GalCiv II: Size Matters

Part 1

Published on March 22, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

When it comes to battles, size matters. To balance that, Galactic Civilizations II introduces the logistics concept.

The logistics concept was designed to prevent the age-old strategy game issue where each side just builds a single mongo fleet/army/whatever and wipes out everything in its path. The number of ships you can put into a fleet is hence limited by your logistics ability which you can research to improve. How many logistics a ship uses is based on hull size.

In Galactic Civilizations II v1.0 that was:

Tiny: 2 points of logistics
Small: 3
Medium: 4
Cargo: 5
Large: 5
Huge: 6

It was done this way to keep it simple for players. But here's the problem -- ship sizes. A tiny hulled ship has 16 space. A large hull has 55 space. That's over 3X as much space but the large only uses up 2.5X in logistics. Advantage: Large hulled ships. There are other factors involved too such as hit points and cost -- which are well balanced. But logistics are out of whack in our view.

So in v1.1, it's going to be this:

Tiny: 2
Small: 3
Medium: 4
Cargo: 4
Large: 7
Huge: 9

The various logistics techs will be pumped up too. The fact is, we want people to be able to build swarms of ships as a viable strategy. We also want people to be able to fixate on building huge capital ships as well. Now, the current system isn't horribly imbalanced by any means, the guy researching the larger hulls isn't able to put in time researching some mongo weapons.

If you go strictly by a spreadsheet, you can see plenty of imbalances depending on how you want to look at it and how nit-picky you want to be.

But I want to stress - the guy who's building huge ships had to go and research (or trade some equally valuable) technology to those huge hulls. They also had to put together the manufacturing capacity to create them and make the sacrifice of putting their marbles into a single ship rather than a bunch. In addition, there are various "round off" things that they have to deal with as well and many components, particularly defenses, take size into account when determining how much size they use.

Update:

After play testing during the evening and taking more into account things like starbase bonuses and the cost of getting those large hulled ships I made a minor tweak:

Tiny: 2
Small: 3
Medium: 4
Cargo: 5
Large: 6
Huge: 8

The Cargo hulls didn't need to come down because the new logistics abilities increase your logistics quite a bit. Before you would have 12 logistics after researching enhanced logistics. Now you'd have 15. You could hence fit 3 transports into a fleet at that stage versus 2 previously.

Comments (Page 4)

aeternali

on Mar 23, 2006

Brad has already said twice (once to you specifically) that you will get more logistics with technology

Increasing the logistics does not help. What has changed is the ratio of the larger ships vs smaller.

Before a huge ship would cost 6 logistics points and in return you could have 3 fighters.

Now a huge ship will cost 8 logistics point and in return you can get 4 fighters.

(see above ships and combat simulator)

Ran the ships above in the combat simulator with the old system 3 fighters vs 1 attacking huge ship i would win most of the time at about the same ratio i state above.

With the new system I always loose in the simulator.

The point is what you get for that same logistics point. So no matter how far you increase the logistics cap the 4 to one ratio will kill you.

ignuss

on Mar 23, 2006

The huge difference between small and large ships which your flawed test ignores is that the tiny fighters most likely won't have any defences while the hugh ships probably will have maximum defence against the tiny fighters chosen weapons.
Meaning: the huge ships will nearly always kill one enemy per attack. The tiny ships won't even hurt the huge ships alot of the time.

aeternali

on Mar 23, 2006

Well the thing is how does ship size compare to logistics?

Is it now always going to be better to go up the logistics tree first?

I'd think what you want is for a fleet of tinys at max logistics to be even with a fleet of huge with min. logistics. (Same weapon/def levels.)

So at start it would be going up one in logistics equals getting medium hulls. Anything else means there is a "best" choice in deciding between logistics and hulls.

In the above example i do this with the extremes. I did not do a middle of the road test as the differences are less noticeable.

Here is the thing. In my tests the fleet with the larger ship hulls is always attacking giving it an advantage. Before it would win 20/30 times but remember i get the first shot for free on this as the attacker so that is the desired result. If i was defending i think it would be 10/30 or so.

Now with the proposed change i loose every time even as the attacker. How do you think that will do on defense?

I think you are right but comparing the ship size vs logistics cost. That is why i was trying to do above.

aeternali

on Mar 23, 2006

My test did not ignore that at all. If you look at my ships you will see that the fighters have no defenses at all.

You will also see that i have optimized my defenses against the fighters weapons without going totally out of balance with the rest of my defenses.

You should also note the combat simulator i was using as it is in the forums and you can test the results yourself.

Even if i can kill one fighter per turn my huge weapon damage output is wasted on a single fighter. In the examples above the fighters win because my capital ships must last for 14 turns in order to beat the 14 fighters. My example proves that they are not capable of doing this after the change.

I cannot, as you state, simply put all my defenses in one category to beat the fighters as it would make me much too vulnerable in other areas. Example, if i did but all of my defenses in armor it would make me very vulnerable to other ship types and configurations. Meaning, that the AI's capital ships will have weapons other than guns i would be totally defenseless against those.

aeternali

on Mar 23, 2006

Combat log of 1 Battleship vs 4 Fighter of above type so you can see the blow by blow.

Beginning round 1.
A1 fires on D4 for 53 Damage.
D4 has been destroyed!
D3 fires on A1 for 0 Damage.
D2 fires on A1 for 10 Damage.
D1 fires on A1 for 17 Damage.

Beginning round 2.
A1 fires on D3 for 51 Damage.
D3 has been destroyed!
D2 fires on A1 for 18 Damage.
D1 fires on A1 for 0 Damage.

Beginning round 3.
A1 fires on D2 for 64 Damage.
D2 has been destroyed!
D1 fires on A1 for 37 Damage.
A1 has been destroyed!

Beginning round 4.
Defending fleet is victorious!

A1. 0/48 HP 44-30-32 27-20-20
Defending Fleet
D4. 0/6 HP 0-0-48 0-0-0
D3. 0/6 HP 0-0-48 0-0-0
D2. 0/6 HP 0-0-48 0-0-0
D1. 6/6 HP 0-0-48 0-0-0

Note the damage output of my single battleship and compare that to the hitpoints of the fighters. This is because every weapon on my battleship is aimed at one single fighter. See only one ship per side can be destroyed per turn. That means that in a full out, currently 28 logistic point, fleet i have to have my capital ships last for 14 turns. They simply are not able to do that. Increasing the logistics cap does not help as that means that i have to last even more turns.

The result is because of the expense of the fleets with large ships compared to the fighters and the fact that the fighters will almost certainly win that a specific hull type is favored. This also does not even consider the effects that bases have.

Jimb0v

on Mar 23, 2006

I really hope this path of adding more "options" does not continue. Options make the metaverse worse by splitting it up into too many categories.

ignuss

on Mar 23, 2006

So did you add the full hitpointmodifier to the ships?
You get +40% from technology.

That means that 1 tiny ship has 8 hp. One huge has 67 hp.
Means little for a tiny fighter but can probably do quite a difference for a huge.

Note that you get +15% hp when you get huge hulls so they will never have less than 55 hp.

EDIT: You will also have 200 space on a huge hull in 1.1 while you now only can have 160 (with +100% miniaturization from technology).

EDITTED ONCE AGAIN:

See only one ship per side can be destroyed per turn. That means that in a full out, currently 28 logistic point, fleet i have to have my capital ships last for 14 turns.

Not true, with 28 logistics points, you can kill up to 4 enemy ships per turn (until you begin to lose ships) and you won't have to last that many turns.

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Mar 23, 2006

I think the whole small vs. large ship balance is a non-issue because there is a much bigger imbalance in ship combat. The attacker has a HUGE advantage!!! Having all ships fire at the same time would restore balance.

In the Dread Lord's campaign missions (playing on level Tough) I'm able to crush the total Dread Lord's, Drengin, and Yor fleets with just a few fleets of heavy fighters. The Dread Lord's have powerful weapons but they are useless if they never get to fire them! Since the Dread Lord's are not using defenses, my fleets of 4 heavy fighters (each with life support, a warp engine, and 3 plasma III bean weapons) with my race's 50% attack bonus has attack 36. They can take out any ship in one shot except for the DL's battleships but even in this case I only lose one fighter, as the battleship is lost in the second round of fire! From leveling up, pretty soon my heavy fighters have as many hit points as a frigate or even battleship!

A huge ship with strong optimal defenses can block the attacks from fighters, unless the fighters are getting high attack bonuses (from race bonuses, military resources, and/or military starbases).

I have been playing GalCiv2 since last Dec. In my games so far (played at level Tough), I have won all my games before things could progress beyond medium hull ships.

I'm playing the last Dread Lord's mission now. In Jan. 2226, I captured a Dread Lord's planet they had captured from the Drath Legion, and in the progress got the Blackhole Gun! After I research medium hulls, I can design a frigate with 2 Blackhole Guns, 2 Warp engines, and lots of life support. With my race's 50% attack bonus each of these will have attack 48 and with a speed of 10 and my race's sensor bonus, I'll always be the attacker (soon I'll also have Eyes of the Universe)! Once I build a few of these, I'll be able to wipeout the combined fleets of the Dread Lord's, Drengin, and Yor.

Next I'll play my first Metaverse game on a gigantic map with 9 Intelligent AI opponents under v1.1. It would be fun to have a fleet battle of huge ships squaring off against each other!!!

Frogboy

on Mar 23, 2006

Aet - your ships lose because your capital ships are, sorry to say, terribly designed.

Your argument boils down to this:

in 1.0X, Capital ships that are balanced in types of attacks and defenses still manages to win 2 out of 3 engagements against fighters that are focused on a particular weapon.

In a "real" battle, the point of capital ships isn't to make a hodgepodge of weapons and defenses. It's to have the room to put on more defenses.

What happens when you give your capital ships say 60 armor against those mass drivers of the fighters?

The biggest disadavantage of fighters is that each one has a relatively small punch. Capital ships have enough room to put defenses to counter their enemies effectively.

Using your stats, I did a mini battle with 1 capital ship with most of is defenses put into armor against those same fighters and the capital ship won 9/10 battles.

Astax

on Mar 23, 2006

I welcome improvements.

I did however fidn smalls hips effective already in certain scenerios. One with starbases, but also vs larger ships without defense. If you have a huge ship that has no defense, the tinies will have an ace up their sleeves. And that is that their total HP will be less than the damage you usually do. So every combat turn you will fire but more than half of your damage will be irrelevant. For that you could have traded half your guns for defense.

I think that adds more to the strategy than just tiny vs huge. Because when you have a huge ship you need to balance defense vs firepower depending on what class of ship you are facing. Agianst huge swars of tiny ships, you only need to do average 6 pts of damage (assumign no hp buffs), rest of the space should go into defense which is mroe efficient when defending against a swarm of little shots vs one big shot from another battleship.

But if your enemy all of a sudden switches to small hulls, now you have to pack more firepower on your huge ships and sacrifice some defense to ensure your capital ship will kill a small craft in one shot. I think that is where the real potential of the system lies. Yous hould balance it so that a Huge ship with all guns and no defense looses to a swarm of tinies, but a huge ship with just a bit of firepower but lot of defense wins (This is already mroe or less the case). But scale it so that if that huge ship is countered by number of medium ships, it will loose because it doesnt have enough firepower. (It's more or less the case now as well, given equal tech)

Ok guy's I cant wait for the patch and redoing fo the logistics and all the other features.

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Mar 23, 2006

Brad: Huge hulls having OVER twice as much space per unit of logistics is not balanced, even if you take into account the cost.

Me: ...the size of ship components increases with the hull size. So huge hulls have LESS than twice as many components per unit of logistics compared to tiny hulls.

When I made this statement at 3:19 a.m. EST I was very tired so I failed to consider that on a huge hull ship, life support and engines take up a smaller percentage of the hull, so a greater percentage is available for weapons and defenses. So the huge hull ship will have MORE than twice as much space for weapons and defenses per unit of logistics. If the huge hull ship has strong optimal defenses then the fleet of fighters will have difficulty taking it out, unless the fighters are getting high attack bonuses (from race bonuses, military resources, and/or military starbases). So I agree the change to logistics will provide better balance.

Brad, what about the HUGE advantage given to the attacking fleet. Would not having all ships fire at the same time provide better balance?!

Alfonse

on Mar 23, 2006

Brad, what about the HUGE advantage given to the attacking fleet. Would not having all ships fire at the same time provide better balance?!

Maybe balance in this regard isn't what the developers want.

After all, they make you use up a tile and build a planetary building in order to have a fleet defend a world. This all screams, "Don't defend; attack!" to me.

The only case where this becomes a problem is because the AI doesn't design its ships with sensors or speed. I can outsee and outrun them easily, so I'm always able to be the attacker. All that requires is better AI.

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Mar 23, 2006

...they make you use up a tile and build a planetary building in order to have a fleet defend a world. This all screams, "Don't defend; attack!" to me.

Ships in orbit get attack and defense bonuses. If you have an Orbital Defense Manager and Omega Defense System, then your orbiting defenders also fleet up and get double the HP. With the right defenses they can absorb the initial attack and then the advantage shifts to them. However, you must spend the time and money to build these defenses and waste two titles on the planet. Thus I would only consider it on a high PQ capital planet along the border with an enemy. I learned in the Dread Lord's campaign missions the value of having a fast fleet to defend a solar system by attacking.

The only case where this becomes a problem is because the AI doesn't design its ships with sensors or speed. I can outsee and outrun them easily, so I'm always able to be the attacker. All that requires is better AI.

According, to Brad's posts in v1.1 the AI will make better use of speed and range, I don't know about sensors. Being able to see the enemy before he sees use you (that's why I choose +2 sensor race bonus) and having a faster attack ships are critical to exploiting the attack advantage.

Even if all ships fired at the same time, the attacker would still have one advantage. He would be able to see the attack and defense strengths of the enemy before deciding whether to attack.

Featauril

on Mar 23, 2006

Well, the idea of big ships is that they have place for enough defense to be impervious to damage from tiny crafts. If you don't specialise them to counter a certain kind of weapon, then you're better off using small ships.

'sides, you'll be facing one enemy at a time usually. Most of the time they've specialised. Why bother with balancing defences between all three kinds? At most you should split it in two.

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Mar 23, 2006

Well, the idea of big ships is that they have place for enough defense to be impervious to damage from tiny crafts.

In Jan. 2226 of the last Dread Lord's campaign mission, I obtained the Blackhole gun when I captured one of their planets.

This gun has mass driver attack 16!

I can fit 2 of these along with a warp engine and life support on a heavy fighter (size small) which will have attack 32 but with my race's 50% attack bonus, 48! This will do damage on ships with even advanced armor! Imagine being attacked by a fleet of these!

In this mission I'm going to research medium hulls because I want room for 2 warp engines and lots of life support / range. Once I have a few of these and Eyes of the Universe the fun will begin!

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