I have thought of another feature I would like to see in GC3: Easier management of unit/ship stacks. For instance, when decommissioning ships in a stack one should be able to decommission the entire stack simultaneously. (If there is already a way to do this I'd love to know how). Also, when launching ships from a planet, it would be cool if you could select several at once and launch them all together, rather than one at a time.

That's a good point, and one I hadn't tested.  While I thought they had fixed that with the biosphere modulator, if memory serves they simply made it indestructable.

Something for GC3, at least.

Define "natural PQ".  Those class 4's I colonize become 13-16...as do the class 1's.  Or do you mean they're all class 5 and they cap at 8?  In this instance, I'm better off playing Altarians or Arceans, or at least bumming the tech off of the Arceans, to bring them to 11.

In either case, I would maintain that the class of planets I get is irrelevant, so long as it's at least PQ6 (cap a DL/DA colony, almost cap a TA colony) or preferably PQ8 (cap a TA colony with one farm), simply because I'm going to have far more planets than the AI.

My assumption from experience that I'll massively outcolonize the AI seems to contradict your theory that "everyone is playing well", though, so maybe you have something there after all.

-

Select the fleet and hit delete.  You'll only get money back from one ship, if memory serves, but it'll decommission them all at once.

And we run up again into two issues

a: a distinction between what I consider fun and you do. Making strategic decisions in resource management is, for me, fun - it's the only reason why I would play a civ style game. If I wanted to play Warcraft, then I'd stick a warcraft disk in the drive.

b: Really? We have issues feeding and clothing 6 billion people with a planets worth of resources *now*, and you think defending 8-20 billion from the invasion of an advanced (possibly technologically superior) foe is going to require nothing that would limit the other options on the table for the Senate Oversight Committee for Land Management?

Beautiful thought. Seems, ah, unlikely - <G>.

Sorry, double post...

Quick 'graphics' thought on the table, as

Fractal Terrain generation for planets, rather than 'raw' files.

Ideal method - convert the name of the planet to a random seed, such that given random seed 'x' and certain predetermined startup conditions, the planet Sirius IV will generate the same planetary crust consistently, and adjust according to the particular game (Extreme planet, high quality planet, et al). If planet name already has a raw file, use that, if you have a specific seed 'assigned' to a planet in the xml, file, use that, otherwise Sirius 4 automatically sets the name to the random seed.

I know some work has been done on doing fractals in SVG, which might let you 'zoom' in to any given level, but even if it was just the raw bitmap we have now, it would be neat to have a unique surface for every planet.

Jonnan

A-(Beeping)-mazing!

There is stuff here that even I didn't think of.

I wonder what Mumble would want to see in GC3?.......

It might just be interesting.

Maybe someone should invite him over.......

First, "Warcraft" (you didn't say which one) does have "strategic decisions in resource management".

More importantly second, what you're talking about is not "strategic decisions in resource management". It isn't because it's clearly the wrong decision. If there are two decisions, and one of them is obviously wrong or clearly inefficient, then it's not decision making at all.

Tiles are the most important resource in the game. They, and the planets they are on, are the fundamental unit of economy. If you want to know what the theoretical power of a GC2 nation is, count their planets and their PQ of planets. Obviously that is only their potential, but that tells you everything you need to know about how good they can get.

Tiles can, to one degree or another, produce one of 3 valuable resources: money, planetary production, or research. Research leads to better tile production. Planetary production (social and military) leads to better tile production and/or taking more territory. Money is required for both of these.

Tiles can be spent on other things too. Influence, planetary defense, etc. However, since those 3 valuable resources are absolutely vital to your success in the game, there is no justification you can put forward (except for personal desire) for spending a precious tile on something so inefficient as mere planetary defense. It would be more efficient overall to simply do what everything else in GC2 encourages you to do: build an offensive military and use it to defend.

And so long as defensive buildings require tiles that can be used for basic resources, they will never be worthwhile next to the other uses of them. It's one thing to have several things competing for valuable resources; this is good. It's another when the competition is so one-sided that the other side can't even make an argument for its use.

Please. We have trouble "feeding and clothing" 6 billion people because we're grouped into about 200 nations that don't very much like one another and think sharing resources is a bad idea. Once you've mastered fusion, power consumption is nothing. You get massive quantities of free energy from water and even deep space. Once you've mastered biotechnology, food is nothing. Hell, food is nothing now; the Earth through technology could support 20 billion people if we so desired it.

Who's attacking the world? According to GC2, you're talking about, best-case, 20 bundles of metal, 1 mile long each. Just investing 20 miles of the planet (nothing, in terms of planetary size or its resources) into defense would provide greater power production and weapons than the 20 ships. That's because planets don't need hulls, engines, life-support, and the like. Planets just need guns and the reactors to power them.

In terms of reality, the only advantage a space-based army has over a planet is that it can fire asteroids at you at massive speeds. That's it. And if they're doing that, the fleet in orbit of the planet is useless. They can't stop them without actually going after them directly.

GalCiv2 is a game. It is not an objective simulation of some future reality. The rules are as they are because one man decided they were so by his own personal decisions, game design, and biases. There is nothing especially unique or special about its rules that define them to be more realistic than any other Sci-Fi game. It is about as conversant with reality as Harry Potter.

Bull. I can come up with one immediately obvious reason to 'waste' a tile on plnetary defense.

It's a planet that is strategically located and it's conquest would fucking cripple me.

DING DING DING.

And that is exactly why I 'waste' tiles on planetary defense on some worlds. Because the 30 tile world with a precurosr library happens to be right on the edge of Drengin space, and it's loss means I lose my primary research facility - under those circumstances, you bloody well 'waste' a tile on a defense facility.

Question for you - do you have any idea where the best defended point was in the United States during WW II?

Not Fort Knox, nor Washington, nor New York. It was the great lakes channel to the St Lawrence - because that was a natural bottleneck in our industrial capacity, and a strike there would be crippling. It was far more *likely* that someone would strike other places - but no where else would have crippled the U.S. industrial capacity half so much for half so long.

And that's why the Great Lakes where defended more heavily than San Francisco, Miami, or a dozen other places. Because you can't protect everywhere, but you can ensure they don't get in a crippling strike. It's strategy.

And if you don't think I had orbital command centers and such on my critical worlds when I needed one for every planet, you're out of your mind.

I don't reload thegame when I'm losing. And I hate losing - <G>.

Jonnan

 

 In GC2 I never build planetary defenses either (other than OCC), because the AI is never really capable of invading anything anyways. There is no logic in GC2 to tell the AI to actually group ships and transports together, and then head for a planet. Right now they just limp haphazardly towards whatever destination each one sees fit.

Hopefully the AI will be a bit more capable in GC3. You say there is no point in wasting a tile on a planetary defense structure, but if the AI was actually 'able' to launch assaults with large fleets and had 10 transports with them, you would probably be rush building planetary defense improvements on half your worlds, if you were unable to effectively counter the threat in time with reinforcements. Especially if the planet was a class 30 with huge tile bonuss.

For GC2 they are useless, I agree. It's the fact that 1-dimension combat gives no 'variety of ways for conquest' and no 'unexpected things happen'. In GC2, it's build the largest hulls with most weapons and defenses in the shortest amount of time possible on every planet, and send them mindlessly to just simply crush everything in your path, game over... start a new game, do the same thing. (for military victory at least)

Not only is that beyond 1-dimensional, it completely in a way obliterates any and all military combat tactics, because really there are none. It's the 'biggest ship wins' or the 'largest number of ships win'.

I'm sure you can / would appreciate actually defining in this game the fact that different ships should have different purposes. That's how things work. There's no such thing as 1 ship does all the best. Battleships in WW2 would get obliterated QUICKLY without support from a fleet. It's just how it is. Sure, it's only a game, but the reason people play these types of games is for the strategy, and the more strategy the better.

Even if they only bring in 1 extra dimension to GC3, I'll be happy, but I plead that they do not leave it in the same 1-dimensional combat form it is in now (although it is still great fun, no denying that).

 

I must apologize to Stardock for my rude comment, I mistakenly thought about the game MOO3 and several articles/interviews I read, (Hey I was tired when I wrote it), and then I continued to ramble on a bit too much.

The AI in GC2 is quite good (give Stardock props), when they patch the last few bugs in the AI, it will probably make the difficulty levels that much more difficult.

Wait a second here. After all the silliness you've suggested abotu planets needing to be able to be survivable with a static fleet defense, you want to introduce a unit that would instantly reverse that? DOES NOT COMPUTE.

In what possible way does this differ from what GC2 already has? Currently, planets are often defended by a few crappy ships and a couple mid-to-high-end ships during the endgame, and I use fully pimped-out huge hulls to beat them. All this suggestion does is move the current endgame a few steps further down the tech tree without changing it in any way.

If you are not already using spies to further your influence game, that may be why you don't like it much.

I'm not sure how one would go about making any sort of influence system immune to attack; even planets can be targeted to further an influence offensive. Starbases are not the totality of the influence game; except for mines and a few well placed bases, it's already mostly planet-based.

Neither of your other statements are necessarily true, either. Rarely does having an inferior fleet prevent me from attacking someone with influence, nor does them having a bigger fleet stop me from succeeding. The AI can't use the same tactics I use to the same advantage, but that's true of plenty of other aspects of the game as well.

True, to a point. Unfortunately, the balance only holds if the ships are equally capable in both roles. When you tamper with the rules to make ships defending more effective , it means each planet can be defended more economically, making it feasible to defend all planets. Suddenly, skipping defense *doesn't* free up enough force to go offensive, or at least not on a worthwhile scale. Buffing defenses are an invitation to reintroduce trench warfare.

If you aren't beating the AI at the colony rush, you may be playing too high a difficulty. If for some reason you get stuck with crap planets even after winning the colony rush, you should have taken a few good planets from someone else long before the endgame.

To a degree, it is an unfixable solution. The AI plays by a specific set of rules; that is true of all games, not just GC. Once the player knows the rules the AI plays by, they will develop tactics to defeat the AI's playstyle, and those tactics will, almost by definition, be something the AI cannot combat effectively.

Ironically, this is demonstrated by the use of defensive ships in GC2. The AI plays by rules that say having ships defending planets (at the expense of offensive fleet) and humans take advantage of that. Quite simply, using ships to passively defend planets is always an inefficient use of resources - those same ships are more effective actually out in space even if you are using them defensively. Defending in an active manner allows the same defensive ships to be used to defend more than the planet they are orbitting. You can take the ship you would use to defend 6 planets inadequetly and put them into one fleet that CAN defend 10 planets.

Not quite.  I'm assuming the fundamental concepts of the GC universe will remain the same from one game to the next.  Given that SD has stated there is a long, convoluted, pre-written backstory to the GC universe, this seems like a safe assumption.  I find it hard to imagine they could change whether interstellar societies mingle without significantly rewriting their history.  Also, I rather like the concept of influence.  The implementation could use some refinement, but overall the idea of a cultural war is absolutely solid.

That's not how that's going to go.  Unless you mean that defense should be so prohibitively expensive that only one or two civs can afford it - but, if they can afford it, they're effectively unconquerable?  Because if defense trumps offense, why would any civ be undefended?

I'm trying to figure out your vision; I think I'm misunderstanding it.  Are you trying to make it so each civ can lock up only a handful of planets?  Or each civ can lock up all their planets, but it would eat up all their resources to do so?  When would that be a smarter choice than positioning fleets in open space to intercept incoming attackers, thus making the whole "my defense is my offense" thing come up again?  If your attacking fleet sucks more than theirs, you can't afford to turtle anyway; locking up your economy into holding what you've got while being unable to pressure the attacker means he gets to race to the win.  If your attacking fleet can hold off theirs, why would you cripple your economy by building more expensive things to do the same job?

I guess I'm confused as to your goal, because I don't see how anything here ends up as a more exciting or strategically deep game.

Ok, first: assuming everyone is playing well, then yeah.  The game's going to be a toss-up.  No matter what kind of rules are setup.  At least you better hope so; it makes no sense to have a game where everyone is playing well but only one individual will clearly win by skill...?

Second: the problem here is that, again, it's too hard to play catch-up.  Once someone gets a leg up, "turns the corner," etc... - which always happens early on - they can coast to the win.  I don't want to see that in GC3.  But the solution is not to make it harder to take their stuff from them...?  The solution is to make it harder to maintain a lead... right?  Defense doesn't do that.  It makes it harder for them to increase their lead, ok, but it also makes it harder for the trailers to chip away at the lead.  That's what Defense IS.

What I meant is that if you have game-trumping super techs at the end, then the correct strategy is to do the absolute minimum midgame development, race to those end techs, and win.  Is that the vision?  Each civ carves out an equal sized portion of the world, turtles up, and chases the super techs?  It doesn't eliminate end-game, it accelerates it.  (And stronger defenses i.e. a more static world makes this problem worse because you can't shake up the tech leader.  I put this in parenthesis because I don't even know if these two concepts are related to you.)  And if the AI tries to do any mid-game work - in theory, the way the game is "supposed" to be played - it will lose the footrace.

In GC2, military is useless to cause influence, as well as to defend against influence attacks (planet or asteroid mine flipping), at least I have never seen much of a difference. Having military ships in orbit of a planet do not seem to quell your citizens from overthrowing the planetary government.

In reality, a military presence would indeed stop it's citizens from overthrowing a government and changing allegiences though, since the much more powerful military would protect it's government institutions. As well as having an incredibly powerful militay force in the vicinity of a planet would either make people hate that other civ or love them.

Trench warfare is what no one wants. But buffing defenses (evenly to a large degree compared to GC2) would hardly create a trench warfare scenario. Right now, defense is practically non-existant. To create a trench warfare situation, they would have to buff defenses to a rather incredible degree.

The whole problem of this 'one ship is good for everything' would be solved by making certain ships do things better than others can do.
Take a Battleship for instance, it is a slow, un-maneuverable, hulking ship that is designed to take out other large slow, un-maneuverable, hulking ships. It may have some smaller weapons to take out smaller craft, but they are not best suited to do that job, therefore they do it poorly. A Battleship is a "force projector" and requires Fleets of combined arms ships to truly be effective.

Therefore, a lone Battleship in orbit of a planet would have no chance against a large enemy fleet of Fighters, small hulled Capital-Ship Assault Craft, with some Corvettes and Frigates supporting them. The huge hulking battleship cannot move into position fast enough to be able to destroy a combined fleet designed to take on solo large ships.

On the other hand, a small fleet of ships, defender class vessels designed to defend a planet, along with a frigate and some corvettes would stand a very high chance of defeating the same enemy fleet mentioned above.

This is how Stardock needs to implement more strategy and better defense into the game. When you think about it for a minute, it's almost common sense, even spaceships have strengths and weaknesses... NASA and other space agencies have to create spacecraft with specific goals and purposes... it would be no different in the future, and should be no different in GC3.

I think there's a tipping point.  Either you buff defense to the point where it still doesn't match up to offense - in which case, no change, so it's as if you did nothing - or you buff defense above offense - in which case, trench warfare.

I think that's the point he was making.  That's the point I'm making, anyway.

The only thing you can do, really, is make defense peak earlier.  If trench warfare is temporary, that's ok.  It can't be there anymore in the late- and end-game, though.  Which means by the late game offense must have overtaken defense.

(Of course, the later this happens, the worse the problem of not being able to catch the leader.  But I won't harp on this.)

The scenarios that would need to be compared are whether building the fleet of defense-specific ships is cheaper, faster, or more effective than building the battleship, and whether defending multiple planets is more effectively accomplished by having one or two planets defended with such a fleet (and the others with minimal or no defense), or whether having a single multiple-battleship fleet in a position to intercept the incoming invasion is better. Or possibly even a battleship designed to swat multiple small ships while taking what they can hand out.

Well, this would be up to what values Stardock would assign such vessels. But it would be similar to how Civ4 e.g. only gave units 1 value (which I can't believe they did! what a NO-NO) but assigned units to have certain strengths.

Above example would signify that Battleships are designed to destroy other large hulled ships. This is what Battleships have been designed to do (the best) ever since they came into existence. Their weak point was that they were exremely vulnerable to certain other craft (Submarines in WW2). Same should apply in GalCiv3.

When you design a ship, your hull size selection and class selection will have benefits and penalties that apply... thus making the largest uber hull ship not necessarily the best depending on your objective. Sending a lone battleship out, it would be vulnerable to fleets of small ships designed to take out large vessels. This would create a new atmosphere (or should I say, a new empty vacuum) of fleet tactics and fleet strategies.

Example... A lone Battleship (that is vulnerable to smaller craft) uses mass drivers, and uses shield defenses.
 - A fleet of Anti-Capital ship assault craft, with several Frigates using lasers, and using shield defenses.

Winner: The bonuses of the small craft cannot overcome their lasers inability to pentrate the battleships shields, the battleship clearly has too much of an advantage, even though it is not designed to take on small craft, and has penalties when fighting them (the lone Battleship would be better accompanied by a combined fleet, than being alone). Battleship wins.

 - Now if the fleet of Anti-Capital ship assault craft, with Frigates were using lasers, and using armor defenses.

Winner: The fight would end up pretty even. A toss up, could go either way. Small ships lasers still have a hard time against Battleship shields, but Battleship has hard time against small ships armor... small ships bonus against large hull could bring victory, or battleships large amount of hitpoints could allow it to have enuf time to destroy the small fleet.

 - Now if the fleet of Anti-Capital ship assault craft with Frigates were using missles, and using armor defenses.

Winner: The battleship is clearly on the wrong end of the strategic space globule here, in every aspect, and would get blown out of the water (err vacuum).

Sure, lasers should probably have a bonus against small craft, missles (or mass drivers) should probably have a bonus against medium hull vessels, and mass drivers (or missles) should have a bonus against large hull. Therefore, a battleship using mass drivers would be even less effective against small ships (but would be deadly towards med/large hulls).

It's the whole idea of making uber-ships not effective to do 'EVERYTHING', and thus bring into the game fleet tactics. Combined arms, after all is probably the best thing they could possibly add to GC3.

But what I'm getting at, is that Battleships (designed to destroy other large hulls), would do very very well, against some destroyers or cruisers coming in. The Battleships though would not fare well against large fleets of small vessels.

Thus the best thing to have would be Battleships along with support craft (a Cruiser, a Destroyer, a Frigate, and several small craft) would be a cookie-cutter good (althogh basic) fleet with the ships available for almost any situation. Then it just depends on what weapons they are using, which ships are using them... and compared to the enemy values.

I pray GC3 (not literally) has some type of combined arms combat system, so that way building big is not always the best thing to do... you would have to have information on your enemy, recon information, or spy information, to decide what ships are best to build to destroy their fleets.

Just going to throw this out there...

I'm not interested in GC3 having a combat system like Sins or Homeworld, where you have an extended rock/paper/scissors system with something like 10-15 different ratios for how much damage a given ship does to another given ship.  Especially given the entire idea behind GC2 ships, which is that you design it yourself, this would not seem to be anything remotely resembling a good idea.

If we can keep it down to the three weapon types that we have, that might work, but the sizes and/or sizemods would need to be changed such that it's horribly inefficient to place mass drivers on a huge hull, rather than just a bad idea as it presently is, and vice versa with regards to missiles/tiny & small, etc.  (Assuming that the current weapon "themes" would be upheld, at least.)

Well, if they leave out the combined fleet combat tactic, what other ways could they get it off the 1-dimensional huge hull kills all tactic? (they could balance things a bit, but huge hull fleets would still basically kill-all)

Well, we could always go to the DL combat rules, where a swarm of fighters always won against a bigger ship.

What I'm against is FORCING the player to diversify his fleet in terms of size, and to a lesser extent to weapon types. Having to hand-build fleets, with the ships coming from multiple planets with different build times, is pretty much the definition of a micromanagement nightmare. Not to mention that the speed of such a fleet is limited to the speed of the smallest hull you are forced to use - small ships simply don't have room to have the same speed larger ships can, at least not while still being an effective warship.

Which brings us to the engine/speed problem, which I for one would attempt to solve by removing the engine components entirely, and simply giving "smaller" engines a slight miniaturization bonus to emulate that...whereas the "newer" engine techs would have a slight negative miniaturization bonus.

I'd vastly prefer a GC3 where you cannot have a 100 speed ship.  20 is far more reasonable.  But maybe that's just me.

(And can we please not have bugs that let me get a TS across the galaxy in a single turn?  Thanks.)

Due to abusability, this would necessitate changing at least the engine tree such that each tech has all of the techs before it as prerequisites, but I'm of the opinion that a change such as this makes tech trading more useful in the first place, as it makes each tech more useful.

The way I'd do it is probably not the best way to do it, as small ships would wind up being approximately equal in terms of attack to huge hull ships.  This is assuming that you revalue different weapon types based on size/sizemod so one of them is very large with a very small sizemod and can only fit on large/huge, while another is very small with a very large sizemod (such that it takes up 2-3 on a small hull but ~30+ on a huge hull).  This also has the side effect of having mediums be not quite equal but roughly so across the board with regards to weapon types.

The problem with modifying ship to ship combat, or ship component possibilities, is that in doing so you can make huge and even large hulls obsolete on the basis of their logistics alone, because fleet combat in GC2 is frequently inferior to a single ship.

I like Galactic Doom's Combat System.

It evens things out very well, and on top of that, I have always wanted to build mixed fleets.

I thought it would be something fun to do one game.

Then, I got turned into sub-atomic particles by everyone else because of it.

I was leading economically, militarilly, influencially, you name it.

But just because I wanted to build mixed fleets, everyone else pwned my ass for it.

And I haven't played GalCiv2 since (at least not as often as I used to), just because of the one-sidedness of the battles.

So all in all, I suppourt Galactic Doom in all aspects, and hereby give him +1 Karma.

Cheers!

Theoretically, I can agree. Unfortunately, that theory doesn't work in GC2 for this simple reason.

Mathematically, it is more effective overall to just build a big offensive military and use it defensively than to build actual defensive buildings and leave ships in orbit. That is, it is better for you to simply surround the planet with several fleets of ships than to rely on whatever fleet is in orbit plus whatever defensive bonuses you might get from those tiles.

You can still protect the planet just as well while having a bigger economy. Just intercept any enemy ships that get close.



Sure it does. It's all about the pacing of the game. The game should feel different at various stages of it.

GC2 does a good job of having the "colony rush" phase feel different from the rest. But after that phase, nothing really changes. You build ships with a number. The enemy builds bigger ships with a bigger number. You build even bigger ships with a bigger number. Ad nausium.

Being able to have real changes in how one plays the game as the game progresses is good. The jump to "superweapons" would change how people play the game in that phase. It's not just more and bigger ships with bigger numbers; it's ships that do fundamentally different things.

And I don't intend superweapons to be "offense wins." It is a different kind of offense that cannot be stopped by passive defense. Take Terror Stars. If they could actually move decently fast, passive defense would fail against them. You would have to have ships with faster speed that could intercept them in order to fight back against them.

"Superweapons" don't even need to be weapons. Maybe one race gets a (mobile) space station that allows them to teleport itself and any ships in that fleet to any location (within a range).



What I mean by that is this.

In GC2, to effectively attack a civilization through influence (assuming that we're talking about a reasonably sized galaxy. Not small), you need to use influence starbases. These are easily attacked and destroyed. Therefore, to effectively attack a civilization through influence, you must be able to build and protect your influence starbases. This requires a military.

If influence is intended to be an alternate means of attack, it needs to be alternate. Military should not be able to help influence, nor should it be able to harm it.

You're right that you can always just start attacking planets. But my main thrust is that the influence system should not have extra things that can be attacked. If there is a way to boost influence over an enemy planet (beyond what your planet creates), it should not be something that can be directly attacked with military ships.



You fail to understand the dynamics of attacking vs. defending.

If I have 10 planets, and I defend them with 5 ships each, then I have 50 ships. If defensive ships were no more effective in combat than offensive ships, then the attacker could take any one of my planets with a mere 6 ships. That is, to take a world, the attacker only needs an army big enough to take that world. This is very imbalanced against defense, especially if the cost of all of those ships is the same.

My defensive army is 50 strong, so I have to pay maintanence on 50 ships. He only has to pay maintanence on 6 ships. I spent slightly less than 10x the resources he did on defense, and he still won.

Now, if we give ships in a static defensive posture double the effectiveness compared to non-static ships, then things change a bit. He now needs 11 ships. I'm still paying more for my defenses than he is for his offense, but now it's only 5x different rather than 10x.

Take the same scenario, but I instead employ "concentrated weakness". I cherry-pick certain worlds to defend well, namely those likely to be attacked. So I put 9 ships on 5 of my worlds, and 1 ship on the other 5. To take one of the fortress worlds, he now must bring 19 ships to bear. He must spend 40% of my army in resources to successfully take one of my fortress worlds.

The attacker still needs fewer resources to attack, but defense is still useful.



Influence was an addition in GC2, so it is hardly a "fundamental concept of the GC universe".



Did I say anything about removing the concept of cultural war? Did I not say that it should be replaced, not removed?

However, if they invest in turtling like this, they have slowed themselves down. Problem solved.

If you were able to do that, then the game's economic model and tech tree structure would be faulty. To do that, you're basically saying that building a super-weapon would need to be free, because you certainly won't have an appropriate infrastructure if you charged down the tech tree to such a tech.

It may require putting some restrictions on the tech tree. Like forcing you to tech down at least 3 branches fully before you can start researching the big stuff or some such.

But we already have games where it does work: the entire Civilization series works like this. Defensive and offensive units are separate from one another. Defenders have the advantage in Civ: they get bonuses for being in the city and from fortifying in it.



That's easy to do. Again, CivIV was able to get away with it. Using a single type of attack unit wasn't a good idea, since it could be countered. Using a variety worked best.

The key is to lower the construction concerns. Rather than having ships that can have dozens of guns that all add up to a single number, just have 1. If it's an advanced ship, it could maybe have 2. Make it so that the gameplay portion of ship design takes no more than 10 seconds: pick your attack, defense, and utility module, and you're done.

The particular attack module would work best against certain defense modules, utility modules provide special effects, and the end. Speed should be determined by the hull; you can choose between 3-5 different speeds for that hull, each with a cost associated with it.

If you reduce the number of options in ship construction, but focus them for a specific and designed purpose, then the logistics of having to have 4 ship designs isn't a problem.

Also, micro-management concerns can be banished with improved UI. Fewer screens, better use of the main screen, etc, can go a long way to smoothing out such things.

So all you're really after is a mid-game trench warfare/turtling contest to be followed by late game superweapon spam? Thank you, no. This may not be what you really want, but it's the inevitable result of what you're asking for. 

I routinely take over empires in immense galaxies using only influence, and rarely is more than a handful of bases necessary. Hell, in my current game the Altarians will die without a shot fired or a base built, period. Influence bases are usually only needed to take the first planet or two in a cluster, the rest just domino. Hell, I've taken over clusters by buying the first planet or two and working from there.

The only sense you really need a military for an influence war is to deter others from attacking you, which would also apply for any alternate means you have planned.

Nope, I understand just fine. Your explination is exactly correct, and the changes you ask for are stupid and unbalancing. I don't WANT a game where 90% of my fleet is stuck in orbit.

We already have game-trumping techs, but you have to research to the end of 4 or 5 trees to get them (hulls, miniaturization, and weapon/defense of your choice. Engines are optional). He just wants to replace the current endgame ships with something differently overpowered, but that will be abused just the same. My current game model rarely has me building anthing between tiny hulls and huge, as nothing else is cost-effective.

I never played any of the Civilization games, but I have played other games that tried stuff like that. It always degenerates to one or two units that get spammed, with a few others being used in specific situations.

Specifically related to your ship design, check out Warzone 2100. It's real time, but the design is exactly what you describe. You pick a weapon, a chassis (defense), and a drive system. There were thousands of possible combinations, but only a couple ever got used, because you lost too much effectiveness at tank killing if you tried to use an anti-infantry system on even a few of your tanks. So all tanks ended with the most effective anti-tank system which was marginally effective against infantry and buildings, and a handful of specialty units for breaching defenses.

Note this limitation was introduced solely because of the unit cap, which would correspond exactly with fleet logistics in GalCiv. When you can only have a few units involved in combat at once, you must pick the most effective units available. Now compare that with Sins of a Solar Empire, with nearly unlimited numbers of ships in a fleet; there you can have varied units, because having them doesn't cripple your fleet in it's primary capacity. Imagine what Sins would be like if you could only ever control 10 ships at once - all the variety would vanish as each civ started throwing fleets of capital ships at each other, as they couldn't afford to use support ships any more.