One of the tedious things about late game Galactic Civ 2 is when you would face a large series of very weak fleets that you just had to slog through to get to the end goal.
Endless Space has the same problem, and actually it can get to the point where its almost a bug (the AI can throw endless streams of cheap ships that prevent your ships from moving).
I have a suggestion to eliminate both issues.
Suggestion: If your fleet is engaging a fleet that is woefully inferior to it, then two key things happen:
1) The battle has no inputs and no animation, the battle is done instantly (this could be made a preference option for those who really want to see every battle).
2) The battle costs no extra movement to your fleet. Basically its a runby attack, you killed the enemy so easily you didn't even have to slow down.
I think this helps ride the line between an attrition war, where you are facing fleets of cheap, but still effective ships....and a mopup effort where you are just going through the motions of finishing a race off.
Good idea; most of my games end up as horrendous slogs for this very reason :C
There are some problems however;
You'd have to come up with a ratio of relative strength that wasn't unreasonable to the under-powered player; frequently a well-equipped fleet of strictly "inferior" strength will defeat a "powerful" fleet of poorly-equipped fleet.
Also, the end-game "slog" is usually fought against ships that aren't all that inferior to yours.
IMO that kind of thing is a design problem more so then a gameplay problem. It's common in this gerne to give the AI massive bonuses as a way to increase difficulty, the AI often already plays at maximum "smartness" at low difficulty settings. Additionally in galciv 2 specifially the AI also has to compensate for limited ship designs available to it. This results in the AI having massive fleets.
64bit AI and ship/strategy data mining should go quite a way to solve this. Especially if some of the things frogboy has been claiming regarding practically unbeatable non cheating AI are true. Should the problem still arise, i think the solution should be in improving the AIs surrender mechanics, rather then any direct combat/gameplay bonus.
But really no matter how you look at this, it really comes down to deciding when the AI is beaten, which strikes me as a very hard problem both objectively and subjectively. Which is why id prefer this problem be prevented in the first place.
You might be grouping galciv in with other games with spam units due to your experiences, but the Ai is supposed to be really smart and learns your stuff*(?). So I am not expecting trash units attacking me in this game...OR I WILL COMPLAIN!
Well, I don't know about you, but if I'm doing my job correctly, all my opponents will be significantly weaker than me by 2/3rds of the way through the game.
I can say that I had this experience pretty commonly in Gal Civ 2. I could make fleets that were invincible to my opponents fleets either through a large tech advantage, or by winning the RPS battle so that my defenses made me immune to the opponents weapons.
Even if the problem is reduced, a subsystem to handle the cases were it is not may be prudent.
Hello (first post on forum, i'm intimidated ^^')
A basic solution to reduce the issue would be to automatically merge the isolated enemy ships into a fleet as large as enemy current logistics permits (i think endless space did that). It makes sense since if i was a pilot, surrounded by allies, seeing a big fleet coming in my way, i'll call my allies to join the fight instead of going alone to be slaughtered alone!
This merge shouldn't include non combat ships as it also make sense that you join a fight only if you have weapons to fight! (should it work if there's only non combat ships? not sure... make sense for non combat ships to disperse if attacked)
However, this solution only reduce the problem since:
- it would only work on one hexagon (which means still have to make your way through a bunch of dispersed small vessels)
- it's limited to the logistics capabilities of the enemy, which can be quite low
A more advanced solution should be to include all hexes surrounding the attacked hex into the fleet merging => clean 7 hex in one go.
An even more advanced solution should be to get rid of the hard cap on logistics capability and replace it by negative things like friendly fire, defense reduction and so on (the more beyond the current cap you are, the more maluses).
I really like that solution to logistics.
Logistics in the traditional Stardock sense is problematic. The downside is you might end up with problems with massive AI fleets like 100-200 ships, but wouldn't many Gigs of RAM solve that problem?
You'd probably still need a hard cap though- or someone would make a 100 ship fleet, and that could cause memory problems. Logistics is for the game's performance sake as well.
with 100 races and huge maps AND still have memory to spare, I think it won't be a problem....oh not 100 logistics but ships lol now I get it.
Even so, tiny ships are 1 logistics point so maybe I'm still right.
DARCA.
GC2 can handle 50+ ship fleets without crashing, even with the 32 bit memory cap. I have a logistics cap of 112 in my current Metaverse game. Somehow I don't think a 100-200 ship fleet will be an issue for GC3.
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