I don't understand why people would want things to scale with map size. Doesn't that just undo the effect you are trying to achieve with a big map - To play something big and epic? Scaling things like movement, sensor range, and life support range effectively shrinks the map back down.

Why not just play on a smaller map if things take too long for your liking? That would allow people who are after a truely epically long and drawn out game to enjoy one without the seemingly needless scaling factors.

Exactly...thats the choice you make with an insane map. Its going to look and feel big and its going to take a long, long time!

The difference between larger and smaller maps, regardless of diminishing returns or not, is number of stars/planets really. Rare on the biggest map yields more than abundant on the smallest maps. Basically.

So with map scaling, you get to have a larger galaxy, and more planets, more opponents, but not necessarily, longer travel times.

Its basically "Economy of turns" and "massive scale" as a goal there.

Mind you I'm not super keen on either map scaling or anti-stacking, but I'm undecided on what would be best. I think personally, I would prefer that engines become one per ship, but then give some possible bonuses to speed to smaller vessels, and perhaps more speed enhancing research techs, even additional "engine booster" equipment you can attach that is also one per ship.

I'm actually fairly ambivalent about them and have no strong opinion one way or the other. There's a reason I haven't been taking about them much in all these threads.

I WILL say that so-called sensor boats (which I tend not to build myself) stops me from "sensor spam" as seen here:

That's a screenshot I took of a GC II game I made last year.  All those dots are actually tiny hulled ships with 13 (or so) sensor radius thanks to the Eyes of the Universe Galactic Achievement.

In GC II I would make sure to beeline to Sensor IV  (or whatever it was) by the early mid-game so I could rush build EotU and then spread out a Sensor Net EVERYWHERE.  Before I had the EotU hooked up, I would spam out dozens of tiny hulled ships with either no move or little move and a couple of sensor modules.

In a way, it was exactly like the oft-derided constructor spam that so many people complain about.  It's a bit tedious and slightly unfun to take the time to erect a sesor net when I could be (as Adam Biessener would say) getting my murder on.

Now it isn't THAT annoying as they can be good "breathers" while my planets "recover" from spamming out colony or transport ships.  Still, we're really trading one problem for another. It all comes down to what really bugs someone.
 

So you're saying "Multiplayer Ruins Everything"?  Couldn't agree more.

In all seriousness, I don't play multiplayer and don't plan on it anytime soon.  But if it bothers you that much, don't play with people who abuse sensor boats.  If as many people feels as you do about it being "unfun", it shouldn't be hard to find people to play with.

I can't think of many things in GC that do.  The pop growth for one is flat out ridiculous. Mining resources and trade resources don't make a lick of sense.  And let's not even talk about the FTL or, well, just about anything else in the game.  While I realize that suspension of disbelief is a highly relative thing, I think making sense from a physics point of view is one of the last things that the GC devteam should be worried about.  

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Mind, I think the REAL problem here, in as much as there is a problem (which is highly debatable), is that components don't scale to hull size (in either direction) AND there is so much more theoretical hull space for all hull sizes once things get going and there are more ways to shrink components than in GC II (though they are spread out throughout the tech tree).  

Combine that with the fact that the Cargo Hull has more room than the Medium Hull.... Well, I think that is the actual problem.  Again, if one thinks there is a problem (which I largely don't).

I guess I am saying people will shift from complaining about sensor boats to overloaded with weapon ships.  Or maybe they'll go back to that hobby horse in regards to range.  Or something else.  IMO, this is a symptom of an underlying issue, which is why I've been staying away from the latest version of this debate until now.  An issue I can't say I care too much about as I largely like the game the way it is right now. But it is one that is going to come up time and time and time again from some unless GC III is radically overhauled.

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And that doesn't even get into the pop=production paradigm that exasperates the above issue.

Changing sensor stacking mechanics is not going to incentivize adding sensors to warships, and is unlikely to result in sensor ships being added to combat-capable fleets except perhaps if the stacking penalty is extreme (e.g. no point in having more than two or three sensor components, at which point a larger or later-game sensor ship might have plenty of space left over for other functional components, though I'd tend to expect such a change to result in players making the smallest, cheapest sensor ships that have full sensor range and all the range and movement desired and still not include such vessels in combat fleets).

Or, you know, you can bother with extending the sensor range on a few starbases, because, well, you have the station there anyways, it only costs a single credit per turn to maintain regardless of what you put on it, and extending the sensor range of the station might just let you move your sensor ships elsewhere.

I'm not at all bothered by a dedicated sensor platform that has no other capabilities being better at providing sensor coverage than a space station with significant other benefits, especially when that dedicated sensor platform is considerably more expensive than the station (well, in maintenance and usually total manufacturing cost; given the issues the game has with very high manufacturing output, the sensor platform can be cheaper in turns to produce, though especially later in the game it's entirely within your ability to put enough construction modules on a single construction ship to complete all the sensor modules with a single ship, and if you use a huge-hulled construction ship you might even be able to get enough construction modules on to complete most of the station's specialization-specific modules with it). The degree to which it can be better can get excessive later in the game, particularly if a few things get abused, but there is nothing at all wrong with the specialized platform exceeding the capabilities of similarly-large multipurpose structure in the specialist's field.

At game start, no ship can have a sensor range in excess of 17 (2 from the base hull plus 13 from the 13 navigational sensors you can put on the ship plus 2 from taking the +2 sensor range trait), or 28 if you spent the free research from Intuitive on getting Interstellar Navigation (both of these values require the +20% hull capacity bonus to have been taken as an empire trait). On anything but Tiny, Small, and maybe Medium maps, that leaves plenty of space left for exploration, and you've designed one of the least effective exploration ships in the game since the maximum exploration rate of a ship with a sensor range of R and movement of M is M*(2*R + 1) tiles per turn; a ship that instead balanced sensor and hyperdrive components can have over twice the maximum exploration rate (using Navigational Sensors and Hyperdrives; under the assumption you took Intuitive and used it to unlock Interstellar Navigation, that can instead be over six times the exploration rate) and may still have space left over for a life support component or two; most of the balanced designs will take 10 turns or less to have revealed more total tiles than the full-sensor design, regardless of whether or not you also took the added movement and sensor range bonuses for your empire.

Furthermore, one big sensor or exploration ship is not necessarily the optimal choice for early-game exploration. Using Navigational Sensors and Hyperdrives or Interstellar Sensors and Hyperdrive Pluses, a collection of Tiny-hulled exploration ships which costs a similar amount of manufacturing as a Cargo-hulled exploration ship will have a similar overall rate of exploration to that Cargo-hulled exploration ship (if you took enough of the speed and sensor range bonuses when picking your empire's traits, the Tiny-hulled exploration ships may even have a higher overall rate of exploration, with up to ~3.6 times the maximum exploration rate depending on which designs are compared and assuming all designs make use of the 20% capacity bonus available from empire traits) and may also be more practical if your exploration targets are scattered rather than clustered. Said collection of Tiny-hulled exploration ships will overtake a full-sensors Cargo ship in total tiles revealed within about 10 turns of all ships being completed, much like the the Cargo-hulled exploration ships that balance between speed and sensor range will.

Especially later in the game, you kind of can do this. Larger ships tend to have far more available capacity than they require for weapons and defenses, particularly since you can game the targeting priorities to only need weapons or defenses and not both on any given design, and so you can design ships with very high speeds. Coupled with knowledge of where the target or targets are, a fleet really can reach out from its 'home base' and strike down any hostile fleets within a significant range of their starting position.

I agree with this guy. If you build a cargo sensor ship, I should be able to build a cargo cloaker ship that prevents you from seeing the attached fleet

It's this issue, along with the stuff that's been so thoughtfully laid out in Icemania's guide and elsewhere, that's kept me from getting deeply into GC3, quite honestly. I've asked about the crazy ranges time and time again and have seen it mentioned a lot over the months, even once or twice by Brad himself (he apparently doesn't like it either). If it isn't going to be changed until the expandalone in 2017, guess I'll just keep playing other games.

I don't think there's a problem with being able to stack. The problem is more the extent to which big ships CAN stack.

Take engines. I don't mind the idea that some ships are 5, 10 times the speed of others. But when ships can be 50 times as fast, then it becomes problematic. The mechanics of the game don't work very well when stuff starts moving that fast - you start getting 1-turn wars and all that silliness. The AI doesn't stand a chance against that kind of thing, and it never will because it's way outside the distance ranges that everything else is scaled around, like SB AOE or AI threat radii.

With sensors, it's much the same thing - in real life, it's perfectly normal for navies and armies to use AWAACS or similar dedicated recon and intelligence units. But these units should be able to give us tactical information over a limited area of the front, not universal data (and certainly not universal data by turn 50). The sensor boat should really cap out covering a theatre of war, and should need to be relatively close so the enemy has a chance of knocking them out.

I'd say the ideal thing here is to determine what the maximum speed limit of the universe ought to be, based on the other mechanics, and the ideal maximum size of sensor radius on a single ship, and then just scale the ship parts off these. Ideally, I get the feeling any warship with a speed much over 20 is pretty gamebreaking; the AI doesn't perceive ships outside that range as direct threats to planets or shipping, and so the very fastest we want a threatening ship to be able to go should be somewhere around that. That lets the AI react to your attacks rather than leaving it helpless as you quickly emerge from nowhere and destroy 10+ separate targets before it even knows you're at war.

It follows that Starbase radii should probably be extended to 10 tiles out - partially because this will reduce SB spam, which we all hate, and partially because it means most ships cannot simply bypass military SBs, meaning someone might actually want to build one ever. In one swoop, this improves AI performance markedly, makes static defenses viable, and still permits stacking as a design choice without allowing it to go to insane proportions. I'd also add end-move-on-attack, but that's contentious and probably best left for a different discussion.

With sensors, it's a bit trickier, because the map sizes are so wildly different. But I think the maximum size you'd really want sensors to cover (assuming you build a ship which is ALL sensors) should be no greater than about 12% of the map. That way, you need maybe 10 to get complete coverage, with some overlap. Scale that by map size and just set sensors to manage that at top level with however many that is. Having to build 10 instead of 1, and having to position and protect them around the map balances out the advantage of seeing everything, while being able to build one ship and park it right in the heart of your empire is too little cost for too much benefit.

I'd actually suggest SBs are a better (mechanical) vehicle for massive sensors than ships are anyway. Just boost up the SB sensor ranges by map size and make them pretty huge. Leave ships with fairly unimpressive sensor ranges - 10 or 15 max on insane, within the AI's threat radius - but make the starbase versions much, much bigger, like 50 at T4. That way, if you want universal sensor data, you need to build and protect listening stations out in the depths of space. They become and investment, and objectives and targets in the war itself rather than just a means of turning off the fog of war permanently with no risks.

I don't think it's right to assert the CEO of Stardock's opinions for him without offering a reference.  Nor any dev's for that matter.

Do you have a reference?

I hated that feature of GCII. Weapons of equal power which are equally effective against all opponent types are larger on big ships than on little ships? Stupid. Life support, drives, and defenses scaling was reasonable, under the assumption that 1 unit of capacity on a big ship represented the same amount of space as 1 unit of capacity on a small ship, and you could perhaps justify a small increase in size for sensor components due to increased noise from the host vessel, but that weapons with identical performance were larger on bigger ships was quite irritating.

No ship in the game lacks sensors; every hull has enough built into the base hull to give the vessel a sensor range of at least 2 regardless of what else is on the ship (well, maybe not regardless; you can add components which have -X or -Y% sensor range as a 'bonus,' but no such components exist in the base game).

Yay! Let's make Tiny non-fighter combatants even more worthless than they already are! Force them to spend space on a sensor component when they're already quite short of space for the drives and life support they need to stay with the rest of the fleet and the weapons they need to fit to be worth having!

Really, this is silly. The hulls come with sensors (you have a sensor range of 2 even without adding sensor components, and the tile dimensions are such that it's incredibly unlikely that that represents having spotters who look out of windows in the spaceship to see what's out there), and under the assumption that future-humans and space aliens are roughly as good at following directions as modern humans are, your ships do not need to be able to detect a target from any great range to be able to intercept the target; all they need is to be directed into a position close enough to the target that they can acquire it and then complete the interception. AWACS would be more or less pointless if that wasn't the case. You might as well suggest that ships without drive components cannot move even though the hulls clearly come with built-in drives (which give you the base 1 movement).

Seems pointlessly irritating and needlessly complicated. Also seems like something that would probably be useless against the computer because it'd be allowed to always see the supposedly-invisible units or at least know that they're there even if it's not allowed to act on that knowledge, though maybe only at higher difficulty levels.

The game at present does not have any way of making it so that diminishing returns or scaling only begins to apply after a certain threshold value is met. If you want diminishing returns or scaling, it's going to be applied from the very first component you add to the ship.

I would further add that the current mechanics available within the game for implementing diminishing returns are garbage. You can add a multiplicative penalty to sensor range on sensor components, which has the issue that the actual benefit gained by adding the sensor component is not the same benefit listed when looking at the component tool-tip to the point that beyond a certain number of components adding additional sensor components actually reduces sensor range (e.g. I have a sensor component which is +1/-5% sensor range; if I create a design and add 9 such components to it, I'll have a sensor range of 6.05, which rounds to 7, and the tool-tip for the next component I add will say that it should increase sensor range by 0.5 but will really reduce sensor range to 6.00, which rounds to 6). You can alternatively add a multiplicative penalty to component size, which has the issue that the reported capacity required to add the component and the capacity consumed by adding the component do not generally match up, as the tool-tip only considers the component you'd be adding and not the increase in space consumed by all the components you've already added to the ship.

Then use zone defense, like you would actually do in a galaxy-spanning empire. Or better yet...

Like the already-existing Starbase modules that do exactly this..? No-one uses them, because they require a military ring and I don't think anyone has ever built one in the entire history of Gal Civ 3, but it's quite possible to build a starbase network that triples your ship speeds.

This fact alone basically demolishes about half the arguments in favour of massive engine stacking, tbh. No-one actually needs engine stacking. If you need to get from one end of your space to the other quickly, then the game provides tool to do that outside of giving every ship 20 stellar folders. If you need to be in enemy space, well, you need to be operating at a speed where the enemy can react to you. You're no longer just asking to be able to get from the one end of the galaxy to the other, you're asking to be able to attack multiple targets in one turn from way outside the AI's awareness, and that's the thing about engine stacking which is so imbalanced right now.

I think, for the purposes of GC3, we can draw something of a distinction between the short-range targetting sensors needed to engage another fleet within a reasonably small volume, and multi-light-year FTL detectors. As Joe notes, these can basically be presumed to be in the basic sensor package that allows all ships to see a couple of light years in all directions.

As I've said over and over again, I don't think anyone is suggesting that sensors and engines should not stack at all. But there should be a maximum attainable speed and sensor range (as there already is), and that maximum should be lower than it is now, because it is presently imbalanced and the AI cannot effectively combat it (and nor can it be made to do so without making it behave idiotically on small maps). 

Or the same number of stations with much more powerful sensors. Again, having to build 10 or 12 of something with 5 construction points s each to completely cover the galaxy is a very different situation from having 6 starbases per planet and needing to build a million constructors to kit them all out.

Which would really be a better solution for the whole frigging station-spam thing. 

Do some research on the range of AWACS radar systems. They have a maximum coverage of around 312,000 km². Note the difference between that number and 510.1 million km², which is the entire surface of the Earth. In other words, real life sensor boats can see roughly about 0.06% of the total 'field of play'. This is our most powerful dedicated mobile radar systems in real life. They in no way support the idea of being able to build 1 or 2 ships and get total coverage; rather, this is an argument in favour of a total ban on sensor stacking (which isn't what most of the reductionist camp are advocating anyway).

Larger real-world radar systems are generally fixed structures or groups of fixed structures. Radar telescopes and suchlike are now built in the form of multiple structures spread across large areas - even intercontinental distances. Basically, no matter how high-tech your methods of looking far away, it usually boils down to a bigger lens = better at any given technology level, and so planets and SBs are well positioned to take up these roles, being roughly analogous to fixed radar installations and of suitable scales compared to ships to achieve greater inferonometric returns from using multiple small sensor groups (an idea which also extends the interesting notion of cumulative fleet sensors).

Really I'd suggest that the Starbase revamp provides an ideal opportunity to tackle both things at once. If SB spam can be alleviated (which it can easily; increase the cost of constructors by 500%, increase the number of construction points by the same amount, equalize SB radius and exclusion and scale them by map size), then why not just tag strategic redeployment and long-range sensor roles onto MSBs? 

Let ship sensor and engine stacking cap out at 20 or 30 tiles, then let military SBs fill the gap for both strategic redeployment (the existing 66% move cost reduction within ZOC) and super-long-range sensors (8 for base, 16 for sector -since a sector is 16 haxes - 32 for the next module up and 64 for the final one). This means that knocking out military SBS rather than bypassing them becomes worthwhile (need to slow down enemy reinforcements and reduce their vision range), kills off the worst excesses of sensor and engine stacking (while still permitting you to build reasonably fast ships and long-range tactical radar units without allowing you to outrange the AI's threat radius) and actually encourages people to use MSBs - without making it impossible to redeploy quickly within your own control. Hell, it even encourages building internal infrastructure and opens up interesting strategic possibilities based on crippling supply lines.

This even appears to be how the game was originally designed to be played, with the speed increasing SB modules and the powerful sensor modules (along with the default designs not using any serious level of sensor and engine stacking). I don't think the idea of putting 10 or more sensors/engines on a hull ever occurred to the designers.

This... so much this.