I found that starports are very easy to distroy, costing 0 damage to my ship when I killed an enemy starport. I think the vulnerability of starports is going to be a very difficult problem to balance out. My suggestion is to allow smaller "defense" ships to be built on planets and starports and allow them to "dock" in the starports, and/or allow defensive modules to be built on starports.
yes, why does it?
and why doesn't it?
really though, I don't care if it has weapons or not, as long as its defenses so its not a egg shell in space...a really valuable egg shell.
Defense doesn't work that way. It would have to have weapons, because with only defenses, no matter how great, it would still be destroyed by any ship with any level of attack.
¿Really? I thought it was who was stronger. Who knows how it is now though...Gaunathor!!!
I could be wrong... I'll check it out tonight if I have a chance.
Not sure I know what you mean here parrottmath. Do you mean you see no real difference in how military functions between now and GCII?
Why can't Shipyards be protected by varying levels of Orbital Defense Platforms? Weak platforms could be researched and built easily early on and further tech could lead to stronger more powerful ones. Perhaps certain races could start with one as a starting unit.
What about space mines? These could at least provide some sort of barrier to approaching ships.
I do like the idea of having the defenses/hitpoints of the shipyard be stronger the closer it is to its main sponsor and weaker the further it is away. This would mean that you would knowingly put the shipyard at risk if you move it out away from the main sponsor to get closer to other sponsors to increase production. I see strategy in that. Would make you really think hard of optimal placements on the map.
All defense functions do is to reduce the damage caused by the other ship(s). If you don't have at least some weaponry you won't damage the other ship(s) and they can whittle away your defenses with impunity until your unit dies.
BTW, that's the way it was in GC1 and GC2 as well.
I do not see how giving the Drengin early weapons has any effect on whether one builds ships on planet versus at a shipyard. Basically one will lead to Drengin fleet camping until the planetary assualt is researched, but there would be little counter to the massive fleet that they can amass in the time you research enough to counter that fleet. Basically it is still a loss of the game in either case. But I wanted to know if there was a difference that I missed.
Having ships docked at the star port would be equivalent to all the defensive needs of the base in general. I don't see a reason as to why a star port would need any defense platforms or more weaponry the closer it is to your planet. It would not stop any assault anyway.
I for one find the star ports rather powerful at filling the map with ships to fight everyone. I can't wait to see what the AI brings to the table in defense of the star port and attacking of star ports.
As to pirates, a simple solution to that is that the pirates do not destroy star ports but raid them for goods making you run the star port at 50% production for a few turns. Remember pirates are their for the money. So if they get your starport a dialogue should come up with a ransom note... pay us a percentage for x turns or lose your starport
By "whittle" do you mean it would lose on the last round of combat? If so then i guess a exception to the rules must be made or guns be added.
Thanks for the clarification parrottmath, and I again agree. I don't see much of a difference other than if the Drengin are immediately next to another player, they could theoretically win the game within the first 4 or 5 moves before the other player has a chance to research military and build a defensive ship. In my opinion, that is the only window of time in which starports are too vulnerable--because no strategy can make success possible. After that point, any player can have defenses stationed at their starport.
As for pirates, I love your idea of having some level of dialogue and decision-making involved.
Lucky Jack, thanks for the response--I thought that was how it worked. And yes DARCA, that means the attacking vessel would win in the end.
I recommend something in the spirit of MoO2. Rather than space-born defense modules, use planetary tiles to build star port defenses such as ground fighters and cannons. I would like to see a Drengin craft try blockading a planet with these defenses.
Urgent news! Terran High Command has just beamed video footage of a recent Drengin assault and the corresponding counter. It works!
I apologize for my ignorance. I would like to input that with a large and diverse game like this it is a shame a really crappy situation like this can manifest.
As a solution it might be best to give a "special weapon" to the stardock, were it can circumvent the current rules to survive combat by using its hit points as a weapon. Or give it real weapons. Or maybe just accept the senario and do nothing realizing any action may do more harm than good...unless you have a creative solution.
Now I have nothing more to add to this discussion that I can tell, best to everyone.
DARCA.
[quote who="parrottmath" reply="58" I do not see how giving the Drengin early weapons has any effect on whether one builds ships on planet versus at a shipyard. Basically one will lead to Drengin fleet camping until the planetary assualt is researched, but there would be little counter to the massive fleet that they can amass in the time you research enough to counter that fleet. Basically it is still a loss of the game in either case. But I wanted to know if there was a difference that I missed [/quote]
The difference is in GCII if you rushed over with a small fleet to knock out the planet defender, you could still build military ships to counter the attack.
You still had many turns until invasion techs were researched.
In GC3 you can't. You are a sitting duck.
What even worse is you probably have one starport between two initial planets, limiting your military options further.
This is only a potential problem for the first few turns. If your opponent has amassed a large fleet and you haven't researched any offensive techs, you are playing the wrong difficulty level.
Just for grins I played a couple quick game starts on GCII--playing casually as the Drengin, planetary invasion took about 16 turns to get. I never really pursued quick conquest victories, so I imagine other players know how to get planetary invasion a touch faster.
But that being said, 16 turns isn't very long to build defenses to thwart the Drengin invasion--considering getting any military vessel will take several turns of research plus however long it takes to produce the ship--you would have to pursue military research and production from the very start. If the Drengin are sending transports by turn 20 and you don't have defense yet, by the time you research space militarization, you've probably already lost.
So as parrottmath said, there isn't really a difference.
Of course, GCIII is a new game, and so while a comparison is helpful, it doesn't mean this game should be just like GCII. Nonetheless, I see this as a non-issue with the exception of the remote possibility of a starport being attacked on turn 4 before it is able to build a defensive ship.
Double-post, sorry...
If i have the energy production to initiate FTL flight &
If i am able to launch billions and billions of $ into space &
If i know that there are enemies out there, and pirates too
THEN
it will be MUCH cheaper to put a metric ton of missiles and point defense on that station from day one than loosing my only ever hope to survive that space race. Also i must make sure anyway that the first meteor or spacetrash floating around isnt just punching through my new shiny stuff, so i would put some armor and shields on it too.
It will also be MUCH cheaper than putting whole fleets on guard duty, which will also cost more than just putting that stuff on the base itself, because you would then need even more supplylines and administration.
I also think that moving starports / spacefactories are a bad idea. Maybe as lategame tech, but not from start.
I didn't read all of every post in this thread because there are many very long ones, so I apologize if I am rehashing something I missed while skimming:
I think it is a good thing that starports are defenseless, they don't take that much effort to defend. The are also very cheap to build, so having your starport destroyed shouldn't set you back that much. That said, there are some legitimate concerns about the current design that I have seen raised. One is that defending starports is something you have to teach players to do. Starports, especially those near the edges of your territory are very tantalizing targets, and I think players in general tend not to play 4x games super defensively. This is not a flaw in the game, but a conflict between fun strategy and good strategy. It's smart to use your first few ships to defend your starbase, but it's more fun to send those ships out exploring or threatening your neighbors' stuff. Furthermore, if your economy will only support a small number of ships, it's kind of a bummer to have to have them docked rather then doing cool ship-stuff. The second problem I see is that having all your starports destroyed makes you unable to produce ships to defend yourself. This seems like it is only a problem very early game, as once you have 3 or 4, you will be able to produce ships at the others to counter the fleet that destroyed your starport. If your enemy has enough strong fleets to keep all your starports neutralized, you were probably screwed anyway.
Anyway here are some ideas that might address some of these issues without giving starports weapons.
1) Make starports require ground soldiers to conquer: Say that starports are such massive and sturdily build structures that they can only be destroyed from the inside. Therefore, in order to take out a starport, you need a transport to bring soldiers to board and destroy the structure. Unlike invading planets, the surviving soldiers would reboard the transport after the destruction of the starport. Starports could also build a project that would transfer population from sponsor planets to the starport as military personnel who would defend the starport in the event of a boarding. This would introduce some interesting gameplay, as well as delaying when starbases could be destroyed until an certain tech level is achieved.
2) Require a special module to destroy starports: This basically the same idea as #1 but introduces a new mechanic rather than adapting an old one. Say that starports are protected by massive shields that are invulnerable to conventional weapons. In order to destroy the starbase, you need to have a ship with a special EMP torpedo module disable the shields first. This module would be very large, making the ship that carries it much less effective in combat, and perhaps even requiring a cargo hull.
3) Make ships docked at a starport maintenance-free: This is a less drastic adaptation, but would encourage players to dock ships at starports and not make them feel like like they are wasting the few ships they can afford to maintain if they don't have their economy humming along yet.
Just throwing some stuff against the wall, what do you think?
perigrine, I'm not so sure about point 2--I think it has some lore issues and tech implications that make it kind of... difficult for me to accept. But I don't see a huge problem with it as a gameplay mechanism.
I have similar reservations about point 1, but I think it is a bit more feasible--but not because it can't be destroyed--just that it can't by earlier weapons. I think this is similar to something DARCA has mentioned, i.e. that defense on starports be treated differently in that they don't have to have weapons to thwart attacks. Ultimately, this would be a short-term solution (attackers will just bring more/higher powered ships), but perhaps enough to allow players flexibility in how they start their games (not being forced to focus 100% on military from turn 1).
Point 3, I think, is very interesting. I like the idea of lower maintenance when docked--maybe not free maintenance--but in any case, a nice, subtle way to encourage keeping ships docked.
That's an issue in and off itself. I think battles need to have time limits, if it takes 100 turns for a ship to destroy something, maybe it should take more than 1 turn to do it.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms had multi-turn tactical battles (and I think multi-turn quick battles could be done also)
Only skimmed the thread so probably covered in some respect before but:
Even without hyperdrive potential space-faring races would have knowledge of how to get into space and how to operate weapons/defenses there. Having the game start you without any military capability makes no sense to me. Allow me to put weapons on the starport AND ships but basically they will be pretty much useless except for defending system assets (startports and starbases) since they won't have sensors, hyperdrive, or life support.
If you must add realism then those people starting as a pacifist race - without any weapons capabilities - and discovering the Drengin next door are supposed to and going to lose - unless a quick alliance (or just AI goodwill) with another military power can be made quickly enough to save you.
This game isn't anything like starcraft or chess.
Your idea would just lead to degenerate gameplay that is no fun for anyone because it would just mean the number one way to take someone out is to destroy their shipyard early via rush and then simply camp them and prevent them from ever expanding or having a chance to fight back. It basically forces people to only rush the military techs early ignoring all else in order to camp the other side or prevent from being camped. In a game that promotes multiple different win conditions and victory paths this would be a very degenerate feature because it would force you to focus solely on one.
Yes, I know the game is not chess, nor starcraft. But there are similarities to both. Each are a strategy game (including Gal Civ). Starcraft gives the ability to build up troops and defenses to destroy the enemy, similar to Gal Civ. There are other overarcing similarities that I could mention, but that is not the point of the analogy.
My point is that with or without star ports the point that Drengin has guns in the beginning forces the condition you mention. It is not going to be a product of whether or not your star-port has or does not have defenses. Whether you have a star-port or don't have a star-port. This is where I'm confused as to why people are so focused on the star-port as being the problem that needs to be adjusted.
Exactly! The starports aren't the problem, they are merely a symptom--but that's not to say that the Drengin having weapons from the get-go is a problem. I think the Drengin having weapons right away makes sense.
If by "your idea" you mean the notion that starports have no innate defense, then this really isn't parrottmath's idea, but stardock's. It is their game, after all. And it is in alpha. If the devs see that no defense on staports actually does cause the game to be less fun, I'm confident they will make appropriate changes. But I think they would be wise to avoid jumping to conclusions and wait for the game and AI to be a bit more developed before judging whether starports should have built-in defense.
But to answer the rest of your post, I think that after a couple more updates and tweaks, a rush will be only one potential strategy, and depending on the galaxy size, the player positioning, each player's exploration pattern, and many other factors, a rush/camp scenario will likely often not work--even if starports have no innate defense. Granted, as the game is now (alpha), the players often start right next to each other, and we are automatically at war.
Once the game and AI are further along, I'm pretty sure the "issue" of starports with no innate defenses will be a minor one--and predominantly only affecting multiplayer games. And even then, I think it will be a strategic issue more than an issue with the game (i.e. by the time your opponent finds you and sends military (probably not within the first 10-15 moves, unless in a tiny galaxy), if you haven't built any military and you have only one or two starports and none are out of attack range... that isn't the game's fault--by then you should have either spread your empire some or built up some military).
You are missing the point and failing to address the example I provided. Since your only avenue of expansion is starport and if starports are basically defenseless what happens when it gets destroyed by a single enemy fighter attack in the very first turns of the game and you get camped? At that point it doesn't matter how cheap starports are because every new starport you build will immediately be destroyed by a simple enemy ship. The enemy will be able to destroy all your new starports with impunity and expand while preventing you from expansion which means you lose. This is why what you propose is a terrible idea. Because it reduced an otherwise grand strategy game that would last for thousands of turns into a simple one of early game rush focused on military tech.
Camping wasn't really an issue in gal civ 2 since each planet itself is an unsinkable starport until it is invaded and successful planetary invasion is pretty hard to pull off early games without significant effort so you can easily build new defense ships from planets to counter any long term camping efforts or even just colony ships with alot of engines to outrun any enemy fighters to claim new colonies under their noses.
This is also exactly why civ 5 had the innate city defense and offense feature in order to prevent early game rushes and why a similar feature needs to be implemented for starports in gal civ 3.
I agree with Logan. At issue is the vulnerability and the way a player can cripple anyone early game if that is what they want to do.
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