Planetary Defenses?

Not at present, but there are planetary improvements that greatly improve the stats of orbiting ships, and allow them to operate as a fleet (regardless of your logistics stat, I think, which can allow for very powerful defense). Along with those, you can simply build ships with nothing but weapons and defenses (no range, sensor, or engine components) to sit in orbit of your worlds.

So far this is coming up to be a Mixxed bag for me.
Love 4x games [+]
No Multiplayer? [-]
Can Design your own ships! [+]
No tactical combat? [-]
No planetary (starbase?) defenses? [--]

I keep going "Wow that's cool"
and then 5 minutes later saying "Well that stinks"

shouldnt be too bummed bout no tactical combat since every strategy game that does it has horrible tactical ai also the strabases do have weapons ugrades that allows them to defend themselves if attacked plus like darth kryo said all u ned to do is put ships in orbit that have nothing but wepons and defense and there is your static defense

I'm not completely 'bummed' per'say because I have really no idea what to expect. I played the first Gal Civ and wasn't to impressed w/the combat system... so I have that hanging over my head.

Part of Space 4x games to me is being the "Supreme Commander" for the armada. You could make the case to me that as that commander I wouldn't be getting into the nitty gritty bits of the combat... but I'd still like to see it. What's the fun in building a huge armada if you can't watch your 'flag ship' duke it out.

In that same token for Armada Building a ship with no engine's doesn't make sense. Why not instead provide a chasis in the design for planetary defenses. Fighter bays (Fighters in GCII?), Missle Launchers.... basically small military orbital stations.

I always liked it in Moo2 that even if your defense armada was wiped clean, they'd still have to get passed the planetary defenses... which in itself made the planet 1 large weapons platform.

I guess if I could find a video somewhere showing off the 'view combat' screen and of a fight I might be a little more grounded on what to expect.

Deformable ships?
Damage models?
Shield Effects?
etc etc.

I'm with Corban. It would be helpful for me to see some in-game footage. Screenshots are nice, but I want a better feel on how the game is played. Combat would be great to see.

FYI, the game is so easily moddable that if you just HAVE to have orbital platforms, you can do it. I just tried it on the gamma, and ti appears to work just fine, barring the fact that the starbase models have no hardpoints to attach things to. If we can get a tutorial on how to add them though, It's just a matter of adding the appropriate hull entry to the game.

Of course, you'll have to restrain yourself from adding engines to the "orbital" hulls, as there's nothing to stop you from doing it and it would be quite unbalancing to have a massive hull like that floating around space in the early game

I'm actually glad there is no tactical combat. Sure, GalCiv I combat was bland but not because of lack of tactical combat but because you only had certain ships with fixed values and only an attack and a defense rating (unlike with the 3 different damage types in GalCiv II).

Tactical combat was in MOO2, for example, and the only reason for me not to turn it off all the time was that the automatic combat always gave worse results than if I duked it out with the (bad) AI. On top of that, tactical combat most of the time is boring as hell since fleets usually aren't on equal footing and the winner is already known beforehand and I'd rather go on with my overall strategy instead of being bogged down by endless boring tactical battles.

So thumbs up to Stardock for actually making a fun game and not some feature-laden micromanagement nightmare. Complexity is a great thing, but not this kind of complexity. Look at Civ IV and you see no tactical combat but a highly complex game due to the choices you can make at any point in the game. And GalCiv II seems to be able to accomplish the same. I understand that different people like different things, but in my opinion, Stardock managed to do what they wanted to do: Build a TBS that avoids many of the pitfalls of the genre (endgame tediousness, micromanagement, bad/non-existant diplomacy and AI in generall,...) without sacrificing depth.

There it is. Want an Orbital Platform? You got it. I was able to mod one into the game in a few minutes, using one of the existing starbase models. The starbase models have no hardpoints for attaching ship components, so I figured out how to add them and just put one at the dead center inside the SB, so all you need to do is place a sphere-shaped hull addon in the middle and build outwards.

The only hitch is that despite my setting the hull's natural speed to -100, it comes out as having 1 move point after building and launching it. So it appears there's no way to prevent abuse, but then again if people want to cheat, 1) they're only cheating themselves since you can't mod metaverse games, and 2) you can just as easily modify the base ships to have huge values. But like I said, if you want it, you can do it pretty easily.

range: 0.1 sct

um, how far is that ?
and another thing, you can see it as cheating only if you aknowledge stardocks balance as the "be all end all" (and that will change anyways).

range: 0.1 sector = not outside your own borders. need some life support to go further.

There are some hard limits on how low a "ship" can go with its stats, regardless how low you set them in the data files. So for balance's sake, you'll be on the honor system with using such things as orbital platforms

Kudo's for Amb. Darth Kryo for making a mod example of Galciv 2. I *tried* to get this suggestion of starbases or weapons platforms into Galciv 2 - but it was not to be. I"m right there with ya Citizen Corban - Tactical combat would have been nice.

I've never Liked the defense bonuses of galciv 1 or 2 just for the same reason you mention - they require a starship. Planetary guns, Starbases, Weapons platofrms, Minefields, shoud have been included in this game - but maybe its not in the strategy vision of the creators.

Maybe someone will make a cool mod for Galciv 2 and include this stuff - though I'm not sure how effective it may be. We will have to wait and see.