PHoenix's have twice as many hitpoints now as they did in 1.02.

Sounds like it is time to sit down and reappraise the role of all ships. If they aren't useful, there isn't a reason to have them in the game, after all.

That, or consider going to a custom build model, with the cost of ships to make based on the cost of parts + mass + inefficency.

I know they want to stay away from that, but this pass of Battle Hammers and other ships being so changed does show that their is loss of understanding why ships are in the game in the first place.

Say, base cost of a ship is X, that gets you ATT 0, DEF 0, Hit Point 0, RANGE 0, Sensor 0.

For every +10 Hit points, cost 50 production.
For every +1 Attack, costs current HP in production.
For every +1 Defense, costs current HP in production.
For every +1 Sensors, costs 10 production.
For every +1 Range, costs current HP in production.

What can I say, I like costs linked to BASE hit points. It's a good representation of size of ship, after all.

You'd need to retool the techs a touch. Phasers get you the ability to ADD attack to your designs in the first place. And top out at say, +5 or so. Other techs could get raise the top, or reduce the cost for that category. So, Battle Shields, for instance, would bring a reduction of 50% to the costs of Defense, and let you top it out at +10 from before. etc etc etc.

Just a suggestion, but then your balance points are easy to find. If you need a raider ship to go chase down and kill freighters and transports and constructors, you can design the old corvette equivalent. Something with just 10 HP, Attack 3, Def 2, Speed 3, Range 3, Sensor 1 at the cost of er... 120. Humm... Well, I suppose tech benies for being up on Attack (if it stayed in place) would reduce that to 105 to 110 or so... What's the original cost of Corvettes?

The AI just has to learn to build ships by roles needed.

You could let the computer have the fun of giving you discounts, slowly, on ships designs you continue to roll off. Scale of volume returns/logistics.

Just a long, oddball thought of mine. I'm not looking to 'Moo-ify' GalCiv. Just address all this shifting about wildly of ships and their balance.

After all, Star Fighters SHOULD be worthless, according to the techs. It's mean to let you shoot up constructors, frieghters, and other star fighters, right? Defenders are meant to be the first defense ship. There to keep out enemy transports, right?

So we either need to focus in on customizing ships so that they will always balance themselves, based on costs to build out of parts, or we can focus in on the roles of the ships, and suggest they be adjusted to fit those roles. Yeah?

A list breakdown of the ships and their expected/projected/stardockian vision would be helpful. Shall we put it together? Break out the spreadsheets/databases and have a whack at it?

OK, I've been messing around with the two latest patches and I must say I don't like what's happened to the battle hammer.

True, I supposed it got abused from it's intended role as defensive ship, but now - even with the latest patch (1.03A57) it looks like it simply cannot stand up to a dreadnaught at all. It's definitely too expensive for whatever it does now.

What seems to happen now is the first person to get dreadnaughts (me included) can just take one or two and go on a rampage. Hmmm - I guess that leaves me about one way to play.

I'm not looking at the mathematics - where's Bobo when you need him? Me not know much, but me know me like having cheap tough ships to defend worlds.

Frogboy,
Even with 20 hp each it takes 4 or 5 Phoenixes to beat a Dread, they still are crap, sorry !

Feargus
That a BH is vastly inferior to a Dread does seem right to me - they cost half the price and require less costly tech. Additionaly if used defensively and coupled with BA, the defenses bonus make them able to stand a Dread attack.

I've also still a problem with the AM Missile, it kills huge SB very easily and make everything up to Avatar quite useless, as a simple AM Missile put them out ...

I think of reducing it to say 25 Attack - as long as special anti-missile ships can't be designed, missiles are hard to balance .. :notsure:

Regarding AMMs, I had some fun using several dozens against AI capital ships in my recent game. There is a degree of randomness to all combat including AMMs. I have seen AMMs bounce off capitals, ie no damage (v rare) and also seen them take out Avatars with one shot but most occassions it would take a couple of AMMs to down a major capital ship depending on the military bonuses.

Currently I do feel that AMMs are overpowered in the hands of humans as we know how to time our attacks to the best effect while I have had no problems taking out AI AMMs that float around the battlefield in v limited quantities.

But nerfing them to 25 Attack would seriously sideline their current role as an expensive one-use offensive weapon. Remember that for a few AMMs, you could have a capital ship would could be repaired and reused.

#12: "Let's not forget that defending ships in orbit get a 60% bonus to attack but nothing to defense."

Is this true? I haven't heard anything else about it. Is the 60% applied before or after the attack bonus for having a higher defense than attack.

I.e. would an att 4 def 5 ship end up with (4 + 5/2) * 1.6 = 10 attack or with 4 * 1.6 = 6 att, which is then greater than the defense, so no defence bonus?

pdifolco,

*D'ailleurs je vois que nous sommes presque "voisins"*

I think that reducing the AMM to such a low attack would make them near useless. Specially againt endgame ships.
In another thread there was someone complaining about the overpowered excalibor ship, that his overlords couldn't even scratch. In this situation, the AMM high attack is crucial. Without it, you would stand no chance if the computer reaches that tech level before you do.

Ransom Richardson,
I don't know the mathematical value, but there is definetly a big bonus for ships defending in orbit.

When at war and losing it (more often than I would like to admit , once my best ships have been taken out and it's clear I won't stand a chance until I've rebuilt, I order all my ships to fall back in order to protect all planets against invasion. This way they aren't destroyed by more powerful ships (in orbit I've noticed they can win) and it delays the land invasions. Also it buy me time to rebuilt.
Before I realised this, my first lost war would mean anihilation since all my ships would be destroyd and all planets invaded soon after.

The same applies when you attack. Since the computer ships will get the bonus, using AMM against them might be a good call, except if your attacking ships really overpower & outgun theirs.

Were the changes that frog boy mentioned in the 1.03A.057 build? I just started a game and I don't see the defenders having more defense.

I'm relatively new to all this and have learned a lot from this forum about how to play a very well thought-out and supported game.

My two cents:

- It appears that for early levels there appears to be an offensive ship with a defensive counterpart (eg, star fighter/corvette v. defender).
- You would think that cost would be equitable and that the given defender could take out one attacker in space while guarding something. This would be at base attack/defense values without modifiers of any sort. The second attack ship should get him barring the "roll."
- In defense orbit, defense value increases so two, probably three attack ships are necessary.
- It appears at some point, the purely defensive ship stops at the battlehammer which appears to have as its offensive counter the battleship.
- AM Missles appear on the scene with Dreads and could be used to supplement defenses due to the lack of additional defensive ships. These should be left alone for this reason. (I'd love to see a carrier ship ala the sub in Civ III.) Sunburns, baby.
- A cost should be considered for HP, attack, defense, speed, range cloaking in the total cost of ships for game balance. Ship cost adjustments could be considered for the technologies that got a civ to the point of making these ships.
- The cost of defending a planet with just ships has effectively gone up if the cost of dreads on up have increased. This is not bad but just becomes part of the new strategy necessary.
- Some previously mentioned ships (corvette, Starhawk,etc.) should probably have there roles re-examined ed or else the covettes can remain photon fodder
- Frogboy is reacting to his public and that is great. Let's not try to give him a headache because you can't please all the people all the time....

There are both strengths and weaknesses to anti-matter missiles. Their strengths include a huge boost to your military rating, their 1 BC maintenance cost, and their incredible firepower in combat. They are also relatively cheap to build (compared to capital ships).

The weaknesses are that they defend first in a stack (and since they have no defense that means they die like flies if snuck up on regardless of whether there are 'tank' defenders in the same square), they are used up with each attack attempt, and using them means a comensurate drop in your military rating. The drop in the rating can result in an inability to bring the AI to the peace table, or even worse might cause other AIs to join in if you use too many of these in one turn.

Vorlin,
In my games the AMM are built and used quickly to put out capital ships or important SBs.. I "open the way" for them with high sensors ship to avoid being caught.
After they hit I just have to use my "real" fleet to end the war, as the enemy won't be able to stand..
And I'm the only one to use AMMs, but that's at Normal or Subnormal AI level. At higher levels I suppose I will be VERY wary of building capital ships for fear of AMMs.
So IMHO they unbalance the game by being so potent. Maybe reducing them will just make them useless, so I think that it should rather exist a "countermeasure" that would reduce their effect when they attack- say some kind of "Aegs Cruiser" that can "intercept" them for example.

>AI get that far without you, then you've blown the game anyway
They are not that far ahead of me. If I did not have to compete in a silly-ass arms race to stay alive, I would get more pleasure out of the game. They happened to have a good starting game position that allowed them more than normal resources. I don't "peek ahead" into the tech tree and got caught flat-footed with, in my opinion, very unbalanced upgrade in their military. I feel I did things right, researching and implementing defense systems, but find even an overlord can strip a planet with omega defenses in a single turn. I am not a newbie, owned and enjoyed GC OS/2, and for the most part feel my investment in Drenging.net well re-payed. I am playing at a "tough" level with bright or better AI and holding my own in a battle not of my choosing until this late-game butt-kicker. If I wanted an easy win I would have used dumber AI settings. I use a huge/tight cluster/rare map to force the AI and myself to strategize rather than provide them an ability to overwhelm and rush me. In the past with these settings I have been able to out-tech, but in this game I have had to dedicate more that 45% of my production to military when I prefer to keep it around 30. I think maybe, with the appropriate level of espionage, we should be warned when an AI is on the track of an overwhelming & lopsided advantage. Is that not what espionage is for? A pop-up letting providing a projection of the completion and and estimate of the advantage would provide an opportunity to adjust our resource utilization and make better preparation for a peace treaty, once an alliance peace treaty is added.

(dug up the thread and bumped)

I'd be really interested in a thorough discussion about "rebalancing" ship values (or even their tech reqs, that seems off for example with StarHawks and Phoenixes)... What about opening a thread in the Mod forum so we can constructively build something instead of just complaining ?

Ideally, to bring a sort of 'real life' balance in it, I'd like to see defense be much stronger than offense, say about a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 ratio for races fighting with about an equal position in the tech tree. Not only is this more realistic it's also (IMO) more interesting, as it can take an incredible commitment to take even a small goal. But...

Computer AIs do very poorly as a rule in games where defense is more powerful than offense. Because AIs aren't adaptive it's not hard to find ways to trick them into wasting their fleets upon an unbreakable defensive position. Also, a game with a strong defense tends to make a military victory very time consuming to achieve, and tends to make games last longer in general, which many people would probably feel lowers the fun value.

I don't think the balance is too far off now from a point of good playability, what needs to be done is to have the computer better estimate military capability, currently it doesn't pay enough attention to defensive and hitpoint values. As it stands right now building a big fleet of defense-oriented ships (i.e. defender, battle axe, etc.) can actually get you attacked because the computer player doesn't recognize their combat value. So this has to be fixed first, because until it is you can't balance anything because 2 of the 3 values used in ship data aren't being paid proper attention to.