I like the idea of non-combat ships being able to break range. In fact, it might be a good idea to have it so that all ships can break range on AutoPilot, but you cannot attack, invade, maybe even colonize or construct while out of range. As for chess... you can learn the rules in an afternoon, but learning how to USE the rules, how to use the strategies, is much more difficult. However, I think all of use can agree that GC2 is more entertaining than chess. It is also more complex. Thus, complexity is not the sort of game-destroying evil you make it out to be. The fact is, games with no complexity are BORING. You either need to make the existing rules more detailed, or add new ones, in order to get rid of that.

 How about this: you not only can't do anything, but you can't change autopilot destinations until you get there. So, if a big ship gets in your way, you have to wait until it moves  (if it's friendly) or get clobbered (if it's not).

I couldn't have said it all in one simple coherent phrase myself aside from using the previous car re-fueling but tricky analogy.

Nobody ever accused the TA tech trees of being properly balanced.

10 turns? Really? On a Medium sized galaxy, the galaxy is 50x50 squares. I don't recall the actual numbers, but getting 5 square movement that early on seems unlikely.

Well, there were also dedicated defense slots. But generally, X=1 and Y=1, except for the high-end ships, which might have 2 or even 3.

The thing I was mainly thinking of would be something like the current system, where you expand a ships range. But I suppose it could simply be a "Deep Range" module that just gives the ship unlimited range.

As for keeping these off of combat ships, that easy. The non-combat chassis should have something like 3 utility module slots on it and no attack or defense slots. And the Colony module or construction module should take 2 slots.

The problem with limiting it to a simple 2x or 3x range increase is the galaxy's random generation. What happens if the only habitable planets are just out of range? I've had this happen before and it really sucks.

Maybe it should be a delay thing.

Ships with "Deep Range" should just be able to act normally outside of range.

Ships without "Deep Range" should have their actions delayed one turn. So if you tell it to move somewhere, it takes one turn for it to get started. Maybe if it's really far out of range (5x?), it gets a 2 turn delay. And if there's some way to give a ship a sequence of commands, you can't use it on ships out of range.

Not since I learned how to beat GC2 it isn't

Okay - then, let's resume Alf list of (by now, too old to remember; btw, thanks to Willytmb for the swift rundown summary which helped tremendously!) suggestion_s status in a freshly updated format with as simple as obvious terms as we or HE can.

1: Slot-based hulls. Pretty much nailed up and nearly ready to integrate. Unless someone else needs to add precision to it.

2: ?... 3:...

Ultimate Espionage excluded, please everyone.

No wonder i only have 43 Karma Points and you're running high on all cylinders with 86 already!

Will you marry me? Once you learn how to read Franglo speech weirdness in one swift glimpse over the essentials?

Algorithmic GC2 intelligence aside, DeepThought screwed Kasparov's brain to an halt one time too many. Ya know -- machine beats human sort_of reasoning.

For the record, and not that anyone cares or believes me, I take issue with the moves (or rather, lack of moves, as the two games in question, if memory serves, were mutually decided to be a draw) that Kasparov made.

I was telling my roommate about this last year, and he said that second-guessing Kasparov was blasphemy.  While I was trying to explain it to him, I also noticed a move that Deep Blue (?) missed in one game.  The idea that I second guessed not only Kasparov but Deep Blue (?) basically broke his mind.

Also, Deep Thought was in HHGTTG.

Valid argument.

If you design ships based on available drop spots, though.

Large Hulls have soooo many hardpoints to pick from that even if you were to lower that silly amount in order to fuse (the principle at least) more or less into "dedicated feature driven" slots capped in terms of size, you'd be nerfing the big-numbers-wins ever so slightly that the limit becomes a consequence of your choices of weapons/defenses *nature & strengths*.

As you go down the tree & gain additional combat points, the value of these slots remain constant BUT benefit from the quality of items aboard rather than amounts.

Lets run down the list...

TSMLH hull sizes.

And let's take only a weaponry Factor.

T2S3M5L7H10 and these are not only Slots but they also are Hardpoints.

Huge still gets ten Eruptors by design & so on.

Abomination maybe. But, we must also factor in Sensor_RangeSupport_Engines_CapacityModules_Defenses_Weapons together as a whole if we are to level out the big to mid-balance necessary to still design powerful (but matching) ships.

If I were to spec it out fully, the progression would be as follows (these are ordered in "tiers" of hulls. One tech tier might have multiple hulls available):

Tier 1: (1 attack, 1 defense).

Tier 2: (1 attack, 1 utility).

Tier 3: (1 attack, 1 defense, 1 utility).

Tier 4: (1 attack, 2 utility) and (1 defense, 2 utility).

Tier 5: (2 attack, 1 defense) and (1 attack, 2 defense).

Tier 6: (1 attack, 1 defense, 2 utility) and (2 attack, 1 utility) and (1 defense, 3 utility).

Tier 7: (3 attack) and (2 attack, 2 defense) and (1 attack, 1 defense, 3 utility).

Do note that later Tier hulls do not automatically invalidate older ones. The basic Tier 1 hull is still useful for a basic attack ship up through Tier 5. That's one of the purposes behind the design: to get past this notion that once you get a new hull, the old hull is instantly made meaningless.

I would also not imagine hulls going beyond Tier 7.

Nonsense. It makes ship design decisions that much more crucial to gameplay. It also means that better hulls don't translate directly into a bigger attack value. Also, it puts a bigger emphasis on fleet mechanics and dynamics, rather than individual ships. You won't just be throwing a bunch of <insert ship name> into a fleet and call it a day. You need to think about how those utility modules interact with other ship attacks and abilities.

For example, most missile attacks are of type "tracking". If you add a ship to your fleet that gives a +2 to all attacks with "tracking", then you have improved the attack value of all of your ships that use those kinds of attacks. Of course, then the enemy comes along with their anti-"tracking" modules, that give their ships a +3 against attacks with "tracking". And so forth.

Ship design shouldn't be about how many "laser 4's" you can cram onto a particular hull; it should be about how you want this ship to function in a particular fleet against a particular opponent who is using particular defenses.

Note: the reason for having it be something like "tracking" and not "missile" is to create complexity and decision making. Missile attacks are usually "tracking", but they also usually do "explosive" damage. Anti-missile defenses gain bonuses to "explosive"-based attacks. But there will be some missiles, particularly late game, that are still "tracking", but do "kinetic" damage rather than explosive (imagine a drill-missile, or a missile that fires a gun rather than explodes). So all of those anti-explosive defenses are weaker against this new missile. Had they invested in anti-tracking instead, it would still work, since the "kinetic" missile would still have "tracking". And there would also be late-game missiles that don't have "tracking" but still are "explosive".

Now that he's explained his ideas a bit more, I believe I'll quote myself:

Such a scheme would actively discourage the research of higher ship tiers, as a tier 1 ship can have just as much firepower as a tier 7 ship. You're shifting the focus from *number* of weapons to *power* of weapons, but that is all. If I can't get more than one or two weapons on a ship anyway, why research that way at all, when researching higher on the weapon tree gives me a better fleet with no down side?

Not to mention the bit about turning fleets into mobile starbase arrays. Load the thing with the cheapest armed hulls you can get and let the modules do the fighting for you. Unlimited use of fleet support modules is not a particularly good idea.

And apparently, rendering that specifically designed fleet entirely impotent aganst anything other than its intended target. Rock paper scissors is bad enough when only three possible defenses are involved - this would incourage dropping defense entirely when it becomes too easy for an opponent to sidestep your protection.

No, it's not.

GC2 weapons are essentially one-dimensional; each new weapon either obseletes the old one (by being smaller and/or more powerful, thus overall increasing the attack value of the ship) or you keep using the old one. A weapon is objectively better than another, and this can be measured using math that can be written into an Excel spreadsheet (I've done this).

What I'm proposing is a 2-dimensional system. Weapons have an attack value, but they also have attack properties. A weapon that has lots of properties is worse than a weapon with fewer properties, since the one with many properties is more likely to trigger a defense bonus. If you have a weapon that is "energy, kinetic, light, ion", if a defending ship has defenses with a bonus against any of those properties, they get that defense bonus.

So a 5 damage "energy, kinetic, light, ion" may have a nice big number on it, but it is much more succeptable to ship defensesn than a 3 damage "energy" attack.

At the same time, utility modules can key off of attack properties to increase damage. A utility module can give "light" attacks a +2 bonus. In which case, the above 3 damage "energy" attack doesn't benefit, but the 5 damage attack gets a nice +2. And that bonus can go towards canceling out any defense bonuses the defender gets, thus putting the advantage back in your hands.

Indeed, the 5 damage attack would be able to get bonuses from multiple different bonus giving powers, just as it is succeptable to lots of enemy defense bonus giving powers. Which one you want to use depends on the situation and the ships your enemy is using.

Unlimited? They're utility modules. They have to go into a utility module slot. Also, I imagine that global "all allied ship" bonuses would be fairly high-tech modules. Lower-end ones would be targeted bonuses to certain ships, targeted penalties to enemy ships, or provide abilities (creating fighters, healing after combat, etc).

Attack bonuses are based on the properties of the attacking ship(s). And the defense bonuses are based on the properties of the ship that is attacking. So if you have a module that gives your ships a +2 defense bonus against "laser" weapons, it will be entirely useless against any attack that doesn't have the "laser" property.

The design of the modules should be such that a fleet cannot make itself essentially invulnerable to all attacks. This is not difficult to do; it's all a matter of proper module design.