Hello people! I've been playing this game for just under a month now, and have to say I love it so far. One of the coolest things is watching the ships you made in combat, but I have to admit that the coolness of the space battles does wear thin after a while.
To solve this I was struck with an idea! What if you added tactics for your fleets to use in space battles (in a similar way as strategies for planetary invasions I suppose). Basically; before a battle each side chooses a tactic to govern how their ships will behave in combat. You could choose agressive tactics like blitz inorder to storm the enemy's formation, Defensive ones to play more conservatively and protect high value ships, Flanking inorder to maneuver around and encircle the enemy, etc. There are many possibilities, maybe you could even design your own custom tactics to use.
Anyway, that's my idea. I think it would help spice up space battles a bit. Lemme know what you think; like it or hate it.
I think they do have something like this planned. There will be no direct control but this form of indirect control would be useful and fun.
Any control is preferable to watching movies.I haven't purchased GalCiv3 yet and dismayed that there is no turn based tactical combat, like MOO2 did 20 years ago.The rest of the game looks amazing.If there will be tactical combat added, where I can control the ships I designed in multiplayer combat over a LAN or the internet, then GalCiv3 has my attention.Otherwise, I hope they include it in GalCiv4.
Actually they do when you build your ships you pick your roles. Assult is basically blitz.
Ship roles are at best an extremely poor way of influencing battle tactics; they're extremely rigid sets of targeting priorities that also assign a starting position and a movement type (supports get 'stationary,' which basically means 'sit at spawn point until all ships with attacker or defender movement types are dead, then advance towards the enemy;' escorts and guardians get 'defender,' which basically means 'remain close to ships with roles designated as defend targets, and advance towards the enemy if all friendly ships with the attacker movement type are dead;' everything else gets 'attacker,' which is 'advance towards the enemy').
Treating ship role selection as a way to govern fleet tactics also has the issue that the roles of the ships which are in the fleet govern the fleet's "tactics." Fleet composition is something which is rather difficult to change on the fly, especially when combat is expected in the near future. I can make two identical ships which have different sets of targeting priorities, starting positions, and movement types, but I cannot make one ship and give it a set of targeting priorities, and then tell it to switch to a different set of targeting priorities without 'upgrading' the vessel even if I already have an identical design with that set of targeting priorities. If I want to use a different set of tactics, I need a fleet with a different composition, or I need time to change my current fleet's composition through upgrading the ships in it to identical designs with different roles or by replacing some of the fleet's ships with identical ships with different roles.
There's also the little issue that the targeting priority lists are inherently flawed, especially given just how strong the priorities are. Escort tank/Capital glass cannon pairings are a thing for a reason, and that reason is that there's essentially nothing that will go after a vulnerable glass cannon which was assigned the Capital role when it could instead shoot at a brick that was assigned the Escort role.
They probably won't ever put tactical land or space battles in, and that's a good thing. You're in charge of a civilization, not in charge of firing the main cannon. What stardock actually needs to do is make battles end before one side is wiped out. Rocket-tag wars are pretty stupid, and by now everyone should realize how easy it is for a human to abuse them.
What would be nice is more actual power over your military details. You say you want tactical mode, but what does that entail? Well, right now, nothing. You just want to focus fire different ships than the AI does. They need to make ship roles more important, but also not so damn strict(I want my carriers to actually participate from that back line). Thrusters should actually be useful for something (even if that's still niche). Military power is all about more bigger ships. The game doesn't support anything else - swarm fleets = dead fleets. There's no underlying variety that would make tactical play at all meaningful if we pretended that you WERE the general. What we need is some sort of competitive balance between military strategies, not a pointless minigame. As it stands, the ONLY military variety in the game is the salvage ability, but quite frankly it is half-baked.
"You say you want tactical mode, but what does that entail?"
Master of Orion 2 did Tactical combat pretty well for a 1996 game.
I would expect the games that followed to have at least learned from the success of it.
So, turned based.
Control of my ship's movement, not watching a movie of combat.
Weapon arcs.
Weapon Beam upgrades: Continuous, Autofire, Shield Piercing, Enveloping on various types of weapons.
Missile Weapon upgrades: Fast, Armored, ECM, MIRV.
Torpedo Upgrades: Overloaded, Enveloping.
Capabilities like:
Use of a Tractor Beam to slow a ship down.
Crew Killing Weapons to reduce defending marines.
Use of Boarding Parties for Ship Capturing.
A Cloaking Device to make one's ship invisible/untargetable to give time to reload or move to a better location.
Drop mines out a rear hatch or shuttle bay of your ship to damage other ships or destroy fighters.
These are not new ideas.
All but the last one was in MOO2 20 years ago.
The last one was done back in 1966 in the Original Star Trek TV Series. Star Fleet Battles incorporated it into it's board game in 1979, and SFB 1&2 PC games back in 1999 and 2000.
I don't need a 3-d environment. There are plenty of those games out there lately.
Blowing up ships is in every game. Capturing ships is only in the best games. People hold that in high regard and enjoy having it as an option.
Other than "control of ship movement", you did not list a single thing that necessarily involves the tactical combat you want. All the rest are variety in military philosophy/design/capability.
Well i recently played escape into the endless and it had what looked like tactical combat. I ended up just automating it. Cause that did nonething to affec t the game.
Just to be clear: Tactical Combat will never be included in any Galactic Civilization version.
Brad and the rest of the development team have been exceedingly clear on this, for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, it's a choice, and the decision has been made against it, for a variety of reasons.
It isn't going to happen. No matter how much certain vocal groups plead or threaten or cajole. StarDock has said that TC doesn't fit within the idea model of the game they are trying to produce, any more than replacing the planetary invasion scheme with an RTS subcomponent would.
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As an aside, frankly, TC in a strategy 4X the scope of GC3 makes as much sense as playing chess, where every piece was assigned a full D&D character sheet, and every single move attack required you to break out the D20 and play 20 minutes of D&D to see if a Rook could take a Pawn. At best, something like Battle Chess would result, but you'll note that even there, the combat is auto-resolved, and, anyway, people tire of Battle Chess very quickly, and go back to regular chess because the point of chess is strategy, not tactics.
I suspect that the people who want battle tactics might enjoy Star Control.. which StarDock is also making.
No one goes over to Civ and tells Firaxis that they need tactical combat to make Civ 6 the best game ever...Don't get why there are so many people who don't seem to get that Galactive Civ is a space empire builder... not a space combat game.
Cooldowns would be cool. Like if you know the computer is going to go after a particular ship you can pop an extra strength shield cooldown for 5 seconds or something.
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