I recently made a mod to try and address the problem of pure defense escorts. I found once I addressed that problem, others started creeping up. The more I thought about how to make the battles tactically interesting, the more I got frustrated with the current role system. Here are some ideas for relatively modest changes that I think would make combat more interesting.
First, split the current role into 2 parts:
1) Priority: Each ship has a priority this is based on the components of the ship and cannot be changed by the player who controls the ship. Priority has three parts, which coordinate with the three attributes Stardock has already introduced.
2) Role: Role dictates how a ship moves on the field and how it interacts with priority. Role is decided by the controller of the ship. I’d like to see basically 7 roles:
Now, so far this is really just very minor tweaks on the current system, though separating role out into two separate attributes is pretty important.
Here’s where I’d like to see a pretty major change: Roles are assigned by the player at the beginning of a fight. Any ships assigned the defender roles are assigned a ship to defend at this point. Roles may be changed from fight to fight. Ships would have default roles, and fleets would remember roles from their last battle.
The player may set a priority target in the opponent’s fleet. Priority targets get a huge boost to their value score. It would also be kind of nice if eliminating the priority target gives the player the option to withdraw from combat.
I agree peregrine, I've requested the same thing in a prior thread. It seems incredibly artificial and gamey to permanently bind the role to the ship design and not be able to change it. The types of engagements and enemies I face can change from battle to battle so why can't my ship behavior change with it?
I like everything but the retreat option, but that's probably because I tend to play the largest maps and it already can take a huge amount of time to mop up an enemy's fleets.
I don't know if it's possible, but maybe a better way to handle defence heavy ships would be to have them add some percentage of their defence to the ship their escorting rather than being attacked first. It could be a way to further differentiate weapons as well.
Say have point defence add 90% because it's easy to imagine a nearby ship shooting down incoming missiles, have shields add 60% (fluff reason the escort extends its shields at the cost of strength) and armour only adding 30% because short of managing to put itself directly between the enemy and what it's escorting the escort has no way to stop mass driver attacks.
Edit: Maybe modify the % of the escorts defence added to the ship it's escorting by the tactical speed of the escort. It would mean smaller hulls would be better at something and it makes sense from a fluff perspective to because an escort that could more easily position itself should be able to block attacks better.
Yeah, I kind of threw that one in at the end. I just like the idea of being able to set an objective for the battle and then being able to get out after, so you could do hit and run operations against high value targets like transports, but it's probably too easily abused.
Um btw. . . . . . why hasn't anybody mentioned drive size ignoring your hull size ? I think it's cosmically absurd that tiny gnats must haul the same hyperwarp rig that propels your deathstar in order to keep up with the fleet; and gaining "maneuverability" in combat in the early game consists of leaving just 2 size units to squish all your torpedoes into.
>sigh!< I guess this is on the devs' to-do list thing?
With regards to the FTL drives, given that GalCiv hyperdrives function by warping space, I do not see it as unreasonable for the size of the drive required to achieve speed XYZ to be largely unrelated to the size of the ship it's on, as far as 'realism' goes. You're talking about bending space to the point that, say, 1 lightyear of real distance looks like it's only 1 AU, and the magnitude of the spatial distortion is such that I would expect that the energy required is likely to be roughly equal whether you're on a 100m^3 ship (roughly a tiny hull) or a 100,000m^3 ship (roughly a medium hull) or a 10,000,000m^3 ship (roughly a huge hull).
You can go ahead and make balance arguments saying that the practically-attainable strategic speeds of ships should be more similar across hull sizes, and I won't disagree with you, but claiming 'realism' as the justification for such is something that doesn't appear to me to have any significant grounding in reality. We're talking about warping such enormous volumes of space by such a degree that the differences in ship sizes are trivial by comparison.
As far as the argument concerning sublight drives goes, I really don't care that it's probably more realistic for the sublight drives to be scaled to the ships they're on; as long as the components provide no tangible benefits other than shortening the time it takes to come within range of an opponent, I'm not inclined to waste space on them. You don't start that far from your opponent, so the benefit in reducing the time spent closing to firing range is marginal. You don't gain any defensive benefits of which I'm aware (it doesn't appear as though ships are any more likely to miss a high-speed fast-turning target than they are to miss a space station). Your ships won't bother trying to keep the range open even when they have the range advantage over your enemies and in fact close with the enemy even if your ships are armed entirely with missiles and have range boosters while the enemy ships are armed exclusively with guns. Why exactly would I want to mount sublight drives, unless there's really nothing else that I can mount that actually benefits me? But sure, go ahead and make a component which is at best marginal even less useful by making its size scale with the size of the ship it's mounted on to make the behavior more realistic.
Um.. because it's not really relevant to a thread on combat roles? No-one has mentioned the brutality of the Soviet gulag system under Stalin, but it's not really that surprising given the topic at hand.
Anyway, people have mentioned it several times in other threads, and I added Newtonian engines to my mod over a month ago.
Um.. because it's not really relevant to a thread on combat roles? No-one has mentioned the brutality of the Soviet gulag system under Stalin, but it's not really that surprising given the topic at hand. Anyway, people have mentioned it several times in other threads, and I added Newtonian engines to my mod over a month ago.
nobody has mentioned thatchlorlorine trifluoride will is known to set fire to on contact: glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth, and more. Nobody has mentioned that it's such an effective oxidizer that it can even potentially set fire to things that have seemingly already been burned up, like ash or spent charcoal. not noted either is that The substance is so highly reactive that famously unreactive elements like platinum, osmium and iridium will begin to corrode when they come into contact with it. Notably tough elements like titanium and tungsten are also regarded as being wholly unsuitable to storing the chemical because they set on fire as soon as they come into contact with it.
The only known way to store chlorine trifluoride “safely”, which we use in the loosest possible sense, is to put it inside of a sealed containers made of steel, iron, nickel or copper which are able to contain the chemical safely if they’re first treated with flourine gas. This is because doing so will coat the metal in a thin fluoride layer, with which the chemical won’t react. However, if this layer is compromised in anyway, or the metal isn’t completely dry, chlorine trifluoride will begin to react violently and cause the vessel to explode.
A few of the other things known to not react with chlorine trifluoride include nitrogen, the inert gases and polychlorotrifluoroethylene. Rather fortunately, chlorine trifluoride doesn’t react with air unless it happens to contain a larger than average amount of water vapor.
Speaking of which, when chlorine trifluoride comes into contact with water, it will react explosively with it and as a fun byproduct creates large amounts of dangerous gasses such as hydrofluoric acid and hydrochloric acid. Hydrofluric acid in particular is incredibly dangerous and along with being able to melt things like glass and concrete, can permanently damage your lungs and eyes. As if that wasn’t worrying enough, if you’re ever unlucky enough to get hydrofluric acid on your skin, it doesn’t actually hurt until a few hours later. After it has absorbed a bit, it starts destroying your nerves and bones and can ultimately cause cardiac arrest when it gets into your blood stream. In fact, in 1994 a lab technician in Australia accidentally spilled hydrofluric acid on his lap and despite immediately executing safety procedures including hosing off, immersing himself in a swimming pool, and later extensive medical care (including needing to have one of his legs amputated), within two weeks of the accident, he was dead.
Unsurprisingly, the Nazis were really interested in the military applications of chlorine trifluoride. After all, it’s a substance that reacts explosively with water (humans are largely bags of water), and for those that don’t come in contact with it directly, there’s the byproduct of the deadly gasses. Further, there is really little one can do to put out the fires it causes directly other than to let them burn off. If you throw water on the source of the problem, it will get worse. The reaction here also doesn’t require atmospheric oxygen to burn, so trying to use that method of fire suppression won’t work either.
Though chlorine trifluoride was thankfully never used during combat, the Nazis did succeed in creating several tons of the stuff in a secret facility known as the Falkenhagen Bunker before it was captured by the Russians in 1944. The Nazis working in the Falkenhagen Bunker referred to chlorine trifluoride simply as “Substance N” or “N-Stoff” and were planning to store it inside specially designed shells which could be used in battle. According to reports released by the Soviets following WW2, Nazi trials involving substance N were promising. But, of course, the weapon was incredibly dangerous for those carrying it around too, not just those they launch it at.
As an example of the kind of devastation chlorine trifluoride can have, you only need to consider what happened when almost a ton of this stuff was accidentally spilled inside of a warehouse in the 1950s. According to eyewitness reports, the chemical burned straight through a foot of concrete and three feet of gravel while simultaneously releasing a deadly cloud of gas containing a cocktail of “chlorine trifluoride, hydrogen fluoride, chlorine and hydrogen chloride” that corroded every surface it came into contact with.
After reading this you’re probably curious about what possible purpose this chemical could serve that doesn’t involve trying to recreate a scene from a Michael Bay movie. Well, due to the fact that chlorine trifluoride is such a great oxidizer, there have been several attempts to use it as a low-cost, lightweight rocket fuel, starting with the Nazis who tried to use it to propel torpedoes. Of course, it’s so difficult to store safely that it’s generally considered not to be worth the risk for this usage. After all, while you’d need to use less fuel thanks to its extreme oxidizing capabilities, if you had a rocket accident, you’d potentially be spewing tons of this stuff all over the place with no real effective way to deal with the situation. For instance, after studying and experimenting with this chemical for rocket use, rocket scientist Dr. John D. Clark famously said about the best way to deal with potential chlorine trifluoride rocket accidents- “I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
There are a couple other useful applications though. For instance, it’s great for plasmaless cleaning of certain surfaces used in semiconductor manufacturing and it also works well at cleaning uranium residue off of the walls of nuclear power plants and removing built up oxides.
More fun facts about CIF3 also not mentioned can be found here including the fact that it could be sole for about a dollar per KG if there were a reason to mass produce it
..and then God created nerds, and he saw that they were good!
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