From 2019:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/1798529872650018441/
And other places, but that thread reminded me, Brad sought ideas. And... so far I'm not seeing anything other than a few under the hood changes which aren't changing much of the feel to combat yet for me.
I've noticed:
At range attacks on the strategy map using missiles or whatever. -shrug-
I LIKE the way ships are built with components just taking up a component space and not the GC3 "weight" of each object differing (33.7 laser weight anyone?) way- this results in different outfitted ships meeting in the field over GC3.
But I'm not seeing:
Am I missing the multiple turn combat thing Brad touted forever? My attacks have been small scale so far, so idk, help me out here. If they are in the game what do they bring to it that improves the experience? The ability to send reinforcements? Anything?
Or really anything different.
There must be big things I am missing here, considering the time the Devs have spent pondering what to do.
well the multiple turn thing right now involves attacking/invading core and colony worlds. there's supposed to be multiple turn combat stuff with bigger ships in the works i think, but with each turn being a month i'm not too sure how it's supposed to work yet.
Range, accuracy, and rate of fire have been equalized, and they're still working on balancing the weapons because everyone is using missiles pretty much for the ranged attack ability right now.
defenses and ship roles are pretty much unchanged i think, there's no accurate info on those to know for sure though. battle logs show very inaccurate numbers right now so no one really knows how any of it works. apparently they tried switching up how defenses work a little while ago, but gave no info that they changed anything and with inaccurate battle logs no one really knew what was going on until the latest patch when they changed it basically back to what it was.
lots of people have posted tons of ideas, but the feedback from the devs seems to be that they dont want to make any large combat changes, because not enough people have been asking for them and the game is coming out soon and they've got other stuff to focus on.
the actual combat is more simple and basic now than in gal civ 3 though, def seems a step back at the moment except for the out of combat ranged missile attack and the taking of core and colony worlds.
lot of recent talk about it here https://www.galciv4.com/article/511246/is-everyone-starting-off-using-missiles-more-than-the-other-weapon-types if you're interested
plus some in the feedback posts
Thank you very much both of you, I am genuinely interested in this. I've come to accept (and even appreciate and like) GC3 combat, so I'm not disappointed at all, but would love to see what creative improvements are coming about.
oh, couple other notable changes from gal civ 3... hp for bigger hulls was just greatly increased, and carrier ship slot items now require a bunch of durantium, so ppl can't just carrier spam as easily.
Ha. Good luck getting any innovation in Galciv combat.
I don't like how combat works right now. It feels oversimplified compared to GC3.
In GC3, you had to decide whether you wanted you wanted your military ship modules to be stronger, miniaturized, or cheaper. And you could mix and match which ones you chose, so you could get improved beams and cheaper point defense, for instance. This provided a lot of strategic depth to the game that we are now missing.
Additionally, I feel like GC4 has taken a step back in the use ship roles. They're still part of the game, but they aren't explained anywhere. As a result, it's almost like they don't exist for new players. Another factor is that you can no longer upgrade your ships. One great thing about GC3 is that if you had old ship you didn't have a use for, you pay credits to upgrade it, and sometimes this even involved changing the ship role. This meant you could, for example, upgrade your interceptors to change them into guardians so that you could incorporate them into a defensive fleet and they wouldn't uselessly die at the start of the battle. In GC4, once a ship has a role, it's locked in. On top all this, there's the problem that if you get a military ship as a reward for surveying a ship graveyard, you actually have no way to figure out what it's role is. In combination with the fact you can't upgrade ships, this makes it very hard build a fleet strategically.
At first, when we got the Battle Viewer back, I was really excited to how combat mechanics were working. But now in my games, I almost always just ignore the battle viewer because it doesn't tell me anything useful. I'm not assembling a fleet of highly coordinated ships like I was in GC3. I'm either putting together a hodge-podge of ships to fend off attack, or I'm pummeling my enemy because I have superior weapons technology and production capacity. In neither case do I get to make any relevant or interesting decisions about the compositions of my fleets. (Yes, there's the choice of beams/missiles/kinetic, but right now with missiles being superior that doesn't feel like much of a choice, and in any case the weapons you build are dictated by the kind of resources you have.)
As a side note, I like the ability to click on the battle alert in the top left and get to the battle viewer again. I feel like since we have that ability, we no longer need the battle viewer to pop up automatically. It gets annoying having to dismiss the battle viewer each time you attack a pirate or survey a ship graveyard.
There's also a problem I've found with the battles-taking-more-than-one-turn thing. If you have smaller ships at the forefront and slower ships at the back, the battle can be over before a big ship even gets into the fight. This happened to me the other day when I was trying to take down a precursor shipyard. I had a medium-hull carrier commander ship that was carrying four interceptors. I had some small-hull ship as well. Because the designation of the carrier ship was "support" it started way in the back, and the interceptors of course started way in the front. The carrier ship had 32 missile attack (the interceptors I believe used beams), so I thought we would make quick work of the precursor shipyard. What actually happened was the interceptors fired a few rounds, some of the small hull ships got off a shot, and then the battle was over. The precursor shipyard took maybe 1/5 of its health in damage and I lost an interceptor. (I'm not sure currently if these are replaced, or how that works.) The other annoying thing was the "Battle Prediction" was total victory. So Battle Predictions right now aren't taking into consideration the turn limit.
I hope they fix combat so I can start crushing my enemies. I've been playing mostly peacefully and going for Prestige victory because warfare just doesn't interest me at all right now.
great post, thx. i agree on all counts. hope the devs read this...
If they were to make your changes to the combat system this late in development will most likely either 1) delay the release or 2) cause the game to be released with an AI that cannot handle ship to ship combat.
This (1and/or 2) will then cause a major negative response to the game.
The alternative is for the Combat system you want to be developed in a future expansion if the majority of owners even care for detailed combat.
Many people that want major changes to the system seem to ignore or forget that the AI needs to be taught how to use these systems. Also, I believe many non-programmers like myself do not realize that one letter, number, or symbol out of place or mistyped can make the whole operation either not work or cause a "Bug".
Had a TRS80 it proved to me that programming computers was not in my future it did however teach me respect for those that have the patience to be Programmers, and how easy it is for an operation to go sideways in a heartbeat.
It seems the devs did really pretty much nothing in the 3 or so years of time they had to truly focus on this aspect of the game once gc3 was much complete and providing good user feedback. It's really sad.
Combat has gotten actually worse and less enjoyable. Wow. I would not have predicted this.
I just wanted to update that in fairness, part of the "horribleness" in combat appears to have been from a major bug or flaw in the design of defenses which 0.92 has changed for the better. The tactical feel potential to combat has returned a little bit, and has me hopeful. I don't think combat has to be complicated and *should* be tied to the strategic layer (by resources like it is) so I'm not looking for suddenly Black Box patched Stardrive style combat or anything.
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