Ship Restrictions. The case for the prosecution.

i think there is some sort of blitz tactic that works for most every strategy game. and i think your suggestion would be a little bit of throwing out the baby with the bath water. for instance, what if i want a really fast scout, should i have to build it on a huge hull? the premiums you pay for engines on the smaller hulls are implemented in the way they scale within the tech anyhow. you CAN'T build a tiny hull as fast as you can a huge hull last i checked. that said you CAN somewhat achieve what your asking for the same way, tinker with the component xml file to get the sort of component scaling that achieves your objective. this should be done thru a mod anyhow, matter of not fixing something that only a few ppl think is broken.

so, i fully support your effort to make a ballance mod for GalCiv2

I disagree with the whole idea. Everything seems well balanced to me already.

Eyes of the universe gives you maximum sensor range without any sensor modules, so there's no point limiting them. Nobody uses them anyway.

Life support range is already capped at a hard limit. To be perfectly honest, I wish it weren't. Pain in the ass on a gigantic map.

Why would you make smaller ships slower than larger ships? A lot of us like escorting our transports. Capping their engines would force us to use frigates as escorts. Besides, the more engines you install, the fewer weapons you can install. It balances out fine for me.

EDIT:
Oh wait, this is an idea for a mod? That's all fine if you mean as a mod. I thought you were saying as a patch for the umodded game.

@P0rcup1ne

I'm not against blitzing but the extremes of movement are just silly in GalCivII.

You can get to the stage where the AI finishes its turn with 20 planets then before it moves again it has none at all. Maybe I'm just too weak to resist making ships which exploit this huge loophole.

To my mind if you want a fast scout you should need to research engines not just stick lots of poor engines on one hull. In any case I reckon cargo hulls (with 1 hp but enough space for sensors and engines) should be the games scout of choice.


@mikeswi

IMHO Eyes is broken too. It is just too powerful and hugely undervalued by the AI. I'd love to see what your response was if the AI always got to it first.

Life support is currently broken and needs fixing... but it needs to be made useful too.
As it stands I never have to equip my ships with any life support. The basic range is fine and one extra starbase every few sectors is a better deal than having realistic ships.

Making the smaller ships slower is possibly a reaction to the continuing carrier debate.

I'd personally like to massage the figures so that fighters were closer in power to larger ships... just with the problems of getting them there in one piece and in time. So speed and range would be the obvious things to limit.

My thoughts are that the basics should be changed... but I guess mods give everyone what they want if it is doable. I'll see whether I can do most of what I want.

Something that I've found effective in other games is a prototyping fee associated with producing the first ship of a class. Such a restriction often deters me from creating insanely specialized units, but gives me the flexibility to do so if it's absolutely necessary.

- Meeper

For a mod, do whatever you want. If this got implemented officially, in any form, I'd personally hunt you down and... well, probably just give you a good slap. But still.

It doesn't make any sense for life support to be on a leash--turn-based life support makes sense (X number of weeks before you must resupply somewhere), but not area-based, so why make it worse? It's already a HUGE pain to get to enemy civs, what with the range cap and the fact that you can only put one construction module on each ship, and sensors--all sensors--are virtually useless already. They take too much room to use at the start of the game and they do literally nothing once you build Eyes. In fact, I have honestly never--NEVER--put sensors on a ship, in about 20 games.

And Engines? ENGINES? It takes half a dozen weeks to get somewhere as it is, and you want ships to be SLOWER?!? My troop landers have a base movement of 65, and I still have to tap the Turn button multiple times in a row while waiting for them to travel!

Dude no matter how many Impulse engines you stick on and cargo hull its still slow.

I always research all the engine techs and jamm as many Hyperwarp III engines on my hulls as I can and research miniaturization techs so I can stick even more on. Playing Gigantic like I do my slow ships are doing 20 parsec and transport are doing 50 parsecs, mediums and large are doing 30.

Being limited to 1 or two engines would take months instead of a week or two on gigantic maps.

Another case of someone crying -
I can't help it, I am too weak, so change the game for me.

Moderate your own ships; don't try to force things on everyone just because you are a wimp.

Another case of someone crying - I can't help it, I am too weak, so change the game for me. Moderate your own ships; don't try to force things on everyone just because you are a wimp.

haha sounds like me.

I personaly would have said something more like this.

why do these adjustments you requested? You cant create specilized ships? If your putting 5+ engines your puttint 2-5 less weapons... how is this unfair?

I've made a mod that did this, but I've never posted it because the game bogged down badly when the ai started designing ships. The basics of what you suggest were there though.

Life support was scaled way down in effectiveness and made a bit larger so fewer could go on a ship. Negative range was given to all civs to counter the extra range given to a ship after it was built. Engines were all given a size of 0 but took 30% to 15% of hull space (sizemod), so the most you could put on and still be effective at whatever job the ship was supposed to do was about 4. This also allowed small and tiny hulled ships to put on just as many engines as large hulled ships and therefore keep up with their larger cousins. I also took out sizemod on weapons and sensors so they wouldn't get larger on larger hulls sizes and scaled the basic size to still fit accordingly.
Defenses I mostly left alone as far as size went but I did cut the cost of them in half across the board.

Basic sensor range on all ship hulls was reduced to 1 and the effectiveness of eyes of the universe was cut in half (5 sensor range). Interestingly I also managed to make the Galactic guidebook useful by making the survey module a large, efficient sensor (same size/sensor range ratio of the best sensor), but also much more expensive per module than regular sensors ( cost increased to 200 ). With the guidebook these became free though, so the survey module became simply an excellent and free sensor even if all anomolies were already gone by the time you got it.

Unfortunately, after all that work it all came to naught since when playing an actual game, the game would bog down horribly shortly after the colonization phase. I suspect that the algorithms used to design ships couldn't efficiently handle the changes I made. Without the mod enabled the game runs fine for me.

Another case of someone crying - I can't help it, I am too weak, so change the game for me. Moderate your own ships; don't try to force things on everyone just because you are a wim

Gee whiz, I didn't realize making a mere suggestion was tantamount to "forcing" changes on everyone. I guess we better abandon any efforts to report bugs in the future too. We wouldn't want to "change the game" and fix something that others prefer broken, after all.


Oh, and "mod" is short for "modify", by the way. Thanks for playing, though.


xpyre: I sympathize, but as a matter of course, I view all arbitrary limits as teh_suck. Not that it matters since it's unlikely you'll be able to impose them in the form of a mod, and it's even less likely the devs will try to implement them in a patch at this point. Hopefully for their sake, for the next game they'll come up with a system to keep some of the ship designs from becoming as ludicrous as they are now, with some reasonable and flexible limits that take things like "common sense" and "the law of diminishing returns" into account.

Actually I am working on a mod right now with increased sizes on ships and their components.I didn't like the fact that a tiny fighter could put 1 impulse engine on and do a speed of two yet a large or huge ship that is perhaps 40 or 50 times larger than the tiny fighter and certainly 100 times or more more massive could put one impulse engine on that isn't even twice the size of the tiny fighter and move 2 parsecs.So I am adjusting that and hitpoints,weapon damage and defenses for a little more accuracy physics wise.

I think "Moderate your own ships" means just don't build ships that you consider unrealistic or exploitive. Nobody's forcing you to make ships you don't like. Or you can ignore the point of Moosetek13's post and insult him instead for a perceived vocabulary error.

IMO, xpyre's original restrictions are much too hard and much too low. There's not much point in designing your own ships if you can only put two engines on a large hull; there aren't many choices left. But I could agree to a system of diminishing returns. For example, if you made a ship's sensor radius proportional to the square root of its sensor ability, that would make a certain amount of sense because then the area revealed by each sensor module would be constant. It would make lots of little sensor ships a good alternative to the big cargo hull ships that are the "best" right now. It could ab an interesting mod if it were possible.

Christ people, no need to pull out the flamethrower. Settle down.

IMHO Eyes is broken too. It is just too powerful and hugely undervalued by the AI. I'd love to see what your response was if the AI always got to it first.

If that happened, I'd just pack as many Sensor IV's as possible on an unarmed fighter and fleet it up with the warships. Or have a scout move ahead of the fleet.

I agree that one is too powerful, but I get it anyway just to avoid one of the AIs getting it. I compensate by turning off the ship blips on the minimap. I was tempted to comment it out of the improvements file, but then I started messing with the metaverse and decided not to.

I love a lively debate.

I forgot to say that I would increase the movements of the engine techs upwards. I think movement of say 15 or 16 works ok in the game (as this is sensor range)... when it gets to 45 or 50 it just gets silly.

If I was responsible for the AI my transports would have maximum movement... So you'd end turn being ok and dead before you moved next... How would you like that?

Anyway, thanks for the comments, especially onlyanegg.
Nice to know that at least one other person has a like mind - I guess that is a sign that insanity is not complete yet.

@DreadArchon I guess you play on gigantic... maybe the way it works is ok on that setting... On large and medium (where I spend my time) then I can span the map in at most 2 turns.

@Hobbes277
Do you really call people "dude"? I thought "Lost" was taking the p*ss.
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