In my inpression, GalCiv3 favors the attacker enormously.If someone attacks with a real fleet (20 to 30 points of logistics), he will almost always meet no real resistance from the AI.
It is also quite difficult to fortify a planet against a real attack. Even if I have "planetary defense" maxed out, my planet still gets conquered easily by a single transport.
Master of Orion solved this better by far. You could build up planetary defenses, as e.g. planetary batteries, fighter squadrons, star-bases that fought against fleets and so on. These planetary improvements were able to repel at least small fleets of attackers on their own.
I think, having some real, working planetary defense would improve the game and would make life easier for the AI.
What do you think?
It should be remembered when constructing 'realism' arguments firstly that FTL drives need not behave like real-world reaction drives (there are FTL models in which the ship bearing the drive remains at a velocity near or even of 0 relative to its frame of reference despite moving from one point in space to another, and warp drive is one of these models) and secondly that a large part of the reason for the scaling of required engine power for increased speed comes through the fact that the media in which most real-world vehicles travel apply quadratically velocity-dependent forces opposing the motion of the vehicles, which is not the case for spacecraft.
Another part of the reason for the ever-increasing engine power required for a given increase in speed is that adding more powerful engines typically increases the overall mass of real-world vehicles, but according to the game a GCIII ship's mass is independent of how many and what components are on it, which implies that when you place a component you're not adding anything so much as trading mass spent in one thing for mass spent in something else, and if I have two ships with the same mass but one of them has two Type A thrusters and the other has only one Type A thruster while neither has any other thrusters, the ship with two Type A thrusters will have twice the acceleration of the ship with only one Type A thruster, and with one of the most reasonable restrictions on the speed of spacecraft being time taken to accelerate to a given speed, doubling the acceleration could very well result in a doubling of effective speed.
That is not to say that I'm opposed to reducing the degree to which drive components can be stacked, particularly on larger vessels. There are good gameplay and game-balance reasons why it might be better for drive size requirements to go up on larger vessels or with higher speeds or both. Justifying this based on a flawed understanding of physics, however, is not a good idea.
I have seen computer controlled fleets with moves upwards of 17 or more. Not just one fleet, mind, just about every fleet.
It's a real pain when the speed for my fasted fleet at the time was 11.
Why isn't someone who wants to stack 1000 engines acceptable? It's constrained by the MassCap. But why should it be if someone wants to play the game that way? Because the game doesn't really work if something can move that fast.
No-one objects to the idea of having multiple engines on ships. No-one minds the idea that some ships will be faster than others. But the point is more that, in GC3, move=attack. Every point of movement allows you to engage another target per turn. With 10 stellar folders, you can build units which can attack 50+ targets in a turn, or transports that can instantly move from their home shipyard to invade and enemy planet like a first-strike nuclear scenario. I should never be able to attain a position where the enemy can lose a war before they have any chance to react.
Presently, you can stack engines to this degree on the largest hulls, because they still have to be able to individually fit on tiny ships. Adding a % of mass cap to engines (as SD have proposed) will help counter this without gimping 'reasonable' designs or constraining anyone to 1 engine per hull (which I don't think anyone wants). Personally, I'd actually prefer it if they just made moves end on attack instead, since then you could keep stacking engines to your hearts content but wouldn't gain a combat advantage, just a mobility advantage. But that has it's own issues, like dealing with stacked units.
I would favor some sort of diminishing returns on engine use.
joeball, it's true that we have no real-world analogue for how space propulsion will/does work in a GC3 model. But given the weapons, the ship types like carriers and the general look and feel we can assume players are comfortable with a parallel to wet-navy ships that they can relate to.
Um... whether you increase the space required for each extra engine, or decrease the performance of added engines, you are diminishing return on investment.
Firstly, the parallels between GCIII ships and real-world ships are extremely superficial. Under most circumstances, real-world capital ships are not going to waste time blasting away 'escorts' when they could be shooting at the capital ships of the opposing fleet. Most real-world carriers are not intentionally going to come within gun range of opposing surface combatants. Real navies have not regularly used the same caliber guns as the primary armament on capital ships as on significantly lighter surface combatants for probably more than three centuries.
Secondly, while it is true that ~50% of a real ship's horsepower can drive it to most of its speed, I am rather doubtful that this is such common knowledge that just about anyone you say it to is going to go "yeah, that sounds right," or for that matter that it's particularly intuitive without spending at least a moment to think about it.
As far as the diminishing returns stuff goes, I agree with DeimosEvotec. The game's UI does not handle diminishing returns well, at least not with the current methods by which diminishing returns can be added to components. If I have a hyperdrive component which provides +1/-10% moves per turn, the reported benefit is going to be +0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.6, etc moves per turn for the first, second, third, fourth, etc drive component I consider adding to the ship. A ship with a base speed of 1 and no other movement modifiers save for the ones from the hyperdrive components will see an actual benefit of 0.8, 0.6, 0.4, 0.2, etc and an effective benefit of +1, +1, +0, +0, etc moves per turn from adding 1, 2, 3, 4, etc of those hyperdrive components. A hyperdrive component which costs 10 capacity +10% per hyperdrive component will be reported in the tool tip before being added as costing 11 capacity for the first, 12 for the second, 13 for the third, and so on, which would give the impression that you'd spend 11 capacity for 1 hyperdrive, 23 for 2, 36 for 3, and so on. The actual capacity required would be 11 for one hyperdrive, 24 for two hyperdrives, 39 for three hyperdrives, and so on.
There are issues with the percentage of capacity solution if they use the currently-available tools for implementing such. Adding a multiplier to MassCap on each component has the issue of stacking additively with every hull capacity bonus you have; a drive that has a -10% MassCap "bonus" which gets added to a ship will change the ship's maximum capacity by 10% of the base hull capacity rather than the current hull capacity, and while 25/50/75/100/250 for Tiny/Small/Medium/Large/Huge isn't the hardest thing in the world to remember, it can look kind of odd seeing a component which supposedly reduces hull capacity by 10% only reduce the actual hull capacity by, say, 5% since you have +100% hull capacity through technology, Hyperion Shrinkers, Helios Ore, and events, with each subsequent drive component costing relatively more of the current hull capacity, and there's also the rounding issue in the display with fractional hull capacities and hull capacity requirements. Adding a MovesCapMass multiplier to each of the hulls which makes drive components require a more or less constant fraction of the hull capacity has odd interactions with the techs reducing drive capacity requirements (if implemented as no modifier on tiny, +100% on small, +200% on medium, +300% on large, and +900% on huge, a 10% drive capacity requirement reduction from techs matters a lot on tiny hulls but almost not at all on huge hulls) and also requires a MovesCapManufacturingCost multiplier to keep production costs relative to the overall cost of the ship similar, and the addition of a MovesCapMaintenance variable would be useful to keep the drive upkeep relative to total ship upkeep constant and moreover to allow the drive upkeep to be increased for larger ships without also increasing the upkeep for all the other components on the ships, and if you had wanted the drive requirements relative to total ship capacity to remain constant even as hull capacity increases with tech, events, Helios Ore, and Hyperion Shrinkers, you'd need to add at least a MovesCapMass penalty to all of the things which affect hull capacity (and, as with the techs providing a reduction in MovesCapMass, you'd have issues where a bonus that matters a lot on a Tiny hull would have very little impact on a Huge hull).
As I understand things, the 'percentage of capacity' thing is not decreasing the performance or increasing the cost of additional engines. Rather, it's making each component require ~X% of the ship's hull capacity, or perhaps a flat X capacity + Y% of the ship's maximum capacity. I.e. you'd have a drive which requires, say, 10 capacity + 10% of the hull capacity, for a total of 12.5 capacity on a Tiny hull, 15 capacity on a Small hull, 17.5 capacity on a Medium hull, 20 capacity on a Large hull, and 35 capacity on a Huge hull. Additional components would continue to require those same capacities. This is not a diminishing returns system; it is simply a system which keeps the drive costs relative to hull capacity somewhat more similar across hull classes.
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