RE: The flaws in nextcolony's battle mechanistics and some suggestions to fix them.
#1 This advantage is mitigated by the fact that the defender can support himself and chose the countering formation plus shield regeneration. With regeneration of the shield and repair of armor the first shot is not that valuable. Simultaneously shooting would make it much harder to have the battle visualised as an animation in rounds/steps. (Prototype of a battle replay: https://nc-client.jarunik.com/replay/M-ZTX2I0J1QS0)
#2 This would complicate battle significantly. Calculating every single ship is currently very costly to implement, very performance consuming for our server and much harder to balance. We would also need some form form of area damage or piercing as high damage ships would waste a lot of DPS on very small ships which would completely destroy balancing. So overall I currently don't see enough benefit for the costs to change that. I would love to implement a really sophisticated battle logic some day.
#3 I agree that this simplification does not reflect reality but I don't think we will ever aim to do realistic 3D modelling in our game. I agree with your judgement. A complete overhaul is not feasible as of now. We did discuss some different targeting and damage types like area damage but discarded it due to the involved efforts to design it in a balanced way. Would be cool to be able to do some more fancy battle module some day.
#4 We implemented abort due to the repeated requests of the community. We will monitor how it develops. We discussed the drawbacks of aborting but decided against some hard to understand timers/limits. One of our idea is to bring some features to allow sieges to planet to allow to reduce the options of constantly evading any fights due to clever ship logistics. We didn't decide on any feature or changes to abort yet though.
#5 The uranium refund was a quick fix to prevent stuck ships due to missing uranium for the return flight. It is not a feature and only happens due to some rounding and calculation problem. It is always a minimal amount and we intend to build a better solution for this longer term. We generally try to avoid passive protection without costs. If we would bring something like docking it would need a significant "fee" to provide absolute protection.
Thanks for your in-depth reply. I do however disagree a lot with your opinions.
#1: Of course it is true that first attack is less relevant with more lines involved. It still decides the winner with the exact same numbers involved at both sides. Regarding the visaulization, this should not be an argument. Visualization might be a nice extra for some players with too much time on their hand, but the mass of players will not watch them, but just click on. All the browser games I played were perfectly fine without visualizations. It is a nice extra, but is certainly less important than balancing the battle module, and removing the first attack bonus would be a part of the latter.
#2 I think you did not read or not understand my proposal. I did explicitly NOT suggest to calculate every single ship, as I am well aware of the limitations. I proposed a calculation method that simulates single ships by still grouping all ships of a type together, and I am conviced that the implementation of such a model would lead to more intuitive results (i.e., with 120 vs 100 of the same ships, also the winner would lose ships^^) without requiring much extra calculation power.
#3 NEVER did I suggest to implement a 3D modelling. As said before, I don't need visualization. I suggested to create a battle algoritm which would lead to results that better match the expectations one has when thinking about space battles. Line vs line with always the first line taking all the damage is quite lame for a space game. Sorry.
#4 I am not against aborts. But being able to abort attacks in the last minute should not be possible, it really ruins the game.
Allow it for the first 10-15 minutes of a mission, that is enough. It doesn't need an extra timer. Travian allowed aborts for 1.5 minutes after a mission was sent, and then, the abort button just disappeared. Was perfectly fine and noone ever complained about that.
P.S. tagging also @rondras and @oliverschmid here.