engines are too big

The engines need to be resized they are way to big and very expensive. On a huge hull (300 and change) the last engine is size 39 and the even the smaller engines that move 1 par. are even bigger.

This is intentional.

Yeah, those engine sizes make you actually worry about speed, instead of throwing two hyperwarps onto a ship as an afterthought that doesn't really effect the fighting abilities of the ship. Now, you have to choose between designing fast ships and powerful ones... adding some much needed strategy to shipbuilding. MORE would be nice, but hey, we're not getting that this late into the beta.

It also means that the racial speed ability is suddenly very powerful, as well as the addional speed granted by the engine techs as you research them. Combine that speed ability with first strike, and you have a huge potential for causing hell in any fight...

I always thought engines should scale exponentially with hull size, so the larger the hull, the harder it was to make them go fast. Capital ships are supposed to be lumbering hulks...give you a reason to actually build small and tiny hulled ships.


But beyond that, the speed nerfs in DA are intentional, to make it easier for the AI to predict your actions...or give it at least a chance of doing so. It had no chance against the DL super speed ships.

I always thought engines should scale exponentially with hull size, so the larger the hull, the harder it was to make them go fast. Capital ships are supposed to be lumbering hulks...give you a reason to actually build small and tiny hulled ships.

+1 I think it would be a good addition if engines scalled differently than the rest of the equipement but then again i don't know how the ai would deal with this.

as for the engione size increase it is rather enjoyable. It becomes more advantageous to build slow overpowered war ships and makes you care about speed and ways to intercept fast transport ships.

Shouldn't the sizemod already be doing that? Adding engines takes a monstrous amount of firepower out of a huge hull...

Ultimately, miniturization is the key to fast ships, though.

The engines need to be resized they are way to big and very expensive

Now who didn't see this coming?   

They just cut the cheese, so to speak.  

Heh, well, there ARE events in DA that make you less worried about speed...for instance, the mega event where scientists discovers rips in the fabric of space-time due to hyperdrive technology (reminiscent of a 7th season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, actually), where there's a max speed limit of 5 parsecs per turn. Then it's not so much a balance of speed and power, but finding the smallest engine that can do five parsecs or more and then bolting just one onto a ship. After all, if ALL ships are restricted to 5 parsecs per turn, then you don't have to worry so much about transports moving an insane number of parsecs per turn, and can intercept them a bit easier.

Mind you, it's a pain for all sides, really...it restricts you and the AI equally. But hey, think positively!

I had that event allready. I play gigantic maps and if you play metaverse u get a better score tha faster you finish the game. with going 5 to 18 par. it will take over a year to reach the other side of the map. remember speed kills.

I do think on small and tiny hulls, the engines should go back to the original size on the tiny, a little bigger on the small, somewhat bigger on the medium, and even larger on the huge. It's just right for large hulled ships.

That way fighters get a comparative speed advantage- as it should be.

The Speed Limit mega event is what pushed me half out of the speed-junkie camp. I'm in the early middle of a DL game now (Huge map) and I've kept my combat fleets at speed 4 much longer than I used to. But I admit I still keep my constructors and freighters as fast as they can be while still having decent life support.

Now who didn't see this coming? They just cut the cheese, so to speak.

Regretably many of us did. I still remain hopeful some rebalancing will occur before going gold. This is not about so called "cheese" - an over used phrase thats usually well wide of the mark, as in this case. I have a great respect for GalCiv2 and have hugely enjoyed it - on Gigantic Maps. I hate games on small maps, they are not "immersive" enough for me. I was originally lured away from Civ4, having been with that franchise for many years, by the superb Stardock Dev support / customer involvement, and still get a large expansive game area to get into.

Crawling across a Gigantic map at such nerfed speeds makes no sense on a Gigantic map, its like watching paint dry, and even less fun. The other changes in DA are fabulous, and they make it a whole new wonderful experience. The engine size change in the Beta build has killed off Gigantic Maps stone dead, and for me, killed off GalCiv2. To play "plain 'ol" GC2 now, having tasted DA with its asteroids and other great improvements, is like going back to Cod after getting used to Caviar.

I'll have a few games on DA final, see how it goes, but if there is little change from the latest Beta balancing, then I will be an ex-GalCiv player. I well understand the development dilema re adaptive AI's and the limitations on forward AI predictive ability. However in a personal sense the balance on the latest build has tipped too far towards AI adaptive programming at the expense of player enjoyment on Gigantic maps. It will make no difference to non Gigantc map Players (particularly Large maps and below), and for them GalCiv2 will remain, fundamentally, a wonderful game that is a huge credit to Stardock.

For me, I am not into crawling at snails pace the whole game over a Gigantic play area - its rather like building six-lane motorways (or Freeways as our colonial cousins call them    ) then expect motorists to be extatic at compulsory engine limiters nerfing car speeds to 40mph on a 3,000 mile 6 lane road, and still enjoy driving.

Regards
Zy

I have NOT been playing DA, but this does raise a question.

I have noticed that the GUI has some issues when you hit the turn button and have lots of ships moving. I mean hundreds of different flight paths. At 50-150 ships moving, many of them will start to lose their autopilot paths, GNN news popups will be missing items (and sometimes not appear), sometimes ship and industry builds do not appear on the right hand side of the screen. This happens on a semi-random basis (if I could guarantee a repeat of it on any given turn, I would bug it and send it to Stardock) on every game I play (1.4 currently). I know these issues are semi-common for the really giant maps. I have learned how to manage 450 planets and ship builds without any pop up information at all, but it is a bit time consuming on those turns...If you get to four or five hundred ships moving, the time it takes the AI to process a turn can be half an hour or more compared to two or three minutes (on my system). I actually stop building/moving ships to avoid this currently.

With the big slowdown on ships it would now be expected to have hundreds, possibly thousands of ships moving on a Gigantic Abundant all galaxy. Has anyone tried this on a DA game? I'm guessing that DA on a gigantic galaxy will not only be painful due to slow movement, but actually impossible. Huge Abundant games may also be out the window...

I'm guessing that DA on a gigantic galaxy will not only be painful due to slow movement, but actually impossible. Huge Abundant games may also be out the window...

AFAIK we'll still be able to play v1.4 DL games. It's not the end of the world if a significant group of folks don't really want to play DA because of this.

True! I am planning on buying DA, because the changes to the game sound fun.

I'm just hoping that it doesn't become a Tiny through Large map only game, because I would like to have both DA and big maps...

I'm just hoping that it doesn't become a Tiny through Large map only game, because I would like to have both DA and big maps...

If you want to have all the new stuff from DA, but don't like slow ships, there's nothing stopping you from just modding engine stats (metaverse aside, though that may well be a big minus to some).

I think you may end up with a split camp on this one. You got some who like med. or below maps that won't have a problem with the changes, but the gig/huge crowd may just stick with DL for awhile. It's no win situation though. It's either high speed less effective AI, or low speed tedium on larger maps. I played one beta game after the speed changes, then decided to go back to DL in order to play a gigantic game. I think as things stand now, any gigantic/huge games I'll play DL. Anything smaller I'll play DA. I usually prefer large/medium, but occasionally enjoy a good gigantic, so most of my games will end up being with DA. People will say just alter the speeds manually, but these for the most part will be meta games, so changing the XML files would be out of the question.

The game mechanics of ship movement and processing during the turn "cycle" in DA are fine, even on Gigantic, if anything I had the impression it was a bit faster.

Such slow turn times are without doubt a consequence of having an older/slower cpu/graphics than is expectation for the developers - I suspect the former in this case as GalCiv graphics are not resource eaters as such, in that SLI is not a game pre-requisite and runs fine on "standard" video cards.

A 2 min turn time stretching to 30 mins as described above is probably a hint to upgrade the cpu. Time between turns for most people is 1 - 10 seconds, usually either side of 5 seconds, even on Gigantic DA.

AFAIK we'll still be able to play v1.4 DL games. It's not the end of the world if a significant group of folks don't really want to play DA because of this.

Absolutely, problem is they did such a good job with the rest of DA, to go back to "vanilla" GalCiv2 is rather like banning the motor vehicle and going back to horse drawn carridges   

I'm just hoping that it doesn't become a Tiny through Large map only game, because I would like to have both DA and big maps...

That in a sentence is where I'm coming from, but it needs to be an enjoyable Gigantic Map, not just a 'menu feature' ...

Regards
Zy

I might be willing to play Gigantic maps with slow ships on DA. Not sure. I was more asking if it was even possible...

The slower ships imply that there will be a lot more ships moving on the map (since it takes them a long time to cross the map) and that they will likely be going to rally points that are months away. I was trying to ask if anybody has checked game performance when you dump a few hundred or thousand ships on the map moving to half a dozen different rally points on the far side of the galaxy. I did try going from no ships moving, to several hundred on DL at one point. Over the course of 4-5 game turns, I went from 2-3 minute turns (meaning from when I hit the turn button, to when I could play again) to killing the game after a turn had been running for 45+ minutes.

My experience tells me DL can't handle it, but there are other solutions in DL. Unless someone has gone back and looked at this specifically, I don't think DA will be able to either. The difference being you can't really avoid having large masses of ships crossing the galaxy in a late game on the very large maps with DA as I now understand the game mechanics....

Zy,

What was the maximum number of flight paths (count fleets as one) that you had going at any one time?

It would interesting of DA were to add a feature, at some cost, that lets a ship go into hyperspace and appear somewhere else, aka Space Rangers 2. If you make the price right, it may not lead to a lot of cheese, or limit how many ships of a given race can hyper-transit to the same parsec. Any version or expansion of such an ideas could solve both the speed problem and the giant map problem.

Such slow turn times are without doubt a consequence of having an older/slower cpu/graphics than is expectation for the developers - I suspect the former in this case as GalCiv graphics are not resource eaters as such, in that SLI is not a game pre-requisite and runs fine on "standard" video cards. A 2 min turn time stretching to 30 mins as described above is probably a hint to upgrade the cpu. Time between turns for most people is 1 - 10 seconds, usually either side of 5 seconds, even on Gigantic DA.

BTW I don't have my system specs on hand, but it is a decent (not top of the line) system that meets or exceeds all "recommended" hardware settings, including 2 gigs of RAM (which helps on gigantic maps).

True! I am planning on buying DA, because the changes to the game sound fun.

I've already bought DA although I haven't downloaded it yet (my notorious OCD with setting up my new PC has contributed mightily to this). The speed nerfing of DA is a big concern, however there are things that you can do to mitigate the issue. I for one tend to buy as many ships as I produce because of my income focused strategy (not my only strategy but one of my favorites). If you buy ships, you may as well buy them at the "front" to avoid long transit delays. You can also build hulls with engines only, fly them to where you need them, and then upgrade them to a "real" fighting ship. All in all, I look at the nerfing of a feature as an intellectual challenge that only helps separate the men from the boys so to speak.

Such slow turn times are without doubt a consequence of having an older/slower cpu/graphics than is expectation for the developers - I suspect the former in this case as GalCiv graphics are not resource eaters as such, in that SLI is not a game pre-requisite and runs fine on "standard" video cards.

I'm currently running an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz with a GeForce 7600GT. I suggest that if you haven't had literally 10,000 ships simultaneously on auto pilot (I have) then I respectively submit that you don't know what you're talking about.

All in all, I look at the nerfing of a feature as an intellectual challenge that only helps separate the men from the boys so to speak.

Mumble, I think you may be appealing to my cocky side

Mumble, I think you may be appealing to my cocky side

Um. Thanks (I think).   

I'm currently running an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz with a GeForce 7600GT. I suggest that if you haven't had literally 10,000 ships simultaneously on auto pilot (I have) then I respectively submit that you don't know what you're talking about.

Quoted for truth.

But ya, the engine thing + gigantic maps have really killed any interest I have in Dark Avatar. I'm going to go from 500-1000 ships moving on an average turn to 3500-7000 ships...I rather stick with DL. I don't want to have to mod the game to make it /playable/.