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Some broad statements first. GC2 is a great game. One of the best strategy games ever made. But I believe there is still massive room for improvement. It has won numerous awards and rave reviews, but in terms of sales it's no Halo 3, or even Sins of A Solar Empire. Not only do I want it's successor to be a better game, I also want it to get the sales it deserves.
With this in mind I have been doing some in-depth analysis of where the series needs to go.I had hoped to get this into one topic, but it has proved too long, and I believe some degree of focus will help discussion. So here is part one, an introduction and
It's easy to dismiss the games selective appeal on the nature of the beast and say that a space TBS can never be that successful, but I believe this is a poor excuse. The Civilization series continues to do well, despite it's game play values being very similar. On another note, EVE online is one of the most successful MMOs ever made, despite the fact it's gameplay is mostly based on spread sheets and plays like a second job you have to pay for.
While Civilization's success is based primarily on the legacy it has built (something I believe galciv will come to emulate), what both of these games do is sell the idea of the position in which they put the player far better than GalCiv does.
The problem is largely one of production values and art direction. There is nothing in GalCiv that I want to take a screenshot of and put on my desktop. There is nothing that I would want to watch a video of on gametrailers.com and nothing that would make a great banner like all those you see for EVE. This is not to say that the game should be designed to sell well instead of play well, but it demonstrates that GC2 just doesn't immerse you in it's world or make you care about what's going on like it should.
The first problem is the fleet battles. This is the one part of the game that should really stun, but it's hardly return of the jedi, and that's exactly what the game should be aiming for.
The first thing is the sense of scale. The ships – even the huge ones – just don't feel huge. Part of this I believe, is simply due to the way they move. I would describe their movement as reminiscent of a child holding a toy ship in his hands and waving it through the air in front of him. They shouldn't be able to turn on the spot like they do. The larger ships need a much larger turning circle – capital ships should be slow, inevitable presences while the chaos of battle swirls around them.
The second is art direction. I would argue that most of the components are too “busy” - being able to see small details – individual wires and lights gives the impression that the rest of the ship is not particularly big in comparison. For example, an imperial star destroyer
in comparison to a terran colony ship
You'll notice that the star destroyer has areas of very low detail and flat consistent surfaces punctuated by some areas of very high detail. The colony ship however, is more uniformlydetailed, and this gives it less sense of scale. Additionally of course, the colony ship just looks like it's made out of plastic rather than metal. This is more due to technology – the absence of modern technologies like normal and specular mapping, which I imagine will be a given by the time the next game rolls round.
Next, look at this AI designed ship. It's pretty butt ugly. I'd say it looks like a toy, but most toy companies usually come up with something better than that.
The problems with this are manifold. The first is the colour (the thalans are a particularly poignant example for this). There is nothing wrong with green ships – klingon warbirds for example. But these colours need to be darker or at least more metallic.
The next is the weapons. This is mainly an ai design problem – the ai should never scale weapons this large – it makes the rest of the ship look tiny in comparison. The projectile effects also need to be smaller in comparison to the ships. And of course the backwards facing weapon is unforgivable.
The next point is simply the range of ship sizes – there needs to simply be a larger difference between each class of ship to make the huge ships feel huge. This is also true for carrying capacity – usually by the time I add a support module, I usually only have space on a large ship for one more weapon than on a medium ship. Carrying capacities (in terms of modules per ship) need to be approximately doubling with each generation. Come to think of it, I've no idea why the size of modules changes with hull size – this just seems pointless and confusing.
Lastly, a further problem is weapon components themselves. I am torn on the issue of whether or not ships should be able to shoot through themselves as they can. It would look a lot cooler to see turrets tracking enemy ships, that's for sure. But moving in this direction means that ship layout becomes a gameplay issue insead of purely aesthetic. I am unsure of whether or not this is a good or bad thing, but it needs to be discussed in detail. One solution would be to give each weapon two turrets on either side of the ship (this is what eve online does), so that only one fires at a time, but the enemy is always in sight of one of them.
The next problem with fleet battles is that there is simply not that much going on.
First, in a visual sense, the vast majority of battles are between two groups of ships in open space. This is boring.
More battles need to be fought around planets because this is cool, especially we if we can get some gorgeous planet textures in the background. Back before TA, I used to keep all my ships garrisoned at planets and I got loads of these. However, since then the orbital fleet manager has seemingly disappeared from the tech trees (at least, definitely for the arceans), so fighting at home is now a disadvantage, which is ridiculous. I would start with the premise that fleets are automatically formed when a planet is attacked, and that no improvements are necessary.
Furthermore, fighting at home should have further benefits. I want to see mine fields, I want to see planet mounted canons shooting down capital ships, etc. Finally, I would change the (currently useless) planetary defense improvements to provide a bonus to defending ships, in the same manner as military starbases.
The next kind of battle we need to see more of is starbase battles. Remember that awesome episode of deep space nine? The first improvement I would make to the system is to make starbases automatically form fleets with defending ships, and not contribute to their logistics score, making it always an advantage to have a starbase on your side. Military starbases should have as much combat staying power as the most heavily fitted out huge ships. They should be fortresses that even the most powerful fleets fear to assault.
Even in open space, there needs to be more going on. If the battle is near a planet, I should be able to see it in the distance. The same goes for asteroid fields and other galactic features. There should be floating debris of destroyed ships, occasional asteroids etc.
As much as I want fleet battles to be cooler, I am highly against the idea of the player acting as an admiral, as if this was a total war game. I love the total war series, but the same principles would not work in Gal Civ. I played a game with tactical space combat (Imperium Galactica 2) and it was naff – all you did was select everything and tell them to attack the weakest ship - ie, what the game already does for you. The difference between a space naval battle and an ocean naval battle (or any other kind of historical battle) is that (assuming no weapon ranges are introduced) in space, everyone can shoot anyone anyway.
What there is potential for, however is strategic (not tactical) fleet combat. By this I mean, telling your ships to aim for different ship systems (weapons, engines, or damage), deciding whether or not to deploy limited use modules, and timing the best moment to use them, or overclocking weapons systems to gain increased fire-power at the expense of manoeuvrability, or risking damage.
Of course, for these tactical decisions to exist, more systems need to exist. I know I'm not the first to suggest that some ships could be given Carrier modules, that allow a certain number of tiny ships to keep place with the fleet without needing engines or contributing to logistics. These ships would be able to out manoeuvre the slow, heavy guns of larger ships. Thus an element of strategy is introduced where medium ships are needed to beat fighters, large ships to beat medium ships, and fighters/carriers to beat large ships. Alternatively, instead of fighters, modules could be added to launch small, unmanned and undesigned drones (ala the opening battle of revenge of the sith), which might be simpler for the player than building and carrying extra ships.
Regardless, being able to zoom down to the size of a fighter flying zooming round a capital ship would give fleet battles a sense of scale and drama they currently lack.
The next parts of this discussion will deal with the interface, economy, and general gameplay.
I like a lot of the ideas here. Plase assume that if I do not specifically mention something, it has got a general "OK":
Keep going, they're listening... let's just hope the yet to be announced development team for GC3 will have at least two years worth of long-term memory once they're all through Elemental:WOM duties.
Everyone has suggested plenty (dare clicking and reading for that much!) already; none of which acknowledged for consideration.
In the meantime, mods for GC2 still can't be uploaded in the library here -- my weapons thumbnails included.
I'd be curious to read about your take on Espionage, though.
My take on how size, speed, defenses, and weapons might interact. Just to highlight it if you don't get through all 50 pages of the topic Zyxpsilon linked to:
https://forums.galciv2.com/328231/page/46/#2132317
Most of the art issues you raise are valid, I guess, just remember there are a lot of people that simply aren't that interested in it. Improve the polish all you want as long as it doesn't affect playability with less capable systems.
Likewise, any tactical combat system needs to take into consideration the effects of game size, especially ground combat and invasion mechanics. I realize you specifically didn't want tactical combat, this is more of a reminder to others who wander in to read and comment.
I actually think they should seperate textures & model elements in the ship designer. They can then link texture both to ship size and the application of certain components, for Example;
Different types of armour could have different textures, as could organic hulls such as the Iconians have.
Overall I do think the graphics in GC3 should be better however you do have to keep in mind that art is expensive.
Talking of, lets ditch the tech robot, I want an animation of my race to present tech to me for variety.
I'd also like to see planetary invasion become a turn based stratergy sub-game (optional of course) that could play out over many sub-turns.
I'd also like to see most of the enhancements to cspace combat already talked about.
The greatest thing I'd like to see is some sort of racial designer that would enable easy creation of custom races in game and animate them for diplomacy, science, battle,etc. a little like spore in that respect, it would be great probably too expensive for stardoc to develop though.
I'd like to see research changed to fields of study e.g. Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Political Science, Computer Science.
You should be able to direct how much research budget you put into each.
Actual techs should then have a cost in each of the tech fields (these could be 0 in serveral fields) Once these levels are reached there should be a % chance that the tech will become available each turn. There should also be a % chance on some technologies that they will not be in the game. I'm still inclined to have the option to make a tech unique to a race as well or generic.
For example Stinger missiles might require level 1 in physhics + levle 2 Computer Science + level 1 Chemistry. It could then have a 10% chance per turn of being discovered once those requirements are met.
Actually I think it would be best if the game specifies which races can discover a tech.
Having read your post (and many other on the same topic from that thread) i have come to a few conclusions.
The religious adherence to the current all encompassing dice rolling has got to go if any depth is to be added to fleet combat. The current system can remain for calculating damage, but a separate aiming mechanic MUST be added at the least. I would model fleet battles in the following way.
Add four new mechanics: initiative, aiming, drones & experience. This adds more depth and tactical choices, but crucially, since there is still no variation in reload times or ranges, the best way to fit out a ship is still fairly obvious to new players and (crucially) the result can still be calculated without running the combat viewer.
Initiative will be familiar to anyone who has played dungeons and dragons: at the start of the fight a dice roll is made for EVERY WEAPON INDIVIDUALLY and is modified by your civilization's initiative ability. weapons then fire in order (and proportionally) to the total rolled. this is effectively the arcean's super warrior ability but made granular and less predictable.
Aiming: I have always thought that larger ship sizes were pathetic: generally you only get one or two more weapons or defence modules on a large compared to a medium. I would change this by scaling up weapon damage proportionally with ship size (which also makes sense to my mind). however, the chance of hitting a ship would decreases exponentially as it's hull becomes smaller compared to the attacker. this means that a huge ship does 1.25 as much damage as a large ship, and has a 95% chance of hitting it, compared to an equal sized ship. however, once a ship is three classes or more smaller than the attacker, the capital ship should have significant problems hitting it. this means that, while medium class ships would be decent jack or all trades, an equal cost mixed fleet would beat them, all other things being equal.
Drones are my solution to the carrier problem, and i nicked the idea off someone in that thread. Instead of building tiny ships and having some sort of awkward interface issue of putting them inside a carrier, or carried along by the fleet, you create a series of drone modules that can be attached to medium and larger ships. think of the robots in the opening battle of revenge of the sith. drones are the ultimate sub tiny ship, and are the bane of anything medium sized or larger, orbiting them at close range and cumulatively doing large amount of damage. tiny, small or medium ships (or specific anti-drone counter measures) are needed to deal with them. once destroyed through, they must be repaired in the same manner as hit points. this creates an additionaly strategic decision of whether or not to use drones in any given battle. most importantly though, they create an extra visual element that makes battles simply far more fun to watch, and gives the larger ships a much greater sense of scale.
experience is gained as a ship does damage to enemies and provides small bonuses to that ship's initiative and aiming abilities.
targets are aquired by ship class, so all ships in a given class or drones select the armed ship class they can best hit and damage, and then choose from among that class using the good old attack:defence ratio.
The end result of this sytem are that an additional fleet composition dynamic is introduced - a range of ship sizes helps deal with different threats, but too much disparity results in too many targets. Large ships are necesarry to deal with medium ships and, mediums are necesarry to deal with small ships and drones, and drones are necesarry to deal with large and huge ships. The player gets the additional decision on whether or not to deploy drones before the battle (which may not be worthwhile against fleets of small ships), but crucially, since this is specified in advance, the results can still be calculated in exactly the same manner without forcing the battle to be played.
*smiles smugly*
This would be useful, and realistic, but the simple fact that things were divided so much amongst different areas might make research prohibitively difficult..... however, if you can balance it, it would be a load of fun....
Ugh..... RNGs make me nausious...... a giant celestial roulette wheel is no fun at all....
And hard counters make me /facepalm
Seriously, there is no reason to do a fighter -> huge -> medium -> fighter ->..... circle jerk. Countering an enemy fleet should be about what is on your ships, not the size of the ship - which is why I proposed the system I did. There is no reason make huge ships completely unable to defend themselves against fighters; make it a conscious design aspect whether you want your ships to be stronger against fighters at the cost of being able to kill big stuff, or to tank the fighter damage in favor of smashing power.
I agree with the idea that aiming needs to be seperated from damage, in order to make the combat system tactical in GC3 you would have to add more complexity under the hood.
Image fixed. Most people seam to agree with me about the art stuff, or are at least ambivalent.
Some general statements about fleet combat: It's obvious that the current system is too crude. Some new dynaimcs need to be introduced both for visual reasons and to add an additional level of strategy, beyond the current attack % defense rock/paper/scissors. I would suggest that this extra dynamic be concerned with fleet composition, and make make certain types of ships better against each other. How hard or soft any of these systems are, i imagine would be determined through beta testing.I think this would improve fleet battles visually and strategically, without hindering those who have no desire to fight out every battle in real time.
I'm not really sure I can go beyond this without designing a system on Stardock's behalf, so I'll leave it at that, and begin writing the next topic.
Yes, I pretty much agree with everything you say here, the trouble with GC2 was the combat system was not really designed with tatical battle in mind, it was built to be ressolved with a few simple roles and all the rest was just window dressing.
Mind you I think Frogboy realised this and will do a very different system for GC3 probably with many of the features you suggest.
I like the toy feel to the game that is what makes it unique. Anybody remember legos, spore, and Space Empires 5? Galciv2 has the same toy appeal of legos; you get to build your own ship to do a variety of tasks. In Spore the designer is a thousand times cornier but anyone see the sales light up on that baby? Space Empires 5 tried for a serious space ship look, but that left no room for the player to really design an awesome ship. Plus there were way to many things you could add to the ship and the AI only picked from a limited few and ruined the gameplay. The most amount of fun I had was a human vs human where i played myself for a day.
If you do not like the small scale of some things dial it up. Have you looked at the best ship designs posts? There are gargantuan ships there that would make darth vader cry for his mother on tatooin. The scaled up weapons can be removed and even shrunk to where to the casual observer will not see them.
In TA it was replaced by the Orbital Command Center. The OCC is a super project that you build on one of your planets and asks like a Orbital Fleet Manager on each of your planets. This makes it a target of human players which compature this AI planet first.
I have also posted in the past that combat ships in orbit should be automatically fleeted for defense and that a starbase should combine with your ship/fleet for defending against an attacking ship/fleet. Planet based weapons for attacking enemy invading ships also makes sense.
I agree that the gap between a tiny fighter and a huge capital ship is way to small!
I believe a compromise art style can be found to suit most people and keep the same level of customization. I had not realised that bout the OFM; i assumed it was just for that one world.
The one final comment I will make is that the AI needs to be better at designing ship visually as well; it doesn't matter how much effort you put into your own if you're still going to end up facing monstosities like that thalan frigate in the OP.
I agree 100% with this and would add the following. Star bases should be able to be built within range of a planet that necessitates that you must fight them to conquer the planet. I agree with you on planetary defenses as well. On the same note it should also go the other way as well. When you assault a planet you should get a big bonus for having a large fleet with you in the form of orbital bombardment. Right now you get the same result if you have a huge supporting fleet or no supporting fleet. Planetary bombardment should replace the assault support options you are given.
Starbases should be more powerful as you suggest and they should be able to house fleets, fighters and other such craft.
I think a model for this already exist to some degree. If you have ever played the game Rebellion, which really was not all that good, they used a model a lot like this where you basically have a few different types of fighters you direct towards overall objectives and you then gave direction to your capital ships by class. So you could tell your heavy units to target their heavy units, or to target their support units and so on. It was pretty basic but it let you do different things. Additionally, and I think this would be an important addititon, it let you retreat. This should be a benefit of having faster ships, you should be able to disengage and fight another day. Even if you are not faster you should be able to direct your fleet to run towards a starbase or reinforcements and basically put the choice to the enemy to chase you, and possibly be overwhelmed or to simply do their damage and then let part of your forces go. This is much more realistic than repeated fights to the death.
I think some of this is very good, though the large ship, medium ship, fighter model is a bit simplistic. Simply put I would leave that in the hands of the designed. You could counter fighters by building fighters of your own, or by having dedicated anti-fighter ships or by simply dedicating part of your large ships armament to anti-fighter weaponry. That would introduce more variety.
I would simplify fighter design so that you basically have fleet standard fighters and bombers. You can upgrade them whenever new technology is avaliable and you are given the choice of either just building the new ones as needed for their cost factor or replacing the whole current force for a lump sum over a given period of time. If you are a fighter heavy force the time and cost would be high. That keeps it simple and managable for the player.
Overall I like most of your ideas though. Good job. Now, onto my main point and criticism. Fleets need to be structured and administered very differently. As they stand right now they are functionally useful only to the point that they multiply your combat power when they could and should do so much more.
1. The player needs to be able to create a fleet and within that fleet have task forces. Right now there is no incentive to have anything but your best ship design over and over in the fleet, be it a bunch of small ships or a few large ships. A proper fleet should have a mix of units for a variety of roles. You need scouts, you need support ships and you need heavies. They all serve a role in a balanced force.
2. Fleets should have to have flagships and/or a command starbase to function as large, integrated forces. If that command function is destroyed and no backup is avaliable the fleet would basically devolve into smaller task forces until a new command unit is provided.
3. Fleets should be utilized much differently in game. In reality if you wanted to defend an area of space what you would do is spread light units around the front facing the potential enemy and then put heavy units behind and your goal in an invasion would be to concentrate your whole fleet to meet the threat. Instead we get a defense that seems to be largely based on putting ships on or around individual planets. My hunch is this is why fleet sizes are kept so small in the game is to allow the AI to be able to defend itself in that manner.
In game the way this would work would be you select a number of systems to be defended by a certain fleet. You then set defensive priorities. For example I would probably keep my heaviest units around my most valuable planet in that particular area. So I assign that task force to be stationed on or around that planet. I think assign other task force and individual units as I see fit to defend the area I have designated. Then when I build new units, rather than having to mess with them individually I can route them to the various fleets I have established and they will be distributed based on my preset priorities.
The huge benefit of this is that in managing my forces I now have like 3-5 major fleets in most cases, with possibly a few minor ones. Managing my forces just got much simpler because I can simply direct the system to allocate new construction and existing forces across my fleets in a pre-set manner. If I am being threatened in 1 fleets sector I can simply tell the inferface to transfer forces from my other fleets and the moves would all be managed automatically. Of course if I wanted to manage individual ships I could but if not much of the burden of shifting forces around is managed for me allowing me to move through turns more quickly and focus on more compelling task. One could simply drag and drop units from one fleet to the other and each fleet would adjust its dispositions accordingly.
For the AI it would make all the difference in the world. Even on the highest levels the AI suffers from an inability to allocate its forces in a logical manner on defense. This would go a long way to solving that problem and I think would allow fleets to be larger as my guess is that limit is in place mostly to allow the AI to use the planetary defense model it currently uses. For the player it would relieve you of having to watch your borders for every little ship the AI tries to leak across.
If you desired you could simply let the fleet apply its pre-sets and repoond to smaller incursions. It would give everyone some measure of border control as well, allowing you to simply intercept scouts you don't want around and may not be at war with and tell them to leave or be destroyed.
When an attack would come the fleets should respond in a coordinated manner. Scouts should be just that. Light forces dedicated more to finding the enemy and shadowing his main body than participating in a fight. Allowing faster ships to run away makes design much more interesting. If I build only slow and powerful ships I can be shadowed with near impunity so it forces me to build a much more balanced fleet to try and destroy your scouts and get away from detection, allowing me to show up unannouced at a valuable target.
Now I actually have a reason to build mid-sized ships and the scouting battle becomes very important. If I can't sweep away your lighter forces my main units are basically moving ahead blind. You can concentrate a massive fleet and pounce at the opportune time because you know where I am and I can't find you. On the other end it becomes almost impossible to defend myself without light forces. If I have to scatter my main units they can be picked off piece by piece instead of in a concentration.
Anyway, that is my $.02 about how fleets should be managed in a new game. The overall goal is to simplify how a player manages the output of construction and the allocation of ships across their empire. You would still be able to move any single ship wherever you wanted. But when you did not ships would automatically be shuffled into the exisiting units. More importantly I think it would vastly benefit the AI and make the game more interesting. Right now when you invade it is basically a matter of when am I going to run out of ships and transports and have to regroup and will the AI hit me somewhere that I am not ready. Under my proposed system any invasion might conquer a few planets but the AI could be grouping its heavy units at the most valuable planet in the area, under the cover of a massive starbase while moving in more units from the rest of its empire to crush me rather than the current mode of just sitting around with forces on each planet waiting to wear me down.
That would make me face a much more difficult choice. Do I lunge for that starbase and planet and try to grab it before help can arrive from other places, knowing that the loss of it deprives the enemy of a sheltered place to mass its units or do I wait for the enemy to mass his fleet and meet him in open battle at the place of my choosing?
To me, that just seems much more interesting than just seeing how many planets I can overrun before I need to repair and build more transports.
BigJKU, you have touched upon fleets on a level I had not considered.
Currently, I definately find that it is far too easy to outwit the AI with a massed focused assualt on a planet, especially if you time your naval assault for the same turn as launching your ground invasion, and if logistics limits were higher this would be even easier. The AI does not seem to understand the doctrine of fighting concentrated and the necessity of taking (what must seem) arbitrary risk.
Part of the problem, I believe is that often on the galaxy maps, planets can be closer to planets in other systems than those in their own. Sensors are often such short ranges that ships cannot be seen by a planet until they are one or two turns away, and there is no means of travelling faster in your won space as opposed to the enemies; hence there are many good arguments for spreading your forces thin. This makes for a borring way to wage war. Dealing with this is definately an idea.
However, when it comes to encouraging the player to have scouts to spot and shadow enemies, I wonder how much micro management it would entail. Perhaps I am just visualising it incorrectly, but it is an intriguing idea. There should definately be n incentive to have different types of ship, but I personally would deal with that by giving battle advantages to certain types of ship versus other, as i originally described, and as is demonstrated it real life navies with air craft carriers, destroyers, frigates and submarines. There is no reason why both cannot be true, and for smaller ships to have strategic, as well as tactical advantages.
I would suggest that the scouting function is simply something that is accomplished automatically. It would be easy enough to code as games with ranged and melee units usually have a setting for ranged units that instructs them to keep their distance and simply keep the enemy within sensor range.
Think of it like this. Defensively you have First Fleet assigned to defend say 5 systems. You would designate the concentration areas for your heavy ships but your scouts would simply be distributed around the perimiter automatically to maintain the best sensor coverage possible. If you were trying to cover too much space with too few ships then you would have gaps. When something comes into sensor range you would have some options such as shadow, engage, or intercept (like if you wanted to tell them to leave but not kill them outright).
The problem with giving fighters an inherent advantage over smaller craft is that it is something that is totally artificial. If a medium hulled ship can carry anti-figther weapons then so could a large ship. It may not be the most efficient way to do things but it could be done if one felt so compelled.
This is a strategy game so cool graphics are the icing on the cake. I would rather the developers spend time on things that would have a dramatic positive impact on the playability of the game. I recommend a simpler UI with only 3 sliders vs 4, that would allow the AI and novice players to get 100% output. The simplier UI lowers the learning curve for new players without dumbing down the game and helps level the playing field between experienced players and the AI, since the AI will never use advanced strategies like the all factories, all labs, or switch strategy.
Researching with Factories and Building with Labs is Crazy!
I often see the AI on level suicide build planetary defenders with lots of defense but no weapons which is crazy. If you want to block an unarmed transport without an armed escort then you only need a cheap empty tiny hull ship. Adding the defense just adds to the cost of the defender without adding any benefit since any primitive attack ship will defeat it. The AI does lots of dumb things like this.
In short improving the UI and making the AI smarter matter more to me in a single player game.
Thanks Mascrinthus! The answer to your question is simple: If this is to be a truly great game, we should have both. I've read the topic you've linked with great interest and it has greatly influences my next topic, in which I have outlined my favourite way of modelling the economy. I'm about to post part two right now!
I don't intend these advantages to be artificial. If you've ever played EVE online you'll know that a small interceptor can run rings around a huge capitcal ship and eventually kill it in the end. It's all down to the game mechanics. The same was true in real naval combat in the age of colonialism.
Bigger ships have bigger guns that do more damage. However they also have a slower tracking speed because they are so bulky. This is not a problem until ships get really small, fast and close up. The big guns literally can't turn fast enough to stay locked on the fast moving ship. The same was true in the eighteenth century: a small brig could in theory destroy a first rate ship of the line because it could orbit round the capital ship faster than the capital ship could turn to get it's broadside pointed at the brig. If the first rate stopped and waited for the brig to come round, the brig would just stop and fire at the undefended prow or stern.
All the game needs is to introduce aiming and tracking mechanics and the merits of different ship classes against each other will wuickly become apparent. Personally though, I would make these mechanics a lot "softer" than they are in EVE or on the high seas.
On the rock/paper/scissors aspect of the game, while it is true that smaller, faster craft will have an advantage over large, slow capital ships, what would be wrong with expanding on the current missile/beam/gun design trees? You have smaller, higher fire rate weapons for targeting small craft and, as the weapons themselves get larger, the ships they are effective against are the larger ships. To keep balance in the system, maybe an addition to the computers research tree to give ships specific amounts of fire control to the ship which would result in for example, an escort type vessel having a lot of small, light weapons that would be more effective against those craft while your larger (battleship sized) vessels might have one or two anti-small craft systems and be focused more on the large weapons used against other capital ships.
Just a thought or two that occurred to me as I was reading these posts...
That's essentially what my mechanics proposal was. I was basing more on WWII tactics than the sail age of naval combat. Guess what, battleships had lots and lots of 20mm and 40mm flak cannons, as well as 5 or 6 inch secondary weapons. The first were useful for shooting down attacking planes - admittedly not as effective as defending fighters of your own, but far better than trying to use the main battery! The secondaries were more suited for killing torpedo boats and destroyers, which were also pretty hard to kill with a 16 or 18 inch gun. Carriers generally had the AA and 5 inch guns for self defense, but gave up having a main battery to fulfill an entirely different fleet role.
Sorry but any game that has fighters able to just fly with impunity around capital ships is basically making an artificial distinction. If you limit the weapons to just a handful of super-heavy weapons it would make sense but there is no logical reason why a large ship could not also carry anti-fighter weapons. All men of war built since the 1920's have had some level of anti-aircraft weaponry. It is illogical to think that one would build a 5 million ton warship and not put some anti fighter weapons on it. No one does it now so why would they fail to do so in the future?
As for your understanding of combat in the age of sail I would suggest doing a bit more reading on that era. I am not sure I can think of any instance where a Brig or even a Frigate defeated a Ship of the Line in combat. There were a few instances where groups of Frigates would defeat a SOL but it was not often. Their real advantage was that they could run away and avoid combat all together with the more powerful ships.
Your idea is nice in theory, but I can't think of an instance where it was put into practice during the age of sail to any noticable effect. In fact Jefferson tried just that by building a large number of smallish warships and they were just swept aside during the War of 1812. Try TR's history of the War of 1812 to get a good feel for the period and how it Naval Combat worked. He is very critical of the idea of building smallish warships.
The idea of the small ship killing the giant really came back into being only when the steam powered torpedoe was introduced and gave small ships enough punch to do it. However that was quickly countered with secondary guns and Torpedo Boat Destroyers (which eventually became the destroyers everyone knows today).
Good read keep it up! [e digicons][/e] [e digicons]:beer:[/e]
You are of course, completely correct in all regards.
A large ship could mount a smaller, faster gun for dealing with fighters. However, I was working under the assumption that it would generally be a worse use of a large ship's carrying capacity to do so. Such a compromise ship would find itself beaten by both an equivalent, specialised capital ship, or by an equivalent number of smaller fighters. On a fleetwide scale therefore, a fleet where each ship type was specialised in such manner, would defeat an equivalent fleet where all ships were armed for dealing with different enemies (this is working under the assumption that, as in galciv2, each ship could only have one target at a time).
I then went a step further and assumed that, for the sake of simplicity, the ship designer would assume the player was operating under this doctrine of specialisation, and not offer the choice of smaller, faster weaponry. That's a matter of personal taste i suppose, and one that i would ultimately leave to the game designers.
Of course, you could indeed have multiple targets, but that's a whole new ballgame. And then there's the possibilty of weapon ranges. By that point though, I fear the business of designing what constitutes a good fleet becomes incredibly complicated, to the degree that a lot of people would just slap on whatever they felt like. People might want that sort of complexity, I don't know.
I agree it could get very complicated if you let it but I see no reason it would have to. I would add two elements to the design system to make it work. The first would be some sort of battle management module to replace the logistics upgrades they now have. The better you got the more targets your ship could fire on at once, up to either the max rating you have in that field or the max number of weapons you are carrying. The second would be the flagship function I already talked about. That would determine the maximum number of ships you could have in a fleet and so long as your flagship was alive it would allow for coordinated targeting of the enemy among multiple ships.
Again, my goal is to make fleets far more valuable in the game and encourage the AI to make use of them rather than static defensive postures on planets because that is a really boring aspect of the game.
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