Sorry for the double post

How can you 'miss' something that was never there in the first place?

By the end of a game you could easily have a fleet of around 20 fighters.

The point of Gal Civ isn't massive fleets though.

It's the make-every-game-the-same brigade!

I just don't think of tiny hulls as 'fighters'. Given how it scales with the colony ships, which are shown in the movies as being ridiculously, absurdly large, and all. I don't miss fighters - honestly, not every setting has fighter weapons that do squat to capital ships - and I don't really consider that GC2 contains any fighters. A fighter that takes the entire industrial output of planet Earth to construct? Na uh.

A fighter that takes the entire industrial output of planet Earth to construct? Na uh.

Exactly my point - yet for some reasons they are called fighters. I am not going to moan that GalCiv2 sucks, because it has no fighters. I am just saying that it would be nice to have them...and wanted to show my solution (i.e. treating single fighters rather as squadrons).
And maybe you're right that the other option is just to rule the fighters out totally..besides you could always take a tiny hull and make it quite big with adding extras to it.

That isn't the sort of thing that is easily moddable.

Generally, modding involves changing stuff that is already in the game. e.g. replacing one the Large hull models with a Star Destroyer model. Or changing the Nano ripper to be less powerful. Carrier class ships would almost certainly require access to the source code.

I can believe that a ship can take an entire planets manufacturing output for weeks.

Lets look at the systems first.

Fire Control,
Navigation,
Communications,
Life Support,
Weapons Delivery,
Power Systems.

Now, we have to build this space going ship that has to be able to defend, attack, scout, report, escort and generally wave the flag throughout the known galaxy. At first we have just the standard well spaceport to build it in. We have the technology to start making the components, we have the ability to fit them in place, we have the ability to get the right people to make them, the ability to have the right people ship them correctly, the ability to have the right people check them for damage, the folks to install them, the folks to test them, the folks to fix them, not to mention the fact that we are sending our sons and daughters into the worst freaking enviornment ever known to anyone so we want to make them as safe as possible... so we we set up Quality Assurance points along everything, we maximize mechanical space to intall and secure backup systems and redundancy checks and the systems that check the systems to ensure they are working well.

Even though we have all of that, we do not have a huge industrial base of skilled labor types to actually build these systems fast and install them fast at first. We do not have the colleges and advanced schools required to get a technically trained work force togeather to put the space vessel togeather. Speaking of which, who is going to be feeding all of them folks. Who is going to be taking care of their children, who is going to be ensure that the grass gets mowed...

Looking at the overall picture... "Geez, it takes me 16 weeks to make a base model fighter with a laser and cannon and some armor on it with 5 billion people" , I can see where folks start thinking... thats a bit long... but when you begin to put in that the average person in the world has an average intellect, than think well the average person does not know where Iran is much less understand that Power is as easy as PIE. You begin to understand why it could actually take a while to create a spacecraft that is only a fighter...

Remember also that if a SU-35, Typhoon or Super Hornet could fly in space over great distances at speeds beyond light and still talk to you and perform all of its other functions, it may well be a LOT LARGER

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

Have any of you wondered how a 1000 troop transport counquers 5 bilion people ( or whatever lives there) ?? i always wondered why peaple search reallity in computer games... its all symbols. Think about a normal map, you got cities marked with dots. One troop transport on the maps is only a symbol, of lets say a whole invasion force ( fighters ,troops,supplies etc) andone tiny hulled ship is a symbol for a hole squadron of 20 ships ?

Ps dont mind my english

Have any of you wondered how a 1000 troop transport counquers 5 bilion people ( or whatever lives there) ?? i always wondered why peaple search reallity in computer games

ever notice that 1000 troops is actually 1 billion of your population?

If you want the whole fighter justification thing its not to hard to imagine your way right to it. Hyperdrive capable ships are incredibly complex and expensive. I.E it takes 1 week for an entire planet to build one. It is so complex that a single person cannot operate a ship. Space weaponry is so massive a tiny ship in GC2 is the size of multiple current super carriers. Anything smaller wouldnt phase these monster warship. The names "fighter" is used as an old holdover from wet navies and atmospheric forces to give admirals a grip on the crafts role in the line of battle of the modern space fleet.

its all a bunch of nonsense but i can justify anything you want ot question. It is after all just a game.

You can see the sort of scale of the tiny and small hulls because you can see the cockpits. They really aren't that big.

A "simple" way to implement fighters in the game would be to add them as a new type of weapon

Good idea, how about a new weapon tech tree in the expansion? Carriers with fighters (instead of ,or as well as beam/missile/mass driver).

We know a death/terror star is going to be in the expansion, so how about the ultimate end of the carrier tech tree ending in a terror star which can obviously destroy entire planets and is protected by fighters (giving it a high fighter attack rating). After all a planet buster would have its own defensive ships, dedicated to protecting just it.

Regardless of how it's doable, why do it at all? As I said, in many universes fighters simply can't lug effective weapons. In GC2, tiny and huge ships mount different numbers of the same guns. If you're going to make 'grain of sand' style fighters, what will they mount? A laser-1 0.001 beam? What's the bloody good of that?

Seriously. Fighters (and carriers) are useful on Earth because planes are faster than boats, and a plane can carry many missiles that can kill boats. This is *NOT TRUE* in space. People have already noted that huge ships are actually *FASTER* than tiny ones, since they can mount more engines. There is no way to mount regular GC1 weapons on 'one man fighters', so given the combat system, they'll be taking 0.001 beams against 23 shields and doing nothing. The only concievable use they would have is for scouting, but there's no reason the technology would scale down that far.

Basically, the only way this would work is with a fairly widespread rework of the tech tree. And for what? Stupid fighters that will die by the thousand? Unless they're treated as missiles, there are no weapons to kill fighters in the game, so they'll buzz around in their hundreds of thousands, doing nothing, until they're picked off by individual beam shots. Hooray.

During my first game I wondered myself: "Hey, where the &^$* are the carriers?!" During my second game as I expanded into the tech tree more, I was supremly dissapointed. To compensate, I get ultra logistics ASAP, create 'fighters' of my own, (usually one light figter with a tiny hull and a heavier fighter with small hull) and sprinkle 'squadrons' of 'fighters' throughout my fleets,but I usually only have one or two designs. Corvettes, destroyers, and battleships are more dominent among my forces.

Still, it would be cool if they could implement carriers and fighter squadrons with a series of patches.