Ships around planets...

Just as the Warrior unit represents more than just one guy with a stick in the Civilization series, one ship in this game is representative of a squadron or other group of ships.

O rly? Based on what?

It doesn't answer his question, anyway. 'In orbit' can cover a pretty absurd amount of volume around a planet, and late-game with a sizable empire the planet could be host to thousands or millions of non-military spacecraft.

You should at least be able to SEE the ships in orbit.

I agree with doomfest, i've wanted some really big heated battles with thousands of ships.

I agree with doomfest, i've wanted some really big heated battles with thousands of ships.

Ow, the maintenance costs...

There's no real indication in the game that a ship unit represents thousands of ships. However, I do force myself to think of colony ships and troop transport as a fleet of ships. I just can't make myself accept that a single ship could carry 4 BILLION people along with associated invasion machinery (tanks, weapons). Plus, the first invasion cut scene shows multiple ships.

But as far as the game goes, there's nothing that says a fighter unit is really a squadron of fighters.

The thousands of ships thing would be awful for Gal Civ 2. Think about it:

GalCiv 1: Everything is predesigned, and displayed in sprites/tiles. Not exactly hardware intnesive, so you can have large amounts with out a whole lot of system taxing.

Gal Civ 2: Virtually every ship is a unique to that game, and is a 3d model. This requires much more system resources, even on high end machines (I have a gig of RAM, a AMD 64 chip, and a ATI X800 Pro, and a gigantic galaxy with all the trimmings can still begin to slow on me late game, not badly, but enough to notice it).

Can you imagine if there were 10,000 ships on one side, and 2,000 on the other? And that would be just around one planet. If there were already problems with graphics cards overheating, can you imagine the melt down that would cause?

While I agree that it would be cool, the better graphics and custom ships demand that something has to give.

I personally prefer it how it is though, as it makes each ship more valuable.

So, max out logistics and place huge fleets on every square surrounding the planet, extending out 4 or 5 levels, and you will have your thousands of ships protecting the planet.

I did it...I played nonstop for 48 hours and had close to 700 ships around my planet...and then my computer froze and I had to manually shut it off. It was worth it though. I haven't had that much fun since...well..Malkari.

Oh forgot, when I say "around my planet" I mean in the squares around the planet.

How on earth did you pay for them all?

Ya, that many ships should come close to bankrupting you very quickly.

Well... he didn't say they were GOOD ships

That many ships at once? No wonder your system hung!

If building that massive of a force is fun for you then by all means, knock yourself out. I'm not about to tell you how you should play and/or value your unnits.

But Fued has a good point, because each ship is individually modeled (unless its in a fleet and then only several are modeled, but you run into the same problem) large amounts of ships cause serious performance issues. The game handles the amount of ships it does by design, if your happier playing different game, then by all means, go play another game   

I had roughly 90% of the planets in the entire "huge" galaxy with "abundant" everything. So money wasn't that big of an issue. I had been saving up to that point. I was down to about 20K when my computer froze. I don't think I'll do that again.