There is a limit on performance on rendering so many ships. Granted there should be no limit, however for practical purposes on hardware limitations I would think there needs to be a cap on how many ships you can put into a fleet.  

This is represented through the 'logistics' technology. Each tier of logistics unlocks a greater value. Ships are assigned a value based on size. Say a small ship is a value of 2 and tiny are 1. You start the game able to support fleets of 10 logistic points. thus you can put in 10 tiny ships in a fleet or 5 small ones.  The values I am using are NOT actual in game values but just ones I tossed out as an example. 

I'm not seeing that as an issue--its a single icon for a fleet.  If you want to see what's in the fleet pop up a new window that scrolls and shows however many ships at a time that the developer thinks is appropriate.

The planet, ship, starbase, resource display list on the right already does this kind of thing and can certainly display more than a handful of items.

--David

I think functionally it's more to prevent the 'lets send all our ships around our homeworld to make it lterally impossible for anyone to launch a ground assault'

Sure you can always out produce the opponent. but is it really fun to have to spend turn after turn pumping out and sending ships to the 'final' home world in a MP game  just because your friend is trying to troll you?

I'm in favor of increasing stack size, if not unlimited, then some very high number. 

I'm not going to use the Spanish Armada metaphor.  Instead, I'll use Wolf 389.  Or how about the defense of Deep Space 9? Nearly every ship that could toss a photon torpedo was there, hundreds of vessels, not including fighters.  And then the invasion of Cardassian space?  How many vessels where there?

Or . . .

How many ships were in the battlefleet in Babylon 5?  More then what we're limited to now.

The Empire's Fleet in Return of the Jedi?  Or the Fleet in The Empire Strikes back?

The Dalek fleet in Dr. Who?

I guess I don't really need to add more.  I haven't even touched on Starship Troopers, or other literary sources.

It doesn't take any special "researchable" know-how to co-ordinate a handful of ships in Orbit.  After all, it's Space.  It's huge.  One modern day flight controller could handle flight after flight after flight in their own airspace area, and that's a much smaller distance.

So I can only conclude that the limitation is hardware/resource limited.  With current machines, I don't think this ought to be an issue.

Captain Tolan T. Grimm, Grand High Poohbah

Old Grognard

Glorigoth

Grimmian Union

Yes, you know what that strategy is? "Beat this stack of 10,000 ships now, sucker!" Moreover, while it is true that the people in high-level government offices are rarely directly involved in the logistical side of how you're actually going to organize and support a fleet of 7000 ships carrying 160,000 invasion troops off the coast of Normandy and land as much of that as possible in the shortest reasonable time frame, their ability to do a great many things is directly impacted by how well the nation's military planners can manage these kinds of feats. If I'm the President of the United States and I ask the army to fight a war on the Moon using a million men, it does not matter how much I want them to do it, there just isn't at present any technology, planning, or infrastructure in place to support anything like that kind of operation. Given that the game's species are more or less just starting to have access to long-range space travel independent of fixed jump gates, it isn't unreasonable to me that the game's species are not at present capable of fielding as many ships as they want wherever they want them.

You are not going to see any species just jump into space complete with a logistical organization that can support arbitrarily large fleets of ships wherever you want those ships to be. Several of the older spacefaring species might have some slight advantages in this respect, but it would appear that stargate travel was, for all practical purposes, essentially a slow rail network. You couldn't resupply on the way, you couldn't divert to account for changing circumstances, and you couldn't easily extend your logistical network beyond the systems where the stargates were built.

There are probably more realistic ways to represent the logistical issues involved in maintaining a fleet 30 move actions from the nearest base than the logistical limit given by the game, and there are probably more realistic ways to represent the command and control issues of fighting a space battle than the logistical limit, but on the whole there isn't much reason to change it, especially since such changes would most likely cause communications issues between the game and the user.

And yet none of these are possible simply by the ruler's command. Modern armies have enormous logistical tails, and even historical 'live off the land' invading armies often required some degree of logistical support even if all that that support entailed was replacement troops. Modern-day navies also have higher logistical requirements than most historical fleets despite size disparities; a single US Navy aircraft carrier carries a similar number of people and requires significantly logistical support than went into the (failed) Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponesian war. The ability of a state's military to manage logistical concerns has an enormous impact on that state's ability to project power; one part of the logistical question is organizing the fleets into units you can support while keeping the fleet manageable in battle, another part is getting the supplies to the point of use, and another part is organizing the supply side efficiently. No one, or at least no human living on Earth, has yet attempted to support fleets and armies at the distances involved in a typical game of Galactic Civilizations II, and it is entirely reasonable for there to be issues with the logistical side of things (especially given how recently the species really became capable of interstellar travel without the aid of the stargates), especially given the scale of the ships, crews, and armies involved at later points in the game.

This is the only one of your points that I would not dispute. However, I will counter by saying that there is a gameplay issue in allowing the creation of arbitrarily large fleets - namely, that such fleets create an extremely unstable balance of power. If a single fleet contains a quarter of my military power and it loses to someone else's fleet of similar strength (both in the fraction of their military strength and in comparison to my fleet) and only kills half of it, that's an enormous blow to my military power. Worse, allowing the creation of such large fleets means that if and when I establish a dominant fleet presence in the area it becomes much more difficult to dislodge me or even whittle down my advantage, as you're either stuck sending ships at me piecemeal to get off a few shots before being blown up or waiting 10, 15, 20 turns to build up a fleet that actually has a chance against the fleet I brought into play while I do whatever I want to do in the area and bring in my own reinforcements to further bolster my dominance. At least in GCII you actually stand a chance of being able to dislodge me through attrition even if you cannot defeat me outright, as it's rather unlikely for the relatively small GCII fleets to be able to completely destroy an opposing vessel or fleet without taking damage.

As pointed out above, logistics really reflects the ability of your empire to coordinate a number of ships to be effective as a military unit.

Besides the factor of supply and such (which is huge, and dominates the modern military above everything else), the other reality is that communications, which are necessary to fight effective, is an Order N^N problem.

Coming up with a technical and organizational structure which can handle directing hundreds or thousands of individual ships effectively is *extremely* difficult. The US Army is currently dealing with this, as it is now possible for a squad leader to communicate directly with the theater commander (even if it would never occur). It's extremely hard to figure out how to effectively filter information, process it, and come up with an organizational structure that can work well and coordinate effectively.

And film is a horrible example to look for effective battles. Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and any other space media I can think of all depict battles that are completely incompetently run, because they're made to look good, not reflect reality.

Logistics is a realistic and applicable concept.   Because my group of 100 people who have been thoroughly trained in current military C3I doctrine will absolutely wipe the floor with a mob of 10000 people, even if both sides are equipped with the same weaponry (and presuming I don't run out of ammunition).

I don't have much of an answer to the "click on many things" issue, because that's simply a result of scale. You can automate much of your fleet movement and such, but when it comes down to actual control, well, you've still got lots of things to manually direct.  About the only solution I can see to that is a "standing orders" ability, which allows your fleets to have a pre-defined mission that it auto-executes (patrol, search-and destroy, protect, etc.).  But even there, that's only a crutch, because it still can't remove the necessity to change those orders as conditions apply.

Quote, please.

Quoting parrottmath,

reply 14

If Gaunathor is asking for a quote... it must be ni impossible to find if it does exist at all

Well, I'm pretty sure, that DARCA is right in that a single ship doesn't represent multiple ships. However, I don't recall, if that was ever explicitly stated anywhere. Which doesn't necessarily have to mean anything. Unlike popular believe, I don't know every single dev-post.

Gameplay always trumps realism

Apple to oranges. You don't compare ship costs with aircraft costs - you stick within a transport medium because the design issues are identical. Small to large spaceships, small to large water vessels, small to large aircraft.   A small HondaJet private jet costs around $5 million. A 747 costs $350 million.  A Humvee is $75k. An M1A2 is $5m.   And so on.   Costs for spaceships are correlated with mass. And mass goes up by the cube of dimensional increase. I.e. a ship twice as big in all directions will have 8 times the mass.  And the difference between tiny/small ships and huge ones is immense; you're talking about something that may be 6 or 7 orders of magnitude more massive.

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html

A TIE fighter weighs in at around 4 tons. An Imperial Star Destroy (the common one from Ep. IV-VI) weighs at least 35 million tons.

Similar things from pretty much all SciFi:  fighters in the double digit tons, max, while large capital ships from the tens to hundreds of millions of tons.

We're drastically underpaying for those huge ships here, and I understand why:  because otherwise, star fighters would be practically useless in the face of even medium-sized ships.  Think about this, if GC3 used something even approaching realistic values for mass:

Tiny:  1-10 tons

Small: 11-100 tons

Medium:  10-50,000 tons

Large: 1-5 million tons

Huge: 50 million tons

You'd never be able to mount any weaponry on smaller ships that could effectively counter a larger one:  heck, you'd likely need a dozen or so Large ships to take down a Huge one.  This would make the game unplayable.  Still, I do think we should make the cost and capabilities spread a bit larger than it currently is. Cost in particular. Maybe add 25% to the volume and Hit Points of Medium, and 50% for Large/Huge, and then 2x/4x/5x the base hull costs.

Given the current GC spread, it looks like Huge ships top out around 1,000 tons, while a "medium" ship is roughly the size of the Space Shuttle.

If only you guys could see my face, gaunathor asked for a quote! WOW OMG I am going to have a heart attack! Jk wow.

I was hoping you knew honestly if I think hard enough I can remember most likely but I do remember seeing it being said pre-alpha. So if you open the catalogue that I think you keep, you should find it. (it was mentioned off handedly too)

I stick by it though because I'm 99% sure about this.

anywho, I agree joeball123 its what us players make that matters...or at least imagine.

DARCA.

I'm not sure the massive fleet is indestructible and running wild scenario is necessarily true. 

There's the exact same number of hit points and attack/defend points involved, they're just grouped differently than before. I would expect roughly the same amount of damage and killed ships involving multiple smaller fleets as opposed to two big fleets (or one big fleet and several smaller.) Possibly giving a small bonus to the bigger fleet if its WILDLY bigger, but even that has historical exceptions where a smaller force inflicted much higher casualties on the larger force than was expected.

And having one massive fleet that can only be in one place at one time means your planets are weakly or not defended and open to invasion. I think it would be self regulating and each player would find their own fleet size sweet zone.

So, I'm viewing this primarily as a game and (my) time management issue and secondarily as an unnecessary constraint that forces me to expend research to partially relieve it.

What do you guys think if the fleet size limitation organically grew over time?

--David

While it is true that you probably cannot just have one massive fleet, there is a significant advantage to be had from allowing one side to gain numerical superiority. Ever go into a GCII battle with numerical superiority against identical enemy ships? The loses are not 1 for 1; the casualty ratios favor the side with the numerical advantage unless the other side has a technological advantage great enough to counter greater numbers. If I can send 11 of my ships against 10 of yours and have 2 survive, I'm coming out ahead, because now I can take those 2 survivors and tack them on to the next fleet of 11 ships and fight your next 10 ships with 13 of mine, and maybe now I'll have 3 or 4 survivors (my total losses were heavier this time around because perhaps the last survivors weren't fully healed up or I just had bad luck or your ships are your new top-of-the-line ships built to counter what I had last time). Next time it'll be 14 or 15 to 10, and I'll just keep piling up the advantage until it gets to a point where you just cannot do enough harm to my fleet to cause me any concerns. This is true even if we both started out with equally matched empires and navies; once one of us gets the advantage, whoever got it can keep snowballing it to take fewer and fewer losses in each successive battle and tip the balance of power further and further out of whack. With a limited fleet size, neither of us can really take advantage of that kind of snowballing because neither of us can take the remnants of our last set of ships, add them into the new production run, and through them against our opponent's new production run which doesn't have the backup of the survivors of the last fight.

One other thing that the removal of fleet size limitations does is it removes one aspect that differentiates the species of GCII and helps balance them against one another - each of them has a slightly different logistics cap. Thus, the Iconians with their +10 logistics can field slightly larger fleets than my Terrans with +6 logistics, but my Humans make up for it with a much stronger economy than the Iconians get. Take the fleet caps away, and Iconians are left with a bad economy and about equal research to the Humans, and so my Humans can throw more and larger fleets at the Iconians instead of more but smaller fleets, and the Iconians are left as a sad, broken, and weak race.

(Please note that I do not remember the bonuses for each species perfectly, nor do I remember their TotA tech trees perfectly; maybe the Iconians in GCII have much better technology than the Humans do and it would be fewer smaller more advanced fleets against more bigger less advanced fleets, but I don't care, the example I gave gets the point I wanted to make across in my opinion.)