It's already been pointed out how easy it is to destroy an opponent by camping and blasting their Starports and this is worse than in GC2.
I would like to see the planets retain some level of ship building capability, say only Tiny or Small hull types (and maybe medium at a higher cost.) Build the larger ships in space, but you'd still be able to build smaller ships (and constructors) on the planet.
The ability to only construct a single starship at a time at the starport/planet is/was a little lame. Consider adding the ability to have multiple build channels (kind of like naval shipyard slipways) and allow multiple smaller ships to be constructed at the same time (both planet and starport) with larger hulls requiring more of the "build channels" so that a starport might only be able to build a single capital ship at a time. Perhaps allow constructors to add/enhance build channels to a starport. You could then build a seriously large shipyard in a secure area to pump out ships.
An alternative way to accomplish this would be to allow a single planet to service multiple starports. Then I load up the planet with manufacturing capability and surround it with starports.
Probably too late at this point, but I think the Starport/shipbuilding capability could have been just a starbase option/module. This would allow adding weapons and defense to the ship building capability.
I'm not seeing a way to get rid of a starport that I don't want and the game insists that I attach it to a planet before I can continue the turn.
--David
Why would the ships disappear? The lore doesn't say anything about the visual aspect of using of hyperdrive. However, even if it would make the ships disappear from "normal" space, because they are travelling through "folded" space, I'd argue, that we don't actually see "normal" space in the game. The game-map is a representation of "folded" space, with each tile (or hex in this case) representing one parsec adjusted by the effect gravity has on the folding.
Because...?That is somewhat backwards from reality where some types of military bases are constructed and then perhaps abandoned or moved closer to the front lines or more important areas while ship building yards or shipping ports are static (and juicy targets.)--David
i see it as perspective a starport is barely larger the the largest ship maybe 20% and mostly hollow whereas a star base is probably at least an order of magnitude larger then the largest ship
with the star port space is at a premium and i don't see them devoting space to engines whereas a star base would need engines so massive it isn't worth it
so what i would suggest scrap the base movement of the star port and create a tug module for medium sized ships
a star port can have 1 tug pulling it and would move at 1/4 of the tugs rate
a star base can have up to 10 tugs moving it and would move at 1/40th the rate of the combined tugs
this could also effect some of the anomolies imagine finding a lucky ranger but instead of a crew magically appearing with working knowledge of the ships systems you need to send a tug ship out to retrieve it and bring it back to your star port for a turn during this time another race might try and swoop in destroy your fleet and retrieve the ship instead
I could get on board with this idea.
Quit guessing Parrotman!
Star ports can move starbases can't unless they use a carrier.
Everything I say is a fact or a prophecy .
It is an abstract representation of travel on the ship. The ship doesn't need to disappear if the map you see is already folded space for that purpose. I go by lore instead of visuals a game shows, otherwise we would have Earth the size of Sun.
If I remember correctly, it was mentioned in a stream that it was basically a UI choice. Placement of the starport is important for maximizing use of planetary output; the choice was between allowing the starport to be repositioned or force the player to manually place each starport as it was built.
"We've got Hyperdrive, the great contribution to the galaxy made by the Humans. But Hyperdrive is pretty basic stuff. To go faster, we need to come up with other ways to go faster. There's basically two ways to increase how fast we travel. The first way is to bend space more. That's basically all Hyperdrive does. Ships still cannot move very fast in normal space; so Hyperdrive used immense amounts of energy in order to slightly warp space to make a 10 million mile trip seem the same as taking a one light year trip. The second way to make ships travel faster is to increase how fast they move in normal space. Bigger thrusters and what have you. We have some great ideas that, with some good research grants, will allow us to come up with much more advanced stuff."The first way is to bend space and that is what the hyperdrive does. The second is the conventional drive thrusters.
you know i still dont get this 1 lightyear is just shy of 6 trillion miles why would you ever want to make a trip take 60,000 times longer?
I would call that a typo in the gal civ 2 database. Switch out 10 million to be 10 trillion and then it is better, but only slightly
While it is more common for the statement "A seems like B" to use B as the baseline scale, it isn't entirely wrong to use A as the baseline scale. It's unusual and not common practice (and is in fact the opposite of common practice) and therefore confusing, but not exactly wrong.
Also, if you don't know that a light-year is five point something trillion miles, you might not know that 10 million miles (which sounds like a large distance because it has a big number in it) is a shorter distance than one light-year (which sounds like a small distance because it's 'only' one light-year). Mixing units, especially units which people don't use every day or which are not commonly used to measure the same things (and yes, I know that both light-years and miles measure distance, but you're not likely to measure the spacing of stars in miles, and there's not much reason to use light-years on a smaller distance scale), is an easy way to obscure which is bigger, and the less likely it is for someone to know the conversion or even the approximate relative magnitude of the units in question, the easier it is to become confused. I would expect that most people would be able to tell me instantly that a light-year is 'bigger' than a mile or even a few thousand miles. Whether or not they'd be able to tell me if a light-year was larger than 1 million miles without having to look up just how big a light-year is is another question entirely.
Regardless, the statement in the manual makes at least half of its point abundantly clear - both trips take about the same amount of time, despite being significantly different in total distance traveled. It might not be entirely clear from the specific statement that you really ought to be using the 10 million mile trip as the probable baseline travel time, but common sense says that if you're using a piece of technology to reduce travel times, then the shorter travel time in such a statement is likely the baseline.
I will also point out that we are not necessarily guaranteed that the ten million mile trip was actually the trip of lower duration. After all, the stargates, which are described as being a (slower) form of hyperdrive that was only able to send ships between any two stargates, predated the hyperdrive, and given that stargates were supposedly massively expensive structures, it's entirely possible, and in my opinion probable, that there would only be one stargate per inhabited system. Since it makes a fair amount of sense to use light-years in measuring the distances between star systems, but not much sense to use light-years to measure the distances within a star system, there's a reasonable argument that a trip of a light-year or two would be interpreted by a person within the game universe as taking less time than a trip of a few million miles, as the first implies intersystem (and therefore stargate) travel, while the second implies intrasystem (and therefore standard sublight drive) travel.
If an average home system for a species sufficiently advanced to have a form of hyperdrive is similar to our own system, then there are potentially interesting objects within the system at least ~3 billion miles distant from the homeworld; without hyperdrive or an intrasystem stargate network, such journeys would need to be made using whatever the subluminal drives are or were. I will nevertheless grant that hyperdrives do not appear to be capable of superluminal intrasystem travel, under the assumption that each move action represents a roughly equal period of time, as it takes a minimum of two move actions to move from Earth to the Sun in a GCII/III game. Since each turn represents 1 week of time (at least in GCII, not sure about GCIII but I don't see why that would have been changed), you would need to be capable of about 2400 move actions per turn before you could say that a hyperdrive-equiped vessel was capable of matching the speed of light between Earth and the Sun; if the comparison is to use the distance between Earth and Jupiter, then you'd require about 460 move actions per turn before hyperdrive attains lightspeed on that journey if Earth and Jupiter are separated by only one tile. Regardless, even with much lower numbers of move actions per turn, movement within a system using hyperdrive is still very fast, being on the order of tens of hours to a couple days (with the 3 base moves of GCII ships, up to a maximum of about two weeks for intrasystem travel, at least between the system features displayed on the map), and still likely faster than whatever the standard subluminal drives are capable of doing.
Well to start off comparing 10 million miles to 1 lightyear is the same as comparing real space to folded space. The reason why you would want to live in space in the first place is questionable. Maybe for adventure or because the planet is overcrowded in the first place. Other than that you would think the reason is the same. Jobs tourism resources military. As far as starbases are concerned i wold not want to see an ai that couldnt play it.
This weeks issue of space weekly has been passing the time on those long journeys for my empires pilots.
It really doesn't matter that you're comparing real space to folded space. What matters is the way that you get there and how much time it takes you. Given that stargates are massively expensive, they were almost certainly used nearly exclusively for intersystem travel, while a slower and cheaper form of transportation was used for intrasystem travel. Since the slower form of transporation was likely impractical for distances in excess of maybe a quarter of a light-year while the faster form of transportation was likely impractical for distances of less than a light-year or two, there's good reason to assume that the two trips are made using different forms of travel and therefore that the ratio of the times required for the two trips might differ greatly from the distance ratio of the two trips. If I were willing to spend the money to fly for a 'short' trip of about a thousand miles, I could most likely complete said trip in about the same amount of time as it'd take me to drive ~200 miles; the time ratio there would be about 1:1, whereas the distance ratio is 5:1. If I want to compare flying ~3000 miles to driving ~200 miles, then the time ratio is perhaps 3:1 while the distance ratio is about 15:1. Given that a 3,000 mile trip would take about 3 days of driving to complete if I drove straight through, there's a strong chance that given the option I'd fly rather than drive, and so it's reasonable to compare the times taken for the trips using different modes of transportation because I would likely use different modes of transportation for each trip (or at least the ~3000 mile versus ~200 mile trip; I might be willing to go with driving for a ~1000 mile trip, but I'd be considerably less willing to go with driving for a ~3000 mile trip unless I have plenty of time to take stops along the way, and flying is just too expensive to consider for a ~200 mile trip, especially when between getting to and into the airport and the flight duration it wouldn't actually save me much time in the first place relative to driving). For that matter, if I'm willing to drive ~1000 miles but would fly for ~3000 mile trips, it's very likely that the ~3000 mile trip will take me less time to complete (at least in terms of travel time) than the ~1000 mile trip, probably significantly so (~5-6 hours for ~3000 miles flying, against ~15 hours for ~1000 miles driving). This is a real-world example of a trip where it'd take me more time to complete the trip of shorter absolute distance than it would for me to complete the trip of greater absolute distance, and one where it's reasonable to assume that I actually would drive for one of the trips despite flying for the other. If you can give me a completely new form of transportation that lets me turn my 15-hour 1000-mile car trip into a trip that takes the same amount of time as my 3,000 mile flight without costing me too much of the economy offered by the car, doesn't that make it worth comparing the car trip to the plane flight? The fact that I can already get there faster by flying doesn't matter for this example because we're assuming that wherever the breakpoint is as far as economics versus travel time kicks in for cars versus airplanes, it's greater than 1,000 miles but less than 3,000.
Another example would be a comparison of taking a trip across the Atlantic to taking a trip up the US or European coast. Flying across the Atlantic takes something like 6 hours or so, which is about the amount of time that you'd require to drive up about ~400 miles or ~640 kilometers. I cannot speak for everyone, but I'd certainly be more likely to take a six hour car ride than a two hour plane flight due to the relative cost of the two options, but I really don't have that choice if I'm trying to cross an ocean. Thus, I could say that it takes me about as long to get from Washington, DC, US, to London, UK as it would for me to go from London, UK to Perth UK, or from Washington, DC, US to Charlotte, NC, US, despite the fact that there's a considerable difference between the total distance covered by the flight and the total distance covered by either drive.
In short, if you're comparing the travel times for various distances, you really need to make an assumption about how you're going to accomplish that journey. I can go from Washington to London in about the same time as I can cross the UK by road or drive a third of the way up the US coast, and since I most likely would drive for either of the two trips where the total distance is shorter whereas I'd almost have to fly for the trans-Atlantic trip, it's reasonable to assume that if I were to make a comparison between trip durations I really would be comparing flight time to driving time rather than flight time to flight time or driving time to driving time. Since we know that stargates are available for use in interstellar travel, that 1 light-year is on the correct order of magnitude for interstellar travel but not for intrasystem travel, that stargates are probably not available for intrasystem travel, and that 10 million miles is at an appropriate order of magnitude for intrasystem travel, and that the paragraph in question is written from an in-universe perspective (which, I might add, is not necessarily written from the perspective of an in-universe Human), it's reasonable to assume that the 1 light-year trip's duration really would have been assumed to be based off of the stargate travel time rather than the sublight travel time whereas the 10 million mile trip's duration would have been assumed to be based off of the sublight travel time rather than the stargate travel time, and therefore it becomes reasonable to assume that the 1 light-year trip may really have taken less time than the 10 million mile trip since stargates presumably offer a much greater average speed (using real-space distance) than the sublight drives do, at least for long-distance travel.
Joe your scaring me and straining my eyes with your posts. At least on the cellular version on this site it looks difficult to read...and it could've been shorter. :/
What's really funny though is when you said "In short" to start the third paragraph! Lol
andwho I agree with you.*
DARCA.
From my original thoughts...
I'd still like to see a planet retain some kind of ship building capability, even if very limited in some way. It could even be as simple as placing "allowed" ships to be built in the planet's build queue just like the stardock. This would help defend a planet as well as avoid the stardock's lack of defense.
When I first started play testing I built a stardock at each planet. Eh. The last couple of games I've only built 2 or 3 and directed all my planets to support the nearest. This really cranks out ships and in the future would limit what I need to defend.
If the AI gets configured to attack the existing stardock design then it will be ugly.
But they are!
Check out the tech tree... If you research the 'Doomsday Ray' (last tech on the beam weapon track) you get to deploy a "Static Doomsday Ray Starbase Module"... If that don't make a 'deathstar', I don't know what does...
Now without the ability to move the thing I'll be in a worse situation than that idiot emperor that built his next to a moon full of saccharine 'cute' teddy bears ...
-David S.
Tugs are possible in the game... one of the engineering techs along the drive track gives rise to tractor beams, etc... so it would be possible if the devs allow un-anchoring for starbases in addition to starports.
I rather the alternate strategy of spares... build them, move/hide/mothball the extras, multi support my primaries... if one or two get 'jacked' I should still have something in system (or near by) to keep on building.
In as much as the beta is coming out in the next week or so, I guess we won't see any change in the alpha but...
If Stardock is really intent on realizing a 'ridiculously' sized galaxy (150+ opportunities to lord over other races... mmmmmmmmmm )... I really want this mobile starbase thing! I can get my own 'deathstar' - play with others with it - take it to their backyards - take over a planet or two... 'wash, rinse, repeat' (x 150+)...
I don't particularly care how it's implemented, but now that you (the devs) have given me mobile starports you've just gotta give me mobile starbases too! I didn't realize the strategic opportunities that have been denied to me before but now with mobility for 'deathstar's a possibility - it would be cruel to leave it out...
Look, if you (the devs) don't want to do the dirty work yourselves, please leave some hooks so I can mod it (meaning give me access to the anchor/unanchor UI)...
I know you guys aren't done with the tech tree (saw one of you is not scheduled to get to diplomacy until October or such)... could you add a track to engineering, something about structural integrity enhancements (different than defensive armor) that would give movement bonuses ("Scotty... I need more warp now", "Captain, I can't.. she'll tear herself apart") and enable a starbase drive ring module or drive ring enhancements... (and with the drive ring deployed the starbase now can have the un-anchor/anchor functionality) that plus a starbase hyperdrive+ and/or ion drive module (in each of the appropriate techs), would give a balanced cost effective approach to starbase mobility... if a player wants it, they'll have to work for it and it would be (at minimum) a two module cost - to go faster the player will have to increase their starbase's structural integrity and add better drives.
I also would want starports with the same functionality - therefor starports, whether from planets or constructors, would deploy immobile, with mobility added at a later date... this would actually bring cost of starports v starbases into balance - currently starports are incredibly 'cheep' for the functionality received... (this assumes that starports can produce driveless constructors - which is what I'm assuming a planet produces to make a starport)
I know there are those who complain, starbases/starports are not ships so they should not move... so, let's not have them move like ships... how about, can only move in a straight line, a -1 movement compared to ships for each drive tech, cannot join a fleet, etc...
Bottom line, I'd rather more options than less! what I am campaigning for, means if a player wants to play with more options they are there, if they don't want to, they can ignore it...
P.S. Hmmmm, the thought about the launching of driveless constructors (ships) brings more to mind... what about if we do......
Why? As you said, the tech is about reducing travel time. So why would you use a comparison that says, that travelling one distance feels now the same as travelling a much longer distance? There is nothing in the text indicating, that the comparison is between different means of transportation. So it makes only sense to assume, that travelling a longer distance would take more time. Therefore, it's the complete opposite of what you're trying to achieve by using the comparison. Namely, emphasising that the travel time has been reduced.
We don't know much about travel times in the GalCiv lore. The few things we do know is, that it would take 10 years to travel via stargate from Earth to Arcea, and that it took the Drengin 70,000 years to ferry their stargate to Toria (which is 20 light-years away from Drengi). However, we don't know the distance between Earth and Arcea (at least I don't remember it ever being stated), nor do we know, if the Drengin ships have become faster in the last couple millennia.
However, assuming that Arcea is the same distance away from Earth as Toria is from Drengi, it would take 6 months to travel 1 light-year via stargate. If we also assume, that the STL-speed hasn't changed, then it would only take a little over two days to travel 10 million miles via conventional means (unless I've miscalculated: going from a base of 6 trillion miles per light-year, you'd travel roughly 4,696,673 miles per day at 1/3500th the speed of light).
Still, even if you were correct, we'd have to assume, that whoever wrote the text within the setting made an intentional distinction between travelling via stargate and via conventional means when he made the comparison, and that he was certain, that people within the setting would recognise this distinction. Furthermore, we also have to assume, that whoever actually wrote the text in real life (most likely Frogboy) assumed the players would be aware of this (because the comparison would be very confusing otherwise).
If the star port can move, moving the star bases also makes sense. How far they can move and how fast is another matter.
Interesting thread so far.
That's another problem with SP's moving, it opens a slippery slope to SB's moving. And that's ridiculous. THEY AREN'T SHIPS. Did Babylon 5 zip around the galaxy? Did Deep Space 9?
Yes, that is true those starbases didn't move... but the Death Star did. We don't know how large the starports are in this game vs. the size of the starbaes. It could be that starbases are 100 times larger than a starport. Hence impractical to move starbases but not starports.
You've got me on the Death Star. I guess I just personally like my space stations staying put.
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