Request for Suggestions:Military Strategic Options in Gal Civ

bump. i'll bump this once.. maybe someone has an opinion..

I have no suggestion, I just disagree.

First, what AI levels are you playing at, if not at least Bright, go back and try that out. Why? becasue I found at Bright and Intelligent I had a great deal of use for smaller ships behind enemy lines in order to act as raiders on potentially superior developing economies. The REAL war, at times, occured four sectors behind the frontlines where my slower BB's were. My dozens of zooming Corvettes and a few BattleCruisers help to win things. The fact that ten of them are equal to support as one BB means the AI has to busy itself hunting down these dangerous guys with it's ships- drains the "frontline" and allows me local superiority. It's a classic use of light military units in real life.

If you're only playing at normal level of AI, I can understand why you've seen no use for other ships, as the AI's economy is *crippled* from the get-go, and they only have what appears to be about half of their brains working.

Now, if you're talking no real use for small ships when Excaliburs are around, well then tough. I've seen the stats of that ship and can understand why- but it's designed as a game ender, from what I can tell.

~SDC~

I must say that I agree with the fact that a lack of chokepoints etc results in a loss of strategic options.

That cannot be refuted.

There are no chokepoints, this is a strategic option not available.

The computer can run straight for your planets and you cannot entrench a position that requires them to pass through, they can go around.

In this it is more akin to the naval aspect of CivX. There are no chokepoints available in the middle of the ocean. Yet, in naval combat there is still strategy.

That also cannot be denied.

In all the sci-fi I've ever read, space combat has always been associated most closely with naval combat, or as an even better comparison, with sub combat. 3 dimensions, no chokepoints.

For a brilliant combination of 2-D space combat and strategic chokepoints in an RTS, try Conquest: Frontier Wars. It had the equivalent of nodes of clustered stars with wormholes between the clusters. There was no way between clusters except through the wormholes, but clusters often had more than one wormhole leading to them, so there were lots of "backdoors."

Dearmad: I am playing on Bright. You can honestly say that the game wouldn't benefit from more ship differentiation? I'd like to see the capital ships slowed (or perhaps the other speeded up) to say 60% the speed of light strike ships. Defense ships that can be used past the early mid-game.

Something to put some variety out there. Currently each generation of ship is so much more powerful than it predecessor that there is no reason to ever build the predecessor. The build times are generally 40 - 50% longer, but the power can be 2 - 10X as great.

I would say that in terms of effective military decision making, this game does seem to lack depth.

In comparing the combat system to that of my favorite 4x game (SMAC), it's obvious just how little there is to think about or do in the GalCiv system.

-SMAC had 3 different types of units (land, air, and sea) each with their own movement restrictions/rules

-SMAC had zones of control, as well as terrain modifiers, which added a tactical dimention to military engagements

-SMAC had 2 orthogonal combat mechanisms (regular and psy combat) which added a great deal of deapth

-SMAC had many 'special' abilities which could be added to units (ie. Amphibeous assault, transport, etc.)

Now I'm not one who believes that complexity is a good thing in and of itself, and I also don't believe that a full tactical combat system is required in a game such as this. However, I do find the system in GalCiv to be to simple, and frankly, a bit dull.

Here are some more ideas:

Supports ships that:

slow enemy ships
can cloak a fleet more than X squares from the closest normal sensor
can un-cloak enemy cloaked ships in X squares
ships to reduce enemy attack
ships to increase the attack of all ships in a fleet
ships to increase defense in all ships in a fleet
ships that can do damage (artillery) far away from other ships

Things like this would make fleets actually useful. These all don't have to be thrown in, but a few of them (or something like them.. you get where I'm going) would add a whole new strategic element.

Ryan,

Ok, slowing capitol ships would be cool. Yes, I can agree with that. Or maybe just speeding up smaller ships, whichever- that would also give another use to small ships: to hunt down other small ships. Sounds cool to me.

The other suggestions you have are too complex for me to support at this point: I need more experience playing the game at this point. So far SB's serve the purpose of many of your ideas, and to create ships that can do the same would sort of make SB's obsolete for that purpose.

The SPEED idea is one I was going to mod into my games anyway- it's a great idea that elegently, i think, makes small ships that much more interesting. As soon as the patches aren't coming at us so fast and I have a mod-handler program.

~SDC~

Up to and including Tough I didn't find much challenge. On Crippling fighting against the 3 alien races at once I've got my hands full and expect I'll lose unless I can broker a peace - they are superior in population, military, production, number of systems and tech . Odd to see Drengin as co-belligerents with Altarian and Arcean...

So far I've suffered no critical losses because of a flexible defence strategy using battlecruisers, starfighters and survey ships with careful attention on withdrawing damaged ships for repair, covering retreats with starfighters, fighting enemy cruisers only where I have starbase support and where necessary letting starbases temporarily anchor my defence. Had I not used these tactics I would have lost my cruisers and probably some star systems and bases.

Overall I'm impressed with the robustness of the system and general playability. A couple of things did come to mind during play:

- There's no minefields in the game. Adding mine-laying ships, a few different levels of minefields and mine-clearing ships would allow some tactics such as area denial and delaying tactics (ie mines should be enough to kill corvettes and damage cruisers).

- There's no natural hazards or barriers. Adding a few things like minor black holes, nova stars, areas of intense radiation and asteroid fields could create natural barriers on the map that prevent movement completely or pose some risk to ships.

- While I don't want "zones of control" it would be good to see opportunity fire, basically that a ship may get a single free shot when another ship moves from one square to another both of which are adjacent to the "defender". Basically this would add a risk of damage when trying to bypass a ship. This would enable some defence tactics beyond just stacking all your ships with your tranports.

- I would love to see a chance for fast ships to evade when a slower ship is trying to engage them. Basically if a ship is alone (not defending a planet or another ship) then if it has a move speed at least 2 points higher than the attacker, then let it withdraw if it suffers 75% damage. This would reduce the "slow ship hunting down fast ships" syndrome which stems from the turn based nature of the game.

Alf, I like all of your ideas. Just those alone would make the military campaign much more engaging.

I do realize that what we are asking for a a lot more complex than just adding the features. The AIs then have to be programmed to intelligently use these features. Are there any developers out there? Are changes like these feasible?

I think Brad's main priority right now is looking to up the AI's abilities with the toys it has right now, since nothing is really broken (fundamentally) as is. I think post June is when these sortsof threads will really take off.

~SDC~

Although i haven't played the game for more than a week, some of these changes osund really interesting. I might be able to mount some kind of defense .

While I would like to see this soon, there are other things that the developers need to focus on right now. I think some people are still having CTD's and such. It would be nice to see if a developer saw this thread tho, and what they think of it.

While I haven't tried this myself, how about building multiple -1 movement SB's in some sectors? Wouldn't this create, in effect, space mud and allow for a type of chokepoint?

~SDC~

The lack of chokepoints in GalCiv doesn't bother me. After all, chokepoints are really only applicable to the surface of planets, where different terrains make movement/combat hard or impossible. But space is far more analogous to sea than to land. There is no cover or chokepoints at all, except for the occassional bits of land and whatnot. I'm no naval genius, but it seems to me that naval/space combat would revolve around Detection, Range/Firepower, and Speed, most of which appear in GalCiv.

That said, I agree there needs to be more differentiation b/w ships. Other than some minor of raiding trade routes or unescorted non-com ships (which is really a bug in the AI, imo), the smaller ships are just a waste of resources when you have access to the larger ones.

Why would capital ships be necessarily slower? That's certainly not necessarily the case with today's Navy.

And why shouldn't more technologically advanced ships be uniformly better than the older ones? Isn't a modern destroer uniformly better than the sailing frigate USS Constitution?

And as for why anyone would build less technologically advanced ships, there are two reasons - money (both construction and operating costs) and flexibility: I can place two frigates in two different places, or the same place - it's my choice. Not so for a single battleship.

Also it takes two movement points to destroy two starfighters, but only one movement point to destroy a frigate... Against opponents with poor move rates, it makes a difference LOL

Regarding capital ships being slower, you are right in terms of todays major combatant ships. However, the analogy isn't DD and BB class but F-18 and BB class Think of it as being maneuverable rather than fast if that helps.

The speed analogy with naval ships is spurious (ships with that are longer at the waterline are encounter less resistance, and so are normally faster).

The best solution to the multiple ship problem I can think of is to add initiative & evasion to non-orbital combat:

1)The faster ship always shoots first.

2)The faster ship then has a chance to evade the retaliation based on their relative speeds.

3)In orbital combat, the attacker always shoots first.

For 'faster' you could use actual speed or add a new initiative factor. The result would enable faster ships to harry slower moving capital ships for a while (e.g. X-Wings vs. Star Destroyers) - and with enough ships destroy them.

As always the problems would be balance & AI. Both would need some development.