I just reread your suggestions, and now I see where you're going. You want planets that cannot be taken by an equally teched enemy. Not "more difficult", impossible. In modern warfare, the attacker ALWAYS has the advantage. Yes, there are advantages from knowing the terrain, using an established logistics base, etc, but the attacker has the advantage of knowing when and where the attack will take place, and being able to put superior firepower at the point of contact.

You want to allow planets to defend with far more ships (logistically speaking, hell, maybe numerically as well - I can see the next whine being "why can the planet only have 10 ships when the attacking fleet can have 28?") than the attacker is allowed, and have massive ship bonuses like military starbases (which given your turtle instinct would also be present) to boost the defenses. Why not go all-out and ask for special planet defense ships that can't move, but get 2000 points of hull to build on and have millions of hit points? Both ideas would make invasions suicidal.

So you understand the way to use ships defensively in the proper manner, and want to completely unbalance the game to make the proper use of ships less effective? Sorry, no.

This post is awsome.

It's official.

This is the post to end all posts.

The point I'm trying to get at, is that the most difficult difficulty level, Suicidal, is not even that hard in GC2... You don't even have to use anything special (all-factories or all-labs) to win. I'm doing an AAR that I will post soon to show this. Similar games (I will use civ3 again) it was close to impossible to win at the toughest difficulties, yet theorically possible. Something needs to be done to make the AI a bit more 'capable'. Of course, many of the ideas shown could probably be used by the player to their advantage, I guess it all comes down to the devs making the AI an opponent (an opponent who wants to win), instead of an obstacle. Perhaps if they add a given number to cookie-cutter templates for the AI to follow (such as how to build social improvements) it would add a bit more toughness to the AI.

The AI currently cannot win through a diplomatic victory condition.. unless the player decides to lose. These types of things don't make much sense.

The only kind of AI that would be able to stand up to a human intellectually..........

Is decades away from being built.

But there are always things that an AI will never be able to emulate.

Such as: Sheer Stupidity, Mindless Insanity, and Emotions (this last one is not relevant gaming-wise).

There was many an RTS game that I won, just by using those two tactics (Mindless Insanity, and Sheer Stupidity)

And remember, two massive advantages that any AI has over any human: it never makes mistakes, and it never forgets.

I don't know how many battles and things I have screwed up by clicking the wrong button of pressing "end turn" by accident. AIs, on the other hand, do EVERYTHING intentionally, and don't have to click buttons. Also, with a human, micromanagement is a horrific pain and can cause you to forget about whole sectors until they are too far gone to be restored. A computer has an endless attention span and never forgets to reset the sliders and stuff.

Just saying, the AI is not as worthless as some of you have claimed: it has a few advantages naturally present in all computers that a human simply cannot duplicate.

Impossible?

To defend 10 planets in this fashion, you have to build 10 separate defensive fleets. To take one planet, all you need to do is destroy one of those fleets.

The attacker has an innate advantage: being the instigator, they determine the time and place of the attack, and they determine how much force to bring to bear against a target. The point of this is to give the defender an advantage, thus reestablishing balance.

Modern warfare is not fun. Games are.

We're talking about GalCiv3, not an expansion for GalCiv2. GC2 made lots and lots of changes compared to GC1. If it makes the game better, it should be on the table for discussion.

The point is that, in the game as it stands, there is a problem with combat: defending ones territory requires the same military that attacking does (the exact same ships that are good for defense are good for attack). This one-dimensional system creates the unfortunate circumstance that a well-defended nation is also one that can readily attack others.

I'm not suggesting a patch onto GC2. I'm suggesting that the design of all of the aspects of combat should be such as to eliminate this problems. A bonus when in orbit is a beginning.

I think this is less from the quality of the AI and more due to the nature of the rules. There are fewer ways to screw up in Civ-style games. Or, to put it another way, the path that a human would obviously see when playing GC2 is not how the AI was told to play.

Look at Civ-style city improvement. For any given square, there are really only 2-3 things you can do with it. You'll build a road if it's between two of your cities. You'll clear jungle unless there's something more important to do. Otherwise, you choose what you want that square of terrain to focus on: food, production, or trade/commerce. Depending on the terrain and the tech, you may not have certain choices available, but towards the end of the game, you can basically make any city high growth, high production, or high commerce.

Having only three city resources (growth, commerce, production) means that choosing what to do with a particular square is usually a no-brainer (make a square that is good at something better at that something). And even if you choose the "wrong" one, the worst that can happen is that your city is level 7 when it could have been level 9 or something. Fairly minor overall.

Compare this with what happens if an AI screws up building up a planet. On a PQ8 planet, the AI decides to give it a farm and some tax buildings, along with 3 factories. Now, instead of having a mid-grade production center (with 6 factories and 1 StarPort), it now has... a big drag on its morale. It has given itself an economic handicap. This planet, because of the farm, will be a constant burden on the global tax rate. The computer may even decide to try to mitigate this somewhwat by turining a factory into a morale building. What does it get? The planet maybe provides a net 30 BC.

In a Civilization-style game, no improvements are ever bad; they are only differing levels of good. Even when buildings cost money, or an improvement decreases the health of the city that uses it, it is a local effect. It hurts that city's overall strength.

In GC2, building a farm on the wrong planet can cripple your global economy by suppressing tax rates. The rules of GC2 has innumerable pitfalls for a player/AI that doesn't know how to build cities. Players, being human, can learn from their mistakes. The AI can't; if it isn't programmed to avoid the pitfalls (and it isn't), it will fall face-first into them.

There are basically two possible solutions: remove the pitfalls or give the AI better abilities to develop worlds. The later shouldn't even be that hard: the AI has plenty of computing resources. It should be able to min/max factory-heavy vs. money heavy vs. research heavy planetary builds. The current AI doesn't. Instead, it tries to develop a world based on some kind of algorithm that was written 2 years ago before people learned how to maximize the economy of the game.

Of course, here's the question: would such a computer that could execute near-perfect economic builds, ever be defeatable? Considering how biased GC2 is towards economy (money wins), I'm not sure.

But will this post ever end?

It's things like this that can easily be corrected to make the AI not so easy to defeat. Such as below, the Lentzlandians trading for things that they cannot even use.

"Harold Gibons thought later on, after the trading conference, what the hell am I gonna use these damn IP's for!?? I want a refund!"

Perhaps in 2011 (So far away....) when GC3 comes out

IMO, they should do away with rush-building period... makes no sense. And if you disagree, then perhaps they should allow rush-researching then... rush-everything. lol. If they do away with rush-building, what good is mass-money? It's not, unless they add an Economic Victory Condition (get your treasury to 2 trillion BC and you win). This would make you actually have to balance your economy between labs, econ bldg's, and factories. And you could still trade BC to other nations and use money to upgrade old ships.

Can't really blame the AI for things like this, it has to follow the retarded things it was programmed to do. As well as the brilliant things.

I would have to say 'not necissarily (mis-spelled that, I know). Civ style games had the same build issues, but in a slightly different way. It's cannot be 'that difficult' to make an semi-intelligent building AI. Also once an AI builds, I don't think it has the ability to change what it has built to something else.

If Morale is good or great, build farms only up to a certain point (14 bil, or 20 bil max). If morale sucks, build no farms and destroy farms that are build. (If something like this is overly difficult to program in, then there is something wrong). Instead the AI builds a super-farm on a 300% tile and fills the rest of the tiles on a Class 19 planet with moarle buildings.

If production is low, build a factory. Some civs in GC2 DO NOT build factories EVER! Many Torian colonies only build their special 1-per-planet factory and that's it. Then they build an uber ship for the next 259 turns.

There is not that many variables involved here. It is not even bad AI programming, it is more of 'neglected AI programming'. They got caught up in the graphics too much.

EDIT: The more likely culprit: "It is precisely the fact that we don't have enough processing power that gets in the way of more realistic AI in our games. Or, put more accurately, the problems we're trying to solve are intractable, and we've yet to find ways to fake all of them." Found at page: http://www.codeodor.com/index.cfm/2008/5/7/Why-Game-AI-Still-Sucks/2224

The fundamental problem if that you're endeavoring to give the defender an "Un-natural" advantage, one that is complete not reflected in actual warfare.

In actual warfare, what you do, as a defender, is try to predict where the enemy will, y'know, attack, and concentrate your force there -all warfare is about gaing a local, short term advantage, and typically the defender does in fact know how to force the battle into those channels.

What I find odd in your post is the assumption that, in Galciv II, this is not there. It certainly is - I always use the simple fact that, for instance, by definition all my planets are within my range, but not the enemies, to channel enemy attacks. A few military starbases, properly positioned, can create a nasty kill zone. There are certainly other such things based upon the terrain as well - asteroids being the obvious example.

I wouldn't mind the AI being better able to do these things too (Although I've certainly seen it be remarkable clever, or lucky, on occasion), but there's certainly no 'rule' to be changed as if these opportunities didn't exist in game?

Jonnan

I'm curious...

Given GC2's "roll" system for weapons and defenses, how would squaring the current effect of defenses work for you guys?

So off-type now gives the absolute (positive, of course) value of its defense, and on-type gives that value squared.  Examples: 4/4/4 gives 4+2+2 or 8 against any given weapon type, now it would give 16+4+4=24 against any given weapon type-but don't forget to roll it.

This would certainly seem to tilt things in the defender's favor, albeit somewhat massively.  Defenses might need to be redone, though, both on a tech cost basis and on a component cost/size/armor value basis.

Do note that this is hypothetical only, as at present I know of no way to (easily) mod it in.

It is a fundamental point of all strategy that a defense cannot be strong everywhere. Defending ALL of your planets to that degree would be prohibitively expensive, but some could be defended that way. The bottom line is, passive defense *should* lose in these situations, so anything encouraging people to sit on the defensive is silly.

Nothing about that could possibly be defined as "unfortunate". You are not arguing for changes in rules to make defensive ship use better, you are arguing for separate planetary fortifications, like the tactical structures in Sins of a Solar Empire. Planets without a defending fleet can fight off small fleets entirely on their own.

1. I believe, if the GC2 combat system stayed the same, that giving 'class modules' to ships would probably solve the whole problem. This way, not every ship in the fleet is an all-out attack vessel, and certain ships would have large bonus's for planetary defense, yet penalties if they launch an assault.

2. And, for ships in orbit, you can only put as many as your logistic's ability allow. And OCC would be applied once tech is discovered, not when OCC is built (terrific idea mentioned earlier!). Perhaps the OCC could still exist and be built only on 1 planet, but it would simply give additional bonuses to all ships in orbit on all planets (extra hp, defense, and weapons). So taking the planet with the OCC would still be worthwhile.

I think these 2 things would be enough to accomplish the defender combat goal. When you make a ship, you add a 'class module' to the ship, just as you would a weapon or w/e. A Defender Class Small hull would get, say, 25% bonus to attack and defense when it is in planetary orbit, but gets a 25% penalty to attack and defense if it is the attacker. And various bonuses/penalties would apply to all Class ships and to hull sizes (small hulls get attack bonus against huge hulls, etc). This would make a small hull craft have a chance to cause some damage / or stop the uber battleship flying around.

This way, defenders can at least have a better chance of defender against other fleets. The point is not to make it impossible, but to make it at least a bit more difficult to take the universe over. So the player has more of a feel of accomplishment from the struggle.

I think the way combat works needs to be redone, it is too difficult for even 'slightly older ships' to do any damage.  1 uber ship, cannot be stopped by anything except for another uber ship. Perhaps making it more likely that a ship will cause at least 1 damage instead of 0 would help. So in space, if a ship rolls 0 damage, there would be a 50% chance again that it will cause 1 damage. That way 1 strong large-hulled ship can't wipe out 40 fleets of slightly older ships. And allowing ships to get to Level 56 is a bit too much, the XP given to a ship needs to be massively reduced.

Ships in orbit defending a planet, if they roll a 0 damage roll, there would be a 75% chance that it will do 1 damage instead. This way, even very weak nations can still have a chance to do some damage. Remember Civ3, Spearman destroys Tank!

Also....

In the game, ship hitpoints correspond directly to the 'overall health' of the unit. Ships that are in open space and that are damaged should have their weapons and defense lowered according to how damaged they are. If a ship is in planetary orbit, it's weapons and defense would not be lowered based on hitpoints.

E.g.

Battleship... HP 80/80    Attack 45/0/0  Defense 0/20/0

Battleship... HP 20/80    Attack 11/0/0  Defense  0/5/0   (Damaged battleship has 1/4th of it's health, therefore 1/4th of it's firepower and defense)

If damaged battleship enters planetary orbit, it would still have 20/80 hitpoints, but would have it's full attack and defense again, due to ship assistance from planetary facilities.

This would make very badly damaged uber-ships unable to continue wiping everything off the face of the map, would make 'Repairing' a more useful feature, and would also give defending ships an advantage against badly damaged planetary invasion forces.

This would accomplish:

1. Give civ's under attack the ability to regroup and launch a counter-attack.

2. Force the attacking civ to actually repair it's ships so they don't get destroyed. Would make invading a more difficult process and slow the invasion down a bit (since taking over a galaxy would likely take longer than a couple years anyway).

3. Would make planets more useful, and would give a slight advantage to the civ that is defending itself in it's own territories in which it has planets abound. The attackers would then need to make sure they have enough units to actually be able to sustain an attack... and would bring in the situation of wars of attrition from bad strategies being used.

Beautiful.

Not to go overboard for defenders... but another idea would be for a planetary improvement to boost planetary defense. Only 1 social improvement though, since most do not want to take up precious tiles on defensive improvements. The single improvement would start out rather weak, giving say, only 1 extra hitpoint per orbiting ship, 1 extra point of firepower and 1 extra point of defense, and a 5% boost to your invasion soldiering defenses.

There would be a line of techs called planetary defense. Planetary defense 1 would give the weakest improvement. Once you research Planetary defense 2, you could upgrade your Planetary defense 1 stations to the 2nd model. But you can only have 1 per planet (of any model type, cannot have 1st and 2nd model built on same planet).

2nd model would give 2 extra hitpoints per orbiting ship, 2 extra points of firepower, 2 extra points of defense per ship, and a 10% boost to your invasion soldiering defense.

There could be up to 5 planetary defense techs. These would be useful for planets bordering close to other civ's, or for planets that specialize and are high priority, or for planets that you own in other civ's areas of influence.

As far as attackers go, if they added in Ship Classes, you could go as far as to have things such as Planetary Invasion Classes, which give that ship an attack boost when attacking ships in orbit, but that ship would have some penalties if it attacks ships in open space (since it was not designed to do so). This type of ship building specialization would not only be fun, and would be great to design all types of different ships, but would bring a whole new tactical level. Hard part may be to get the AI to use these properly though.

Just some thoughts about various types of Ship Classes they could use:

Class

Gunboat: Smaller than a Patrol Craft, the Gunboat is a short-range interplanetary vessel used for policing actions in areas near the border and newly acquired territories.
 *Class Bonus: Weapons/Defense bonus when operating inside it's own sphere of influence.
 *Class Penalty: Weapons/Defense penalty when operating outside it's own sphere of influence.

Patrol Craft: Patrol Craft include a variety of vessels, such as Fighters, Defenders, Anti-Capital Ship Vessels, and Escorts. They are small, highly manoeuverable, lightly armed vessels. Larger than a Gunboat but smaller than a Corvette, these multi-purpose craft are most often used in planetary defense, patrol, escort, recon, fleet assistance, and covert raids.
 *Class Bonus and Penalties: too numerous to mention, depends on Fighter, Defender, Anti-Capital Ship etc.

Corvette: A small, manoeuverable, armed vessel, smaller than a Frigate and larger than a Patrol Craft. An easily built vessel, their main role is patrol, escort, and as a fast attack craft.
 *Class Bonus: +1 Speed, Weapons bonus against craft this size and smaller, and if it is the attacker.
 *Class Penalty: Defense penalty against Destroyers.

Frigate: Larger than a Corvette but smaller than a Destroyer, the Frigate is a long-range vessel with their main roles including escort and being used as a fleet defence platform. Variations: Escort Frigate, Patrol Frigate.
 *Class Bonus: Will protect smaller craft by drawing enemy fire to itself. Defense bonus when in a combined fleet.
 *Class Penalty: Defense penalty if not in a combined fleet.

Destroyer: Larger than a Frigate but smaller than a Cruiser. A fast and manoeuverable yet long-endurance vessel intended to escort larger vessels in a fleet or battle group and defend them against smaller, short-range but powerful attackers. Variations: Destroyer Escort.
 *Class Bonus: Will protect larger craft by drawing enemy fire to itself from smaller craft. Defense and hitpoint bonus when in a fleet with larger craft.
 *Class Penalty: Weapons penalty against larger ships.

Cruiser: Larger than a Destroyer but smaller than a Battleship. the Cruiser is a long-range "force projection" weapon. Their main role is to attack enemy merchant vessels, armed reconnaissance, and providing overall defence for a fleet. Variations: Light Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Auxillary Cruiser.
 *Class Bonus: Range bonus, Hitpoint bonus when outside of it's own sphere of influence, gives fleet a defense boost.
 *Class Penalty: Jack-of-all-trades design makes it not particularly well suited to take on any specific type of ship, thus it receives a small weapons penalty against any type of ship.

Battleship: Larger than a Cruiser but smaller than a Dreadnought, the Battleship is a large, heavily armored vessel with a main battery consisting of the largest of weaponry. Battleships were larger, better armed, and better armored than Cruisers and Destroyers. Battleships are the embodiment of space power, and serve to enhance a civ's force projection. Battleships, though, are vulnerable to much smaller, cheaper ordinance and craft.
 *Class Bonus: Weapons bonus against ships of size Destroyer and higher.
 *Class Penalty: Large weapons penalty against ships of size Corvette and smaller.

Dreadnought: Larger than a Battleship, these Super-Dreadnoughts are the most advanced and heavily armed vessels available. They are designed for long-range engagements, to take an incredible amount of damage, and are a crucial symbol of galactic power. Dreadnought's, like Battleships, are also vulnerable to much smaller, cheaper ordinance and craft.
 *Class Bonus: Range bonus. Weapons/Hitpoint bonus when in other civ's area of influence. Weapons bonus against ships of size Cruiser and higher.
 *Class Penalty: Weapons penalty against ships of size Frigate and smaller.

  Hull sizes effect ship manoeuverability, thus giving certain hull sizes bonuses and penalties against various other hull sizes. Weapon types could also be more/less effective against certain types of classes and hull sizes.

Galactic Civilizations 2. GC2 got "caught up in the graphics too much". You're really going with that one? You're really saying that a company that is run by the AI programmer for GC2 was "caught up in the graphics too much"? A game who's graphical quality and art direction is... weak at best was "caught up in the graphics too much".

Um, if you want to believe that, fine.

How's that a problem? I've already written a fairly convincing diatribe on how the attacker advantage creates poor gameplay, and compared it to a game with defender advantage and how that creates better gameplay.

You're missing something. Purely defensive play fails, not because defending any one target is hard, but because of the economic pressures of trying to defend everywhere all at once. That is, it has nothing to do with the actual nature of combat, and has everything to do with the cost of units.

So even if the defender does have a tactical advantage, they had to massively invest in their economy to pull it off. Which means that you should be able to out-tech them.

Also, this is a game; playing defensively should be a viable strategy. A player should be able to invest in defensive techs and build defensive ships and be reasonably well assured that he can't be attacked successfully without an equally massive effort on the part of the attacker.

Yes, it can.

A one-dimensional military is not a good thing. It means that building a military to defend yourself is a hostile action. Everyone will see you building a military and they have to assume it is for attacking purposes. By having a split between offensive and defensive ships, you can have a situation where your have a fairly low attack rating, but have many of your world be neigh-impregniable fortress worlds.

Having two separate sets of military units creates strategy, both at the level of choosing where to attack and at the level of choosing how to best protect yourself. When someone asks "how should I defend my empire," there shouldn't be one right answer.

It can't take up tiles. Anything that takes up tiles that isn't directly related to the economic function of that city isn't worthwhile. It has to consume some other resource. Or you can upgrade a StarPort into it.

But you can have an improvement also improve planet quality (absolute, in terms of tiles) by 1-so that it doesn't really take up a tile.

As long as it doesn't stick if you decom the improvement.  Otherwise I would gleefully abuse the $%@#* out of that.

Problem being out-teching the defender swings the advantage back to the attacker.  I don't see it making much sense to say "out-tech" if the results don't follow, if the attacking fleet of higher-tech doesn't beat the defending fleet of lower-tech. 

OTOH, if that doesn't happen, and turtling beats out aggression, the game becomes a war of attrition, which is not fun.  Influence victory?  Ascension victory (ugh)?

Isn't it normally the case (and doesn't it make more sense) to make generating offense take a massive economic investment, whereas generating defense is cheap?  But the defensive cap is lower than the offensive cap?  So setting up defenses would be useful, but there is an avenue for endgame that doesn't involve three generations of Altarians hurling themselves against barbed wire fences until their blood rusts through the barbs?

As an aside, I also really like the idea that attack / defense scales with ship HP on the offensive.  This is not THE solution, but it would make a good part of the solution.

I don't know, I haven't studied any historical inter-stellar societies (HAR HAR), but this certainly IS the case with GC2.  The Influence system is, in fact, centered entirely around inter-stellar societies interacting.  "Influence" is described as "food, clothing, and music," among other things.  Considering that military tech by-and-large becomes consumer tech further down the line (or even vice versa), and certainly social tech is passed hand-to-hand through tourism (another aspect of the existing Influence system), I would assume that inter-racial societies intercourse frequently (twice a week?  HAR HAR) in the GC2 model, and there are plenty of opportunities to get some hints as to How That Thing Works.

Also, someone earlier suggested dead-end techs?  I can't find it, now.  But I would like to stress how much I hate this idea: just reading it made me screw up my face and go "EWWW."  It seems to me that's mistaking "challenge" for "luck", as the player has no control over the how his effort translates into results.  So, yeah, it makes it harder to tech up.  But not in any good or fun way.

EDIT: aaaaaand one final note.  I feel like a large portion of this discussion is really dancing around the idea that the current implementation of military starbases SUCKS.  Aren't those supposed to be our world-protecting static defenses?

That's the point: if you want perfect defense, you have to pay for it. If you want some defense, it costs less than the equivalent attack power, but you have weaknesses that can be strategically exploited.

Ahh... the end-game. When everyone bottomed out on the tech tree and basically have nothing to do except throw their economies at each other.

Want to know how to deal with this? Don't let it happen. Whenever a TBS game reaches this point, it collapses in on itself. All of them. Run out of tech tree, max out your economy, run out of room to expand, and the game stops actually working. With no more economic stuff to do, the winner is the guy who's biggest at the end. And that unfortunately is usually a matter of luck rather than any kind of skill or intelligence.

GC2 is an interesting case, because it really lets you play with the knobs. Civ games end at a pre-defined turn-limit, but GC2 games will continue until a victory condition is reached. Even after the tech tree has been exhausted.

The solution? Towards the bottom of the tree, you should start getting super-weapons that can allow you to attack in unorthadox ways. You should start getting powerful ways to subvert planets without having to attack them, or of sabotaging them before your attack. You should be able to build Motherships that bring massive firepower and ability boosts to a fleet, thus allowing it to stomp most non-Mothership fleets into the ground. And so on.

They could work for that purpose, though personally I'd rather have them scrap the combat model and come up with a better one. I'm not a fan of "bigger number wins" and "roll the dice" in combat models.

Instead of providing a percentage attack bonus to your ships (how boring), have them actually involved in any combat that takes place within a given radius. Every attack round, they make attacks just like other ships involved in the actual fight. The enemy fleet can't attack the station itself in such combat.

Additionally, they can allow ships stationed at them to, if the ships have the movement to reach the target in one turn, instantly attack any enemy target that gets in range. That is, the attack takes place on the enemy's turn. Or, the attack happens if an enemy makes an attack against one of your other fleets/planets in the range of effect.

Now that's a good idea, although I'm not sure I would make it linear, simply on the basis that we can assume in combat that the engineers and command staff are going "Dammit, screw life support - if they get a shot through the starboard shield we won't have to *worry* about getting back to Proxima!" (Um, yeah. I RP in my head a lot. Why do you ask? - {G})

I would translate it from the percentage of damge to gradients (You may not rmember this from high school - 100 gradients = 90 degrees, 50 gradients = 45 degrees, etcetera) and calculate the sin(percent working in gradients)

So a ship running at 90% hit points would be running at 98% effectiveness, 30% structural integrity would give 45% effectivness, et al - minor damage has almost no effect (IMO here truncating works pretty realistically - even minor damage means there is one weapons battery offline etcetera)

Frankly, it works across the board - Making the self repair systems and engines on ships respect this means a ship with minor damage could repair itself very quickly, but a heavily damaged ship would need to limp back home to a starbase (or fleet repair dock? A ship that enhances the self repair capacity in a fleet?) or spend months out of action.

Jonnan

This is neither a new, nor an unrealistic choice to force people to make.

Jonnan

Speaking strictly in terms of offense vs. defense, "weaknesses that can be strategically exploited" is another way of saying "defense that talks big but walks with a limp".  I have to assume that "weaknesses" in this case refers to non-military weaknesses, ex: drained economy, low morale, or being susceptable to influence flips.

But if we want to talk about balancing those, we go up one level of abstraction and we arrive right where we started: building military defenses is not worth it because you can't defend against the culture war.  So they can't take your planet with a gun, but you can't stop them from selling you iPods.  And it becomes smarter to be on the offensive, again.

OTOH, if you make it so that defense trumps, then it's a war of attrition again.  And regardless of whether or not there's an end-game (we'll go there later), attrition is not fun.

There's another fundamental difference between defense and offense that makes scaling defense past offense a bad idea, IMO: investing in defense allows you to postpone offense investment, but it still allows you to invest in offense later.  If you build this "no one can hurt me" defense, you win by definition.  Given equivalent investments, at some point in the curve offense MUST beat defense.  I mean, even Chess has a stalemate rule.  Where you put that point in the curve generally defines the usefulness of defense in general, the viability of rush strategies, etc...  But it has to happen or the game has no progression.  Defending your way to the win?  Attrition.

What?  No.  Efficient maintenance and growth is not "luck."  In fact, reaching the end first is the whole point of the game!  I will grant you that in many cases in GC2 it comes down to luck - but not because this is a universal law.  It's because in GC2 it is too difficult to catch up if you fall behind early.  That's the entire point of this discussion.  How to make it so that winning early still requires you to play hard throughout to win late.

That's not a good solution.  It's still end-game.  If you make them too powerful, they trump the pre-existing tech and you create the condition you bemoaned earlier, where the game "is meant to be played" one way, but there's actually a better way to play it, and the AI fails.  If you don't make them too powerful, they're just another notch at the end of the pre-existing tech tree.

The only way I can see this working is if you mean for it to accelerate the end-game (and not, as you claim, to eliminate it.  Because, well, you're not eliminating it, you're just redefining it).  The thing is this is already in the game.  It's called Technology Victory, if you want the Super Infrastructure Win, or Ascension Victory, if you want the Super Military Weapons Win.

But it's not good gameplay. And I would also contend that, with a planet's worth of resources, it isn't terribly realistic either.

I meant that some planets are better defended than others. Unless you spend the economy to fully protect all your worlds, there will be some places that are better protected than others. Which means that an aggressive enemy can attack the less well defended worlds.

Again, you're assuming that GalCiv3 must be exactly like GC2. Influence is not a terribly good system; I feel it should be replaced with a better system, one that includes espionage as part of it.

Whatever the new influence system is, it should not be something that you can attack. So military should be utterly useless against it. You should not have to have a large military to use influence as a weapon (as you do in GC2, whichi is what makes it a bad system), nor should you need a large military to prevent influence attacks.

Does it? Last time I checked, having a military costs money. Each ship has a cost associated with it. Someone with a skeleton defense has the money to field a bigger offensive army than someone with only defensive ships.

And I'd also like to point out that the guy who's being defensive, unless he's also using influence attacks, isn't growing. The offensive player can take other people's territory. That means that he's getting bigger.

No, but try playing through a game where you get no planets with a natural PQ higher than 8. By the end-game, what matters is who has the best planets, assuming that everyone is playing well.

That makes no sense. Why would the AI, who researched these techs to begin with, be unable to use them? Are you assuming that GC3 will have bad AI? If so, you may as well just say it's an unfixable problem; if you can't assume the AI is going to use techs, then there's nothing that can be done.

Again, we're not talking about a GC2 expansion. This is a new game in the series; it will be different.