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MUZZIAH

Join Date 01/2008

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Capturing Enemy Ships

Many years back i used to play a game similar to GalCiv2 called Masters of Orion2. To this day i still highly rate this game. Why. Masters introduced a concept of being able to capture enemy ships. You were able to add them to your fleet or preferably return them to a planet or star base for decommission, where you could extract unknown technology.

This added an awesome element to the game in which i would play a technologically backwards civilization with increased military production. Then with my many primative ships i would scour the galaxy "assimilating" new ships for their technological value.

Initially you would use marine pods to board enemy vessels then later transporters. Suffice to say it's an element completely missed in GalCiv. Shame.

However the battles were turn based so i am unsure on what formula would be best used.

What are others opinions on this? Especially fellow Masters fans.

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You CAN capture AI ships in GC2. Invade an enemy planet when it's building one of their warships and capture the starport. Let it complete the construction and the ship is your's to keep. Or you can go to the diplomacy screen and buy them, but you'll have to wait a while for delivery if the ship is outside of life support range. Or you can establish good relations with a Good/Neutral aligned race and then culture flip them to capture some of their ships(along with their planets, galactic resources, and asteroid mines).

Unfortunately, even with better tech, the AI builds slow-moving, and sometimes poorly designed ships which are often hideous.

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Ah, I loved that option. But buying ships just isn't the same you know.

I'm a huge fan of the MOO series and they got some things just right with that game. Ship combat was one. Sure it could take forever, but you had so many options with your ships. Stealing enemy ships via marines, scuttling wounded ships in battle to damage enemy vessels. That and I loved the fact that you could Death Star planets, as well as conqure them telepathically.

Though what they did right was outweighed by what was bad. The micromanaging just got out of control in the big maps.
That's why I love GC2 now. Though the ship combat still bugs me. MOO in general, ship combat is really detailed and you can control it. GC it takes a little bit to get ship combat going and you don't have as much control. But at least they got the rest of the whole "running the empire" "running each planet" and "diplomacy AI" thing right with GC.
It's the reason I can't get myself to go back to MOO.

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Yeah your right with MOO having way to much micro-management but it was just to much fun being the captain when you sent your fleets to battle.

I do enjoy GalCiv2 very much it has a smooth interface and some fantastic MOD's however it feels that the emphasis is on appearance not game play when we talk ships. Its like Homeworld but without any control. Shortly put where is the strategy? This is a strategy game so why remove the ship to ship.

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Well it does kinda fit in with the idea of the game. You have alot of control in GC2 but not alot of fine detail control. You can build spys and send them to planets, but you can't dictate what they do there. You can design ships and send them on their ways, but you don't pilot them.
Where MOO put you all over the place decision-wise, GC2 feels more like you are the top guy in the empire. Everyone does what you say, but you can't wander down to the airforce base and fly a dangerous mission yourself.

The strategy in GC mainly deals with supporting your fleets, researching tech, and moving your forces around in general. You can check up on your enemies and see what they're equiping their ships with and then guide your research and design in a direction that takes advantage of those weaknesses.

That being said a bit more control in land and space combat would be nice. You know, something like attacking styles. You could tell your ships before they enter combat to either fight defensively or offensively. As a result they either don't take as much damage but deal less, or they take more and deal more. Something that gave more control but fit with the feel of the game.

That and the ability to bomb planets from orbit would be nice. That was one thing that I REALLY missed from MOO. You could just bomb a planet back into the stone age without landing a single troop there. The GC2 reliance on troop pods to do anything to a planet is the only thing that really annoys me about the game. The rest is golden.

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I would love to have the option to capture a starbase or starship during battle or a war. Adding this option would add so much potential, from potential tech trees, (EMP Tech, Transporter techs, etc) to new modules (EMP modules, Marine Modules, Starbase Capture Modules, etc) to new and exciting strategies.

For instance
you could research Drone technology which would give you robotic drones. You could use these drones to capture a ship, remove the crew, and take the ship "home" to your homeworld.
you could research cyborg technology in which you would build cyborg soldiers, and use them to capture various enemy ships, starbases, and colonies.

The potential for this aspect is virtually endless.

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I like the idea of boarding parties and marine modules etc. More benefit to soldiering! A whole new dimension. And GC2 _does_ have turn based combat even if the movie does not look like it.

Unfortunately, kind of like my idea about ship damage, the fact that it seems 95% of combats are over in one round kind of makes this less workable.

With boarding it becomes more galley or age of sail combat instead of ironclads and battleships. Arrrgggghhhh! Walk the plank matey!

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...This is a strategy game so why remove the ship to ship.

Technically, ship-to-ship combat would be tactical combat.

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that would be nice, but soon, somebody is going to come in and say this wouldn't work because it is just adding micromanagement. but I like what Thenightguant said,

Well it does kinda fit in with the idea of the game. You have alot of control in GC2 but not alot of fine detail control. You can build spys and send them to planets, but you can't dictate what they do there. You can design ships and send them on their ways, but you don't pilot them.
Where MOO put you all over the place decision-wise, GC2 feels more like you are the top guy in the empire. Everyone does what you say, but you can't wander down to the airforce base and fly a dangerous mission yourself.

The strategy in GC mainly deals with supporting your fleets, researching tech, and moving your forces around in general. You can check up on your enemies and see what they're equiping their ships with and then guide your research and design in a direction that takes advantage of those weaknesses.

That being said a bit more control in land and space combat would be nice. You know, something like attacking styles. You could tell your ships before they enter combat to either fight defensively or offensively. As a result they either don't take as much damage but deal less, or they take more and deal more. Something that gave more control but fit with the feel of the game.

That and the ability to bomb planets from orbit would be nice. That was one thing that I REALLY missed from MOO. You could just bomb a planet back into the stone age without landing a single troop there. The GC2 reliance on troop pods to do anything to a planet is the only thing that really annoys me about the game. The rest is golden.

I agree. Even though I never played MOO it makes sense.

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So many choices. Some just simple sense. The ability to research multiple techs at the same time. The ship to ship tactics were a pleasure and would influence your entire game plan. It seemed that the more you got involved the more pleasure you got out of carefully planning the future of your empire. I loved the in-depth micro management.

People complain about the micro management involved, but i find the economics of GC2 have to be adjusted regularly, the upgrading of vessels tricky & the spy system limited. All of this add's to the time it takes and as i could put it, micro management. I like to soak in all the details and have all the choices available. How can u complain that a strategy game has to much detail. Agreed everybody has a happy balance. Perhaps we should be looking at an option to disable certain elements to reduce micro management.

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That being said a bit more control in land and space combat would be nice. You know, something like attacking styles. You could tell your ships before they enter combat to either fight defensively or offensively. As a result they either don't take as much damage but deal less, or they take more and deal more. Something that gave more control but fit with the feel of the game.

That and the ability to bomb planets from orbit would be nice. That was one thing that I REALLY missed from MOO. You could just bomb a planet back into the stone age without landing a single troop there. The GC2 reliance on troop pods to do anything to a planet is the only thing that really annoys me about the game. The rest is golden.

I don't think this is micromanagement.
Adding a new ship type: Planetary attack vessel(PAV), would solve the problem of being able to bomb a planet without landing troops without feeling micromanagement-y.
I sometimes find myself wanting to bomb an enemy planet but not capture the planet. Why? Because the Korx stole a resource I wanted or maybe the Terrans colonized a planet I wanted. I want to teach them a lesson(Hey, Don't mess with me!) without actually conquering them.
And what would be cool is if you could add EMP to the PAV and destroy all of their electronics. Add Lasers, Plasma, etc, and destroy the improvements and literally put a hurting on them, and force them to apologize.
It would be so cool if next time a civ moved in on my territory and started demanding money and acting superior, I could destroy every starport, farm, lab, and factory that they own from orbit and force them not to act like that.
Oh, what would be really cool is to create a Tech-Removal Pod, which actually causes a specific type of damage so that they have to re-research some of their techs. Make it random and the number of techs would depend on the number of pods.

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