okay, well i've gotten into tweaking the game myself from time to time, as you can see above. would you happen to know how i might be able to change the way combat rolls are calculated myself?

I'd suspect that it's hard coded. Sorry.

they scrapped first strike in 1.1

Not true. Frogboy talks about removing first strike in 1.2, but that's beside the point. The point is, defensive ships usually lose even when they have the first strike advantage, so simultaneous combat isn't going to make a strong defense a winning strategy without a huge pile of defensive racial bonuses. 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.

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.

i agree with the offencive guys. If i build my fleets with a bias towards attack, then "I" have the tactical advantage by deciding when where and who i attack ..... if i turtle up and build defencive ships then i lose many tactical choises and am resigned to defence without my offence

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.

IMO the defences aren't the way to win the war (especially since they only work on 1/3 occasions). What they ARE great for is giving you an edge in a particular war. So that your ships get better and better against a certain civilisation that developed such and such weapons. In this role they are definitely worth the price.

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.

Empyrean, will you marry me?

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.

Unfortunately, a ship with good defenses doesn't have the option of trying to evade or escape an attack. No reason, just the limitation of the AI, I assume. Since an attacking ship can pound away all day and the defnding ship just sits there and takes it, there's not much you can do except suspend belief and look for someone to produce a better AI.

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. 

Unfortunately, a ship with good defenses doesn't have the option of trying to evade or escape an attack.

Excuse my ignorance here but I'm fairly new to the game... is there any advantage to having speedy ships other than the fact they can get around the galaxy faster? Would it make sense to use the speed factor in a similar manner to defense (e.g., perhaps halve the speed and add it to the defense rating)? It would seem to stand to reason that faster ships would be harder to hit. That might help your small fighters when they come up against a huge, lumbering, heavily armored behemoth (and perhaps be slightly more realistic to boot).

Of course, that might throw the game balance out of whack with regard to engine cost...

Just a thought.

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)

I'm in the opposite camp. Defense of 1 early is huge on a level playing field when attack ships have one or two weapons. Defense of 15 when your opponent has attack of 5 is also huge, however any player that gets there probably could get to a more impressive advantage on the offense side.

Again, player vs. player would make it all so clear. Right now defenses are cool for those who wish to pursue them. However, they are not an efficient way to win the game. A player focusing almost exclusively on offensive techs player will win much, much earlier. The offensive player will have more ships, and have more tactical flexibility. That's just the reality. Debate if you like as far as styles, however, the truth is that the game is set up to favor offense, and favor it heavily. I'm sure the design team had the debate many times over and decided what they decided.

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?

Speed gives you the *strategic* advantage of being able to pick your fights if and when you want it. You know the old saw, about attacking the enemy where they are weakest and where you are strongest.

I believe, this advantage is equally useful whether you are using all out attack ships or mostly defensive ships or mixed in between. This is also independent of whether the combat system is simultaneous or gives the attacker the 'first strike'.

Currently (v 1.11), attacking first (which superior speed allows ) also gives you the *tactical* advantage because ships that are destroyed in the very first attack don't get a chance to shoot back making the whole point of defense on such attacking ships irrelevant.

RESULT from change of current 1.1 system to simultaneous system

- If you are the attacker most of the time (because of superior speed), putting defenses on the *attacking ship* now make sense, because you must always take into account return fire, even if you can kill the defender with your first 200 attack. This is assuming you want to reduce attrition.

If you don't, you just slap on as much attack as needed to destroy the defender ship in your first attack, so you sustain only one round of return fire, any more attack is useless.

Some people have argued that because simultaneous attacks guarantees the defending ship a return shot, there is in fact going to be less use for defense on all ships! That is you don't need defense because when one 'all-attack ship' battles another 'all-attack ship', both will die as opposed to the old system, where you need defense to surivive if you are attacked.

This leads to a MAD kind of situation where both sides just pile on attack. This might happen, but players who do that, aren't worried about casualities. Which makes sense, if you don't care about losses, obviously you don't slap on defenses.

RESULT rom change of current 1.1 system to simultaneous system

*-If you are the defender (most of the time due to lower speed) you no longer need to put defense on fully attack oriented ships even if you are attacked by a giant attack fleet with huge attack values. This is assuming you are willing to accept attrition.

Otherwise, defense still is useful.

To be honest, I'm still not sure if the switch to simultaneous combat will make defense more useful.

EDIT: Never mind, the above, I'm now sure defense will be better in simultaneous. Because in 1.1 if you have superior speed, you never need defense at all even if you worry about attrition. But with simultaneous combat, if you want to reduce attrition, you definitely need defense, even if you constantly attack rather than defend.

That is why defense becomes more useful .

Of course if you don't care about attrition you still don't need defenses, but clearly that makes sense..... The change to simultaneous should not affect that.

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.

Hmm... I'm afraid the discussion isn't so much that defenses are worthless, it's that they compare unfavorably to heavy offense in many situations. How much you value defenses and whether or not you use them is a matter of personal playing style. One may argue that defenses are useless, but the playing style will be adjusted to it; the same goes for various people in the defenses camp.

I'm with Veblen on this. I believe defenses are overrated at the moment. That doesn't mean I forego on them altogether, but I use them to increase the edge I have on the opposition, not to gain an edge. As defenses grow less reliable and more expensive when the game progresses...

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.

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

Gnashing of teeth will come about because the AI becomes harder to beat not because defense becomes less important (if it does at all). People are really explpiting the inability of the comp to get the first hit. , the change to simultaneous is more to fix Ai weakness really...

I suspect most players ldon't give two hoots that defense is too weak, i would guess, people play with max attack and minimal if not zero defense.

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

Defences should be expensive - but with the new ruleset the price should drop slightly. Let me explain:

But this has to be said first....Defences unreliable?Occasionally you may loose a ship because the rolled dice let you down. Is this unreliable? Nope, its just plain bad luck and it happens sometimes. But without defences you're not going to be tasting any of that massive slice of the survivability pie (Poor stats analogy, sorry).

The only time I build defenceless ships is in the early game, where numbers mean everything. In the 2nd quarter I add defences and my ships last longer that the AIs, simple. Pre finale its almost a case of ships with roughly 50/50 attack /defence, this is because the AI seems to chuck out ships at a phenomenal pace and I need to keep my ships alive, guess what? It works. even if I stupidly manage to end a ships movement points among a load of enemy fleets I might only lose a ship or two against whole fleets with them attacking, nice. Late game the attack percentage goes up, but the level of defence is still high due to tech advances. Yeah I lose the occasional ship, but thats okay because most of my ships survive and get tougher.

With the new ruleset coming up, the importance of defences will become paramount and therefore the price should drop. If not then the galaxy will be filled with throwaway ships, kamikazee squadrons designed to eat at the enemy fleet and thrown away once used. While I lament about the weakness of the AI strategies, the balance of power will irrevocably shift to the AI. I don't care how good anyone is at this game, the AI will consistently have more ships than you, especially on higher levels. Part of the balancing of the game must include lowering the cost of defences.

But thats what I reckon. I could be wrong.

thanks for listening

By higher levels you mean above tough?

While I lament about the weakness of the AI strategies, the balance of power will irrevocably shift to the AI. I don't care how good anyone is at this game

Frookie, hopefully the whole point of the new combat system is to help the AI in combat. At present it can be a massive advantage to initiate combat and deal an initial 'killer blow'. The whole tactic of using distance, speed, timing and sensors to out manoeuvre the opposition must be very difficult to program into the AI.

It also has little understanding of the importance of a 'counter-attack' in a solid defence. Again a big disadvantage for the AI. Hopefully, the warmongering players will now have to think a liitle harder in planning our imperialistic campaigns.

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.

Another thing about the system is that while it's perfectly viable strategy to focus almost 100% on weapons and ignoring defenses, doing the opposite, with minor research on weapons and mostly on defenses is clearly inferior.

In my latest game that is still on going , I play the Drath with defense bonuses, i delibrately, played Good, to gain access to even mroe superior defensive technology, and I restricted myself to researching only the first few laser tech and focused primarily on point defenses (everyone else was using missiles so my choice was simple).

I have totally punked my opponents in the colony rush stage thanks partly to extreme good luck, and so I seriously outclassed them in every area. And yet my ships (i stayed with small hulls, like the opponet) armed with aegon missile defense (early on telepathic defense) occasionally got destoryed or damaged by much cheaper and lower tech ships . I was like 1 attack, 60-70 defense (small hull with 2 warp engines) versus ships with no more than 8 attack ( closer to 4 actually). I think this is the variance thing vablen is talking about. With only 10 hitpoints, even if hits are occasion you get pushed down to 3-5 pretty quick, and then you need it to be withdrawn to be safe.

Later on some of my opponents switched to mass drivers which made things even worse.

Of course, I never came close to losing and it was always obvious I would win, but if i had used my usual strategy of maximising weapons, I doubt i would suffer as many losses .