I think the tile is discriptive enough.
But for those of you who like to be specific ....
What new features do you want to see in Gal Civ 3?
Is there something that you want to see from Gal Civ 1 or Gal Civ 2, only you want it to be better?
Do you want it to have Real-Time, Control Your Warships, Space Battles?
Etc.....
So please respond.
ROCK ON!!!
Quick note - Starbases, or more to the point *orbital* platforms.
A: The starbase 'logististical point' system should be on a sliding scale. Massive Starbases should 'cost' more logistical points than small base stations. Something as small as a sensor outpost should cost you no logistical points to build.
B: You should be able to build Orbital starbases - they would count as defending ships in orbit, should cost relatively less logistical points than a starbase of the same size in deep space, and qualify (either automatically or with the correct upgrade as orbital command centers (unlimited, or at least larger, fleets in orbit). The starbase itself would have the same range and other assist advantages as another starbase of the same type - it effectively occupies the same position as the planet.
C: to build large starships should require an orbital facility (MOO got that right).Maintaining such a facility is of course a trade off in allocating space - a Starbase might be able (assist in) to manufacturing Battleships, but be relatively weak gun wise, in the same way you have to decide between engines, guns et al on ships.
D: Large starbases, requiring no movement, should be at least as powerful (if not far more so) than a ship of the same 'weight class' barring other considerations. It should take a fleet to take out even an undefended starbase (Okay, I can do it with a Stormbird in SFC II - but it takes awhile I can tell you! And Stormbird's are wonderfully munchkiny ships - {G}))
E: Whatever logistics points a starbase 'uses' from the grand total globally, it should more than compensate for locally. In deep space, the coordination required to fight battles in deep space is difficult. Within the range of a starbase, with a highly defended Command and Control system, sensors, long range weaponry, shielding and a colonel to bring you coffee? You should be able to coordinate a much larger fleet for the defense of the Rigellian Shipyards than for that little outpost at the edge of known space. Even if your fleet is not in orbit itself with the starbase, having the AI - 4500 "Devastator" battle computer synchrozize the fleets sensors, the starbase sensors, automaically cover weak points, et al means when you attack a fleet near a starbase, you are fighting the starbase as well.
All of which adds up, to *me* at least, to a more powerful defensive option, which is nonetheless copatible with the basic GC II scheme, has the same built in limitations as starbase logisitics may demand, and can be overcome by a sufficiently determined opponent.
Any thoughts? - Jonnan
I think recapping the conversation is generally stupid, EDIT - but in this case I misread a quoted section of yours, so it's a good thing I went back and did that. So the confusion here is mine, and I apologize. Two things:
1) my entire discussion around Influence was not for the Influence system, but rather for the underlying principle of interstellar communication as it pertains to Technology costs scaling down.
2) as a new point in and of itself, one that I only vaguely touched on earlier: I don't care if the Influence system stays as-is or undergoes a deep redesign. However, I want the cultural war to stay, regardless of its manifestation. While I don't know exactly what your issues with the Influence system are, I will say that my problems with it are limited to the sillier rules - 4.0 probability flip, for ex. - but the idea underneath it, IMHO, remains sound.
It's been a long time, but I remember Combat Mission having a strong tactical-combat AI. It might just have been because I sucked at TBS at the time I played it, but I don't think it was entirely my fault.
Now, I'm not saying it's good enough to beat a decent player, but ultimately if it's good enough to provide a challenge, that's all I'd ask for. Though I do understand the "player exploit" angle.
Without tactical combat, using mixed fleets with support modules would still work if the AI could competently handle them, but asking the AI to understand the player's unique mix of modules would be asking a bit much.
Note that this is distinct from asking the AI to understand its own pre-determined mixes of modules, which is easily doable.
We-Go is just the term for turn-based games where both sides' queued actions happen simultaneously (again, see Combat Mission). So both players queue up their moves at the same time, and when both players have hit the "Turn" button the queued moves of both players run at the same time.
So... if the GC2 cap of "ships in orbit" were removed, wouldn't that be the same thing? You could stack 100 ships in orbit around a couple of planets, or ten ships in orbit around twenty planets. You'd get the same effect, defenses can be "strong but breakable" or "really tough except for certain weak worlds," and in the end it's still more efficient to build an offensive fleet and fly them around defensively.
Ultimately, that's the problem I have with this. The "defense is stronger than offense" idea isn't just a comparison over a single combat. It's a question of efficiency of the overall strategy. "1 defensive ship beats 3 offensive ships" doesn't mean anything if "1 defensive ship" costs you more than "3 offensive ships" - unless the offensive ships are incapable of playing defense. But I don't think that's what you're arguing, since you're saying your system still gives players the option of running offensive fleets defensively.
You keep saying "defensive ships will cost more but be more effective defenders." But the question, really, is "if two civs spend the same amount, one on offensive and the other on defensive, which civ will generally be in a better position?" If the offensive civ will be, then we've got no change from the GC2 dynamic. If the defensive civ will be, we have turtling.
Are you saying that playing defensively should not be a game-winning strategy, but merely a valid stalling tactic mid-game? (And, by extension, that your proposed endgame techs would obliterate the stalling tactics in order to speed up the endgame?) Doesn't the "ships in flight have their attack scaled down according to HP, ships in orbit don't" idea cover that? I mean, I still don't get your vision.
Well bottom line, this was said from a blog Draginol that I found searching google, which was stated by him back in 2008 (some 6 months or so ago):
So they will be implementing multiplayer, planetary development will actually not be a jumble of stuff the AI throws in there, and there will be (as an option) TACTICAL BATTLES! YEA!
I guess you can turn it off, so it will work similar to how GC2 does now, just weapons and defense with nothing more. But when it comes to tactical battles, here is the definition:
MILITARY TACTICS: are the techniques for using weapons or military units in combination for engaging and defeating an enemy in battle. Also seen as the art of organizing an army.
Also: Tactics – 1. The employment of units in combat. 2. The ordered arrangement and maneuver of units in relation to each other and/or to the enemy in order to use their full potentialities. 3. The employment of units in combat. It includes the ordered arrangement and maneuver of units in relation to each other, the terrain, and the enemy in order to translate potential combat power into victorious battles and engagements.
So just from various definitions of what Tactical Battles actually means, I would have to assume that they will employ some of the ideas relating to military units that have already been discussed by us in the past week or so. Most likely I would think that this would include the use of Combined Forces.
Here was where I found this particular statement from Draginol by:http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/322138/The_future_of_Galactic_Civilizations
The best news, is that it is OPTIONAL! So those who don't care to use the additional tactical options, or prefer not to mess with all the military mumbo-jumbo, don't have to.
Of course, this is no gaurentee of what will end up in the final game, but is the only info I could find that seems to be somewhat official. As far as multiplayer goes, I was completely unaware they ever intended to add this into the game, I am somewhat shocked.
In GC2 the only way to win is through military conquest, or if you go for influence or acsension you still have to have a very strong military to win via those methods. Diplomatic victory also requires you to have a very very strong military so other civ's won't go to war with you and will stay in line.
Going for an Acsension vitory is the only victory condition where going on a strictly defensive position makes sense. And keep making strong defensive ships in the meantime (with enough counter-offensive capabilities to be able to take any potential enemies out). Regardless,
I think the Diplomatic victory should not rely indirectly on military as much. Something such as using your diplomatic power to eventually become head of the UP, then you control all galactic laws, thus 'ruling the galaxy'.
And it would be nice if they added a few more victory conditions in as well. (economic victory)... To increase your score, sometime during the game, civs should select a 'victory goal' at a certain point, so you can increase your end game score if you achieve that goal. Thus if an AI selected Military Conquest as it's official goal, and you were the only other civ left, attempting to defend against there might for long enough could give you a 'Defensive Victory' and same for you...
Acsension was a cool idea, but they should make all victory conditions be scored more evenly in the end game, so you don't get shafted score-wise for going the non-military route.
Why does it have to be all of one or all of the other? Let's say you want to go to war with someone. You can go full-on offense, and assume that no enemy offensive ships will get past your blockades. If your assumptions are wrong, you're going to lose worlds.
If defense is sufficiently strong, everyone is going to want some minimal level of protection. That's why your "remove the orbit cap" doesn't work; it requires you to invest too much into static defense around a single world to make defense meaningful.
Minimal defenses are your protection against a fast-strike. They keep your enemy honest; in order to take your planet, they need to be serious about it. They can't just throw a unit or two at it and get it for free; they're going to have to work for it.
Those who choose not to have this minimal protection gain a slight economic advantage, at the potential cost of losing worlds. There should be varying degrees of defense, each degree requiring more and more economy to build and maintain. Yes, there should be a breaking point where the defense isn't worth it. But in GC2, that breaking point is one ship; it's never worthwhile to have a ship on (static) defense.
No, that's actually terrible news. People think that being able to switch something on and off is good for a game. It isn't; options always have a cost.
Balance requires knowing what all the factors are. You can't effectively make a balancing decisions without knowing all of the minutae that goes into that balance. If those details change, if the user can decide what those details are, it is not very hard to get into situations where things work when the option is set one way, and not when it is set another way.
For example, there is an entire Super Ability devoted to making colonizing of certain hazardous worlds easier. This ability is meaningless if you turn such worlds off. A simple option screws up the balance. But it can screw things up in more significant ways too.
What if the idea behind having hazardous worlds was so that the overall pacing of the game would be broken up by a mini-colony rush, one that could be initiated by whomever felt the need to expand. That is, it's an alternative means of expanding after the colony rush without having to go to war. It allows a wily player to come back from behind by keeping the big boys squablling, while he goes off and takes some choice territory.
If that strategy were important to the overall balance of the game, being able to turn it off has an affect on game balance.
Note that this example is about something that was added to the game in an expansion. Combat is absolutely fundamental to the game; putting an imbalance there is the kiss of death.
A good tactical combat system is about as far removed from "bigger number wins" as it gets. Fleet composition, special effect modules, relative ship sizes, maneuvering; all of these should play a part in a good tactical combat system.
Such a complex system is necessarily difficult-to-impossible to simulate well. If the simulation AI isn't as good at combat as the player could be, then you create a fundamental imbalance. The player who decides to play the battles has an economic advantage. So you can either play through these battles and spend less on military, or spend less time on something that you don't particularly like, but have a harder time playing the game overall.
This gets even worse when combined with multiplayer. Do I dare pit a mere AI against a human? So now, I have to fight each tactical battle, even if I don't want to. That will make multiplayer games drag on even more than they would anyway.
As I mentioned before, a good tactical combat system requires a lot of front-work care and feeding. Proper fleet composition and all of that. That's just what you need to do to get your fleet to the battle. So, it creates this incredible complexity in ship and fleet development. This is very annoying for the person who's simulating tactical combat, because he's got to deal with this complexity that a more simplified combat system, like one used for non-tactical combat TBSs, would not have required.
It's a big can of worms. Oh, you can certainly make a TBS that has optional tactical combat. But will your game be better off overall for doing so than taking one road over another?
The best way to do this is to effectively make two separate games. Make the main game non-tactical, and then release an expansion that changes everything: resourcing models, tech trees, etc. That version would require tactical battles (possibly with a simulation option for fights that truly don't matter). Such a game would focus more on combat, so there would be fewer victory conditions.
There's a fundamental problem with that. A military victory, pretty much by definition, means that you own most of the worlds in the galaxy. The other victory conditions don't require this. So long as score increases with the number of planets you have, that will be the best way to increase your score.
Because the offense-defense situation is not linear, it's closer to an unstable equilibrium. Think of it as trying to balance a sheet of plywood on edge; as soon as the balance goes slightly one way, the whole thing falls over - and it doesn't take much of a push to do it. As soon as it is more defensively effective to park ships in orbit than to use active defensive fleets, that's all anyone will do. The balance you want to achieve is nearly (if not entirely) impossible.
To go back to your 50 ship scenario: I'm assuming (since you didn't state otherwise) that the 9 on 19 is the bare minimum required to win that battle. So after the battle, the defender is out 9 ships and a planet; the attacker is out 17 or 18 ships and now has a planet with only one or two defenders (which are offensive ships and apparently not nearly as good at defending). The defender will almost certainly take the planet back the next turn (with the defensive fleet from another planet, as I guess we're assuming that's all he has), at the cost of only a ship or two. The attacker loses 19 ships, the defender loses maybe 10 ships and regains control over the planet.
Even if the defender CAN'T take the planet back, the attacker lost 40% of the defender's fleet, while the defender lost 20% of his fleet and 10% of his planets. The attacker needs to rebuild that fleet in order to continue, and the defender is left with fewer planets to spread his remaining defenses around. Until the defender has lost so many planets that ship upkeep is preventing him from replacing losses, the defenses become stronger with each planet the attacker takes.
At least we agree on something. Optional tactical combat isn't actually optional - it's either required or irrelevant.
If the AI is capable enough to control battles as well as a player, there is no reason for the player to take the time to control a battle; it's irrelevant. If the AI is NOT capable of doing as well as a player, the player really has no choice but to control the battle; the outcome depends on player control, so player control is required. Making it optional does let the player opt out of clearly pointless battles ( e.g. killing a minimally armed starbase may take several combat rounds, but the outcome is never in doubt), but any worthwhile battle requires player control.
That's not what the problem is. The problem is that the different victory methods have score multipliers, which mean that games that otherwise would be evenly scored would gain different scores based on how you won. IIRC an influence win is something like 1.2, while a military victory is 2.0. This means if you were to set up a game so as to have both victory conditions available on the same turn (invading the one planet you don't own instead of making peace and getting the influence win), the influence game might score 120k and the military win would get 200k.
Initially I was thinking of tactical combat in a different manner, whereas actually it COULD end up being combat exactly like GC2, just that the player will actually control the battle... ? Turning that option off would just be a disadvantage to the player (unless that player was just absolutely terrible). And to destroy a Starbase that had 900 hitpoints with a 1 Attack Star Fury, you would have to shoot it 'manually' 900 times (900 clicks). ha...
That alone will make you constantly go back and forth to the menu to constantly turn it off and on. And especially since in GC2 it is pretty uncommon to have fights that actually end up pretty close, most are mismatched, you don't need tactical combat for any of those. Then turn tactical combat back on with a fight you would normally lose, so you can win it.
<----- turns into ------>
If we are lucky, maybe they will make non-optional tactical planetary invasions, where you get to control each one of the 1+ billion soldiers you have in your transport and get to tell each soldier who to shoot.
I really like the idea of logistics requirements decreasing as you get closer to your planets. In fact, let's go a step further, and make attack, defense, and HP increase as well, and decrease sharply the further you get into enemy territory. This will prevent players at war from simply finding a "core" planet and taking it out to score a cheap victory. If you tried that under my system, you would be so weak by the time you got there that you wouldn't stand a chance.
You've stated that you've never played a Civilization game. Every one of them, all 5 with their various expansions and so forth, have given the defender various advantages. None of them bogged down into "race to the end"-style stalemates. Well, except for CivIII, but that had nothing to do with the combat model, and more to do with the fact that if you had more than like 12 cities, they'd be useless due to rampant and unstoppable corruption.
The empherical evidence stands against your supposition.
How many ships you have after a battle depends entirely on the combat model. There are combat models that would, for example, give you 10 ships at low health.
This is more along the lines of what happens with close battles in Civilization: the winner has weak units. They can self-repair, faster when in cities, so they'll be back up to full strength in a few turns. But if you had forces nearby to reinforce, but they arrived too late to save the planet, they can still take advantage of the moment of weakness for the attacker.
It also depends on the nature of the defensive bonus. A percentage-based bonus can easily go non-linear or have unpleasant side-effects. If the planet could simply construct things that act like extra ships in battle (similar to my earlier idea for carrier modules that spawn ships at the beginning of battle), it could provide a reasonably controllable defense bonus.
There's also the time commitment. Look at the Total War series as an example. The battles are the meat of the gameplay; the TBS portion is something you do to build armies to go kill people. Battles take a long time. A good city siege can take 30 minutes to resolve. In a 4-hour session of play, you're looking at 1.5-2 hours purely in battle.
In a game focusing more on the TBS portion than combat, what good is spending that time? If battles take 5 minutes to resolve, are you going to forget the complex TBS stuff that you were planning to do this turn? And if battles take less time to resolve, then how interesting could they possibly be?
The purpose in having tactical battles is for those battles to be interesting and fun. Is it really going to be that much fun, or is it going to be fun sometimes, and route busywork other times?
It also means I have nothing but your assurance that this is true. I have no direct information about the relative defensive orientation of the games.
My biggest concern is that you are moving the game into the passive aggressiveness of Axis and Allies, where the defensive advantage was so great that the first person to attack in a major battle generally lost the game. This led to massive defensive build ups and, after dozens of turns of staring over a border, the person with the slightly better economy had enough tanks to cut through the defender's massive infantry pile.
The games I've played with optional combat involved a choice at the beginning of each combat, and generally a "delegate" option available even during combat. Do the hard part, then walk away while the AI cleans up for you.
And it's not usually a matter of controlling only the really close battles, it's controlling the battles where you can get hurt. PTO II allowed a competent person to take on battleship fleets with destroyers and not only not lose ships, but never even take a hit - all due to the predictability of the AI. One of the private challenges I gave myself in that game was to take over as Japan in April 1945 and beat the Americans without losing a ship. It's not actually that hard, because I can rip apart any fleet they throw at me and they never get to fire back. Turn off battle control, and it's impossible to win at all.
Of course, if they keep upgrades the same as in GC2, whereas once you take an enemy planet, you simply upgrade your badly damaged ship (to the exact same model/ship it is) solely for the purpose of restoring 100% hitpoints in 1 turn. As long as their is no enemy fleet within range, you are fine. And the cost is pretty cheap to do so too.
If you have the money, no need to have it wait in orbit for 10 turns repairing. This can be abused as well to keep your ships healthy... They should only allow an upgrade if there is an actual 'change to the ship', and all upgrades should take 2 weeks (turns) minimum.
The only problem may be that on Maps with Tight Clusters, if you get stuck in a corner of an immense map... and there is ALOT of room between you and everyone else, you would be pretty screwed (if they made attack/defense/hitpoints decrease sharply with range - perhaps a very minimal decrease may work). Logistics, on the other hand, would make more sense, since being far from your territories would show that it becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate your fleet (no com satelites, starbases, planets, and outposts to help coordinate).
But if you are FAR from your own AOI, your logistics idea, along with attack/defense being lowered due to hitpoint damage the ship has taken = would work well together. And the fact that being far makes it not-wise to use the "upgrade my ship to the exact same ship at low cost to refill hitpoints" (since it takes so long).
These 2 things, as well as some of the others mentioned would:1. Not give defenders extreme advantages.2. Make attackers need to plan their attack a little more.3. Give civ's across vast areas more of a chance (similar to the hardships of crossing oceans).4. Make damaged ships much more vulnerable, since that is exactly what they would be. If you skimp on your repair rate, you might as well just have these ships be suicide ships.5. Make it more likely a civ cannot bring just a few big tough ships over, and take over the galaxy.
Just to throw this in here, it's still around 2 years until GC3 release... such a long time! Maybe they should just scrap Elemental and start on GC3 now! (J/K! Especially since Elemental is the engine for GC3). I might be broke by then if Obama's stimulus plan doesn't work, since Biden says there is a 30% chance of failure.. so odds are with me!
"So your saying there's a chance!"
Here are a few more: Race-specific political parties (Because the Drengin Pacifists would probably have some trouble in the Senate ) , as well as race-specific AND MODDABLE government types.
UPDATE: Oh, yes, almost forgot: ship modules that increase repair rate, and have Freighters spread influence.
True, that is why I would make the decrease, very slight, if even preasent, in neutral space. The big cuts would appear if you entered the influence space of an enemy who had declared war on you.
EDIT: Just to clarify, when I say "a decrease in HP", I do not mean taking damage. I mean your max HP would decrease, but the same % of your health would remain. There are some problems with that that I am unsure how to resolve, so I may just take the HP part out.
Boy am I glad I won't have to worry about finding a job until maybe 4 years from now...
I was broke before the crash.
Such as if your ship has 1 hp left, you are far from home, and declare war on an enemy (while in his AoI), you would essentially destroy your own ship .
haha.. it's actually not funny, but oh well.. , I wasn't at any means rich then either, I was a contracted employee before, but that went kaploop... so now, well since the government is pushing wellfare, maybe I'll hop in on the bandwagon! J/K! Enough with politics, I see so much of it on TV, I actually I had a nightmare about Politicians (aka, the Snathi) chasing me around!
Yeah, enough about the stim... But having some Snathi in congress would probabaly be something of an improvement!
Haha.. hoarding their proverbial nuts.
I don't mean having Snathi as congresspeople! I mean releasing several armed Snathi warriors in the middle of a vote! That would speed things up a little!
On a more serious note, I would like to see a revamp of the requirements system to allow different types of requirement. i.e. some starship components would require improvements, some techs would require resorces, some starbase modules would require a special type of constuctor, and so on. Don't just have techs unlock improvements, ships, and modules, and have techs all be researchable without any requirements.
Snathi are squirrels. Congress is nuts. Snathi strike teams in the wells of the House and Senate would be so ugly...
Nice one Scout!!!
I had a great idea based on starbases in orbit.
I'm also trying to divert the focus away from the whole combat system argument.
If only for a minuite. So here's my idea......
There should still be a cap on how many ships you can have in orbit around a planet. But if you were to build an orbital starbase (economic, influence, whatever), it would increase that cap by +5 up to +10.
And the starbase would also affect the planet with it's bonuses (such as an economic starbase, it would boost planetary income on the planet, not to mention any trade routes attached to would also generate more cash).
There might also be a max cap on how many of them you are allowed to build in orbit (like 5 maybe).
But eitherway, they would be a great help no matter what.
And do you know how annoying it is to build 20 maxed out economic starbases along a trade route just to generate more income?
It still wouldn't replace those kind of starbases, but it would help eitherway, so that you could build 5 economic starbases in orbit, they would have all the economic and military modules built in (so that they could be able to defend themselves and any ships in orbit at the same time), and apart from that, you could still be able to build those 20 starbases going along that trade route (maxed out too) and be able to bring in an awsome amount of BC from that!!!
They should also incorporate a new manufacturing only starbase into GalCiv3. It would boost production on planets, and if it was built in orbit around one, it would greatly speed up ship building (not to mention social building). So you could have honest to god Shipyard planets.
It would be amazing.
Anticipating replies. Feel free to mention anything that I forgot to!!!
Let's Rage!!!
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