They run straight towards the enemy at close range.What is point of thrusters if all ships just head towards point blank range,
It's not logical Jim.
thrusters do have a purpose, they allow the ships to turn more quickly when they pass each other.
And what difference does that make.The ships fire at any angle an all stay in rail gun range.
From a tactical point of view it make no sense what so ever... I hope and do think the battle viewer will get some love down the line. Currently it is not all that fun to watch other than look at the light show.
The killer: If I have range and speed tech advantage my ships should never be hit. It makes no sense at all...
Where is the "full reverse thrust" Combat option for my sniper fleet?
This has bothered me as well. It makes no sense!
I hope this gets redone in a patch.
I imagine that's the reason, right there. They don't want fast missile boats to be the only viable ship design.
Pretty much all battle viewer is intended to do. SD has stated many times the Quick Battle option and Battle Viewer option will always produce the same results. Weapon ranges is something new, and could actually end up getting removed, Don't expect to ever be able to control the battle, tell the AI to stay in stand off range, or have to worry about weapon arcs and whether you need to broadside the enemy or not.
In some games you could go through thousands of battles and that would get tedious.
Exactly
It is a design flaw though.
I get that lasers and kinetics need to be viable options, but what is the rationale?! As it currently plays, if you use exclusively missiles, you just have to assume your ship captains are morons charging in guns blazing rather than utilizing the range advantage!
I kinda think (and hope) they will remove the range requirement and have thrusters in to boost evasion.
It seem this system was just thrown in half baked and I'm not sure ever the devs know what is going on.Many games have hands off tactical combat that allows for many viable designs,GBS,Dominions and even EndlessSpace made more sense than what I am seeing here.
Luckily for them the reviewers gave them a pass on this.
I love me some endless space, but its combat system was wonky as heck, full of extremely difficult math that ultimately didn't mean much.
I don't disagree with your point, GalCiv3's system needs some love, but I wouldn't say we are at that point just yet:)
Your ships do use the range advantage - missile ships get to attack their opponents before those opponents can attack back. That's one of the advantages of missiles as a weapon type.
What they don't get to do is pound the enemy from afar for the whole fight, as that would make fast missile boats massively OP.
Still, it makes little sense when your faster missile boats use their engines to charge into the enemy's range that much faster. It seems having slower engines would be an advantage in this case. Has anyone tested this?
Yeah, you shouldn't put thrusters on pure missile boats.
By putting varying numbers of thrusters on ships with other weapons, you can control the relative rate at which the ships in your fleet approach the enemy, allowing the missile boats to 'hang back' by being the slowest of your ships.
It seems that the captains cant tell the difference between a misse and a multibillion doller missile launcher " ehh they will blow up if we hit them with either"
The Battleviewer doesnt need to be interactive but be more informative instead. Would be a start to actually see all ships on one screen. And have hitpoint bars on them.
Imho as of now the combat in Endless Space felt better than the one in GalCiv 3. That said, I disliked it, but the thing is that you knew how the mechanics worked and you knew what you were doing.
So maybe they should somehow do a better job in vizualize what actually matters in combat.
E.g. in Endless Space there were simply phases. Phase 1: Rockets, and so on. But in GalCiv you have thrusters and think "why should I actually use them?"Same with Armor. And then of course you don't know how the AI acts.
While this is a special case it shows pretty good what difference it makes:
In the campaign level 1 I only used slow missile ships. The Capital ship there has a bay with 5 small fighters which respawn after each fight.So what is happening there is that all the enemies only attacked the 5 small fighters, which were lost after the fight, but that the opponents got completely annihilated.So next fight they just respawned and I didn't lose anything.
So apparently the AI focuses on the first ships they can target and don't switch their target anymore. I didn't test this but you might want to exploit that, by not giving your ships any armor at all, and then create one unarmed ship, with thrusters and heavy armor which then soaks all the damage while the opponents get destroyed.
There is basically another example where this actually happened: Against one of the strongest fleets my fighters got destroyed. Next up was the capital ship. So all the enemies focusfired on the capital ship as it was still faster than the millile-boats. So it was impossible to win this fight as they always killed the capital ship which make you lose the map. That's not a bad thing, but this shows how the AI works.
And imho it should be more apparent to the player which combination of stuff actually makes sense. Like Rockets + Engines would intuitively make sense, but apprently not in this game.
There is also a Thread on Steam where several of these Questions came up:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/620713633851563999/#c620713633853311419
And all of this, this Entire thread, is the only problem I've ever really had with GalCiv as a game (series). The Lack Of Controllable battles. Games like Total War have controllable battles, and they also have a "auto-resolve", even though those battles have in depth controls and variables to take into account when auto-calculating. After Elemental I was Really Stoked for the next GalCiv because I figured they'd use the battle engine from Elemental.Just as is pointed out with "weapon ranges" here, ultimately it dilutes weapon types as well, though I have to say they've improved that this time around by tying weapon type to defense type for real this time. In GalCiv 2 you had different weapon and defense types but they were completely cosmetic choices and in the end the lump some of damage and defense were all thrown together so it didn't matter if you were using lasers against energy shields or mass drivers against armor.I was hoping they would have incorporated some of what they learned from the battles in Elemental and FE into GalCiv. Maybe in a future expansion after some of the non-combat 4X's are filled out more we'll get controllable battles. If MoO and MoO2 can do it, I don't see why it can't be done in GalCiv, aside from the obvious choice of it never being considered in the first place.Everything else about GalCiv I Love, but the battles have always been the weak point in the series and feel arbitrary compared to everything else. GalCiv 3 here feels like it's starting to try to change that so hopefully we won't see a step backwards into GalCiv 2 battle mechanics. Weapon types, shield and armor types verses what kinds of weapons, ranges, all these should matter.Like with missiles here. The missile ships should hang back. There should be a "Role" for that ship class that tells it to stay back and shoot and let the enemy come to it. You don't even need controllable battles for that. Just a modified ship role to tell it to hang back like a "support" role, but shoot at anything that get's close, like a modified "assault" role that's told to shoot at everything and not prioritize targets based on what role they are in the fleet.If anyone knows how to make a custom ship role/class type, that should fix the missile ship issue the OP is having.The ship roles could have been handled better. Ship role A: shoot everything. Ship role B: shoot everything that attacks ship role A. Ship role C: Hang back and shoot everything in range..etc etc. Prioritizing firing order based on ship role ends badly. I can see the bridge of one of those ships in battle now...Officer: Sir, enemy off the port bow. It's coming right for us and opening fire, do we return fire?Captain: No, we're not allowed to target that ship type first. Take the damage and fly around it. We're only allowed to shoot at that ship over there on the other side of the enemy fleet. We'll come back for these other hostiles once that one is destroyed.Officer: But sir, we'll be dead before we get close enough to attack that ship way over there. Why can't we just shoot the enemy that's right in front of us?Captain: Are you questioning my orders?!?! I didn't make it to captain by shooting any old enemy that was within firing range!!! I just got lucky the ship I was on was always fighting ship types we were allowed to target...
@RavenX: They actually planned to give you the choice to define how your ships should act in the fight. Like this ship is aggressive, and this one should stay back.
It didn't make it for release, but will come either in a DLC or expansion.
The Ship's Roles seem to work fairly well. You just have to remember to set them to how you see the ship behaving in combat. Multiple ships are being targeted by each side, and each type (assault, escort, capitol and support) ship seems to behave according to the target/defend priorities listed. Spotting the defense actions has been a bit tougher, but the missiles are being stopped.
The ability ti make a custom roll would be interesting. The roles govern target/defense priorities and starting position in the formation... and that's it. The only thing left is to remove one of the two priorities or to add everything as a priority.
I actually want my interceptor/assault ships to blow past the enemy equivalents. They do target and exchange weapon fire with them, but their real mission is to wear down the defenses and escorts of the capitol and support ships. Once the bigger ships are down, then they return to help finish off the rest. The light show may not have an effect on the battle, but it does show how the settings and weapons behave.
I agree that a lack of tactical maneuvering detracts a bit, but to me the mechanics seem to be reasonably balanced.
Everything you put on your ship is just a Stat. At the start of combat all stats are calculated and the battle result instantly determined. Every thing to do with Range, Maneuverability, speed, defense, offense etc. Is all thrown into an algorithm and the result determined. All you are doing with the battle viewer is seeing a non-accurate reenactment of the battle using a simplified physics engine with NO AI. The AI was finished being utilized at the start when all the calculations were made. This means there are less calculations going on in the battle viewer, so you can watch more ships duke it out without lag or problems with low end systems (systems that only have 1 gig Video Ram)
Do you have a source for this, as it's not how I understood the combat to work at all. I was under the impression that the battle viewer is an accurate re-enactment of the simulated battle. The attacks, hits and misses that are displayed certainly match up to the results.
Never been an issue for me, personally, either in GalCiv or Civilization or any other 4X that doesn't feature manual control of battle resolution.
If it's a sticking point for you, I fear you may be disappointed, as the devs have frequently confirmed that there are no plans for manual control of battle resolution. As they have pointed out, on larger maps it's entirely possible for the player to have 30 or more battles in a single turn. Manual control simply isn't practical.
What a load of bull crap, completely made up and easy to refute.
Just take a few pirates attacking a station defended by an unarmed scout. If you auto resolve the battle the scout most often survive since the auto calculator work different... while in the viewer the unarmed scout will charge the pirates and die and then the pirates die trying to attack the base.
It is very clear that the viewer work with how the ship actually fight since you can use the different roles to your advantage while the auto calculator bring more balanced results and very much different results quite often.
Why do people try to state their own beliefs as fact?
It's one thing to draw the wrong conclusion from something you observed, but this comment was a little over the top.
Hrm, while I don't know it for a fact, I am extremely sure, that the battle-viewer is indeed just a representation of the results which are caltulated beforehand.
You basically have the log, which you can see after the fight, or during the fight, but it's always there.
However you could actually easily test it out in multiplayer. Because if the one player attacks the other, and then one player choses quick battle, and the other ist able to check the battleviewer, the battleviewer can obviously only represent what was already determined in the quick battle.
Another thing is, that you can just replay the whole combat in the viewer. If it was calculated via representation, it might have different outcomes, which would be rather bad.
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