Even then, a race with offensive racial bonuses will still beat them, so the issue of defense vs offense clearly falls in favor of offense due to the costs involved in making defensive ships.

You're right, it falls in favor of offense, but i don't think impossibly so. at the same time, I think your comment below is untrue:

Point is, racial bonuses towards a particular style of play make anecdotal evidence gathered by playing a race with a strong tendency towards a particular playstyle meaningless.

chance wins games. it's just inherantly unpredictable. as i've said, i focus on variety. in the few games where i've played with both offensive and defense huge ships in my fleets, the defnesive ones usually net way more levels than any others. if i'm ever in a bind, i can retrofit this ship into an offensive dynamo pretty cheaply.

why bother with that when offensive ships can be built more easily? ego, partly. i like to play the good guy often enough.

but one time i had kind of put off developing much military power when the drengin sent a feet to earth. i thought it was out of their range. i had a couple weak fighters and my initial surveyor, which had gained lots of experience and HP boosts. they were using drivers. i traded to get all the miniturization i could and the req's for arnorian battle armor, grabbed xeno ethics and the armor tech in 2 turns. i'd only researched stinger 4, but their fleets of fighters just kept dying against re-christened FSS Monkeyspanker.

anecdotal evidence is not meaningless. it's idiosyncratic and serendipitous. balance is important yes, but my main priority is having fun.

Yeah. I think that's an open, and interesting, question. Facelessclock summed it up well in the OP... Defenses are effective but expensive, and it looks like they're not worth getting for a big part of the game.

It can be frustrating to try to talk it through on forums because so often people end up talking about different things. Shields will feel a certain way to a player who enjoys leisurely game, takes the time to develop his or her empire, and goes to war wth a solid tech and production advantage. In contrast, a player in a masochistic game who strains to win as fast as possible may experience shields differently. This makes it real easy two otherwise reasonable, intelligent people to go back and forth on something like this and never actually talk about the same thing.

So, for the rest of this comment, let me clarify that I'm talking about balance, I mean balance from the perspective of a power gamer trying to win as fast as possible and optimize every choice. Such a player will only research shields if doing so has a higher return, in the form of combat effectiveness per cost, than investing that research in elsewhere.

That said, the way it is right now, from what I can tell, shields aren't worth researching in the beginning of the game. Putting the research points into weapons is a better investment. Later on in the game, when ship attack values get up around 20 or so, the picture becomes less clear. Also, shields are most effective on relatively large, high tech ships fighting relatively smaller, lower-tech ships, which is a scenario that doesn't happen until the mid-game at the earliest.

So, should the damage, size, and cost values be tweaked? Well, we would hope to gain an improvement in gameplay. More of the tech tree would be useful, the experience of deciding how to deck out your ships would be richer and more nuanced. From a subjective point of view, we would hope that the change would result in a net increase in fun (that's a, uh, technical term) for all players; from an obective point of view, power gamers going for "accurate" play would face fewer options where one choice is always inferior, and so could explore more of the "game space" without deviating from accurate play. So that's the benefit, or at least the hoped-for benefit, of tweaking the values. In the real world, we have to admit some uncertainty because the new system could be worse.

What's the cost? Well, there's a small but not insigficant up-front cost (determining and entering better values), and this cost comes from out fixed pool of manhours at Stardock. There's also a big potential downside; I think everyone involved with setting the values where they are now would emphasize that a fair amount of thought and testing went into the process. New values could mess up the balance more. Furthermore, all of the existing third-party tech charts and the information on the wiki would be outdated.

So is it worth a change? Well, I think so, but not in the immediate future. Add modding support and the simultaneous firing system in 1.2, and let those sink in. Get the Library acceptance times down to days instead of months. If there's good feedback between modders trying new things and Stardock incorporating the best new ideas back into the game, then the cost of the change is much smaller. Stardock can take something that works instead of developing it themselves, and there is less uncertainty that it will break the balance because it can be thoroughly tested in a mod first.

I don't know, we'll see what happens. There's room for improvement, I think, but doing the improvement right is tricky. At the same time, it's not really breaking the game outright, and shields are useful in some contexts. I just hope GalCiv2 reaches the level of polish where issues like this are sorted out.

There is a situation where massive defenses are worth it: when the enemy has much better logistics than you, better speed, higher production and keeps wailing on you to the point that you have to throw everything at production and can't research as quickly. It happened to me yesterday.

Playing as Drengin, the Altarians and then the Torians declared war. The Altarians probably had 60% of all habitable planets, a huge economy and a huge military. Same for the Torians, except they didn't have as many planets and weren't as powerful. The two of them had already defeated the Drath (who turned evil), the Korx and the Yor. I was the only evil guy in town.

They both had logistics past 30 and large scale building. By the time they attacked me, all I had was logistics of 22 and medium scale building. Both of them had hyperwarp too and all I had was early warp drive. All the AIs were using mass drivers and armor, so I used beams.

Any time I sent fighters after them, the fighters died and I couldn't defend my colonies. This went on for a while, so I switched to frigates with heavy armor. Five frigates per fleet. Moderate beam attack strength.

I went through several designs but the one that did the most fighting had 6 or 7 Adamantium II modules and 2 psionic beam cannons. I could just barely hold my own with the Altarians. They had nano rippers, graviton drivers and HD spike drivers. The Torians could barely scratch my paint job. They had railguns, singularity drivers and later graviton drivers.

In every fight, I was outnumbered 4 to 1, 5 to 1 or 6 to 1. The fights lasted for 3-5 minutes each. I won most of them, only because their weapons couldn't get through. If I had gone all attack, I would have gotten myself conquered very quickly because I could NOT keep up with them in ship production.

At the end of it, I forced them both into a peace treaty, then built huge fleets of less expensive ships and mined two military resources to keep my military rating up. I ended it on a tech victory with a few extra planets and a lot more respect for heavy defenses.

I've had similiar experiences, yes defensive ships are expensive to produce but they're an investment. If I use them wisely they're less likely to take losses, and whenever they have a victory they come out of it with less damage. Less damage means I can employ them in upcoming fights instead of having to wait for them to repair. If one of my balanced fleets isn't able to take out one enemy fleet then I'm proper f**ked, but if it can take them on one-by-one, it has a decent shot at wasting all of them. It suffers far less pyrrhic victories.

A ship with decent defenses can easily cost twice as much as a pure offense ship, but if say your production outpaces your logistics ability then you can counteract your disadvantage by having high-quality (offense+defense) ships in those fleets. The most recent game where my balanced ships drastically outperformed my offense ships I had a number of high-production planets and a strong economy, I was able to invest in enough defense research to make them effective and could afford the more expensive ships.

I agree with mikeswi.  I've experienced many close games where defences can make difference in the arms race, mainly because the research costs are much lower. If a single form of attack is causing you problems you can overload on the defence against that one attack type and win consistantly. You just out-tech them to a point where their weapons are useless even if they have more rps to spend.

The problem comes with multiple opponents with multiple types of attack, in which case this strategy is just useless. You can "waste" huge amounts of money on the wrong defences.

If you are ahead in the race you can probably stick to weapons alone, because you can churn out effective ships so much quicker without expensive defences on them.

Anecdotally an odd point in all 3 defences for medium size ships, in the early game seems to be a good compromise... but that is just me. 

well, B4 v1.2, speed will be of a huge benefit to defensive ships. You can take-out the biggest guns first, those who are more probable to do any damage to your expensive defense. Then, for the rest of the battle, you are almost invulnerable.

But 1.2 will also change the "all-attack-RoadRunner" ship strategy, since wiping most of the other opponent's fleet in 1 round won't keep you away from harm.

So when 1.2 will come out, I guess people will have generally more balanced ships. The "all-attack" players (me) will have to take some defences (which will rise the NPV (Net Present Value) of the technology) or the "huge-defense" players will have to get bigger guns, to wipe out threaths faster. (rising weapon's NPV)

well, B4 v1.2, speed will be of a huge benefit to defensive ships. You can take-out the biggest guns first, those who are more probable to do any damage to your expensive defense. Then, for the rest of the battle, you are almost invulnerable. But 1.2 will also change the "all-attack-RoadRunner" ship strategy, since wiping most of the other opponent's fleet in 1 round won't keep you away from harm.

Perhaps this is a newbie question, but please could you briefly explain why?

I'm starting to wonder if the combat system needs to be revamped. Depending on random rolls of the die may not work so well when the numbers are between 1 and 50. At that point, one bad roll means a ship dies.

This is entirely the problem. 5 attack and 250 defence vs 100 attack 0 defence...60 hitpoints each...combat simulator shows the defence heavy ship winning just 5 out of 50. And when the attacker ship wins, it's usually with half hitpoints or more still intact. A purely random distribution is not at all good when the hitpoints don't come close to scaling with the offence.

However, I'm confident it'll be changed in 1.3 when people realise from 1.2 just how bad a random distribution is. I predict much wailing and gnashing of teeth once the reality of removing attacker fires first hits home.

Random50,

I was thinking the same thought. I think I'll start a new thread about that pretty soon if no one beats me to the punch. Messing around with the combat simulator and using a little common sense shows clearly that ships don't have enough HP for the random system that they are in.

I believe the problem with advancing cost of defenses on a ship could be solved by the developer granting a cost plus strategy towards defensive products on a downwards type time constant scale.

For example:

1st set of defense costs - 100% of cost
2nd set of same defense costs - 98% space bucks
3rd set of same defense costs - 95% space bucks
4th set of same defense costs - 86% space bucks
5th set of same defense costs - 63% space bucks.
Overall Savings - 10% and change per level of defense. (58% total if you opt to max out a defense at 5 layers)

By the time you have gotten to the 5th layer of defense you have saved a small chunck of change that can be used to help build a new R&D type weapons ship.

You overall cost should reduce as your mearly improving on the layers or thickness of a said defense that already exists. For example your shield is still a shield, it just has the ability to move or absorb more beam energy. Your armor is mearly a micron more thick, you have added a second missle defense (should get a bonus from the selling company anyways!).

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

By higher levels you mean above tough?

By higher levels you mean above tough?

Painfull is more appropriate, because of the bonus allocation Richrf, currently its masochistic.

@DarkMatter - I agree with the spirit of what you are saying, but the scenario I wish to avoid is being swamped by a never ending supply of AI ships, It will almost completely kill strategic gameplay. A "tank rush" a la RTS if you prefer. One of the reasons I prefer to play turn based games is to avoid this. I prefer elegant strategies months in the making, fine tuning my planets as much as possible.

In fact I'm all for the idea of killing the first attack advantage, but lowering the cost of defences might make the AI use them to a greater degree than at present.