Terror Stars = One Trick Pony? » Forum Post by Apokaluo

I absolutely agree with this. Sure Terror Stars are powerful because they can blow up stars. But they really are not something you can build interesting strategies around as is. Because of that, they don't really contribute to the game other than to end it.

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I don't agree with this. Although I do think that Terror Stars deserve some weapons to defend themselves against 'Lukes' (Skywalker), the Terror Star is very expensive and absolutely devasting and that's kind of the definition of a Terror Star. Else it would be just a mobile starbase and a mobile starbase is just a kind of very big starship. With this kind of reasoning you run the risk of losing the distinctiveness of certain game elements in my opinion.
I must admit however that how distinctive game elements should be is a matter of opinion. For instance the current resources are clearly seperated by giving a single type of bonus, but there is no fundamental reason for not having a resource which gives 5% military and 8% economic bonus (some kind of weapons factory?).

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Terror Stars can be fleeted now, so that's the defense. No more Luke sneaking through the defensive screen, unless your defensive screen isn't very good.

I don't like the secondary use idea, because doing anything besides the original role would turn them into very clumsy battleships, or overpowered cheese if they're able to throw a military starbase's bonuses while still being mobile. I like the pure strategic role of pounding an entire star system to dust. It's the futuristic equivalent of a ballistic missile submarine: designed to perform one devastatingly powerful attack, not a bunch of different military functions.

IIRC, Brad said they were basically designed to make it easier to handle entrenched enemies in the end-game (second hand info, so that may not be a direct quote). Even if they were made more general-purpose, I doubt I'd use them for anything but the main star-busting function, just due to the movement speed. I like very mobile attack fleets.

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I just think you should be allowed to put engines on them. Make the expensive and require more techs and stuff, but they are kinda useless to me because I cant stand anything that moves less than 2 parsecs per turn. Defenses are not really neccessary since they can be fleeted although it would make sense to be able to put a few guns on something that big.

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Don't get me wrong, blowing up stars is neat, but I'm not really interested in disintegrating all of the enemy planets. I'm also not interested in having the whole rest of the galaxy mad at me.

then why did you reserach and build terror stars in the first place?

but they are kinda useless to me because I cant stand anything that moves less than 2 parsecs per turn.

my typical method so far is to build them in the area i plan to use them. beats the crap out of waiting til i've got grandkids with grandkids for them to get across the map.

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you can blow up planets with them? mine moves but i cant blow plants up and they keep dieing and i agree you should be able to add stuff though

You blow up stars, not planets. The exploding star destroys the planets though.

If yours are dying it means you aren't defending it. You can put them in a fleet, so just put in defenders as well

I find the comparison to nuclear ballistic subs to be pretty apt. They have one thing they do and in doing that, they really make everyone else angry. Unfortunately, Terror Stars don't have the one advantage that a submarine has - stealth.

Since they don't have that, I would agree that mounting defensive equipment would be a good improvement. Given their size it would be easy to add a stupidly large amount of defense so I'm not sure how to appropriately limit that, but hopefully it will be looked at as a possibility.

Engines, I'm not entirely sure about. Maybe something interesting could be done with mobility: Allow them to generate a temporary wormhole to any previously seen location on the map and take any fleeted ships with them. After they jump, they can't do anything until the next turn (so you can't jump and fire immediately) and have a 5-turn warm-up period before it can jump again. Also, maybe a Terror Star shouldn't have a limited range and should be able to support any fleeted ships beyond the otherwise normal bounds of those ships' range?

Anyway, some thoughts that would help make the cost of a Terror Star more rewarding.

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Don't get me wrong, blowing up stars is neat, but I'm not really interested in disintegrating all of the enemy planets. I'm also not interested in having the whole rest of the galaxy mad at me.

then why did you reserach and build terror stars in the first place?

but they are kinda useless to me because I cant stand anything that moves less than 2 parsecs per turn.

my typical method so far is to build them in the area i plan to use them. beats the crap out of waiting til i've got grandkids with grandkids for them to get across the map.

I had the same reaction

As for speed; I managed to get my Terror Stars up to 5pc/turn which would still be glacial on a map larger than medium I'm guessing (I was using mine on a medium sized map). I had a +3 fleet speed ship in and I can't recall what was giving me the other +1 speed.

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I just think you should be allowed to put engines on them. Make the expensive and require more techs and stuff, but they are kinda useless to me because I cant stand anything that moves less than 2 parsecs per turn.

And when the A.I. built a few of these that went zipping through your homeworlds and crippled your empire in a couple of turns, you would accept this as good game play and not cry foul? Every game would degenerate into a race to build terror stars and end the game.

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Every game would degenerate into a race to build terror stars and end the game.

not to mention ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT!!!! mwa hahahahahahaha!!!!!

(i had to resist the urge to intentionally put "!!!11")

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You seem to be looking for some kind of "super unit." GC2 is smart enough not to include one, I doubt they're going to start now.

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From one of my earliest games on the largest map possible, and my first evil game in the previous Gal Civ, I ended up with about a dozen terror stars loaded with cultural palaces, and this was before starbases, influence, and influence modules were all nerfed.

I didn't get to blow anything up, because all the systems flipped to me before I could reach them.

With that in mind, I don't mind terror stars in TA being one-trick ponies. I mean, it's a hell of a trick. Plus, the speed doesn't matter so much when you can build one anywhere you want.

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One question about fleeted ships and the wormhole anomaly. If 1 ship in the fleet has the survey module and hits a wormhole, does the entire fleet go with it?

Put 5 seconds of thought into what I said and you'll know where I'm going with this....

As for removing the warmup time and just up the research time...Creativity could bypass the research time "penalty" whereas nothing can reduce the warmup time.

TS are fine as they are, glass cannons....slow glass cannons.

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Hawawaa

Join Date 09/2006

+33

WAIT A SEC! Can't you guys just get a carrier ie a ship with a warp bubble to improve the speed of a Terror Star? I know you need to also pick the right race too but... maybe I need to try that out... but if you know tell me. Thanks.

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Warp bubbles affect terror stars. I suppose racial boni do as well, so at least on smaller maps, the speed isn't that terrible.

Racial speed bonus is generally underestimated, in my opinion...

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Hawawaa see reply #8 about speed...

I'm not playing TA right now but I did play GC1 and used terror stars then.

If 5pcs/turn is still too slow, then a strat I would employ, build a fleet or 2 of fast constructors, I dont know how many constructors it takes for a complete terror star. When I spam influence sbs I built them all at once, 12 constructors. Once I get to the right location *poof* instant influence sb.

Same principle for the terror star. Fly your contructors a few sectors from the target star and build your new terror star. Bring something to fleet with it and defend it once built. Once it's warmed up, go blow up the star and have some fun your shiny new Terror Star.

I do not want AI Terror Stars flying at me at 10, 20, 30 pcs/turn. I want the time to stop them.

Terror Stars are not suppose to be *practical* weapons. They were not practical in GC1 and I would not expect them to be in GC2. But, they can be useful in their own limited way.

Resourceful players will find ways to make the Terror Star useful.

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Resourceful players will find ways to make the Terror Star useful.

i prefer using them to convert those systems with five PQ-0 planets into asteroid fields.

in a war, i'd have to look at them as an option for desperation more than anything. it's far more profitable to take over an enemy's planets, but if they're much more powerful than you can hope to be, utterly destroying their worlds might be your best hope at victory. the devs say they're there to help destroy 'entrenched' planets, but frankly, i've never seen the AI entrench their planets effectively. what i have seen them do is build massive blobs of ships so numerous it might seriously present a challenge to winning (and that's really only on masochistic and above).

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Warp bubbles affect terror stars. I suppose racial boni do as well, so at least on smaller maps, the speed isn't that terrible.

Racial speed bonus is generally underestimated, in my opinion...

Racial bonuses don't help. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that fleet speed modules do... now, if only the goddamned Terrans would research the damn things so I could buy them off them.

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You seem to be looking for some kind of "super unit." GC2 is smart enough not to include one, I doubt they're going to start now.

Huh. Isn't a huge hull loaded with defense already the super unit?

In the old gc, all the other upgrades worked along with the terror star, and it wasn't uber-powerfull. At least the defense upgrades should be available.

I would think allowing it to move a little faster wouldn't be horrible either. A gigantic map is just too big for something soo slow.

If not, they need some other benefit. Such as :
1) A hanger to quick repair ships.
2) Huge influence bonus. (think about that... I'd defect...)

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If 5pcs/turn is still too slow, then a strat I would employ, build a fleet or 2 of fast constructors, I dont know how many constructors it takes for a complete terror star. When I spam influence sbs I built them all at once, 12 constructors. Once I get to the right location *poof* instant influence sb.

1 constructor to start the TS, 5 to bring it to 100%, then a 10 week waiting period before it's online.

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Resourceful players will find ways to make the Terror Star useful.

i prefer using them to convert those systems with five PQ-0 planets into asteroid fields.

in a war, i'd have to look at them as an option for desperation more than anything. it's far more profitable to take over an enemy's planets, but if they're much more powerful than you can hope to be, utterly destroying their worlds might be your best hope at victory. the devs say they're there to help destroy 'entrenched' planets, but frankly, i've never seen the AI entrench their planets effectively. what i have seen them do is build massive blobs of ships so numerous it might seriously present a challenge to winning (and that's really only on masochistic and above).

I used mine to gut an enemy that was, at the time, an ally and whose military was almost exactly matching my own. They had the bulk of their fleet around their home system and blowing it up just ripped the heart out of their military.

In my case a loophole in the UP treaty that pushes your ships back to your own space allowed me to break my alliance and declare war, but it did not push my TS out (likely because it was counted as a starbase and not a ship). Stardock's aware of that loophole now and I imagine will fix it.

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Yeah, the thing about the high-quality enemy planets is that they are usually very useful to capture rather than destroy, especially if it's an enemy manufacturing center, and especially if it's deep in the heart of enemy territory, and if the AI is working correctly, then the enemy should throw everything they have at your TS, so it wouldn't really be much harder to capture a planet than to destroy its sun.

The times I'd imagine myself using one of these things is when dealing with the low-quality planets my enemy has, that aren't really worth invading and then taking the time and resources to upgrade and defend. Or to use it on high grav/aquatic/radioactive/etc type of planets that I can't colonize (or upgrade if colonized), but that I don't want my enemy to control either. In these cases, making it work more than once would be nice and make it a useful strategy to use. Otherwise, it sounds kind of costly for little reward, IMHO.

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Terror stars should be a fully capable military base with offensive weaponary. If you really want to make it a TERROR STAR, you should be able to fuse it with economic and influence starbase's. Overpowered? I call it someting to really afraid of.

(If I recall, in Galciv I it was like this^)

If you don't like it then you should have the option to determine how terrifying a terror star can get.

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Yeah, the thing about the high-quality enemy planets is that they are usually very useful to capture rather than destroy, especially if it's an enemy manufacturing center, and especially if it's deep in the heart of enemy territory, and if the AI is working correctly, then the enemy should throw everything they have at your TS, so it wouldn't really be much harder to capture a planet than to destroy its sun.

The times I'd imagine myself using one of these things is when dealing with the low-quality planets my enemy has, that aren't really worth invading and then taking the time and resources to upgrade and defend. Or to use it on high grav/aquatic/radioactive/etc type of planets that I can't colonize (or upgrade if colonized), but that I don't want my enemy to control either. In these cases, making it work more than once would be nice and make it a useful strategy to use. Otherwise, it sounds kind of costly for little reward, IMHO.

I used mine to blow up a total of 4 star systems I believe. I had two ships that traveled around fleeted with it: one large hull with high defense and one small ship with Warp III (Terrans) - total speed 5 pc/turn. I'd cruise in, wait a turn if necessary so everyone had their full movement points then remove the TS from the fleet, move my ships just outside of the system, destroy the star and then move my ships back in and re-fleet. That way the TS was never unprotected in enemy space. I definitely got a lot of bang for the buck, since it totally annihilated 2 enemies and so severely crippled a 3rd that they weren't a credible threat any more (which left me in possession of the game).

As Terror Stars are now, they seem to have two uses - for the hell of it (or because, hey, what else is an Evil ruler to do?) or to strike at an enemy (or a friend/ally about to become an enemy) brutally. If you blow up a few measly little planets that aren't helping your enemy much (unless tons of really high value ships are right there and get destroyed as well) then I'd say you aren't getting much bang for your buck. Wipe out a major production center and you've may be able to drag them back down if they're getting too far ahead.

They aren't weapons to be used if you need those planets that you're destroying more than you need the enemy not to have them

Remember, winning the game doesn't mean that you've conquered the planets - just that no one is left to oppose you. Following a campaign of scorched earth is a valid plan, even if not a great plan if there are future consequences

I'd say there was 1/4 of the map that was a total wasteland when I was finished.

Wonder what would happen if you gifted one to the AI... Probably get destroyed immediately just like lone troop transports.

Anyway, it seems like everyone would like to see them developed further so they are less of a 'novelty' feature.

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Terror stars should be a fully capable military base with offensive weaponary. If you really want to make it a TERROR STAR, you should be able to fuse it with economic and influence starbase's. Overpowered? I call it someting to really afraid of.

(If I recall, in Galciv I it was like this^)

If you don't like it then you should have the option to determine how terrifying a terror star can get.

Yeah, I was talking about it earlier in the thread. Culturally maximized terror stars were insanely overpowered, but that was before cultural palaces were nerfed (and deservedly so). Even so, I suspect they'd continue to be insanely overpowered.

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