Cutting down on total number of ships / military sizes?

from GalCiv2 Forums

One of my biggest points of frustration with this game is how, after AI players come into serious money, they crank out hundreds and hundreds of ships, literally spamming the galaxy with them. It makes wars a pain, it makes keeping track of everything a chore, and it makes the map a cluttered and "unrealistic" mess.

I understand that this isn't a problem for most players, but I enjoy some role playing in my games. In particular, I prefer a Star Trek-style universe (often using the ST mod), where individual ships are highly prized and not disposable, and where fleet sizes are fairly small.

Is there any relatively easy and painless way to mod the game, such that total military sizes and numbers of ships held by any given player will be sharply reduced? I'd love if each side had, at most, maybe 100 ships on the map at any given time -- with a strong preference for larger, capital-sized ships. Ideally, there would be an emphasis on individual ship-to-ship combat, and less emphasis on massive-fleet-vs-massive-fleet spam.

Also, is there a non-economic way to make this happen? It seems that making ship components more expensive, and/or crippling everyone's economic bonuses, would force stinginess on everyone's part. But that's not really what I have in mind. Also, in my very long and drawn out games (I like to RP, as I said), eventually each side ends up with piles of free cash and would get around any economic limits I tried to impose.

Thanks in advance for the help.

modding
2,562 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I would like to say that in my games, I generally feel there aren't enough ships to be 'realistic'. Except for certain AIs like the Torians who favor small and tiny hulls, I have almost never encountered a race with more then about 200 individual ships, even in full-tech games. I'm curious about your settings; what game is this (DA, TOA, original GalCivII) and what's the difficulty level?

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

You can boost the cost of ships to unreasonable extremes and expand the hulls' logistics requirements.

Here's a neat trick I picked up from somebody no longer on the forums. Go into the GC2Types file in Notepad, and hit Ctrl+F. In the first box, type in

</Cost>
End of quote

and in the second, type in

0</Cost>
End of quote

This will increase the cost of every single ship component (and thus the time needed to make every single ship) by a factor of 10. Not entirely sure how the AI will respond to that, but it should place a higher value on a small number of ships, as opposed to simple diverting a load of resources to military production or something stupid like that.

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