to carry this out further the tech would have to be researched and increase with further research.

you would need to modules one for the command ship. and one for the receiving ships.

This is a signle minded way to look at the role of ships in space. With new medium you redefine the role. Carriers in space would make the best mobile command posts. There role as carrier would be expaned as well to house the things you need to keep the main battleships suppled, and to keep the fighters up and running. Also, you could make it a staging area for land forces. The carriers would just be a multi-useable craft. They would not go tow to tow with the battleships, no that is not what they where made of. They where made to carry things. You just need to expand to role.
Also I find this funny how you went hard SF(in a small way) when GC2 is a Space opera.
But then that could be the way I am reading the post

Meh... that last proposal looked largely complicated. One question(to Kryo): Why do we not have carriers(Star-Destroyer type), yet we have Terror Stars? What do Terror Stars add to the game other than the ability to go on a very slow(1pc/wk slow) genocide-followed-by-asteroid-eating session?

Well guys, with the addition of those ship modules we've heard about, we pretty much DO have carries, at least in principle. I mean you have a ship with a component, that when its in a fleet, all other ships in the fleet will have more speed, and other for fire power.

I think its use is obvious. You have a cargo hull with these componets and you fleet it with a ton of fighters. Or one capital ship with fighters. so they can move at the same speed or close to it, which was the primamy short coming of smaller hulled ships.

They may not be IN the carrier but that would be just a graphical thing anyway. This game doesnt have fuel consumption, crew warriness etc. so they dont need to be in the ship. BTW, this is the same reason i dont thing hangar on starbases are necessary.

What you talk'en 'bout Willis? Now if that isn't the dumbest thing I have ever herd of.
How can you say that with a straight face? I must admit a ture carrier "might" not be feasible in the future, but some sort of hybrid ship would be. At the very least some ships will have larger than normal boat bays to support a wing of fighters, to support ground pounders when the use of a ships guns are not feasible or as a force multipler in a battle.

I have to say, I'm a supporter of both Carriers (Or some hybrid form of Battle-Carriers or something) and Orbital Bombardment.


I'm going to talk about OB, since this is the feature I'd really love to be in the game. I got this idea from a discussion with a friend who is a Halo fan, he plays the Freelancer Combat Evolved mod and has read the novels. (Forced me to read them to, they're okay, but nothing compared to Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, etc.) In my opinion, Orbital Bombardment should reduce a planet's quality to 0, and remove ownership of it from all races.
The two forms of Orbital Bombardment I envision for Dark Avatar should be Nuclear Bombardment, where ships can be fitted with special Nuclear Warhead Deployment modules for destroying planets. This would take a few turns to set up, but once commenced, would be over in another few turns, but has a random chance of failing due to either resistance from the surface or your opponent responding by taking out your bombardment ships with a fleet. The other form would be easier in that it would rely on custom built ships, but it would take longer. Ships with Plasma weapons or above may "Glass" a planet, an option taking several turns and for each turn removes a set percentage of the planet quality, until the planet is quality 0. This would also have the possibility of being interdicted by your opponent. "Glassing" is where a fleet uses Beam weaponry to reduce the planet to a molten ball of heated rock.

Sorry if this made very little sense, I've got a splitting headache and am doing a piece of Higher coursework (Any Scots should understand what I'm talking about there)

I hate that bias of only allowing effing Plasma and above beam weapons to have special abilities. The damn things can't get past a simple energy shields, how do you expect them to penetrate an atmosphere and melt a whole planet? If they do, the planet should crumble and solidify into mine-able asteroids, so that the player gets some gain from them. Missiles from Harpoon and above should therefore be able to nuke a planet and crush it to asteroids, and Mass Drivers above Singularity Driver should repeatedly crack it up until it breaks into asteroids on its own.

This is sounding ridiculous, however, since only top of the line shipboard weaponry sound remotely powerful enough to destroy a whole planet. Plasma, Harpoon and Singularity Driver are merely second-generation equipment. It would take Doom Rays, Black Hole Eruptors or Black Hole Generators to bombard a planet.
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Carriers in reality are so powerful because they have squadrons of planes on them, which are much faster than any ship, can travel farther than a shell and hit deeper inland. In the GalCiv universe, ships are as fast or faster than small fighters and pack more of a punch over the same range, thus defeating the purpose of why carriers would be powerful.
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A true GalCiv carrier would have to be an extraordinarily expensive, enormous ship that uses 40 logistics points, has pathetic weapons, tons of defenses, and the ability to carry up to 70 small fighters. It's strength would lie in the fact that it has unlimited range and can deploy giant fleets irrespective of logistics ability. It would be larger-than-huge hull size auto-fitted with hangars, with 100 base hp, but with a sensor range of 4 pc. It would have 48 space left over for the player to put whatever extra stuff they want on it such as engines, extra weapons, more defense, sensors, etc. Such a ship would have devastating offensive power, but would be extremely expensive concerning the price of the carrier, it's huge battle fleet and all that combined maintainance. Battle fleets would only be replenished or upgraded at planets or military starbases. Only tiny or small hulls would be carried.

And... if a player sends their entire battle fleet of small fighters to fight two fleets each containing 5 dreadnoughts, and the little fighters get destroyed, it would be useful to have some large escorts or else say bye to the carrier. So in the end, the poor player must fund a battle force of one carrier, 70 small fighters, 2 battleship escorts and invasion fleets containing transports, spore ships or even a Terror Star. A largely unwieldy strategy with loads of cool factor and a military rating so high that no normal force would even dare a war with you. Yet, a carrier vs carrier battle would be purely awesome. Throw in starbases, Terror Stars and dreadnoughts, and you have an epic, time-consuming, memory-consuming, slightly maddening space war.

The point of my idea was to limit the drive for a Genocide Rush or whatever it is called, without any economic gain in destroying planets it really becomes a last resort to remove worlds from the equation. And Plasma would easily penetrate the atmosphere, and if not, the ships could quite easily go into the atmosphere and "Glass" the planet that way.

I have an idea to make this rather easy.

Players, at any time, should have the ability distribute the population of one of their planets around the tiles on that planet. New population gets randomly allotted to random tiles, meaning that it would be useful for the player to do this only when an invasion is inevitable. Distributing population would, however, have no effect on production.

When a planetary invasion is initiated, the invader chooses which tiles to start off from and how many troops to allocate to each one of those tiles, and the invasion then progresses from there outward until all the improvable tiles of the planet have been captured.

Citizens(if any) inhabiting non-improvable tiles(tiles that don't contribute to PQ) would still be alive, and then the player would be faced with 3 options:

Good: Convince them to join your civ and make them equal citizens.(BC lost, population gained)
Neutral: Let them do whatever they want.(No change)
Evil: Enslave them!(Big military & social production bonus)

Now, here's how Orbital Bombardment comes into this picture of an improved Planetary Invasion:

You can attach Bombardment Modules to any ship, but they take up a lot of space and cost a bit. These Bombardment Modules allow for that ship's weaponry to be used for Orbital Bombardment. When one of these 'bomber' ships arrive in orbit around a foreign planet with no defending ships in orbit, a screen comes up with the planet map showing improvements and population allotted to each tile. The player then chooses one tile to attack, and the ship rolls and attacks. The attack strength removes a number of citizens from that tile by either killing them or causing them to flee to a neighboring tile on their own. The formula for damage done is:

ShipAttack * 20000 taxpayers

where ShipAttack is the total number of attack points for any kind of weapon on the ship. For each point of damage, 15000 citizens would flee and 5000 citizens would be killed. However, the ship would:

1. Need at least one Bombardment Module in order to bomb a tile at all.
2. Only be able to bomb as many tiles per turn as it has Bombardment Modules.
3. Lose 10% of total HP for every bombing run due to atmospheric entrance.
4. Have to bomb the planet upon entering an undefended orbit, so that this isn't used as a form of espionage.

Once a tile has no population left on it, any improvement built there gets destroyed and the tile must be terraformed for further use. A bombing raid would also disable the defenders ability to shift it's population for the next turn due to shock.

This way, the population would take a long time and a very powerful ship to totally get destroyed, and thus causing bombardment to be method of merely reducing the difficulty of an invasion and not being a 'genocide run'. Also, if any new defending ship enters orbit while the bomber is still there, the invasion fleet must fight another battle to maintain space superiority.

This would result in some nice strategies, like taking down planetary defense improvements and then going after those chunky Galactic Achievements and Hyperion super-projects to strategically cripple an opponent. If the enemy depends on their 4 Hyperion Shrinkers to make immensely powerful warships while you have only 1 Shrinker, you could bomb those enemy Shrinkers into dust to permanently weaken their military power.

The AI could simply be programmed to target Orbital Fleet Managers with priority over Galactic Achievements with priority over Super Projects with priority over normal improvements both when bombarding and when defending. It could choose between how to prioritize normal improvements by targeting those with a higher output over those with less. It's manner of handling bombers would just be the same as it's manner of handling transports.

space fighters would equal reusable drones.

Here is my idea about carries. I'm curious what you think about it.

1) Add a carrier module to ship designer.
2) Add certain adjustments to the calculation of the fleet speed. Namely, if a fleet has a big ship with a carrier module, than all the ships that are n sizes smaller receive equal speed, unless they are fast enough already.
3) Viola!

The good thing about this ides is that I would not need any new graphics (except, possibly, some icon) or any other extensive modification of the game. The bad thing is, I'm not sure if it would be feasible for players to use such module. Maybe some other bonuses to the flee might be added, such as slightly increased repair rate or +1 to defense of smaller ships.

Hm, come to think of it, are there any modules that give fleet-wide bonuses?

Edit:
Damn, I should pay more attention to the news and messages. Someone said something like this is being implemented already. Where did that info came from? Well, it's good to hear regardless.

Edit 2:
Come to think of, it's not only speed that should transcend onto smaller ship, but a range as well. In fact, the range is more important, since in RL naval carriers are much slover than planes they carry.

Yes. In Twilight of the Arnor, you have:

Atlas - Gives a 10% attack bonus to all ships in fleet except for the ship carrying it.
Fortitude - Increases HP of all ships in fleet except for the ship carrying it.
Driver - Increases speed of fleet.

That's because real aircraft carriers move on water while their planes move through air. In GalCiv, both the carrier and fighters move through space.

However, the smaller a ship, the less space must be folded to make it move, and thus, it SHOULD go faster with the same engines as a larger ship would, but the developers haven't considered this.

just put two such ships in each fleet

I can t wait to test weather or not these parts are considered weapons... Cause if they don t count I would prolly just put them on a non-combat ship and not worry about its firepower.

I m seeing my recon ships turning into Carriers!

Hm, so by adding all three modules to a ship a player will be able to get something very much like a carrier. Sounds good.

Although, it would be cool if the size of the ships played a role, as well as the stats of this "carrier". I like meaningful bonuses much more than generic "+x to something" stuff. It make sense that only smaller ships can benefit from speed and defense bonus. It also makes sense that a carrier doesn't just give a bonus to speed, but makes the speed and range of smaller ships equal to it's own.

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see how those modules are implemented.

i thought about this just a little. but ships would more or less jump at the same speed. that is why the engine size is different for ship classes.

how ever in combat your not flying at ftl speeds and maneuverability then comes in play and the smaller you are the faster you can turn.

so what this game needs is not a carrier. but combat engines. these would work on number of engines compared to size of ship.

manuevering thrusters component that make enemy shots "miss".

yes in fact i will start a new thread to get some feed back from those who have stopped reading this thread. like kyro, froggie boy, and other devs.

Maneuvering thrusters...

GalCiv 2 missiles are extremely, extremely maneuverable and travel at faster-than-light speeds. Since ships in combat aren't going FTL, there's no way even your most advanced sub-light maneuvering thrusters will prevent a Black Hole Eruptor from sucking away part of your ship(or all of it).

With the long distances involved in space combat, thrusters wouldn't be too effective against beams either. Several miles worth of dodging only equates to a few degrees worth of turning for the weapon firing the beam due to the distance between weapon and target.

However, mass drivers have no guidance whatsoever except the gravity of their targets, so if your thrusters can pull your ship away faster than your gravity can pull the mass driver towards you, then you can escape.

i made that observation here in this thread.

not for the reasons you did. i thought missiles would have guidence to target. energy weapons would be speed of light. and gun shots lose guidence once the shot leaves the barrel.

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I think the best way to add aircraft carriers would be to do this:

1.) Change Tiny hulls to disallow the possibility of equiping life support.
2.) Add a Module called "Hanger" which generates a life support field like a planet, and also allows a number of tiny hulls to be stored. As research progresses and larger capacity Hangars become available, that number can go up as well as range of the life support.
3.) At this point we can find fun things to do with the game. Perhaps an option to launch an air-strike against a single enemy ship which will have a 50% chance at first-strike capacbility. Or, if an enemy airstrike is approaching a fleet of large ships with a carrier, it could launch an interceptor group which will immediately go to a fleet battle (although it would be a dogfight) and if the attacker succeeds in breaking through, bonus damage could be further inflicted to the target fleet. Tiny hulls could have improved defense against larger ships, so it would be advantageous to lure the fighters away from a target fleet before attacking with capital ships.

maybe this belongs here I don't know but, is there any way for a ship to add logistics to a fleet? and if so boom Carrier!