More Uses for Ships

from GalCiv2 Forums
At the moment there are basically four uses for ships: combat, conquest, cargo, and colonization/construction. All of these are necessary, and all of them have corresponding modules. This is great, but even more could be even better. To wit:

Something that might be nice for an update or (more likely) an expansion would be more specialty modules for ships. I'm not talking about cloaking or anything like that; I'm thinking things like fleet speed boosters or diplomatic modules that would improve relations with other races. Clearly the former would have to be huge to keep them from being massively unbalancing (especially if you extended them to include low-level weapons boosting, too). You might also have something like an orbital bombardment module designed to support ground invasions (or even provide new invasion tactics) on planets it's in orbit around.

This would make cargo hulls even more useful, but it would also require more strategy to properly deploy and protect them. To prevent them from unbalancing, you could put a limit on bonus stacking (to differentiate them from starbase modules, say) and make them huge (e.g., =>40 units or so). Add to this the opportunity cost of having your shipyard build these instead of combat ships or constructors, and I think would add an interesting strategic depth to the game.
8,475 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I believe there are indeed new types of support modules planned, like the special ships that were in the GC1 expansion.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
what ever happened to super weapons such as the romulan mauler that is a weapon with a ship built around it
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
You know what would work, admiral/commodore quarters.
Basically, it would allow the ship to be paid for by itself in logistics, being that a high-ranking commander is on board, and increase logistics due to the fact that he can give orders so there's no wait from your military.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
When we are talking about it. Can a ship evade enemie attacks? Bcz it makes sence that a fast ship should be able to avoid a laser.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I wouldn't say avoid a laser travelling at the speed of light. But it should be much harder to target faster ships.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I wouldn't say avoid a laser travelling at the speed of light.


Why not? Let's assume that the distances over which combat take place are of the order of hundreds of thousands of kilometers; laser light will take 1 second to travel 300,000km, 2 seconds for 600,000km, etc. With lead times measuring in the seconds, ship agility could well be a factor.

Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Even at a relatively short distance, say 9,300 miles (15,000 km), the fighter was crossing your field of view at 10 miles per second (16km per second) and you fired at the image in the viewscreen you would literally miss by a mile.

The time for the light from the craft to reach you would be 1/20th of a second and the laser would take another 1/20 second to hit that point in space.

The trick would be that you will have to aim at where the target will be, not where it was. Although if you had a way causing the weapon effect to move back in time then you really could shoot at where they were.

Anyway, one new type of ship I would like to see is a Food Freighter. Colonies with limited squares could have their populations increase this way instead of having to build farms. +100% or +300% food tile improvements would become more useful.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Who shoots from 15k away?

All space combat I've seen and heard of has been no more than a couple of klicks away! At which point speed and size is still a factor. I'd like to see smaller ships have a better defense rating against larger ships, due to their size. I doubt this will happen, however, since you can arm a fighter with the same weapons you can arm a battleship.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
All space combat I've seen and heard of has been no more than a couple of klicks away!


All the space combat you have seen has been in cheesy SciFi films. If you have a mass-driver which can whack out a chunk of matter at, say, 100,000,000 metres per second (0.3c), why would you wait until you opponent was 2000m away? Well you might, but I'd start taking shots at tens of thousands of kilometres. Even further with missiles.

Side note:
Although I realise it would probably be impractical to implement in GC2, I think it would be interesting if the Beam/Missile/Mass-driver trinity weren't just 3 flavours of the same weapon characteristic. For instance, beam weapons will obviously strike long before a missile fired at the same time... but missiles would probably have longer range. Mass-drivers would be more efficient at causing damage per unit power, but would have the shortest range of all 3. With bonuses to defence based on the speed of the ship being greatest for mass-drivers and least for beams. So you'd want mass-drivers on heavily defended cruisers that can get close and slug it out, missiles on light frigates that try and destroy their opponents before they can get close, while small agile fighters have less need for armour because they can dodge, but more need for point-defence because they are vulnerable to long-range missiles. And so forth, making it worthwhile to research all 3 types of weapons and defence types.

Perhaps we'll see something like this in GC3.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I'd like to see turrets, none of them would be anywere as powerful as standard weapons but you could put them on large or huge ships so they could fire at multiple enemy ships at once, it doesn't make sense that a battle ship with a half dozen phasers on it would just shoot enemy fighters one at a time when it could just blast an entire fleet in one fell swoop.
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Bottom line (at the top!): There are a lot of good reasons why close ranged combat makes more sense than long ranged.

It's hard to know what's technologically feasible in the GC2 universe, but even if it is possible to make a beam go, say, 300,000 KM, I can think of a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to. Energy consumption would be enormous (and enormously wasteful); why not shoot from a couple of hundred KM? That way you aren't projecting a beam over hundreds of thousands of klicks of empty space.

It's no different for the other two weapon types, either. The problem with mass drivers has already been noted, and that's even with projects moving at an appreciable percentage of c. Considering how much energy it would take to propel even a small projectile that fast, it's reasonable to expect slower speeds and, consequently, a harder time hitting the target. And as for missile weapons, you'd want to give as little warning as possible so that point defense can't take out the relatively slow fragile missiles. And increasing the speed raises the same problems you run into with mass drivers.