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 5)

Enigmatical

on Mar 23, 2006

I guess I have to ask.. why are ALL weapons aimed at a single ship?

Surely each individually placed weapon on a ship would fire in sequence and when a ship is destroyed it would then move to the next?

That would be how I expect a large ship to function... not firing every single thing it has at a single ship!

Maybe that is where the issue lies here

Alfonse

on Mar 23, 2006

Imagine being attacked by a fleet of these!

What of it?

A corresponding huge ship would have enough hitpoints and defense to survive the first salvo. Your ship, with its lack of defenses (not like they could ever have enough...), wouldn't.

I guess I have to ask.. why are ALL weapons aimed at a single ship?

Because large ships would be even more overpowered than they are. And there would be no real advantage for having smaller guns.

Kalin

on Mar 24, 2006

Blackhole guns are nothing, finish the missile tree and get blackhole eruptors. They do 25 damage for about the same size, and not that much more cost. The problem is, even if you can stick 2 of them into a tiny, and have a weapon bonus of say 50, you end up with a 75 attacking craft.

On the otherhand, the top of the line armors, are all around 8 or 9 space (maybe more now since the size has been increased), and protects around 10 (in their category). In order to protect against 50 missile (let's assumine you have +defense as much as they have +weapons), you would need about 50 space for defense TOPS. Then, all you need is one or two of these guns on your huge ship and you're ready to go. Now, send your 4 fighters against the huge.

Asumming normal rolls, you'd never even be able to scratch the huge ship. If you get a luckly roll, then yes, you will be able to hurt it. But that's just luck. So the question is, do you feel lucky? You have four turns if you attack first to be lucky, you have three if he attacks first. Every turn that passes, you have one less ship to be lucky. Oh, did I mention if you lose the battle he'll gain a ton of HP, where as you might not even get one?

The obvious solution is to switch weapons and attack the huge with something else. This, of course, is the designed gameplay mechanic. There is a reason why there isn't an armor type that can defend against all three. Secondary armor should only be put on if you can't think of anything else to fill the space.

Now, for the argument that says 2 huge against 14 tiny is unfair and you need to survive 14 turns... frankly, you need better math skills. First of all, a huge = 8 logistics, a tiny = 2 logistic, which means 2 huge against 8 would be fair, 3 huge against 12 would be fair, forget the mediums, they are a completely different size and will die first anyways. No matter how you do the math, it still comes down to 4 turns. If you attack first, they only have 3 turns. If you really want 14 tiny in your maxed fleet, ok, 5 turns. The ONLY way the tiny can win is if they manage to string together enough 'lucky' hits to kill 3 huge ships in 4 (or 5) turns. Snowflake in hell... snowflake in hell... maybe pick that 'luck' trait and hope it helps. That is, assuming you could somehow get 14 tiny ships together to form a decent fleet without it being picked off one by one as HP loot for the bigger ships.

IMO, Those who are crying have obviously never went around with a couple of battleships looting HP. Horribly imbalanced, but amusingly fun. It's like an RPG game of sorts, with a turn button. (Hmmm... next time I'll start naming those ships, no wait... individualized designs!

LOL! )

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