To clarify, I actually do love tactical combat in other games.  I just think the amount of effort required on Stardock's part to add it into GC4 and make it good would be too much.  Logistical combat makes a lot more sense in the space warfare setting as well as in the game that has already been built.

My idea above is as minimal as I can get it, and it would still take a huge effort to add it in and then balance all of the ship roles out.  Combat may have to wait for an expansion to get lot better from what it is now, but I hope it gets some focus in the future.

I, personally, find it entertaining to design fleets at the macro level, especially since there are modules that magnify the entire fleet. 

I would love to see a fleet template manager where you can set up a template for a fleet with the various ships, roles, positioning, etc.  You could then show the fleet template name in the ship viewer side menu so you could quickly send your "rock" to take care of your opponents "scissors." 

For assembling the fleet once the template is created, you could either:

1) Have the fleet be a build option at the shipyard. The shipyard would queue up all the necessary ships, keep them docked at the shipyard until they are all complete, then send them to whatever rally point the shipyard is currently using once the fleet is assembled.

2) Designate a rally point to use a specific fleet template. As ships arrive at the rally point, they will automatically form fleets according to the selected template. You could also automatically select the nearest ships that would complete the template and route them to the rally point.

how fleet tactics/setup would be enhanced under a new weapon/def system » Forum Post by Basilisk83 (galciv4.com)

@transjeremy

You misunderstand me, sir. Its not like we dont like tactical combat in general. Otherwise i wouldnt have spent like 200 hours in Pathfinder kingmaker. But there is a difference between having tactical combat with (relatively) generic ships every round, which are, for the most part made to be disposable, or tactical combat with characters which are distinct from one another and which you formed an attachment to. (Crpgs, Xcom etc.)

Yes - tactical combat, even with generic units, would be infinitely more appealing if the units involved had special abilities and options to chose from (Age of Wonders for instance, or kings bounty) - but implementing this in the remaining months would be an immense undertaking. Unless you are willing to pay the developers for an extra year, i dont see how we can get that. And this game isnt made for that to begin with.

@imperious leader & others

That said - i think, not the actual "how missiles and CWIS" work within the confines of the automatic battle" is my issue with the game as it is, but the question ( or illusion) of agency, that I need to be invested in that battle. A smarter man than me once said: a well designed game ist just a chain of interesting decisions.

This is why i said we should have a battle planner before the actual battle. It literally could be just a screen with some pretty animations. Select your parts of the fleet, maybe use a leader ability, tell them how to conduct themselves in battle, tell them that "England confides that every man will do his duty" and send them off to pew pew each other.

I think this is something that we can realistically achieve - and it would go a looong way for me.

To remind us all:

"There is quite a bit more depth with both ship-to-ship combat and invasions. For this reason, combat doesn’t necessarily conclude in a single turn

In previous Galactic Civilizations games, combat and invasions always finished in a single turn no matter how many ships or soldiers were involved. Now, the number of turns it takes to complete a battle or an invasion depends on the forces that are involved."

This passage from the GalCiv4 FAQ, and the promise that it holds, is the main reason why I decided to take a risk on this game and bought early access, something that I abhor from normally. I have GalCiv 2 and 3 - that would have been enough, if not for this prospect. The new Leader system was a draw - but THIS was the tipping point for me.

In times like Warcraft 3 reforged and Cyberpunk, people should stop trusting developers with their money until the product is actually out.

However, i do trust stardock, bcs not only are they clearly passionate about this series, they are also, as far as i can tell, not under the heel of some publisher.

the ship combat as it is now however, falls short on that promise IMHO, using all your move points to fire generic missiles before a battle just isnt enough.

maybe there could be different "targeting patterns" so your fleet could choose what order to target the different types of ships before battles if you want to. you could order your ships to go after their support ships first, or capital, or maybe try to target the early interceptors and assault fighters first before moving on to their bigger ships. you could have a default targeting pattern set up and only change it when you think that specific battle calls for it, making it much less tedious since most battles you'll prob be using your default.

The problem that I would like to highlight is that in GC3 and currently in GC4 the combat system is very skewed towards a swarm of tiny ships. 

This is caused by the fact that a ship can only target one ship at a time.  If a huge ship has 6 powerful lasers, it can still only fire at one ship before recharging.  If it is fighting a swarm it can only take down one ship at a time which is far to slow and it is often annihilated in two volley's from the swarm.  There was no way to give a huge ship enough armor to even give it a chance.  

You could build a swarm of your own tiny ships, but carriers where by far the most effective means because building that many small ships could become tedious.

I think the easiest and quickest way to provide some balance between large and small hulls is to make smaller hull sizes do less damage to larger ships and maybe increase larger hulls fire rate.  

The goal of the player in combat is to maximize ship survivability and logistic points per weapon/armor/other.  Currently large and huge hulls fail to come close to achieving any of these goals and are often relegated to the back line as support ships.

Did anyone here ever play Gratuitous Space Battles?


Gal Civ has one of the hands down best ship designers in existence.  you can make the ships look like whatever you want.  Why not make that mean something  a little more in the combat?

Rather than just ship types.. interceptor, Assult etc.      Let the Player designate ship behavior in combat.  

So I don't have GC4 yet... so I'm not even sure if the stuff still exists in the game but in GC3 thrusters were completely pointless... utterly pointless

But if you had say... "stay away from enemy snipe at range"   Or "Close rapidly and fire at close range"  or "Swarm weakest ship"   or "Swarm Strongest ship"   as commands you could give your ships.  Having fast maneuverable ships actually starts to matter.

Beyond that...  how about letting us assign Firing arcs for weapons?     (this could also give you additional paths for research...  Fixed mountings => Turrets => Ball Turrets =>  Emitter pads (phasors in st anyone?))

And yes I realize this would take a lot to program into the battle viewer to make it work.. so it is probably not something you will want to just slap in there, but you could probably borrow some of the battle code from SCO..     It would also let different races have more flavor.

Race A likes to swarm.. Race B likes to turtle and have very heavy front facing defenses etc.


So my thoughts.   Don't give us tactical control in the battle..  but give us strategic and tactical control in the fleet design stage.

that carrier swarm tactic worked because small ships did too much dmg and bigger ships didnt have good enough defenses. lower sm ship dmg, but make them more accurate and harder to hit, and give bigger ships better defenses to help balance that out. in fact dmg could prob just stay the same if more focus was put into the defenses, while having larger hulls have better defenses, but be less accurate and easier to hit.

I have played this game since GC2 and do not have even close to 12 major battles each turn.This is pretty lame excuse.The pointless one sided battles do not need to be played.

Quick notes:

1. I LOVE the non-intrusive implementation of the BV by having it be accessible as a map point-of-interest.  The "there was a battle here, would you like to see it" presentation is AWESOME!  Whoever thought of this presentation of the feature deserves a pat on the back.
2. Ship roles.  I don't have much input on ship roles because in GC3 I could /never/ remember which roles did what.  Please MAKE THE SHIP ROLES INTUITIVE!  I'm not sure how to do this (but you guys are smarter than me, you'll figure it out) but when selecting the role to make a ship it should be obvious:
   1. Starting position of role (how close/far from front lines it starts)
   2. The Role itself (ie "protects role xyz", "tries to stay out of combat", "dives enemy role xyz" etc).
3. Could/can roles be changed /after/ a ship is built -- like ability to assign roles within a given fleet?
4. When selecting a role, would it make sense to separate the starting position & the role? (ie you select 'role' and 'starting position').

Cheers, glad to give Beta 2 a play.  Game's coming along great guys.

-tid242

love the graphics of the battle viewer!! this is def a great addition. quick though on how it works though...

it is kinda hard to see what's going on in the battle with how much the battle viewer zooms in all the time. maybe if it just zoomed in right at the beginning and again at the end it would make it easier to see what's going on during the battle. maybe also zoom in once or twice for a couple secs in the middle of longer battles but put in a wide enough view most of the time so that players can actually tell what's going on.

I'm loving the battle viewer. I have one small suggestion for the viewer, and a bunch of suggestions for combat.

For the viewer, it would be nice if tit remembered the camera view I used last time, rather than me having to set my favorite view every time.

For combat, I'd first like to second Taslios on dumping the current ship types, which I also can't remember, in favor of some sort of menu for choosing ship behavior. It feels like a few sliders might capture most of what you would want:

• Initial positing within fleet: front to back
• Aggressiveness: how much the ship will try to run ahead to attack, or stay with ships in its position.
• Preferred target sizes: whether the ship prefers to attack targets larger than itself, about its size, or smaller than itself.
• Combat vs auxiliary targeting: whether the ship prefers to take out the ships that can do damage or prefers to go after auxiliaries like transports and fleet support.

No matter what these settings, the ships should also prefer targets with a higher ratio of attack to remaining defense over targets the other way around.

If you stick with ship types, it would also be good to get rid of the AI using the declared ship type when deciding which ships to attack. It shouldn't be possible to paint a big E on a defensive tank ship by declaring it to be an Escort, and have the AI throw everything at it, while ignoring all your lightly defended offensive ships that you declared to be Capital. If the ship types stay, then the AI should target your ships based on the type it suggested during ship design, not the type you declared. The type you declare would only affect your ships' behavior, not the AI's.

I also agree with the suggestions to make weapons more differentiated. Some possibilities in that direction:

Missiles could be long range, but easier to counter. For example, anti-missile technology could be cheaper, or work better. For example, it could recharge at a faster rate during a battle. This could make missiles good against small ships, which don't have much room for anti-missile protection, but not so good against larger ships.

On the opposite end, kinetic could be short range, but harder to counter. In particular, it should expensive to get a high protection rating on large ships. (Since they are bigger, it just takes more armor to give them the same amount of protection.) Also, kinetic protection wouldn't recharge at all during a battle.

Beam could be in the middle.

Also, it might be interesting if larger ships could have longer range on any of their weapons. Perhaps there could be an enhancement that increases range by 10% or so, and that you can put on as many times as you like. A big ship could get longer range, at the cost of fewer slots left for other purposes.

Finally, on ship balance, it feels like given a battle between two fleets of equal cost and equal technology, but one constructed out of hulls that are one size larger, the fleet with the larger size hulls should win (because large hulls are more efficient at generating damage.) But if the fleet with larger hulls has hulls that are two or three sizes larger, then is should lose (because fewer larger hulls are not as good at targeting multiple enemies.) That principle will encourage a variety of ship sizes in a fleet.

Taslios,

Targeting N ships could be a solution.  The only problem I can see is that it may be a lot more difficult to balance and code into the game.  When you add a feature like that there can be unintended consequences that shift the power dynamic.  Because it would be much more difficult to balance I'd go with damage reduction where you can adjust a few numbers to reach a more fair fight.

Basilisk83,

When you say, "give bigger ships better defenses" are you proposing to give each hull size a flat defense bonus for shields, point defenses, and armor.  If that is what you mean then the problem with that idea is that it would need to scale according to the technology you've researched, or it wouldn't work because of how weapons currently work. For example if I have a 8 fighter swarm that can do 100 beam damage and a 8 point logistic huge hulled battle ship that has 200 shield points, in 3 to 4 volleys, I lose my battle ship and they only lose 3 to 4 fighters.  The amount of base defenses you'd need for the largest hulls would be astronomical.  Balancing is also much more difficult in this case.  The Derek stated in the Gal Civ discord one of the reasons GC4 weapons all have the same range currently is because it was confusing to casual players. 

I think the best way to fix this is to reduce damage done by smaller ships to larger ships. This will also draw battles out so that they can last more than one turn.  This feature is in the game, but I haven't seen happen yet.  Battles occurring over the course of several turns could make for some exciting gameplay.

I do like the dodge mechanic as long as it doesn't make small ships over powered.

If the huge ship also has armor that reduces the total incoming dmg once shields are down, then it would take a few more turns to take down as the smaller ships fleet gets smaller and smaller. and if it's something like 12 small fighters vs a huge ship with a few tiny/small ships, and they're all targeting the huge ship first, then the well armored huge ship with the small backup might be able to take down the swarm before it can take out the huge ship. maybe more research into defenses could give higher starting bonuses in that defense too.

12 dmg for a 1 logistics ship does sound a little high. small and tiny ships having that amount of firepower in the game might just be broken too. all those base +1 bonuses def work better for small ships than large ones. maybe if the bonuses were more % based and less "base dmg" based then it would even things out a lot more.

and i dont think dodge would make them too overpowered as long as they couldnt do as much total dmg to larger hull sizes, which makes a lot of sense considering whenever u see smaller ships in the movies and shows they're always a lot better at dodging attacks and targeting accurately than bigger ships but not nearly as powerful or tough. should be harder to bullseye a whomprat with a star destroyer than with an x-wing