Newbie Questions

You want to give away a whole planet for a single ship? why that?

NOOOOOOB!! ;p

So to answer your questions

1. im not sure.. are you looking in the "User" Tab, thats where all your custom designs are kept. also if you save it as a template then your able to keep the design without all the weapons and stuff on it so you can easily edit it later if thats what you want. Also they generally need to have a different name then the one you were working on otherwise it wont save correctly. Im not sure really why its not showing u your design otherwise, there shouldn't be a reason why its not in the user tab when you make a change.

2. Could be a few things, different weapons have different cool downs.. but tbh i suspect a bug, i have noticed some ships dont fire for awhile even when on top of each other after one of the newer patches.

3. Im not sure, i think you just have to destroy/cancel the trade route and then build a brand new cargo ship to send to a different planet. its in the govern tab (far left second option i believe) somewhere there.. if you need more exact details ill have to check later i don't know off the top of my head.

It seems I missunderstood. Well I am a noob.

To #3: Send that trade vessel to another planet of yours and then launch the ship again. You can choose a new home planet.

Was that what you meant?

I don't know much about the other questions though.

reagrding the home planet of cargo ships: in my experience, the easiest way to handle those is to add the planet you want to designate as their home planet to the sponsor list of the shipyard where you build them. the game will ask you which of the planets in the sponsor list should be the home planet. the planet doesn't actually have to contribute any manufacturing points to the shipyard and the distance of the shipyard doesn't matter.

this way you can build the cargo ships on a dedicated manufacturing planet and assign the "trade planet" as their homebase the moment the ship launches from the shipyard. 

i don't think there is a way to redirect existing routes, though.

some general pointers regarding trade:

the bonus from the trade capital is really huge - it seems pointless to make routes that don't use the trade captial as the homebase, so it's probably a good idea to decide early on which planet will be the future trade captial and assign that planet as the homebase of all your trade ships. the trade capital and trade post scale with wealth adjacency bonuses, so it's a good idea to use a planet where you can put a few shopping centers, a bank and maybe also the economic capital adjacent to the trade capital and/or trade post - all of those buildings will boost each other. put the planet on 100% wealth after the infrastructure is built up. that planet alone can fund your whole empire, so every other planet can run at 0% wealth.

trade income scales with the length of the trade route i think, so it's probably a good idea to use some planet that is far away from your trade partners.

Do you know if factors like Pop effect trade route payouts. or is it just the modifiers of the capital/trading post that matter. I know pop directly is effected for wealth but not sure if that is also a factor in trade. Im normally just lazy and send cargo from my home planet to each races home planet.. wish i could tell/see where they decide to make there trade capital so i could then make even more of a profit. maybe they should give those planets there own little icon or something.

don't really know what factors affect the trade route output. i *think* distance matters, but not really sure if the population or wealth output of the planet has any effect. wouldn't hurt if we had some map filter/overlay that shows the potential trade yield of each planet. as it is now, i usually send my trade ships from my trade capital to alien planets that are far away. 

also, the default trade ship design is horrible. it's full of life support systems and no engine, so it moves across the map at a whopping 2 or 3 tiles per turn. i like to make my own design for cargo ships. cargo module, 4-6 engines, some life support - this way they'll actually get to the target planet before the game is over ;) 

Thanks for trying everyone

1. I tried to customize a ship and got the same layout as another ship (I wanted a fully loaded medium missile carrier). I then deleted the ship (although Ive already built one) and the strangest thing was that the ship became invisible??? (just a black square in the fleet list).

2. Well, Ive tried with long range missile medium carriers and often they are "out of range" while short ranged medium ships are "in range" in the same fleet in the same battle. I thought that maybe it had to do with the engines but even that didnt seem to matter. Would really love to have some more ingame manual in this game (the devs should take a real hard look on Age of Wonders III, that ingame manual is great)

3. The problem is that I trade a freight ship from one of my allies and tried to send it on a trade route. I thought it was just going over to the planet I wanted as starting point and go to the other planet, but apparently it didnt work this way.

Does anyone else has a suggestion?

Well, now I have another one:

4. Is it possible to attack ALL ships in a hex. Drengins are right now protecting their fleets by splitting them into single ships. That way I allways have to attack the same hex (only single ships against my fleet every time) several times and when my movements points run out, the blasted Drengins take the rest of the ships in that hex and run.

4. You need to build faster ships, I don't make warships that move less than 15, although in my last game I had one that had a speed of 132!!!

One of the XML files is called TradeRouteDef. If I'm reading that file correctly, a standard or slave trade route should have a base value of

0.05 * [planet "incomes"] + max(1, min(250, 0.025 * [trade route length])) + max(1, min(250, 0.1 * [trade route age]))

A luxury trade route should have a base value of

0.1 * [planet "incomes"] + max(1, min(250, 0.05 * [trade route length])) + max(1, min(250, 0.1 * [trade route age]))

Luxury trade routes should additionally grant +5% influence and morale to the host colony, while slave trade routes should grant +5% production to the host colony. All three types of trade routes should grant +1 morale to the colony if at least one of the empires involved has the Entrepreneur faction trait. This base value is then multiplied by the trade route value bonuses which apply to the planet in question.

It should be noted that the "planet income" modifier listed in TradeRouteDef.XML appears to be based off of planetary production rather than any specific to planetary income. I have a (somewhat modded, but nothing specifically aimed at trade routes) test game where Earth is specialized for manufacturing and has a population of 61.4 (production of ~109) with -39.5 income while another world is specialized for wealth and has population of 27.5 (production of 61.9) with 2070.8 net income, while Drengi (my trading partner) has a population of 17 (production of 22) and a net income of 11.3. The Earth-Drengi route 6.6 of its base value from the incomes of Earth and Drengi according to the tool tip for the trade route in the Govern screen, while the other colony's trade route gets 4.2 of its base value from the incomes of my other colony and Drengi (again according to the tool tip). 5% of 2070 is 103.5, so clearly net income is not used to compute the bonus from trade planet "incomes," but 5% of 83.9 (22 production from Drengi + 61.9 production from my colony) is 4.195, which is rather similar to the value of 4.2 listed for that trade route's bonus from trade planet "incomes." Similarly, when we check Earth-Drengi, we see that 0.05 * (109 + 22) = 6.55 and that the Earth-Drengi trade route has a bonus of 6.6 from trade planet "income." Note that if you have structures (or projects, if you've modded the existing projects or added new ones) giving bonuses to gross income (e.g. v1.01 Prometheon Pleasure Parks), this bonus will NOT affect the trade route value.

This indicates that the best trade worlds are high population worlds, preferably with bonuses to base production (high approval, stacked Economic Rings, Durantium Refineries, Thalan Hives, perhaps a few other things; note that despite v1.02's renaming of the tool-tip to indicate that the Durantium Refinery and probably everything else that gave production bonuses give bonuses to "total manufacturing," the structures themselves still give their bonus to a planet's base production before any modifiers) and trade route value multipliers.

This also indicates that trade on smaller maps tends towards pointless; smaller maps cannot accommodate long trade routes, and tend to be relatively short, which imposes several constraints on the two main contributors to a trade route's value. It just isn't feasible to make up for significantly shorter trade route lengths by way of population, not when only 5% of the planetary production goes towards the trade route value and planetary production values tend to be in the low hundreds at most anyways.

This would appear to me to be a very good rule of thumb, though I'd also tend to prefer higher-population worlds if they're similarly distant.

Since I havent gotten a real answer on many of my questions, I wish to return to the topic (and add questions). Bare with me, Im still only playing tutorial.

8. Is it possible to attack ALL ships in a hex. Drengins are right now protecting their fleets by splitting them into single ships. That way I allways have to attack the same hex (only single ships against my fleet every time) several times and when my movements points run out, the blasted Drengins take the rest of the ships in that hex and run.

Please, I would love to hear the answers to the questions if someone has them (or if everything mentioned above is just under deveploment).

AFAIK for #4 and #5 - no and no - trade is defined as inter-civ not intra-civ - pirates can destroy your freighter en route and enemies can attack the freighter to destroy it

The reason for #7 is probably because they want to avoid the exploit / bug where a ship enters the dry dock and the game crashes because you don't actually have the strategic resource to build it.  The whole strategic resource system is new (I think) in GC3, so there are some rough edges.  For the moment -- I suggest not queuing up so many ships in advance on your shipyards.

This sounds like a bug. I'd suggest reporting it.

Not all at once, no.

No.

Firstly, if you've armed your carriers and want them to support your other ships with their weapons, make certain that their role is not still set to support; you can set a ship's role when you save the design (and only then, unfortunately). Ships set to the support role are supposed to more or less stay put and out of combat. Secondly, it's a bad idea to consider any of the weapon systems to be functionally like artillery; the only thing weapon range can buy you is first strike, and ships do not attempt to keep the range open in any engagements whether or not doing so should offer them an advantage.

As far as ensuring that the ships reach the enemy at roughly the same time, I'd suggest designing them for similar tactical speeds, ensuring that slower vessels have longer-ranged weapons, and setting all vessels you wish to participate in the fighting to Assault/Escort/Capital/Interceptor/Guardian. Note that Escorts and Guardians are supposed to act as escorts, which I think means preferentially targeting things that attack the escorted vessel and sticking close to Capital and Support ships (for escorts) or Capital, Support, and Escort ships (for guardians). Not sure about that, though.

You can see the full list of targeting priorities in BattleBehaviorDefs.XML, if you are curious.

Thanks a lot wuphonsreach and joeball123, that really helps me a lot. A final question then, where do I find BattleBehaviorDefs.XML? Ive tried searching my HDD for that file and the net and come up empty handed.

If you installed the game in the default directory, then C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Galactic Civilizations III\data\Game.

Thanks, found it. Is it possible to add another, lets say Artillery, by copying and editing, without the game falling apart?

Without the game falling apart? Sure. But the new ship role won't appear as an option within the game, at least not just by modding the files that we have access to in the Data folder, as far as I can tell.