I thunk i need to clarify my thoughts. I meant creating stargates which let you transport a ship from one of your planets to ANY of your planets in one turn. So it doesnt matter what is your speed technology.

Also do not forget that considering the size of a stargate and the tech used to create it, it would probably be equivalent to hundreds of engines. So any transport between planets would take 1 turn

(I mean stargates did not just disappear with hyperdrive)

Actually, they did. To quote the back story from the databanks on this site:

The humans were shocked to learn that hyper drive did not create a galactic utopia but rather a galactic race. All of the races quickly ended communication with one another (having eliminated their star gates)

Brad has repeatedly said that hyper drive is far faster, and cheaper then the star gates ever were, as teh data banks reflect:

A ship going through a star gate would still take months, even years, to go relatively short distances. With this new drive system, that time would be halved with improvement for even greater relative speeds.

As far as the engine limit and speed limit, what would be the point of researching engines?

As far as life support, it is vital in my games. I play on a large galaxy with rare stars, tight clusters. It's not uncommon to have gaps of three or four grids between star systems, making life support vital (since you then either have to leap frog starbases, or stay at home, since there may not be a habital planet when you get to that next square).

Heh. I just posted a similar solution on another thread. For you old timers, think MOO, it had stargates. You needed one on each end and they worked great. You still need engines, because they only work between your own planets...The cost was in building the gate itself, not in use.

How about adding an additional module? "Hyperspace Cores"? Or something with a similar intent. Although i have not played the DA beta, power plants have been added to planets to boost production, why not have a requirement for power cores on ships with max speed based on how many cores you have.

I am not sure if this is a new idea or not, however it seems that it would make ship design and balance between speed, weapons, defense, and power, a little more complex.

I would personally hate to see some sort of hard cap placed on ship speed as there is on sensors.

Power units and diminishing returns on speed should solve it. There wouldn't be a hard cap but it would be difficult to reach above 10. Anybody that can squeeze more speed with miniaturization deserves it.

Upper boundaries should scale with the map size unless starbases and factories become considerably cheaper. 30 seems reasonable on gigantic. 10 on gigantic gets the game tossed into memory lane.

However...

If planet sensors are significantly increased and survey modules permanently eliminate the fog of war, I could live with 10 on gigantic.

The AI doesn't do very well on gigantic and the map should probably be eliminated... topic for another thread.

If planet sensors are significantly increased and survey modules permanently eliminate the fog of war, I could live with 10 on gigantic.

I dont really get why whould you need super sensors. Just build up more scout ships.
Also this would make free survey module technology (i forget what you need to build, something under sensors i) worth it.

Hmm, another option- make engine power scale, so getting moves from 1 to 2 is easy, getting from 7 to 8 is hard, from 8 to 9 even harder...

I was thinking about it, but this would be kind of complex to implement. Simply keep 2 drives max(each drive takes at least 25% of ship space). Thus with Ion you could get max to 3, impulse 5 ... Hyper to 10. I mean, doesnt matter how you think about it, in real life the drives ARE the biggest part of any starship.

Put that together with the OP's notion that a stargated ship has no movement left at its destination, and maybe we have a good compromise between slowboats on gigantic maps and AIs that are not running on a Star Fleet mainframe.

This is what i was thinking of. Thank you to have put it clearly.

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I mean, the ideas we think should be easy to implement from developers point of view. The least code they have to change the better it is.

How about an option to allocate all power to the engines?

Using it would increase the speed of travel at the expence of weapons and defence being reduced to null until next turn.
Doing so would solve the inability for the AI to 'see' threats far out as fast travelling ships would be harmless without slowing down gameplay when moving ships in friendly territory.

Instead of stargates or scaling: how about making it so that your ships get a movement boost in your own sphere of influence? Or the boost could be tied to being near one of your planets, but I like influence area better.

This way you can at least build internal starbases in a reasonable amount of time and specialized ship-building planets on the other side of your empire can still be useful in a conflict.

A good side effect of this is that it gives the AI factions a boost when reacting to a player's moves.

Now it's come out recently that the AI doesn't build fast ships because of system hardware limitations - many people's computers just can't handle the amount of calculation the AI would need to plot out 30+ movement points each turn. The idea of extra moves in certain regions may blow the AI's mind, too, but the idea of crawling around the entire map at speed 8 is seriously daunting.

We could avoid the obsolescence issue by making it cheap to upgrade ships as it's cheap to upgrade my computer. Right now, upgrading is far too expensive.

building a ship of 100% engines to get into position, then upgrading it to a full scale battleship

I have tried this, albeit with small hulled ships where the upgrades don't cost so much. I abandon doing that after first couple times because, it's really unrealistic to think a thirty or less man crew could change every major component on a ship in the middle of space in three weeks or less. Where are those parts coming from anyway? Interstellar FedEx.  

Have any of you guys heard of a little know game called 'Stars!'? It was a...I dunno, maybe a Win95 game, so it's pretty old, done by probably just a couple of programmers. Some of the concepts in that game I have yet to see rivaled or beaten by any 'real' space game, including MOO/MOO2 and GalCiv2 (but GalCiv2 does really well).

In Stars! each race had 'habitability' statistics comprised of Tempature, Radiation and Gravity. A race could spend points to widen thier habitability sphere, even to make the whole band of a given stat as habitable--however, the middle of a given habitability band was considered ideal, and moving farther from that middle ideal made things less and less comfortable. You could even make one or all three habitability stats 'immune', giving your race a big advantage in colonization but it would suck in all other areas.

Each planet also had habitability stats, and with various levels of terraforming technology, a planet could be brought into line with your races' ideal living environment. You could colonize less-than-habitable planets, usually with x-number of colonists dying each year (or game turn/whatever) due to the harsh conditions of the planet.

The game also modeled Stargates, allowing Stargates to be placed on starbases as just another module. (Starbases were designed in advance with the modules they'd mount, like ships are in GC2, then just built. I don't remember anymore the exact menthod for building starbases in this game.) Stargates had a rating number which was how far it could teleport a ship, but there had to be a similiarly rated Stargate on the other side.

Starbases (or maybe plantes?) could mount inter-galactic mass drivers that could be used to shell planets several light years away (that was pretty fun).

All ships had a 'fuel' stat, making fast enignes seriously fuel in-efficient, making an engine trade off...sure, you could have that superfast starship, and it would have to stop to refuel half-way through the turn. Added nice balance very simply. There were also some cool engine ideas, like a Fuel-Mizer engine that had a medium cruising speed that used almost no fuel, while speeds faster than the efficient one caused exponentialy increasing fuel consumption, often much greater than standard engines. There were also 'ram-scoop' type engines that could gather fuel from intergalactic hydrogen (or whatever), allowing them to refuel to some extent. Also, the hyperspace travel in the game was based on 'warp' numbers, with early engines not capable of passing low warp numbers, while the most advanced engines could cruise at warp 8 or 9 and sprint short distances at warp 10 (which was the game maximum).

'Fleet oilers' could be designed so a warfleet could travel very long distances that would otherwise be impossible due to fuel restrictions on a given hull.

Hulls had a number of slots to be used for engines, weapons, armor/sheilds/defense, utility and general purpose, and probably some others. Things like cargo pods could be added (cargo ships had an innate cargo area, but cargo pods could be added on), fuel tanks, and other novel things (including cloaking devices) to create some cool custom ships.

All in all, I wish I still had that game. It had no graphics whatsoever, it was nearly 100% text in various windows to help you manage your empire. The galaxy was a bunch of white dots, and the 'combat viewer' was a big grid that had an icon for your ship, and an icon for the enemy ship (or ships, big fleet combat was supported), and cheesy graphics for weapons. But the game was super fun, with alot of very original things to consider for strategy. I can't remember if it had diplomacy, but I know there was trade in the game, so it must have had some basic diplomacy options.

I think the biggest problem with the game was that it didn't have much mass-market appeal. I'm not sure most gamers would take time to look at a warp-speed v. fuel consumption graph to determine how fast/efficient that engine really is, and if that makes it good for a warship or if it would be better for a trade ship. This is the game I got the Manuvering Jets idea from for my write up on tactical combat in that sticky thread. There was alot of just really great and cool stuff from that game that I've never seen before or since.

ETA:

Alright for Wikipedia! Those that are interested in seeing what I'm talking about can read the wiki here:

Stars! Wiki-link

it's really unrealistic to think a thirty or less man crew could change every major component on a ship in the middle of space in three weeks or less. Where are those parts coming from anyway?

Pshaw, given the broad-strokes modeling behind GCII this is at least as much a question of the flavor text as it is a matter of mechanics or "realism." Nanotech is getting to be a bit too much of a deus ex machina these days but if you assume some sort of nano-scale assemblers and disassemblers and an instantaneous comm tech, all you need is to send the software and wait for the soup to cook. Presto, stringy old warship meat turned into a delicious stew of death-dealers.