All right. I just loved the cinematic; but something that struct me: the "Crusade Fleet" was composed of a few huge behemot ships and plenty of support vessels around them. Something that rarely happens in my previous GalCiv games; as the game always played with this simple fact: bigger is better. Therefore, you ended up with a fleet of Cruisers at the end.
It's not as impressive, in my humble opinion, as a properly constructed (and somewhat realistic) fleet. It's always funnier to see smaller starships in operation buzzing around their bigger counterparts; akin to Destroyers and Frigates protecting their aircraft carriers. Which is why I would like to suggest to the developpers to.. well, add a layer of complexity to fleet design that would favor diversified fleets over monoclass ones. How? It's actually elegant:
Make starships deadlier as they get smaller.
Now listen. I am not promoting the idea of all-starfighters (or Corvettes) fleets. Nor am I saying that a starfighter alone should be more powerful than a starship of bigger size. It's all about cost-efficiency: the industrial production required to build 1 corvette could be better spent to build 4 starfighters, if ALL you are looking for is punch power. When it comes to Cost vs Cost, Starfighters are ALWAYS going to be superior to Corvette, who will ALWAYS be superior to Destroyers, etc...
But why build larger starships at all, then? Again, the solution is elegant:
Make certain component only available of ships of a certain class or bigger
Stuff like "Starfighter Hangar" should only be available for the biggest starships. "Anti-capital ships torpedoes" and "Flak Turrets" would be available only to Frigates. "Long-range Plasma Beam" only available to Destroyers, etc...
You will end up with starship classes with a specific mission, and it will make sense for you to make them work as a team. It will make sense for you to keep them in formation. It will make sense for your heavy weaponry to target the smallest ships first; as they are the one carrying the heaviest weaponry load.
Now, let's try to simulate, logically, what would a "comprehensive" fleet look like.
First of all, the punches: the Starfighter. They are the fastest and deadliest crafts. However, their weapons are short-range and have to expose themselves to reach their targets. There can be multiple kinds of Starfighter; from Interceptor to Bombers. A squadron of Starfighter carrying weapon X (torpedo, laser, etc..) is going to be the most cost/effective way of carrying destruction, no matter the potential hull size. Starfighters are, ultimately, short ranged. So you need a Carrier to move them around. This can be armed, in which case it becomes the equivalent of a Battlestar. But then, why have them carry offensive weapons if it would be cheaper to have the same weapons carried by smaller starships? Ultimately, however, a Carrier is obviously very vulnerable to Fighter strikes. Unless your contingent is specifically made up of Interceptors, you will suffer bad casualties from the opposition's fighters. This is why you need specific anti-fighter weaponry to screen against opposition attacks; like Flak Turrets or Mines. These do not fit on a Starfighter; so you need to have Frigates to deploy them around, as we have established the smaller crafts are the most effective way of carrying weaponries. Now, we have a very interesting fleet disposition. A Carrier sorrounded by Frigates who shield it against ennemy Fighters. Thing is, with the Frigate screen, nobody has the capacity to hurt the other side with its fighter. You need a certain amount of long-range weaponry capable of punching through the frigate screen to open the way for your starfighters without exposing themselves to the ennemy's starfighters. These can only be carried around by Destroyers and bigger ships. Obviously, you could load these up on the Carrier, but it's more cost-efficient to just build Destroyers. So we end up with: Starfighters (Bombers-Generic-Interceptor) Frigates (fighter screens) Destroyer (Frigate-punchers) Carriers
You end up with a naturally diversified fleet. It would make sense for your Destroyers to target the ennemy's Frigates first, instead of going all-in on the carrier.
The simplistic combat of the last two games acts as a as a barrier to a lot of things. I think it's the reason combat is such a hot topic. Is it likely to change? Your guess is as good as mine.
You know, if you want to encourage the use of small hulls, you could make it so only small hulls can cross asteroid fields. (Maybe inversely only allow big hulls to cross nebula.) The possible screen shot showed asteroids acting as rivers. Being long stings between the hexes.
I support the proposal to have diversified starship classes in fleet. It would add more strategic depth to the game and be more 'realistic' if you look at scifi movies/tv shows.
Well, there is certainly potential in giving certain starship class advantages in certain terrain. As long as it's logical and make sense.
I was just hoping to have a "grand strategy" need to diversified fleets. After all, as simplistic as Europa Universalis 3's combat was, it still made sense to have armies composed of a healthy mix of cavalry, infantry and cannons.
I think the truest barrier of the last game (Galciv 2) is basically the weapon system itself.
Just look at them
Railgun countered by armor, Laser countered by shield, missile countered by RAM / CIWS / AAW.Well, it's a good idea, until you put the calculation into the concept
Railgun =1 won't be able to penetrate armor =1. So basically if your ship has a railgun with damage value of 1, you won't be able to destroy another ship with an armor with protection value of 1. Well, you can still play with this calculation method. But the worst part is that if you have a ship that has 3 railgun, you can penetrate a ship with only 1 armor. Then, if you have 2 railgun, you won't be able to penetrate a ship with 4 armor point. This is why the game favor bigger ships to the smaller ones. Because basically a bigger ship can get more armor than the smaller one to get weapons. That is the reason why a single super ship can destroy everything in their path. As you won't be able to beat him even if you throw all your smaller ships into it.
So how to counter this problem? It's up to Stardock. But I can say that it also happen to another 4x game. Basically more weapon = stronger. More def you throw into a ship = GOD
edit :
Ok, I think I have an idea without changing the system too much. We can add "Size Penalty" into the bigger ships. It is not the evasion thing like some older 4x game I know, but more about the size itself. But let us imagine first about some science fiction / space combat movie / game that we have seen until today. Let us see from Star Wars franchise, Battlestar Galactica, even from Star Trek and other space combat movie. Then remember some of space combat game like Free space 2, etc.
When we watch a space battle, we always see that bigger ship will always sitting duck in their position. Their size prevent them from doing maneuver, and they can only counter small fighter with their own Point Defense Weapons. So how Galciv 3 emulate this battle? Just like I said previously. It is the size / maneuver penalty. The bigger the ships, the more penalty they get from the size.
Let say, a tiny ship has 0 maneuver point, while a huge ship has -50 maneuver point. You can improve the maneuver point from a booster module. But to prevent a bigger ship to spam boosters in their design, only 1 booster will give effect to the maneuver point. So a tiny ship that get a booster will get a bonus from maneuver point.
So what is the purpose of having a positive maneuver point? positive maneuver point will give your ship critical strike bonus, while negative maneuver point will get more critical attack from the enemy. So a tiny ship with 20 maneuver point can do 300 percent damage to a huge ship with -50 maneuver point (example. I leave the exact calculation to the math scientist here).
With this point, tiny ships can still do wonder against a huge one. Of course, a single tiny ship still vastly inferior to a huge ship. But a number of them can save the day from total annihilation.
Obviously, the game's combat mechanic will have to be revamped entirely. You are 100% right; the old system favored bigger ships.
I think one big problem is the trope named "critical existence failure"; where a starship would still perform and fight at 100% capacity even when down to its last hit point. When I think of it; I believe the solution would be to have a ship's system failure occur much, much before its hull breakdown. For example; a ship down to 80% hit point would only have 50% weapon power available. A ship down to 50% hit points would suffer a complete weapon shutdown. A ship down to 30% would be immobilized; unable to flee until emergency repairs are done.
That would suddenly make the involvement of smaller ships more combat-effective. Imagine a Battlecruiser vs. 5 corvettes; both having relatively same amount of his point and weapons in total (they hit for 20 damage total per turn, and each side have a total of 100 hit point).
The old system woud advantage the Battlecruiser big time: After 1 volley, the Battlecruiser would still be at 100% weapon capacity, while the flotilla would only be able to do 16 damage; losing 20% of its firepower. After the next round, it would just get worst for the Corvettes. Compound this problem with the problems you have outlined; it's obvious why larger starships are favored.
In my new proposed system; after the initial volley, the Corvettes would be down to 80% of their firepower while the Battlecruiser (down to 80% hit point) would be down to 50% of its initial firepower. It's easy to figure out why the Flotilla would gain the advantage. Ultimately, a diversified base for your firepower would prevent its easy crippling.
IF you are wondering why we shouldn't just have a linear diminishing of firepower following a starship's hull loss, then you just made both fleet equivalent. However, the point you made regarding Defense Advantage would make the game favoring larger starships as well. IT should become a game of balancing out individual starship's survivability with a fleet's capacity to have firepower lasting through multiple roungs.
In the campaigns of GC2, that was how you beat the Dread Lords. Especially in the original game, a swarm of tiny ships could rip apart a larger ship with far higher tech due to how the weapons mechanics worked. In Dread Lords each ship fired all its weapons at once, generating massive overkill on the target but allowing the rest of the enemy swarm to attack again next round. In Dark Avatar the weapons started firing per weapon mount rather than the whole ship, so 3-4 tiny ships might die each round but the rest would still keep fighting. The swarm was definitely more powerful than the singe large ship.
That system would put larger ships at enough of a disadvantage that there would be no reason to use them. A single large, expensive ship would be worth less in combat than the same dollar amount of smaller ships; if there's no combat benefit from building the larger ship over the smaller ones, why would anyone ever build a larger ship? Swarms of all-weapon tiny ships is occasionally fun, but I don't think that's the combat model we want to be encouraging.
What if a Military personal resource was introduced
a fighter would need only 1 pilot where a massive battleship would need over 1000 people to make it run properly
this could also have alot of differnt mechanics in it if your main fleet is destoryed you not only loose the fleet but 100k of your soldiers just died you people are not happy with your millitary incompitance
could also have buildings to increase how fast you recruit new troops faster even galactic projects to give you a boost maybe a slider to set how much of your population is conscipted for more evil empires with good empires getting bonus to recruitment when there at war because of patriotic pride in there empire
if you had to worry about not just the cost but also how many people you had to pilot your ships you may have to put a more balanced fleet of ships together
You can, it just takes a long time (and your ship might get destroyed in the meantime). Damage and defense rolls are between zero and the max value you have (or zero and the square root of the max value, if your defenses are off-type (shields vs. mass drivers, for example)). This means, that there are four possible outcomes each combat turn in your scenario:
Attacker and defender both roll zero: no damage.
Attacker and defender both roll 1: no damage.
Attacker rolls zero, and defender rolls 1: no damage.
Attacker rolls 1, and defender rolls zero: 1 point damage.
In TotA, any damage roll above zero will also reduce the enemy's defenses by the same amount (all the way down to zero) for this combat turn, even if the attack did no damage. This won't help in a 1vs1 fight, but if you attack with several ships, then you can eventually bring down even the strongest defenses.
We could have certain ship modules or utility that require a larger chassis to carry. New high-tech SuperRailCannon requires to be installed on a battlecruiser, for example? Or some special weapons that change the battlefield (AoE weapons, maybe? Less direct damage tho) require bigger ships.
The important part is to have two "needs" that both pull in each direction of Smaller vs. Bigger. The player should compromise and adopt a fleet made of both for the optimal fleet composition. If your mechanic entirely favor big or entirely favor small ships would ruin the outome that we are looking for.
There's nothing a fighter can do that a tiny hull couldn't, the push for carriers is mostly people that want to evade the logistics cap (see reply #19) or just on a mindless "lol carriers are cool" rant.
I disagree. Even a tiny hull ship is a full fledged star ship. It has an FTL drive, life support for longer deployments, a bigger crew than a fighter and is therefore much bigger (and costs more). A fighter is just one pilot (maybe 2), a small but powerful drive and some kind of weapon, depending on the role it plays (anti-starship, anti fighter or missile defense role). It's a lot smaller and cheaper than a starship and it needs a carrier to get to the battle.
That has to be a capital ship for hangars, for resupply, for repairing, for pilots and mechanic crews, ammunition, fuel etc etc. So logistics cap isn't evaded at all.
Basically fighters are nothing more than a weapon system that's just not mounted on the ship and is harder to defend against than a more conventional missile or beam weapon.
Yes, I find fighters cool, but I think there are valid reasons for them. Frankly, my impression is there are as much people on a mindless "fighters are dumb" rant than the other way round.
This is, unfortunately, difficult to justify when you can have a single transport ship carrying 1 billion soldiers, and it costs less than anything else in your navy (this is under the GCII model, mind you). If you can spare 500 million people for an army in just one basic transport module, you shouldn't have any problem whatsoever finding a few thousand people to serve in the navy.
Beyond that, judging by historical military levels, human nations can sustain ~5-10% of their adult population as members of the military during peacetime, and upwards of 40% during wartime. If we're looking at a multi-planet empire and considering only the requirements of the space navy, well, I think you're well within your <10% limit of peacetime military personnel even if you have hundreds of millions of people in the navy (which, judging from the crew requirements listed in GCII's intelligence report under the 'details' menu for ships, would mean that you have tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of ships).
The whole "100K soldiers died causes huge morale hit" thing is terrible when the invasion of planets requires you to bring troops in quantities similar to the total population of the planet being invaded, since the resultant casualties tend to number in the billions (or at least hundreds of millions) even on the winning side; conversely, it should hardly matter for fleet engagements that don't involve troop transports or colony ships, because individual ships rarely have crews much over a couple thousand, according to the intelligence report screen under unit details.
I could see Carriers introduced as a way to extend the operating range of little ships - instead of having to have your 10 sectors worth of life support units on every ship, you could instead have a single ship with lots of life support modules that also has 'hangar bays' which would allow your fleet to ignore the life support limits (or average the carrier and supported ships life support range in some fashion) on X of your ships below size Y (possibly up to X 'ship points', where Tiny costs A ship points, Small costs B ship points, etc, potentially with a maximum size per hangar bay/cargo module/whatever you want to call it), as well as allowing you to ignore the speed limits for those ships that fit into the hangar (which would also allow a similar module that doesn't allow you to ignore the speed limit of the little ships, which would fall into a 'fleet tender' style role). Or they could introduce a more complicated support module where each ship can carry so many supplies or so much fuel, and various types of hangar bays or other support modules allow you to extend the fleet range.
I tend to disagree with the premise that smaller ships should be deadlier, depending on implementation - I absolutely do not want to see a return to the module size scaling of GCII, not when there was no reasonable explanation for it. If weapon A does X damage no matter what ship it's on, and the game doesn't model ammunition restrictions in any way, there's absolutely no reason for weapon A to take up more space on larger hulls than on smaller hulls. Defenses I'm a bit more okay with size scaling - it makes sense that the armor plating on a battleship takes more space than the armor plating on a fighter, and it makes sense that it might take larger shield generators or more chaff dispensers to adequately protect a cruiser than a corvette; same goes for life support and engines. But weapons? My Death Ray takes less space on a fighter than on a Battleship despite there being no apparent difference due to the ship type mounting it? If my fighter Death Rays were weaker than my Battleship Death Rays, I could understand it, but not when they're functionally identical. I would tend to say that smaller ships should be more focused on firepower than survivability, and that the game mechanics should allow you to swarm big ships which aren't designed to deal with little ships in such a way as to give the little ships an advantage (overkill on big guns with long cooldowns, targeting difficulties of some kind, blind spots in fields of fire, something), but at the cost of making the little ships relatively fragile. GCII gave weapons perfect accuracy, and additionally gave big ships the defense and health advantage over swarms of little ships, and when it started allowing ships to target multiple units in any given round it took away the overkill factor which helped swarms survive.
I think it's a very good idea to have some weapons of such a size that they cannot be mounted on smaller vessels, as long as these weapons aren't made impractical due to it being better to mount 5 Fighter Laser Cannons in the place of 1 Cruiser Hypervelocity Gun or some such situation (I wouldn't mind that there might be scenarios in which that might be the better option, but I would want them to be special case scenarios - i.e. when creating an Anti-Fighter Cruiser instead of your standard Heavy Cruiser).
Big versus small has been become problem for many 4x Space Game, not just in Galactic Civilization Series. The reason is simple. Because in 4x Game, both big and small ships are just the same type of unit with different size. Look at them, they move at the same dimension, they use the same equipment and weapon (tiny ship is equipped with the same railgun as the bigger ship), and they have the same role (both are platforms with weapon and armor), and they fight with the same rule.
That's why the bigger the ship, the powerful they are. Because what? bigger ships have the advantage that the small not. It is the size. So because bigger ships can do what the smaller ones can, but small ships doesn't have that the bigger one not, then the result is always the same. big ship always win.
So how's to solve this problem? Well, we have only have one choice. that's to give the small something that the big not have.
In an another game with different mechanic than Galactic Civilization series, there are some suggestion that we can make.
1. The smaller the ship, the stealthier they are. Because of the size, it is easier for the enemy radar to spot bigger ships.
2. Small = cheap; faster to build; easily to maintain. It is easier to make 100 small ship than 1 big ship. Big = powerful, with sophisticate technology, can bring more missile, ordinance, can be equipped with better radar. But because of the sophisticated technology that it possess, plus the size, it is harder and more expensive to build and maintaining them.
3. Maneuver. Yes, fighter can maneuver better than a carrier size ship. You can see in Star Trek that a Defiant Class can maneuver better than a Galaxy Class.You can see X-Wing can move around the Imperial Destroyer and another big ships.
4. Surgical attack. It is the primary use of small fighters, I guess. We can look at Star Wars IV, where the rebel send fighter to do surgical attack to the Imperial artificial planet and strike it's core.
So, surgical attack, maneuver, and stealth. It is what a fighter should have and a cruiser and carrier not. in an event of space battle, a squadron of fighter can sneak into the enemy formations, using their maneuver capability into the enemy's cruiser blank spot and fire the enemy engine or weapon system.They won't be able to destroy a massive star destroyer singlehandedly, but by crippling the enemy asset, they can change the course of battle to their side.
Then how Galactic Civilization and another Space 4x Game emulate this? I don't know.
I still prefer the idea that groups of smaller ships should be more powerful than a larger ship. Buck for bucks, smaller ship are going to give you bigger punch.
But larger weapons have special qualities; longer range perhaps. Or AoE. Or special anti-Capital or special anti-fighter. Which justify the appearance of larger vessels on the battlefield, but does not invalidate the presence of smaller ships.
I guess I don't get it. You can already mix ship sizes. As your tech improves your smaller ships can become pretty powerful. The current system has a lot of flexibility. The idea of smaller ships being the most powerful (unless they are high tech vs low tech opponents of course) is kind of silly to me.
This
Most powerful in the cost-efficient meaning. 1 small ship vs 1 large ship would give the advantage to the large ship any day of the week, obviously.
But if you look at what it cost to build 1 large ship vs its equivalent in small ships, then small ships makes more sense. Smaller is just plain more efficient. You can afford to lose them more easily, and they happen to be the first targets by the ennemy. Larger ships are meant to fulfill other roles.
If you want a carrier type fleet do what I do I build 1xlarge/huge hull as the "Carrier" and use tiny/small hulls as fighters/bombers.
I re-state "IT aint broke dont fix it!" if you want proper carriers go play sins they have them on there.
man, what is it with people who are fucking obsessed with Carriers? I propose an elaborate suggestion as to how to make multi-size ship fleets viable, and people are merely reading it as "carrier, lol".
Actually read the thread, damn it.
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