hi i'm jeff, 28 years old.

I bought gold edition months ago and have been playing off and on since then and have asked my wife to get me the latest expansion pack for christmas.


Maybe i'm thinking too much but I can't find information on how this rock paper scissors ship design works exactly and to be honest I don't like it.

maybe i'm too biased towards MOO2 still being my fav but I think a system where:

all weapons damage shields first
all weapons damage armor second
all weapons damage structure (hitpoints) third

with the exception of ecm tech having a chance for missiles to miss completely is more realistic.


anyways, this enemy ship with approx 70 shields and 5 guns or missiles destroyed my 3 ships with 50 lasers and 5 shields each(or something like this, it was months ago)

can someone explain the math behind ship offense/defense more than the few lines in the manual (damage square root of number if shot with paper not rock, whatever)

it makes more sense to me that my 50 lasers should have worn down that 70 shield in 2 shots minus the shield regeneration rate per second leaving my 2 ship to partially hit armor while the 3rd ship hit all armor on the first attack roll. this leads me to another point about massive numbers of low tech ships VS 1 high tech ship. This is why MOO3 was poor as 5 of my lower tech task forces were wiped out 1 by 1 by a more advanced enemy task force. i am not a fan of fleet limits and i know i would have won had my 5 fleets been allowed to engage the 1 enemy fleet at the same time.

fleet limits make the game all about TECH and not about strategy so to win the game the startegy is all the same. design and build a better product, it does not matter if your second generation ships outnumber your enemies 4th generation ships by 22 to 1, you're going to lose, not lose in huge epic battles, but be wiped out completely in equalized 10 versus 10 combat.

in case you're confused, here's an example:

gen 2 / gen 4 (tech levels)
22 to 1 ratio =
220 ships to 10 ships

the battle should be 220 ships versus 10 ships

with fleet limits the war consists of 22 battles of 10 versus 10
-strength in numbers doesn't apply so we have the generation 4 ships kicking the tar outta the gen 2's meaning that the gen 2 civilization has no chance in hell so give up and start again.

anyway sorry to rant but i would really like to enjoy galciv2 more and any input on how the math works with this rock paper scissors combat system would be appreciated.