3 easy steps to better combat

I'm totally jumping the gun on Beta 4, but I've been thinking a lot about combat since the stream on Friday. I think the way they were struggling to put together a good looking battle pointed to one thing that needs to be improved to take advantage of the new battle viewer and ship roles: we need larger fleets. A few ships ramming into each other will not be that interesting either visually or strategically. I don't know the technical roadblocks, but I think that it is clear that the more different ships with different roles we have interacting, the more fun combat will be both from a fleet planning and a combat watching perspective. With that in mind, here is my 3 step plan to get better fleets earlier.

1) More logistics. First step to building bigger, more interesting fleets is to allow us to group more ships together.

2) Cheaper ships. Next step to building bigger fleets is to make building ship easier and quicker.

3) Let shipyards build multiple ships in one turn. Even with cheap ships, the 1 ship/turn limit will make assembling large and interesting fleets long and tedious. How much better would it be if you could just pump out 10 tiny ships in one turn?

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

The ship production is fine in numbers. Bigger fleets are fun. It's to easy to build ships we don't need them cheaper.

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ScrivenerOfLight

Join Date 02/2007

+34

I think these are all great thoughts, peregrine23. I'm not sure how carriers will fit into the current scheme (in terms of the number of additional ships in battle), but even with carriers, I'm not sure the max number of ships in battle will be very high.

I think more logistics would be good, but maybe there are other (additional) ways to increase fleet size (one of which is already in game but doesn't seem to be functioning).

1a) The Hyperion Logistics improvement is intended to reduce the logistics of ships being produced at a shipyard. It doesn't seem to be working, at present, and so once this is functioning, fleet sizes could be slightly larger.

1b) I don't believe the Hyperion Logistics improvement is presently affected by bonus tiles. If it were, then well-placed logistics improvements could have a major impact (making a huge hull cost only 7 logistics, for example).

1c) I don't believe the current Hyperion Logistics improvement effect is intended to stack if multiple planets sponsoring a shipyard have this improvement. Perhaps the effects could be cumulative.

1d) Or, instead of removing a logistics point from a ship, the Hyperion Logistics improvement could add to your total max logistics points, but not as in GCII--make it so each planet can have one, and each improvement's bonus is cumulative. So each logistics improvement that is built would increase total logistics. If these were expensive, this would help prevent too many being built too quickly and would be a good late-game method of increasing fleet size to gain a tactical edge against high-power opponents.

2) More logistics techs could be added to increase the maximum (perhaps in different tech categories).

3) Logistics could be calculated slightly differently--instead of calculating each ship individually, smaller sizes (tiny and small) could be calculated in squadrons. For example, instead of each tiny ship counting as 2 logistics, make it so something like 1 to 5 tiny ships cost 2 logistics and 1 to 3 small ships costs 3 logistics.

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