Here are just a few ideas I had for improving warfare and ships in Galciv.
- Maximum ship size shouldn’t be solely dependant on the technology of the day. Certainly massive ship sizes and special ship classes should require certain technologies, but in general, it should be the things you can mount on a ship that are most determined by your technology, not the fact that you can build a ship. After all, you can build a colony ship from the start. That’s quite a feat to pull off for a society that can’t put together a military vessel bigger than something that looks like a fighter.
- The algorithm for winning or losing in combat should be overhauled, or at least expanded to allow benefits and penalties from any number of new sources.
- In the spirit of more complicated combat, ship sizes should have advantages and disadvantages, encouraging fleets with ships of various sizes. Speed, manoeuvrability, weapon capabilities, weapon tracking and cost could all play roles in encouraging balanced fleets, as could advantages for ships specialised in particular roles. The idea is that the player could build a balanced fleet from the start and hop straight into some intergalactic butt-kicking if that was his prerogative, or have fun defending himself. I think this would be a vast improvement (in terms of realism and in terms of fun-factor) on constantly upgrading small ships till medium hulls came along, then repeating to the top of the tech tree, and just using the biggest possible class because there was no advantage in doing otherwise.
I don’t know if I'm alone here, but I always thought that fleets and battles should be bigger, but fewer. It seems silly that even with a high logistics technology, the player is still stuck with dozens of 'fleets', and that these 'fleets' attack separately even though they’re in the same place.
- Regarding fleets, logistics could be handled by giving a fleet an upkeep cost derived from all its member vessels, which needs to be met by a supply value of a system they’re stationed in, with the amount that can't be supplied being payed for to represent shipping supplies from elsewhere. This would free the player from the abstract notion of a 'logistics' level, but still impose scaling penalties on impractical and unsustainable military build-up. Ships outside of friendly space would have to pay this whole amount, though a type of supply ship and/or a supply module could offset this but having their own mobile, but deteriorating supply value. Coincidentally, this module and the more advanced versions of it could replace the mechanic for how far from your planets you can travel or explore.
- Regarding battles, one idea is to have battles take place in sectors. What I mean is, once a battle is joined, all friendly and allied ships in that sector, and all enemy ships and those of their allies in that sector would take part. Each fleet could have an option whether or not to join, giving allies the option of chickening out and the player the option of saving a fleet’s turn for further movement or other actions. This would greatly reduce the number of annoying and pointless battles between two tiny ships (basically my only major pet peeve with warfare in Galciv), and increase the kind of massive and spectacular battles that (I assume) people want to see in their x4 games.
As usual, a bunch of ideas more suited to a sequel if anything, but there we go
- Edited for typos