Sirthrax

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

I've had battles where I expected to lose at least 3 or 4 medium ships, and come out without a single loss. In other words, the system can work in our favor as well. If you're still frustrated, use a custom civ with the proliferate trait. You'll lose a lot more ships, but it allows you to take these losses without devastating your military

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

[quote who="jephrey641504" reply="49" id="3875197"] Do these engineers you have understand that a stray unit cannot break a siege by its lonesome? It has to attack the besieging army. It can't just fly into the planet and halt the entire operation without a shot fired. As well, reinforcing the besieging fleet should not halt the siege; nor should splitting units away from the siege. The conflict in the game is supposed to be symbolic of real conflict. No sin

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

Thanks for taking time during the holidays to answer questions! Glad to hear numbers will be adjusted until they look good. Personally, I'm good with limiting weapon range to ship class. Makes sense for larger ships to have longer range than smaller ships. It should also solve the fleet splitting problem I mentioned. I think the random targeting is the best way to go. Makes battles a little more interesting. If I would change one thing about tar

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

Draginol, I read through your the possible roles and how combat currently works, and had a few thoughts. 1. Tactical speed seems to hurt fleet design more than it helps. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my ships with higher tactical speed outpace my larger ships, causing my fleet to split. This often creates a suboptimal situation where my smaller and faster ships are often destroyed before the larger ships behind can enter a fight. The +300% defense against la

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

Basilisk83, Autotargeting is important to keep turn times low. Giving players that much control over battles dramatically increases the time it takes to get through each battle. If the player is willing to take that time to fight each battle individually, they will perform better against the A.I., the A.I. will need to be improved to fight these battles, and now players that don't want to choose targets now have to because if they don't, the A.I. will sweep them. I t

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

That looks like a great start to ship classes Draginol. When you start running the simulations, I'm sure some numbers will change for balancing, but I like the overall ideas shown here. Why do ships target things that they aren't strong against first? I.e. Fighters target larger ships first. Thanks for listening to us, I really hope to see this work. Other ship class ideas: Interdictor-Large-Slows enemy fleets nearby Superweapon- Huge- increased d

Reply to GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #1 - The 2023 plan in GalCiv IV Dev Journals GalCiv4 Forums

Glad to hear we are moving away from the rock, papers, scissors combat. I really want to see this succeed. I agree with PaulLach that the most important thing you can do is write detailed descriptions of how ship classes operate in combat, and make sure they act in that way as much as possible. My suggestions for combat based on what you've written are: 1. Run hundreds of battles

Reply to fights in real time in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Large fights supposedly can take place over multiple turns, although I haven't managed to get one yet.

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

It's not that I don't love RTS style games. The Total War series does an incredible job with that style of gameplay. A 3D RTS would be much more difficult to make. It's that I don't think the developers have the time to make a great rts space game. The work required to make this would be immense and I don't think it could be done on the budget they would have to work with. I would rather see them focus on improving the current combat system

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

You're right, complexity does not equal fun. The current ship roles has quite a bit of complexity, but I'm not sure I consider them fun. They might be better if the information about what they do is more accessible and clear in game. I read a wiki post about how they work, but I struggled to make good use of that knowledge. The goal is actually to make the system as simple as possible, while still complex enough to be entertaining. The system I posted may be

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

I think this warrants its own reply, and I'm curious to see others thoughts on it, but I wanted to list what I see as the pros and cons of the current combat system. Pros : - Ship designer is absolutely incredible and provides nearly endless variety to battle cinematics. It also allows for custom ship load outs which makes each ship class special. - The battle viewer allows us to veiw the battles in 3D and generally has pretty good pathing and mov

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

I also don't think GC should have an RTS system as it really doesn't fit the current system in place, adds far more complexity, and slows downgameplay. It is mush simpler to modify the current system to be more interesting, while trying to add an intuitive nature. I've stated this is a couple places, but I still think the best way to improve the combat system is by changing the way ship roles and ship sizes work, and maybe improving carriers. This post I wrote awhile ago

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Extermination is my favorite of the X's. Exploit for me is just a means to Extermination of the other races. Plus I think that Exploit could be improved with combat. More special weapons, or modules that effect how combat works. As I've mentioned before I think the key is changing ship roles and how ship sizes work, but another interesting option is to add more weapon systems. One way this could be done and improve the exploitation is by making specif

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Out of curiosity, what do you do at Stardock?

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Thanks for replying. I hope my posts on the subject of improving combat haven't been irksome. I gravitate towards Gal Civ over any other space related strategy game because of the ship designer. I have hundreds of designs in GC3 and GC4. Some of them taken from other fictional universes and others of my own creation. Designing a ship and a fleet are what I invest my time into when playing. It would be nice to see more variety in fleet design.&

Reply to First DLC in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

I and a couple other players discussed that as a possibility. Stardock hasn't given any official news about future DLC. In my opinion, an improved combat system would benefit Gal Civ IV the most. The other aspects of the 4x genre, exploration, expansion, and exploitation are very well fleshed out. The ship designer is incredible, and there is a lot of variety in ship modules. The way they combat syst

Reply to Ship Designer bugs/missing features in GalCiv IV Bug Reports GalCiv4 Forums

One of the Festron models is missing as well

Reply to Slotless Module Concept in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

This isn't a bad idea. I could see slotless modules being an improvement as long as you can't stack them. I'm really hoping SD does a patch focusing on the current combat situation. Large and huge ships could use some more work. I think a DLC that revamps the combat system entirely would be the best way to go. That way SD could give it the time and attention that it really needs.

Reply to Please make large and huge hulls useful again in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Derek, how does Stardock test balance for combat. If you could separate the battle calculations from the rest of the game and just feed it a hundred scenarios, you could probably get some pretty good statistics to help inform your decisions when you make changes.

Reply to Please make large and huge hulls useful again in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

I wonder how Stardock tests balance. If you could separate the battle calculations from the game you could feed it hundreds of scenarios and get some good statistics and a better feel for how to make adjustments. Stalker0, you might be right about the tiny vs huge ships normally. They might be more balanced than we think. The larger issue which this thread started with is that fleet amplifiers exist and they can stack. Because I can have many tiny ships vs only

Reply to Please make large and huge hulls useful again in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Yeah, I hope it gets fixed as well. Balancing it would be a least better if they can't or don't have time to make a better system. Unfortunately they never fixed the GC III system so I don't know if there's enough incentive or desire to fix the GC 4 system. I would like to see an official poll asking what improvements players would most like to see added or worked on in the game. Combat is top on my list, but I'm interested to know if I'm in the minority </p

Reply to Please make large and huge hulls useful again in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

[quote who="Croc411" reply="6" id="3856655"] Well, we've had similar stuff in GC3 all the way throughout its history, but the issue gets aggravated now because those amplifier modules are available from the very start of the game and are quite cheap. It really makes outdamaging the AI trivial on any difficulty level. I think there are 3 things they could do about it: (1) Make the AI use them as well (might be difficult to implement) (2) Increase the re

Reply to Please make large and huge hulls useful again in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

In my opinion fleet wide modules shouldn't be able to stack. It really unbalanced the game

Reply to Please make large and huge hulls useful again in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

Thanks for showing this. I've been trying to point out that large and huge hulls are useless for awhile, but your analysis really hits home most of the problem. The only other thing I would point out is that swarms beat large and huge hulls because they can target more than on ship at a time. Because large and huge hulls only get one shot at a time they really can't deal with swarms

Reply to First reviews out (IGN) in Galactic Civilizations IV GalCiv4 Forums

I think there is fair criticism in this article, but I dislike how he tends to focus on the worse parts of Gal Civ 4. My first issue is that he's comparing it to Stellaris which has had multiple years of development, expansions, and time to sort out the bugs. Stellaris has had it's fair share of issues that have been reworked and polished. GC4 is just entering the first phase of it's hopefully long life. Any 4X game is going to feel similar to what he's describing.