Suggestion - unfinished battles

Sounds nice, but I think, combat system needs to be built up from scratch. Yes I know ... it's difficult to realize. But we know there ARE huge differences between DL and DA in combat, why not changing it another time?

Here's my suggestion:

1. Remove that rounds-of-fire-thing. It might be easy to realize to have ships firing in rounds, but this results in a not-very-realistic combat behavior.

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2. Instead of using "rounds" introduce RoF for each weapon. Cheaper Weapons might have a better RoF than later (and more expensive) weapons, so they will not become totally useless in midgame fights (endgame is huge weaponry only). For example: I am often using Phasors as long as possible, because they're cool and "startrekish", even if later weapons are allready avaiable.
Also my typical strategy is to have "mass produced" ships with cheaper weaponry (for example Phasors instead of Disruptors) and some "top notch" ships with best weaponry avaiable. Why not give older weaponry a longer stay on the battlefield by increasing their RoF?

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3. Heavy weaponry should miss a lot often smaller targets. For example a Disruptor might be a mighty weapon against a Battleship, but not against a nimble Fighter - it may miss. Introducing some kind of "Weapon's Accuracy" would give the player opportunity to use fighters against big ships.

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4. When introducing a "Weapon's Accuracy", a "RoF" and a difference between light, medium and heavy weaponry, we also should check if its possible to restrict some weapons to a specific class. Example?

A nimble fighter may be equipped with weapons up to "medium" size (Energy-Weapons: Phasors), but it's mainreactor is too small to support any bigger weapon. So you can't have a Fighter with huge damageoutput but too low profile (can't be hit by Battleshipweaponry) - it will not be "uber" vs Battleships.

"Big Example" for Weaponry (beam-weapons):

Read this way: Name of weapon, Type, Efficiency (Chance to hit and Chance to damage without any defense).

Laser | Light Weapon | Tiny (90%/95%) | Small (90%/90%) | Medium (95%/75%) | Large (100%/55%) | Huge (100%|33%) | Civilian Hull same as Large

Plasma | Light Weapon | Tiny (85%/100%) | Small (90%/95%] | Medium (95%/85%) | Large (100%/80%) | Huge (100%/80%)

Phasor (I - III) | Medium Weapon | Tiny 70%/100%) | Small (80%/100%) | Medium (90%/100%) | Large (95%/90%) | Huge (95%/80%)

Phasor (IV - VII) | Medium Weapon | Tiny 50%/125%) | Small (65%/100%) | Medium (80%/100%) | Large (90%/95%) | Huge (95%/85%)

Disruptors | Large Weapon | Tiny (33%/125%) | Small (45%/100%) | Medium (66%/100%) | Large (85%/95%) | Huge (95%/95%)

Subspace Blaster etc | Huge Weapon | Tiny (5%/150%) | Small (25%/125%) | Medium (35%/100) | Large (75%/100%) | Huge (95%/100%)

Okay, thats it. You see - bigger weapons are not as usefull against small targets as smaller weaponry, but IF they hit, they might destroy their target with one salvo. Light weapons are very good against smaller targets, but they're not very dangerous vs bigger targets. Medium weapons are fairly good against anything.
Also interesting: beam-weapons are most accurate, but do lesser damage against large and huge targets. Projectil-weapons do more damage against everything, but are less accurate (and even totally useless against smaller targets if too large).
Missile-Weapons are sometimes more accurate than beam-weapons, against same sized targets, but miss often / everytime when used against too small targets. For example: a heavy and slow torpedo of a Battleship will never hit a Fighter, because it's able to evade.

Second "Big Example" for Classes and their equipment:

Read this way: Class (Size), smallest allowed weapon-class, best weapon-class, biggest allowed weapon-class

Fighter - Antifighter (Tiny) | Light | Light | Medium
Fighter - Anticapital (Tiny) | Light | Medium | Medium
Corvette - Antifighter (Small) | Light | Light | Large
Corvette - Anticapital (Small) | Light | Large | Large
Corvette - Anticorvette (Small) | Light | Medium | Large
Frigate - Antifighter/-corvette (Medium) | Light | Light-Medium | Large
Frigate - Anticapital (Medium) | Light | Large | Large
Cruiser - Antifighter/-corvette (Large) | Medium | Medium | Large
Cruiser - Anticapital (Large) | Medium | Large | Large
Battleship - Anticaptial (Huge) | Large | Huge | Huge

Lets check: Smaller ships can use smaller weaponry, bigger ships bigger weaponry (easy to understand). Now its funny: you can NOT use any weaponry with any ship, so you have to use smaller ships to defend your Battleship against a threat like a Fighter. If you throw in a dozen Fighters, you can easily destroy a Battleship, if you're using medium weaponry, because YOU can hit AND damage the Battleship, but the Battleship with its large / huge weaponry will miss your fighters very often. Also, if introducing RoF, your medium weapons will fire more often than a large gun of the Battleship, so you can do more damage in same time.

Finally:

To get rid of that inaccurate and unrealistic rounds-system, we need to add following:

Weapon Rate of Fire (RoF) - Smaller weapons do fire more often
Weapon's Accuracy (Acc) - Smaller weapons might hit bigger targets more often, but larger weapons will miss smaller targets if they're too small.
Damage per Shot (DpSh) - How much damage does a weapon per salvo?
Damage per Second (DpS) - How much damage does a weapon per second?

To calculate DpS you need to know:

- What damage is done per salvo and how many salvos are executed per second
Example 1: A Laser I is firing 3 times in a second, doing 1 damage per shot (3 DpS)
Example 2: A Phasor I is firing 1 times in a second, doing 4 damage per shot (4 DpS)
- What weapon-class is used against what target-class (Accuracy and effective damage)
Example 1: A Laser I is hitting a Fighter with accuracy of 95% (95 out of 100 will hit), meaning it does a maximum of 95 Damage in 31.7 seconds when firing 3 times in a second and 100 times.
Example 2: A Laser I is hitting a Battleship with accuracy of 95%. Efficency is 33%, meaning a Laser will do 10.45 Damage in 31.7 seconds when firing 3 times in a second and 100 times.

You see, the Laser will destroy a Fighter with ease, but it's almost useless against a Battleship.

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5. If we have a realistic weaponbehavior, its more usefull to have mixed fleets instead of using just the biggest ships avaiable. A player with Fighters and Corvettes (tiny & small) will win most battles because of their sheer number (you can have three times more Fighters and Corvettes than Battleships) if the enemy is using just Battleships. So everyone has to mix his fleet - and most battles will be more interesting to watch, because (if even fleets are battling each other) its not sure who's winning.
Also, its now possible to add / remove following features:
- remove "one-must-survive-rule"
- remove "dying-ship-shots-last-time"
- add "ship-shots-multiple-targets"

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6. Now the battlesystem is ready for Starstriker's Idea: Introduce a "retreat-button" if your fleet is loosing the battle. This way, you can save yor fleet instead of watching it to get squished by a superior enemy fleet.

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I know, it's VERY difficult to realize, because it would require to do the battlesystem right from scratch. It might be even too big for a small patch, so I would recommend to use this feature either for a second Expansionpack OR for GalCiv3. I really want to see a more realistic (but still NOT interactive) battle and I am pretty sure, this suggestion might help you, if you're using it.

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Thanks @ Starstriker1: without your suggestion, I never would have posted my concept.
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There's something to be said for a simpler combat system, and I really don't think rebuilding the system from scratch is necessary.

I think the objectives you want to achieve could be done a bit more simply:

1)Making older weapons viable (and establishing the possibility of using cheap weak ships OR expensive, powerful, cutting edge ones) could be done simply by scaling weapon costs as you go up the tech tree. As you get better weapons, the older ones become cheaper. By the time you're sporting phasors, laser weapons should be absolutely trivial in cost, while your new weapons should be costing you a pretty penny to be fielding right away.

A possible implementation of that:
*Each weapon (or weapon class) has a much bigger cost associated with it than now. New weapons are prohibitively expensive
*Every new tech you research along that line of weaponry decreases those weapon's cost by a certain percent

2)Your other objective, which is to make mixed fleets more competitive, could be done with a simple targeting/evasion system I've suggested before.

Currently, your luck modifier changes your minimum roll with each weapon on your ship, which is a bit wierd. I suggest the following:

*Nix the luck factor in the combat rolls
*Add two new ship stats: evasion and targetting, which could possibly even have racial stat influences
*Allow players to add components that will increase evasion (ie, sublight engines, ECM...) and targeting (computers, short range sensors...), along with tech lines for both of these. The evasion components should have a large sizemod, making them FAR more efficient on smaller ships than larger ones.

Minimum rolls would then be determined by the formula (max damage / (attacker targeting - defender evasion). If the targetting and evasion values are the same, the minimum roll is 0. If the evasion exceeds the targeting, the roll could be negative entirely (signifying a miss).

I think those two concepts would cover most of what you wanted to achieve!

I wince when I hear "make old weapons cheaper," being reminded of the fusion beam cheese from Master of Orion where you could shove about six banks of 99 of those things on a ship at a time. . . maybe if it were carefully implemented, it would be good.

I also hesitate with any suggestion that goes "rework the entire combat system" especially to the extent you're talking about, because at that point, you may as well make an entirely new game. DL to DA changed by having ships attack weapon by weapon instead of ship by ship, it didn't implement an entirely new set of weapon stats that need to be tested and balanced.

In my opinion, having combat stop after a certain number of rounds is enough. That adds enough of a strategic element without making things overly complicated. Past a certain point, it's not complicated for the sake of being useful, but complicated just for being complicated. Leave things like weapon accuracy and range for RPGs and tactical combat games, and let's keep things a little more abstract for strategy games like GalCiv, that's my opinion.

Here here. I approve. But the tie rule(s) has been on my gripe list for a while now...

~ Wyndstar

I don't think that making the wepaons cheaper will have the effect you're worried about. Space is still the limiting factor, and you're getting those cheaper weapons (and defenses?) at the cost of overall ship power. The only change that scaling equipment prices back and forth would accomplish is in build times.

As for the tie rules... the simple method would just be to kill them both. There doesn't need to be a victor.

I think I really want to see my suggestion in GalCiv3 ... I like real battles, thats one of the features missing in GalCiv2. There are battles, yes, but they're not very realistic and not that interesting. To have more simulate weapons, it might be a little bit more difficult to balance the game, but the result will be more exciting than just "ship1ofteam1shots, ship2ofteam1shots, ship3ofteam1shots" --- "ship1ofteam2shots, ship2ofteam2shots, ship3ofteam2shots, ship4ofteam2shots, ship1ofteam1destroyed" --- "ship1ofteam1shots, ship1ofteam1die, ..."

Yep that's battling in GalCiv2 ... too predictable.

I think what you want is a more interesting battle viewer that isn't as literal in how it displays the battle mechanics. Without actual tactical combat (which isn't really going to happen any time soon) the underlying mechanics are best kept simple. If you want more entertaining battles, improving the combat viewer to be more flashy and dramatic would be the way to go.

The ideal is a simple implementation with a flashy representation.

I like the idea of reworking the combat system with unfinished battles. The whole win-lose concept is basic (no offense to this game because it works well). Hit and run tactics, the decision to continue or retreat, delaying an enemy by drawing them deeper into space, implementing ROF for weapons, initiative rolls for first attack, ambushes, robot mine fields to disable hyperspace, etc. could lend depth to the battle system. Good idea for a future edition.

I'd personally like to see a battle round limit put into a patch! As far as mechanics go, it's an almost trivial change (unless there are a lot of places where the code assumes that one of the fleets has died). The majority of the changes would come with getting the AI to take advantage of all the new options... their current tactical AI might WORK, but it'd be at a disadvantage without taking into account the need to repair or hit their opponents multiple times. But doesn't the AI need some better war waging skills anyways?