In other words, starbase benefits should not stack with other starbases. Otherwise, 90% of the time spent on games will be building starbases to surround your planets (which is a rather tedious chore).
Currently the dominant strategies are either:
1. Colony spam.
2. Starbase spam.
3. Do both.
100+ planets with 5 starbases means the construction of 500+ starbases. Each starbase requires at least 8 constructors for a total of 4000 constructors. Each constructor takes about 5 seconds to move to the appropriate starbase, meaning that it would take 20,000 seconds or 7 hours to build 500+ starbases in a game.
In other words, the game effectively devolves into building colony ships so you could build more colony ships so that you have more colonies so that you CAN BUILD MORE COLONIES FASTER. And then after the colony rush is done, the game becomes building constructors so that you could build starbases so that you can build constructors faster so that you can build EVEN MORE STARBASES FASTER.
Personally I think the developers should create a minigame on who can spam out constructors the fastest. To be honest it wouldn't be all that different from the game right now at certain settings.
One only needs to spam starbases if it is necessary to win the game. Well my experience tells me it flat out isn't. It will make you more powerful, yes, in the classic turtle strategy (otherwise known as "grow tall"). But it flat out isn't necessary to win.
it simpliy isn't. Therefore if you find starbase spam tedious..... Don't engage in it. I know I certainly don't.
PS: As I am sure you know, one can put multiple constructors modules on a single ship. By the time the mid game rolls around, this drastically cuts down on time spent.
If one wants to complain about starbase spam, don't focus on the optional maximization game. Instead focus on the fact that the number of relics and resources that can be mined has increased by a huge factor. THERE is where the real spam is coming from compared to GC II, IMO. Instead of "firing and forgetting" mining ships and having the occasional relic, the usable resources are off the charts in GC III. If one wants to complain about game mechanics, that's the place to look. Again, IMO.
And even there it isn't that bad with a bit of planning. But at least I can see the complaint there, though what one could do about it at this stage, I don't know.
Regardless, making it so only one base can affect a planet at a time nerfs a huge portion of the "growing tall" strategy. And unless there is a very good reason to get rid of it, I don't see the point of changing it.
Fair enough. I've actually made it a rule that I'll only build one starbase per planet.
Of course with 100+ planets even THAT'S a little too much.
God knows what would happen if I really tried....
And yes, relics should be much more rare and placed in difficult to get locations.
Wouldn't it be much better to instead make building starbases less painful ? Make a template starbase, put a single module, and have an option of : Some Constructors going to the waypoint X will build me until i have all the modules in the template.Fire and forget
On the plus side, it's good to see that Starbase defences really aren't what they used to be. I remember losing fleet after fleet to a Thalan AI that had gobbled up like half of an Insane map, grabbed a couple of military relics and proceeded to screw me over. Only gobbling up minors with hyperion shrinker wonders kept me able to hold my own.
Still took like 4 huge fleets of absurd power to kill those bases. That brought them down a peg or two.
You want to tread on that hallowed ground! Personally I don't do it (mass spam starbases) but if I do I only put it around my Capital planets,Financial,Manufacturing and research planets and these are normally a mix of military/Econ and mining bases. But there will be others that do this and that's why theres a minimum distance between starbases as Frogboy and Mormengeil has taken this into account during development?
Isnt this a wide vs tall debate, and what you are proposing is to limit the ability to grow tall, if you need to?
Oh look another thread about Starbases, sigh....
I agree with dansiegle30. Tall vrs wide.
It is not required to spam starbases at all. Its entirely optional. In fact I only put starbases around my major research planets, and productive planets. If I want resources Ill grab those as well.
The mfg and Re buff are hardly worth the spam, BUT the morale buff sure is. I usually have 1/planet
I disagree with the OP. Starbases should be used to their maximum benefit if someone wants to use them. The idea that you don't want them so everyone should do without is just plain evil. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Bad boy!
Anyway, why would I want to stop at 5 starbases per planet? That's fairly simple thinking.
Now go back to your corner and think about what you wrote.
+1
Sick of GalCiv III being all about Starbase and Constructor spam.
Blowing up ships is fun. Blowing up starbases to make room for your own is not. Reminds me of the siege and tower spam of Eve Online. I still remember clearing and claiming the south after the fall of BoB to the Goons. No thanks.
I do agree with another thread about cost. If I had to say, I'm a tall builder over a wide guy. But 10-20 SB modules only costing 1 BC mtc seems overkill. Rough guess, thinking 0.1 to 0.2 BC per module would be Bit more fair.
How about buffing the economy starbases, but making them a planetary orbit structure ? Not in the free space, but tied to the planet...
This is game changing though
-1
I like starbases and constructorsl Pushing them around is fun for me and possibly many others. Please keep that in mind.
I heard Paul talk about how he deliberately changed things to no support for starbase modules to keep the focus on starbases themselves. You are going to have to come up with some good reasons for changing it for that kind of redesign. The presence of an expansion race is not a good reason. It is part of GalCiv. If you find it a bother for any reason, add more opponents rather than asking the game to be redesigned. That will end your expansion soon enough. Sure, you will have an expansion bonus, but it takes more than that to actually win the game if you give it settings that challenge your play style.
I spam starbases because I like spamming starbases, but when you look at how inefficient the cost versus reward is, it's almost counter productive and the only reason I don't call it counter productive is because I'm not going to insult myself that way. As was mentioned, I think that the best thing it does for you is morale, though once you tech up, manufacturing and research go up, but when you compare that with the flat bonus from most tech trees ... Crap, I like starbases, is there some group for that? "Hello, I'm fenwe. I have a Starbase addiction."
Totally agree with this. Having more than one starbase affect a planet makes absolutely no sense to me and is super annoyingly tedious.
This is one of many blatant bad game mechanics that the devs either ignore entirely or simply reply with a forum post similar to a post in this thread along the lines of "You don't need to do it to win so it doesn't need to be changed".
Or you know, do like me. Research life support extensions and then group your planets together under one star base. It makes everything so much neater and easier to manage.
i agree with the op. economic starbases just add boring passive economic buffs but they are such big hassle to construct and choose optimal placement. galciv2 was better this way as there was no minimum distance required per starbase making the placement much less problematic.
I don't this as a problem currently.
Don't want to micro 20 constructors for an econ base? Maybe think about building bigger constructor ships. I usually end up building star base factory ships which have some 20+ construction points on them... One of these ships can build up several econ bases.
The big problems with starbases are:
- Spammy, because you can place them so close together (maybe they need to have larger exclusion areas)
- "Request Constructor" button is a poor mechanic
- The player gets constantly pestered to "Upgrade Starbase"
- "Core" constructor designs are over-priced, with extraneous features
They are probably the most hated part of GC3 for me, but a few relatively simple fixes would make them much better:
#0) Increase the exclusion radius on starbases.
#1) Get rid of the "Request Constructor" button. Replace it with a build queue, where you can queue up all of the things that you want to build.
#2) When a constructor rolls off the assembly line, allow us to press "A" or something to have the constructor fly off and automatically go to a starbase that has items in the build queue. The choice of which starbase to go to should be based on distance plus how old the current request is. If both starbases have the same age of requests, go to the nearest, but if the farther starbase has been waiting for longer then at some point it should trump the nearer starbase in terms of "need" and the constructor would go there instead.
#3) Optionally, give us the ability to design starbases modules and then pick those starbase templates when the base is first constructed. Or "governors" which would manage the build queue (the governor should be a choice that is presented at starbase creation).
I agree with the OP. Constructor spam is a real pain in the neck. It's a design defect. In my current game, at turn 300 on an excessive map with 80 planets, a typical turn takes 10 minutes, even though I've gotten to be about as efficient as possible with the constructors (although I haven't yet tried the trick of using big ships with many modules). I keep telling my wife that the game is much, much more tedious than my office job. It's a tribute to the overall excellence of the game that I keep persevering.
Some of the posts in this thread are a little too smug about "if you don't like it, don't do it." That goes against the grain of a 4X game.
The solution is obvious: This should be a galaxy set-up option. With clusters of 2 or 3 planets, you'd still have lots of stacking bonuses, but much less spam.
Have to agree with OP and the post above me by Bruce. Saying you don't HAVE to do it to win is a waste of thread space. You don't HAVE to use ideology to win or when the wheel was around you didn't HAVE to micromanage it to win or build ships over medium size, and on and on.
Most people like to get the most efficiency they can out of their planets and bases, so its only natural if you can build 4-5 you feel like you are wasting $ etc if you aren't. Personally I never built economic starbases before coming here to this forum since when you just build one it doesn't seem to even lower your projected debt / or raise projected income by even 1 when I tried in the past so I just built them for mining. After seeing this im going to go try it but like the OP, I sure don't want to feel like I should have 4 on this planet and 4 on that one til my entire map looks like crap because its filled with starbases and game lags because of it.
Would prefer if they were more effective and only one per planet was allowed. You guys really enjoy building constructors that much that you like having to place 4-5 on every planet? Not sure why you would defend a mechanic like that unless its just because you are sick of seeing posts about it and devs never do anything. But then if that's the case, obviously a lot of people are not liking that part of the game.
You have to understand, the OP Marigoldran was... not popular. He had a unique sort of obnoxiousness that did not endear him to the denizens of the forum, and so many would have disagreed if he said the sky was blue. He was, however, very good at spotting (and then mindlessly abusing and endlessly spamming about) mechanical flaws. He wasn't very good at coming up with good suggestions on what to do about them, though; didn't tend to think in terms of incentives and game theory very well. He's a little missed, because sometimes his points were very perceptive - but this particular thread is one of maybe 5 he will have posted on the topic within about 10 minutes, usually with absurdly long titles. You can largely ignore most posts in a Marigoldran thread, because their general theme is more 'please go away and stop being an asshole' rather than actually discussing the mechanical problem he was highlighting.
I personally think SB spam is more of a symptom of the overproduction problem. We aren't supposed to have the resources to put 6 SBs round every planet; doing so should basically soak up all your production for thousands of turns. Having 1 SB for every 5-6 planets, which leads to constructor spam being relatively tiny, is more in line with how the balance is meant to be lined up - there shouldn't really be any turn in the game where you have to visit two SBs to direct construction.
Think about it like this. If you could only produce a military unit in 5 turns, and each constructor took 4 turn to build, how many SBs would you actually have? Would you rteally be mass-stacking them round the class 5 planet Craphole 3, with it's 4 usable tiles and -50% production? Or would they be reserved for the middle of large bunches of core planets while 90% of your industry was trying to churn out enough military hardware to actually matter? I think that's where we're supposed to be. You should want to get 5 round every planet, but it shouldn't be something you can actually do. The problem is, right now we can do that - we can rack up a 5-engine, 5-constructor point constructor every turn and so massive SB spam is a thing.
@naselus:
Attacking the original poster's reputation is doesn't really do anything to forward the game's progression.
Making star bases/modules more expensive (or as you suggested prohibitively expensive) is not the solution (not that it couldn't be a topic for another thread) to the annoying SB spam problem.
Making SB effects 1/planet is a simple, elegant, terribly obvious solution and the dev's not doing it feels like them giving us the middle finger. Which is what they seem to do about the many problems of this otherwise would-be amazing game.
I know. I'm just explaining the reason why most of the pre-necro replies to this thread aren't very constructive. I actually liked Marigoldran, because he was perceptive and he did have a point most of the time; unfortunately, his method of relaying that point usually encouraged more discussion about how annoying he was rather than the topic itself. If someone else had raised the point, or if the OP had made just one thread about it, then we wouldn't have mostly-useless responses like 'well, don't do it then'.
I don't think capping it at 1 per planet is an elegant solution at all, tbh. It's a band-aid, fixing a symptom without addressing the root cause, and so is really a lazy, slap-dash, knee-jerk response - precisely the opposite of elegant design. An elegant solution would be one that changes the incentives of the player, rather than just stamping 'Thou Shalt Not' on certain options. If a system is broken, fix the system, don't just add in arbitrary caps for when it inevitably spirals out of control.
Note that I'm not suggesting making SBs more expensive, or prohibitively expensive - that would mean raising their price compared to everything else, which isn't what I said. The solution I'm arguing for is rather a sizable reduction in player purchasing power, which would mean constructors take longer to build but so does everything else. This would address dozens of flaws in the game, rather than just one, and would make massing SBs possible but difficult rather than easy but ineffective.
I have to speak up every so often and defend my poor maligned friends, the constructors. For me, a good deal of the enjoyment is placing and deploying constructors. I'm getting good at it, in my evaluation, even though I haven't tried playing with the range extension. I even used a pair of military bases on a crucial beach-head battle where they had adjusted to my weapons. It made all the difference. I seldom do bases for single planets, though. It seems inefficient. If I can't place a starbase so it covers more than one planet, than I don't bother putting one there. Obviously, some of this depends on my map choices, where there are a sprinkling of planet clusters throughout the galaxy. But if people are only arguing about the phenomenon of single planets, then it seems like other player concerns are being shoved aside. I do surround my home planet with a ring of starbases these days, though, and am trying a ring of starbases with research modules around my main research planet. So I see what people are talking about with that approach. I just focus with the constructors differently.
I think naselus is on the right track, looking for root cause in the economics, though I haven't found his or anyone else's answers comfortable just yet. For me, they are working out well even if they could be even easier to manage. I would hope that none of that gets broken while trying to address some of the issues other players experience.
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