Idea: Make bigger ships more expensive

I'm not sure if higher maintenance is the answer (too new at the game to say with conviction).

That said; anything that encourages more use of the smaller hull sizes later in the game (without breaking other game dynamics) gets my vote.

Franbo

I would absolutely veto this. A good idea, maybe, if combat worked differently.

But larger hulls are definately already _not_ cost effective. In part because of the gang up and overkill way that combat works, and in part just because fleets with more and smaller ships are inherently more flexible, I find that better logistics and larger fleets of smaller cheaper ships with miniaturization are much, much better in the game already.

Open for correction...

I should mention I tried building large Altarian ships loaded with fully-miniaturized defense and high tech end-of-line weaponry (nightmare torps if I recall correctly), but they cost so much that it really hurt losing even one and even if the big ships were fleeted the AI had (in my experience) no trouble killing them dead with huge fleets of a gazillion all-attack (literally in the thousands, actually even mine were over a thousand when fleeted but theirs were hideously _plural_ thousands), for much less economic loss even if the entire AI fleet died.

After that painful loss (it was at the end of a long game with a once-healthy Altarian empire finally succumbing to a _huuuge_ Drath empire just by being out-built) now I generally favor even in the mid-end game max-logistics huge fast fleets of fully-miniaturized small hull ships with all weapons and engines, plus maybe a flagship with the fleet attack bonus module and maybe a survey module. At least that is where my expereince has led me.

But I confess I am still a noob (more economically than miltary though).

Overkill isn't really a problem in DA or TA. A suitably armed battleship can wipe out an entire fleet in a single volley! Any weapons that haven't fired get to select a new target.

Also, once top end weapons and defenses enter the picture, the entire combat system breaks outright, being prone to exploits and uninteresting one-shot combat. For instance, a single all attack ship can take out fleets consistently if it has enough weaponry to kill the entire fleet in one round, providing it takes the first shot. This is thanks to the 1-hp rule which says that there is ALWAYS a survivor from combat, and that it errs in favour of the attacker.

This is one of the big weaknesses of TA, where research rates are higher and weapon trees are shorter, but that's a different subject altogether.

This suggestion is more about mid-tech combat, where the system still works, and doesn't apply to situations where the ships are capable of one-shotting each other consistently. The combat breaks at that point, regardless of ship cost. Hell, some argue that the combat breaks once ships larger than medium start flying around, and this would also mitigate that quite well.

I like the idea, although I'm not sure on your numbers. Seems to me I already build capital ships that easily come in at 4-5k bc. I can't remember the base cost of the hull... but you are suggesting pushing the cost of those super ships to what? 8k?

Maybe. I really liked the DA addition of making the larger hull sizes a "big deal" to quote Frogboy by making them bigger in just about every way. Fewer capital ships... but still HAVING capital ships would be a great feel. Currently there is no reason to do that.


I think you are really wrong here. Losing a fully kitted out fleet always hurts, but that doesn't mean those huge hull babies aren't worth their weight in bc.

The difference between swarms of tiny/small/medium fighters and using huge hulls can be vast, and this is for several reasons. First, smaller fighters (except for the arceans) are all but guaranteed to take attrition. If played right, huge hulls almost never actually get destroyed. When they never die, their cost effectiveness vs. smaller types becomes a huge advantage. Any hull type can, in TA, get fleet values of over 5000 before considering any military starbases. I'll talk more about fighting at very large combat values in a bit...

But there are more advantages to the single huge ships than the fleets. There is less micromanagement - you are just dealing with less ships. A fully kitted huge hull is a threat to destroy almost ANY fleet, the only thing which can go toe to toe with a full offense huge hull is a mostly defense huge hull. Bonus effects end up having more of an effect on huge hulls due to truncation. For instance, a +15% HP bonus to a small fighter (base 16 HP) is actually only 2 HP... or 12.5%, where as a Huge hull benefits from the full 15% bonus. Also, fleets of mediums or smalls can never become the invincible "1 HP" monsters where you just kill ship after ship because you have the higher attack value. In these cases, not only do huge hulls not get destroyed, they don't even take damage. Now, its kind of an exploit of the tie rule (another discussion) and its only possible with huge hulls late game....

But the point is the advantages of larger hull sizes snowball into making them the best if you can build them.

As for dealing with super-high attack fleets, there is a pretty simple strategy for minimizing your losses by choosing which matchups you fight tactically. Against a FLEET with a large attack value, you want to send in a single kamikaze all-attack huge hull. You only lose one ship, and you will knock out the majority of the fleet. If you are facing a single all-attack huge hull, you want to send a FLEET of mostly defense huge hulls. These will take down that single juggernaught while taking little to no damage. Against a fleet of mostly defense huge hulls, you want to send a super-high attack fleet, which will then suffer few losses. And so the rock-paper-scissors of fleet composition is complete.

But against a high attack fleet of smaller fighters? Send in a single Kamikaze huge hull to blow most of them away, losing only himself... and then follow up with a high defense huge hull fleet and the fighters will do nothing. If the fighters attack is small enough your kamikaze huge has a shot of winning the first assault outright through the tie rule - and then no attrition - and hence more cost efficient.

The name of the game is attrition. Ideally I like to play through entire games without losing a single combat ship. That is mostly do-able with the large hull sizes. You can do it with smaller ships ONLY with the Arceans, due to Super Warrior.

Its rough, because it wasn't going to be an AAR, but if you want to read how I played a game without losing any battle ships, read my recent AAR: My Greatest Comeback Win Ever!
To read a game where I first analyzed the current DA battle system (it went through some early tweaks) read: Combat Balance
For an insight on one method to tackle the game economically, read: Altarian Rebillion AAR



@ Starstriker - I know we've talked about this new battle system in different threads for at least a year now. I think increasing the cost of huge hulls, but otherwise leaving them the same (I'd actually INCREASE their logistics cost myself, rather than your suggestion of possibly decreasing logistics) is one of the better, easy to implement solutions I've seen to the lack of late game fighters. You don't want fighters to be the clear choice, because then there is no reason to go through all of the research up to huge hulls. You don't want the galaxy to only be capital ships late game though... and the reason it wouldn't happen is late game upkeep. It would still be do-able to go all capital ships, it would just be more of a strain on your economy.

So, I guess I vote for your idea, generally speaking. Still not sure on your numbers.
~ Wyndstar

Wyndstar, I guess your results have just been different from mine. And maybe I am doing something wrong (though anymore because of past experience I mostly prefer Arceans, or better yet a custom SUper Warrior race). I read your AAR earlier by the way, very interesting.
My large hulls in the game to which I referred were dreadnoughts with about 500 nightmare torpedo attack and a balanced 3-way defense of about 120 or so total. I _did_ only have one real large hull type design. Reading your description that was probably my (painful, after getting to that point) downfall. I also had command ships with small hulls but the meditation modules, in that game I used one each for attack and defense in each fleet. But typically I could get maybe 3 dreadnought ships, I forget, into a fleet. When these would go up against Krynn or Drath fleets of small, maybe some medium, hulls the AI fleets would have around 2000-3000 almost all-attack total. Sometimes I could kill a whole fleet, sometimes not, but I _always_ lost one or more of the dreadnoughts doing so, and could not afford to keep fighting the battles though the AI would not make peace with me, so I used my higher speed to run away  :NOTSURE: . Eventually I just could not build dreadnoughts as fast as the Krynn and especially the then _huge_ Drath could build smaller hulls (this was TA with a immense abundant map, so you can imagine the pain of losing at the end of the game after doing well except for letting the Drath get a little too strong).
Note part of the issue was just that the Altarian -20% weapons is a hole you never climb out of, even after all your research the AI is also researching.
The Arceans are much easier to work this side of the game with, but I just never liked the speed deficit they have so I started using Super Warrior custom races (in DA, and in TA by editing the XML file since the beta will not support custom races yet) with a speed _bonus_.

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I copied the meat of your analysis above, Wyndstar. Thanks. You should talk with Drengin about getting something like that into the "TA idiot guide" ship design and tactics write-up.

As I said, they were totally pulled out of thin air. One of the problems I found at guessing them is that the combat loadout of a ship is still the majority of the influence on the ship cost. The only way to get the proper effect in that context is to increase the cost of larger hulls by a huge amount. It does the job, but has the unintended side effect of making those bigger ships prohibitively costly to manufacture (the maintainence should be more or less right on the spot), which would slow down ship production a LOT.

One possibility is to cut the cost of components down significantly, say, in half. Then the hull costs can be tweaked more carefully. Another is to seperate the maintainence cost from the production cost somewhat, and adding a drastically increased maintainence to larger craft.

Do you have suggestions for numbers?

I have a suggestion:

-Diminishing returns- for high attack fleets and ships.
When the firepower outweighs the defence by a certain percentage, the benefits are drastically reduced and the extra attack is added to the defence of the target!
Example: A Knight with very little armour but massive uber muscles and little endurence runs out into the field and swings madly at the descently defended but well built opponent... the attacks energy is so invested into attack that the opponent weakens the attacker by deflecting blows and catching the wild attacker in the weak points of his armour. Like Aikido.

-Diminishing returns- for high defence fleets and ships.
When the defence outweighs the attack by a certain percentage, the benefits are drastically reduced and the extra defence is added to the attack of the target!
Example: A Knight runs out into the field but has so much armour he can barely swing his sword... this makes him an easy target and boosts the attack of the attacker.

I like the idea of the larger hulls costing more, it would make the fleets much more varied and provide a valid reason to produce smaller ships. I would like to see the concept also applied to weapons, making the weaponry exponentially more expensive with each generation, but with added techs to make older weapons cheaper. (IE after plasma III you could research either phasors I or plasma IV which would be cheaper and smaller, but do the same amount of damage as older models)

Though it's a little off topic, I completely agree with you Karl. The new components should be expensive, and the old ones should get cheaper as the game goes on... this would represent the infrastructure being developed for the technology. It makes a ton of sense, since a civilisation that can build BLACK HOLE GUNS can probably put together a railgun without even blinking. It gives the player the option of keeping ships cheaper by using older designs, while adding a cost to using freshly developed techs... the resulting ships are "experimental"... powerful, but more expensive to field until the infrastructure is in place.

Though it risks driving the thread off topic, I can think of a couple ways of implementing this. Both of these require that beam weapon, mass driver weapon, and missile costs are now abilities that the player can improve via research.
1) Tie in a cost reduction ability to each weapon tech, while scaling the costs of weapons as they go further up the tech tree
2) Add in a new "weapons infrastructure" branch to the tech tree for reducing weapons costs.

However, I'd classify "dynamic weapon costs" as a somewhat separate subject. It would definitely increase fleet variation, but it wouldn't really effect the use of different hull sizes.

I Don't know. The analogy seems a little off. We aren't talking about muscles here.

If I shoot you with a snub-nosed 0.38, you will hurt. Maybe die.
If I shoot you with a minigun using HEAT rounds, you will be a fine red mist. How can you justify the defender getting extra defense from that?

Conversely, if you shoot me with an M-16 using military grade armor piercing rounds and I am wearing a kevlar vest, the bullet will go through. If I am standing inside a dome made of 2 inch milspec tank armor steel, there might be some spawling, but that's it. How does my steel plate give you more attack?

I agree that a high end capital ship ought to be worth something--not just one of fifty ships that you don't really care about losing because you can just produce another one in a few turn's time.

I like the idea of higher cost per ship--if it costs alot, it will take a long time to build.

But how about a different suggestion--that it requires a specialized shipyard to produce battleships and dreadnaughts-like a Hyperion Shipyard, and only that particular shipyard is specialized enough to build supermassive capital ships. And only one of these shipyards per empire would be available. So even if you didn't increase the cost of the ship, the time to produce several ships would be greater because only one can be built at a time.

Ive heard this discussion in many games. If you make an economy strong enough to make a fleet of Dreadnaughts, why bother with frigates?

In real life, there is little advantage in taking an equal weight of smaller ships against a few larger ones in a direct engagement. With few execptions, the smaller ships get their heads handed to them with little return damage to the capitol ships. If the only role of the navy was grand fleet engagements, no modern navy would ever have bothered with anything smaller than a cruiser.

The smaller classes are not there for their grand fleet capacities, so why are they there? The reason is simple: 99.999% of ships operational life is spent in other ways than engaging in grand fleet battles. For non grand fleet activities, having three smaller ships is superior to having one large one. The advantage of being able to be in three places at once is a simple example whose operation advantage cannot be underestimated.

In GalCiv2 as well as most other strategic games, 90% or more of what a ship does (other than wait) is enaging in grand fleet battles. (GalCiv2 is actually one of the best for giving ships duties other than straight combat.) Because of how the games work, small ships tend to get less and less useful as time goes by. Trying to make smaller ships still viable as time goes by because modern battle fleets have lots of small ships is kind of silly.

A note on fighters:

In my personal opinion, one of the silliest recurring themes on these boards is the insistance of some people that tiny hull warcraft are the functional equivaliant of modern jet fighter aircraft. The desgnation of fighter or heavy fighter by AIs of these craft just adds to the confusion. Fighter aircraft are small weapons platforms that can only sustain independant operations for a matter of hours.

Tiny hulled ships are true warships that can function independantly for at least weeks if not months at a time. The naval equivalant is the coast guard cutter or the escort cruiser, not a fighter aircraft.

Fighter spacecraft have been simulated in many strategy games, but do not currently exist in the Galciv2 universe.

Scincerely,

[email protected]

I appreciate the reality argument, but increasing the ship variety is more about making warfare more interesting, and adding more strategy to fleet distribution.. when do you risk your capital ships? When can you make do with smaller fleets in your skirmishes? Since Galciv2 doesn't give many options for small ships outside attacking other ships, I would argue that you can still make them useful by making them the less powerful, but more cost effective units.

With the setup we're suggesting here:
*A fleet of medium hulls will mop the floor with a similarily outfitted (ie, same kinds of technology, same general distribution of components) fleet of smaller ships. This is the same as we have now.
*Smaller ships suffer more from attrition, and gain less from leveling up, as it is now.
*Equivalent larger ships have a significantly larger cost/effectiveness ratio, resulting in longer build times and a larger strain on an economy in terms of maintainence. This is the only new element.

The result is that the capital ships REMAIN the most dangerous, the most effective for head to head battle... but, as you were pointing out, those big ships can't be everywhere at once. They're also expensive to lose, so constantly putting them at the front lines is an unwise use of resources since they can't take the attrition. The smaller ships, though, can be produced almost anywhere at a decent rate and can be fielded without as much need for caution.

The key here is that the current cost assigned to smaller hulls in GC2 makes them very, very vulnerable to attrition. The ultimate aim of this suggestion is to give the smaller ships enough of a cost advantage that they can remain cost effective despite that. The added maintainence to the larger ships is just a way of discouraging blatant spam of the larger vessels.

The biggest problem in my opinion is the tie rule. Since smaller craft have low hp and because the tie rule only applies, i believe, to the last ship and not the entire fleet, you will almost always lose the 100% attack ships to a 1-hp 100% larger hull.

As an aside, i liked the original DL combat system better. Back when armor was different from hp albeit more random and only one ship was attacked in a single round.

Back to the present, in my opinion, larger hulls are still more advantageous but not by that much. In order to prevent attrition, you need to research down the armor line as well as the hull line and even then, fleets will always have the ability to double your armor rating for the same cost. Its definitely less micromanagement and your total hp and leveling is better but discounting the tie rule, its not that much of an advantage.

I also don't want to see huge hulled ships take any longer then they do now. I usually average 15-20 weeks already on 100% military with 3-4k ships on some of my best worlds. This is not quick by any stretch of the imagination. Smaller ships always have the advantage of getting out quicker and knocking off transports and starbases and fleeting up against bigger threats.

The best solution would be a mixture of things. Increase base costs of medium-large-huge by perhaps, double. Not a big difference, maybe even keep them the same way. However, add a multiplier for maintainence for larger hulls. Right now, its linear, i believe. Cost directly correlates with upkeep so (2x 250 bc medium-ships) and (1x 500 bc large-ship) have the same total upkeep of lets say, (10%, 50 bc).

But with something like this:

Tiny - 0.5
Small - 1.0
Medium/Cargo 1.25
Large 1.5
Huge 2.0

A tiny hull would be 4x cheaper to maintain then a huge and a small, 2x cheaper. Ship upkeep costs are already pretty brutal, with something like this in place, you really can't afford to have all capital ships running around unless your economy is truly phenomenal. Larger ships won't necessarily take longer to build, just harder to keep around. They also won't just be expensive by default, which is less arbitary.

The last change would be either to eliminate the tie rule or make it so that the victor is decided by total attack that round and not for the last ship hit. Therefore a fleet of 4x100 attack small ships would win with 1 ship, 1-hp left over vs. a 399 attack large ship.

I like that. A bit of an unusual approach, I'm sure, but that would definitely bring medium hulls back as the staple of a navy, and encourage building small and tiny hulls as well

I agree that the tie rule is a huge problem, but it's also only a problem at the very end of the game, where you're using the best possible weapons and hulls. At that point, the combat has already broken down entirely, since it's a series of one shot kills and brute force tactics. At that point in the game, expecting combat to be interesting and varied seems like a bit of a lost cause... it seems specifically designed to either 1) give the first player to tech that high an insurmountable military lead or 2) give all the players who tech that high equal footing, resulting in a winner-takes-all infrastructure and economy contest.

That's the main reason why I usually play with the slowest tech settings, since it leaves the combat in the more interesting middle stages for far longer periods of time. I still wish that the weapon upgrade speeds were slower, but that's moving off topic a bit.

Back to ship costs:

I like where you're going with that, Infoceptor, but I have a bit of a variation here.

The ultimate goal here, in my mind, was to get rid of the situation where a larger hull cost twice as much as the smaller hull (with the same weapons and such) yet had three or four times the combat effectiveness, as well as to make the maintainence of such powerful weapons of war more of an economic situation. I initially thought that simply increasing the base hull costs would do the whole thing quite nicely, but I realized that better miniturization and components tends to break it again, since weapon costs don't scale with the hull size (even when their size does).

Here's an idea, then: add a more modest extra cost to the base hulls (to compensate for their HP... lets use the current HP booster values, and say 10 bc per HP of the base hull), but also add a constant cost modifier to the hull that is applied to all components, not unlike the sizemod.

For an in-universe explanation, the increased size of weapons on larger hulls can already be attributed to needing more space for the turret mountings. After all, a tiny craft can entirely turn itself to face its opposition, but that big dreadnaught has too much inertia for that to be viable, so it needs a set of independant turret to face the target. The bigger the ship, the more flexible the turret mountings need to be to give the same effectiveness. The cost modifier would be analogous to paying for the cost of the turret mounting and targeting hardware. The same kind of explanation can easily be extended to other components, as well. Bigger engines are needed, and so are more expensive. The same degree of armour on a bigger ship is going to be more expensive since there are more materials involved, etc.

At any rate, it's a believable abstraction, and serves our purpose: increase the base cost of the larger vessels so that they have a downside (cost) and an increased effect on military maintainence costs, with the added bonus of scaling with more expensive components and higher miniturization abilities.

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So, some tentative values:
Ship base cost is equal to their base HP * 10 (a value which is blatantly ripped from the hull boosting components)

And, since I liked Infoceptors values:
Tiny - 0.75 times component cost
Small - 1.00 times component cost
Medium/Cargo - 1.25 times component cost
Large - 1.5 times component cost
Huge - 2.0 times component cost

The real problem is that larger hulls completely dominate smaller hulls for thier cost. Actually that isn't so bad. What is bad, is that the AI doesn't understand this. It keeps building kindling fleets of smalls/meds while you build all large/huge ships with defense. Which makes thier ships completely irrelavent.

So my put would be yes larger hulls should be more expensive, but at the same time, the AI should use/design better ships. (piling 6 doom rays on huge hull, with 10 points of token defense, and 1 engine is just silly...)