i think there is some sort of blitz tactic that works for most every strategy game. and i think your suggestion would be a little bit of throwing out the baby with the bath water. for instance, what if i want a really fast scout, should i have to build it on a huge hull? the premiums you pay for engines on the smaller hulls are implemented in the way they scale within the tech anyhow. you CAN'T build a tiny hull as fast as you can a huge hull last i checked. that said you CAN somewhat achieve what your asking for the same way, tinker with the component xml file to get the sort of component scaling that achieves your objective. this should be done thru a mod anyhow, matter of not fixing something that only a few ppl think is broken.

so, i fully support your effort to make a ballance mod for GalCiv2

@P0rcup1ne

I'm not against blitzing but the extremes of movement are just silly in GalCivII.

You can get to the stage where the AI finishes its turn with 20 planets then before it moves again it has none at all. Maybe I'm just too weak to resist making ships which exploit this huge loophole.

To my mind if you want a fast scout you should need to research engines not just stick lots of poor engines on one hull. In any case I reckon cargo hulls (with 1 hp but enough space for sensors and engines) should be the games scout of choice.


@mikeswi

IMHO Eyes is broken too. It is just too powerful and hugely undervalued by the AI. I'd love to see what your response was if the AI always got to it first.

Life support is currently broken and needs fixing... but it needs to be made useful too.
As it stands I never have to equip my ships with any life support. The basic range is fine and one extra starbase every few sectors is a better deal than having realistic ships.

Making the smaller ships slower is possibly a reaction to the continuing carrier debate.

I'd personally like to massage the figures so that fighters were closer in power to larger ships... just with the problems of getting them there in one piece and in time. So speed and range would be the obvious things to limit.

My thoughts are that the basics should be changed... but I guess mods give everyone what they want if it is doable. I'll see whether I can do most of what I want.

For a mod, do whatever you want. If this got implemented officially, in any form, I'd personally hunt you down and... well, probably just give you a good slap. But still.

It doesn't make any sense for life support to be on a leash--turn-based life support makes sense (X number of weeks before you must resupply somewhere), but not area-based, so why make it worse? It's already a HUGE pain to get to enemy civs, what with the range cap and the fact that you can only put one construction module on each ship, and sensors--all sensors--are virtually useless already. They take too much room to use at the start of the game and they do literally nothing once you build Eyes. In fact, I have honestly never--NEVER--put sensors on a ship, in about 20 games.

And Engines? ENGINES? It takes half a dozen weeks to get somewhere as it is, and you want ships to be SLOWER?!? My troop landers have a base movement of 65, and I still have to tap the Turn button multiple times in a row while waiting for them to travel!

Another case of someone crying -
I can't help it, I am too weak, so change the game for me.

Moderate your own ships; don't try to force things on everyone just because you are a wimp.

I've made a mod that did this, but I've never posted it because the game bogged down badly when the ai started designing ships. The basics of what you suggest were there though.

Life support was scaled way down in effectiveness and made a bit larger so fewer could go on a ship. Negative range was given to all civs to counter the extra range given to a ship after it was built. Engines were all given a size of 0 but took 30% to 15% of hull space (sizemod), so the most you could put on and still be effective at whatever job the ship was supposed to do was about 4. This also allowed small and tiny hulled ships to put on just as many engines as large hulled ships and therefore keep up with their larger cousins. I also took out sizemod on weapons and sensors so they wouldn't get larger on larger hulls sizes and scaled the basic size to still fit accordingly.
Defenses I mostly left alone as far as size went but I did cut the cost of them in half across the board.

Basic sensor range on all ship hulls was reduced to 1 and the effectiveness of eyes of the universe was cut in half (5 sensor range). Interestingly I also managed to make the Galactic guidebook useful by making the survey module a large, efficient sensor (same size/sensor range ratio of the best sensor), but also much more expensive per module than regular sensors ( cost increased to 200 ). With the guidebook these became free though, so the survey module became simply an excellent and free sensor even if all anomolies were already gone by the time you got it.

Unfortunately, after all that work it all came to naught since when playing an actual game, the game would bog down horribly shortly after the colonization phase. I suspect that the algorithms used to design ships couldn't efficiently handle the changes I made. Without the mod enabled the game runs fine for me.

Actually I am working on a mod right now with increased sizes on ships and their components.I didn't like the fact that a tiny fighter could put 1 impulse engine on and do a speed of two yet a large or huge ship that is perhaps 40 or 50 times larger than the tiny fighter and certainly 100 times or more more massive could put one impulse engine on that isn't even twice the size of the tiny fighter and move 2 parsecs.So I am adjusting that and hitpoints,weapon damage and defenses for a little more accuracy physics wise.

Christ people, no need to pull out the flamethrower. Settle down.

IMHO Eyes is broken too. It is just too powerful and hugely undervalued by the AI. I'd love to see what your response was if the AI always got to it first.

If that happened, I'd just pack as many Sensor IV's as possible on an unarmed fighter and fleet it up with the warships. Or have a scout move ahead of the fleet.

I agree that one is too powerful, but I get it anyway just to avoid one of the AIs getting it. I compensate by turning off the ship blips on the minimap. I was tempted to comment it out of the improvements file, but then I started messing with the metaverse and decided not to.