had the advantage of instant acceleration to full speed where any ship you built would take approximately 8 turns to reach full speed) I made the maneuverability extremely high and had all guns and torpedoes firing only through arcs 1 and 8 (the two forward arcs). The Torps were installed first ON PURPOSE. The Torps disrupted the shields allowing the phaser banks to reach the armor since they fired after the Torps.
All in all, none of my friends were able to design any ships to beat my Iowa Class.
Under the right conditions I had some designs that might have given you a run for your money. "The right conditions" being: duel with no warping out. That is, I had a design that I think could do the trick but it would take like 100 turns to do so, maybe more against a speed 32 ship.
Mine had a speed of 62 and mounted some photon torpedoes in arc 3 and some more in arc 4, and a plasma torp. Shields were good to starboard and practically gone to port; no armour or belts. But it had enough power to maneuver, charge all weapons, and handle all EC(C)M.
When a target is going 60+ weapons spend most of their time missing. At a speed of 61 you are likely faster than the other ship so you direct the battle, and can keep your weak side away from the enemy. Since weapons tend to miss fast ships, mine could just charge in. I set range type firing so as I passed the first photon torps would fire first and weaken the shield. They would be expected to do about 30 points of damage. Beyond 30 points of photon torpedo damage in one volley there is no additional bonus against shielding. Then the next arc of different photon torpedoes would fire and weaken the shield more since they fired at a different time (using two separate firing arcs guaranteed this). Ideally, one pass would reduce a 30 point shield to a 4 point shield not counting damage. That's a defecit requiring 205 points of power to correct, again assuming the shield isnt actually damaged. Every three turns or so I send out a hail-mary plasma torp and hoped for some luck (remember plasma eats armour). As the target ship got slower the plasma torp became more effective. Deadly but it took a damm long time to kill something.
Obviously this ship would suck for defending another slow ship or planet, but it was great where you had nothing to defend and the enemy could not warp out.
Its funny when I first started playing the game I was concerned about fighters, but fighters in cosmic balance really aren't that much of a threat to dreadnoughts; full shields and belts will do the trick. What you use fighters for is to send them at a destroyer or maybe even a cruiser, and then forget about them and have your ship do something else.
sunsetconductor :
I see a lot of people on here mentioning this game for the Apple II and the Atari, but none mentioned that it was available for the C= 64 as well. Commodore rocked!
I would love to see a modern port of The Cosmic Balance. But with "fleet" battle capability raised to 12 or 24 ships. A 3-D battlefield would be fun too with better graphics (of course).
Damn, I miss my Commodore....it is a shame the monitor and the power supply finally died on it. Can't find an RGB monitor anywhere these days.
Jason
Houston, TX
I did not know it was on commodore; cool! Was it in full color? On apple and atari it was B+W or B+W and two specific colors.
A fleet of more than four ships each would be fun but then Cosmic Balance II (which assumes a four ship maximum per side would need to be overhauled - not that I would mind . . . mind you
😛 ).
3D would be a major change to the game. Fortunately since Cosmic Balance uses free movement and no grid that problem is already solved. The tricky thing here - and its all just math of course - is figuring out the shield boundaries in 3D, given an arbitrary position and heading of the target and firing ships respectively.
I've been thinking about making a combined cosmic balance I and II for Windows Mobile. But as is the case with these things, trying to get the combat formulas and AI right is the pickle.
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