Several Combat Suggestions

Initiative order: That would certainly make the battles look more interesting and realistic, instead of the current system of 'everyone pick on that one guy'

Hull Size: It might be interesting to have small fighters harder to hit, but why would small ships do less damage to big ones? They are already disadvantaged by not being able to fit as many weapons.

Exponential Technology Growth: Er... higher technology weapons already deal more damage than low tech ones. That's what the numbers mean. Adding another modifier on top of that is just pointless.

Shield depletion: I really don't see the point of this. It would further weaken the power of defenses, which a lot of people already ignore completely. Not to mention, it seems a lot of extra complication for no particular reason.

Overkill: Fleets already do this. I do agree that maybe the same should apply to multiple weapons on a ship. This would also add a further design element- if you're fighting small ships, it may be better to stick with Lasers instead of Plasma, as the damage would be distributed more evenly.

Suprise attack: Yea, there should still be SOME advantage to be gained from maneuvering your ships tactically with the new system. I'm worried that the changes in 1.2 may drain a bit of the strategy out of the wars...

1)agreed, some initiative type thing would be fun, maybe based on ship size, or weapon range.

2)already taken into account in Hit Points - its much harder to destroy a larger ship. I dont think missing would apply with such things as computerized targeting and near-instantaneous beam/driver weapons or guided missiles... however small the hull

3)I think the weapon/sheild stats are ok as they are - with this sort of change, a small tech advantage would make you invincible! (if i'm understanding the suggestion right)

4) having sheilds/armor which decrease in strength durin battle would be interesting, but would probably take a lot of work to implement. would be nice to see in an expansion...

5)this would work, especially now all ships will fire together

6) I'm not sure how you could surprise or sneak up on someone in open space - theres nothing to hide behind
i've seen suggestions for cloaking devices tho, surprise attacks could work in conjunction with that

hope i dont sound too critical - its meant to be constructive

I was trying to fix the not using shields problem. A fleet of weak fighters will destroy most shields, so expensive shields are not really worth the cost. By making each level go up exponentially, the advantage to having a bunch of weaker fighters is reduced when facing better defense.

My logic was this: Say a gun can do 1 damage, and a cannon can do 5. That cannon could blow a hole in a strong wall, say with rating 3. But, 5 guns, which can do 5 damage total, should not be able to do anything except put marks in that wall. But, giving enough time, they can chip away at it and eventually get through.

It just doesn't make sense to me to have a battle ship go up against a fleet of pigeons and become bird food.

Surprise Attack: So, it would force all of us to let 1 unused move point to our fleets when in a tactical delicate place?

1) i think you should be able to choose targets but that might too hard

2)I completely agree because the defense that you have on the ship would have to cover the entire thing so that a medium sized ship has a bigger system then a small and damagae would be distributed differently

3) I dont know if exponential rowth but definetly agree that lower class ships can beat a bigger one... i mean this just simply shouldnt happen its like if you were a guy with a machine gun vs 5 with knives... i mean you could annihlate them nothngt like well the 5 knive guys can do 5 dmg each that they kill the machine gun guy even though they werent near him.. for the comment above if you are playing on a hard enough difficulty you wont be invincible or atleast you shouldnt be

4) AWESOME for shield depleteion so ya know what im talking about

5)great idea

6) meh that sounds acceptable

Most changes i completely agree with and think that those changes would help

I however remember a game called master of orion 2... i dont know who remembers this game but you could control battles and i love that idea and think its fantastic if possible should be incorporated into this game

1) true.
2) true.
3) FALSE. two strength 1 shields are stronger then one strength two shields. Why? because they;re independent systems.
But, the game doesnt incorporate bits of ships going "kaboom" so its better already to just use the better shield (less space needed)
4) ...
5) varies with weapon. with agreeable.
6) heheh

@bummed,

I agree that with a large enough tech difference (like your knives vs machine guns example) you should for all intents and purposes be invincible - but this is and example of modern weapons vs iron age weapons! there are lots of in-between levels, and you should NOT be invincible for example a machine gun against 5 pistols. I think the exponential increase would too quickly reach the 'invincible' stage for too small a difference in tech, unbalancing the game in favour of more technologically oriented races/stratagies.

sully13, just curious, how are the sizes changing as tech increases? same as usual?

well id like to point out that (not sounding all star warsy, just a good example) one tiny x-wing destroyed the death star, MAJOR difference in size. just saying that the little ships can do more to a big ship then you would think

Initiative order: I think something like this should be used, but not so strictly small v small, big v big. Instead what'd be nice is a more prioritized system based on which enemy ship is most effectively brought down by your targetting ship. As it is currently with the "We all attack you" that can be exploited by simply figuring out which ship that is going to be then just put your best defenses on it and then while they attack your defense ship you are ploughing through their fleets.

Hull Size: A gun is a gun is a gun. If I take a pistol and strap it to some tiny robot and get it to shoot something then take a tank and have it fire the same type of gun it'll do just as much damage. The difference in Hit Points make up for the fact that a larger ship should be harder to destroy than a smaller one. Now if we were to instead say that the weapon costs less space on a smaller ship than the bigger ones, then yes it should do more damage. For smaller ships dodging I don't think it'll help much. Most of the weapons in the game move fast enough or have a guidance system to make differences in size and maneuverability pointless. However, you could still get what you want if you increased the difference in HP. As it stands now it's roughly 10,20,30,40,50. Perhaps a more geometric growth on that would satisfy you like instead make it 10,25,45,70,100. The other alternative is to make the defenses on a larger ship more effective. A battleship can afford to spend more power keeping their shields up or using a bigger chaff and the armor would cover more area. But this might again have to tie into size of the defenses used.

Exponential Technology Growth: The idea's good but technically the game already takes use of this fact. A Laser 5 can do the same amount of damage as a Laser 1 but uses quite a bit less space. When you consider effect/space used it already takes care of most of that. For defenses I agree with echelon. Regardless of what the defenses are two of one thing are always going to be better than one of the next thing. Perhaps instead of your squared ratio a smaller exponent would satisfy you? Like using a 1.2 to 1.3 growth. That ways two Defense 2 parts would give you equivelent 4.8 (using a 1.2 system) while a three would give you 4.3. This way it does still pay to put more smaller things on your ship, but they don't give as much an extra bonus over using something more effective. As for weapons a similar thing would work with defenses, but if we start making the highest stuff now start doing 30-40+ damage by using a geometric growth method then we will have to make the hit points of the ships larger to accomodate this so that a tiny ship weilding the best gun can't just about 1-hit kill anything.

Shield Depletion: That sounds decent, if a little overpowered. As you have it mentioned it would mean a S1 could only take 1 damage before going no longer working. A S2 would take 3 damage. A S4 would take 10 damage. By the time you start getting to the final shields we're talking a deflection value that is larger than most of the ships have hit points since an S10 would block 55 damage. So as written it won't work unless you completely overhaul the entire defense specs for all defenses so as to keep them balanced. A much easier way to do this is to make the defenses more effective than they currently are then put them on a time-degrading scale. Basically that an S10 after t seconds will work only as well as a 9 and after t more seconds as good as an 8, etc. and if you go by a 1/t relationship then your S10 would last much longer than an S5. This would have to work on all defenses, though, chaff and armor alike. It doesn't make sense to try and fix one defense system and ignore the other two.

Overkill: Lasers and projectiles can't redirect after being fired and it would seem almost unbalanced to make the missiles do so. Repicking a new target after one is destroyed is already done to some extent.

Surprise Attack: I agree with you on that one. But not so much the "I got more movement than you so I surprise attack" I think it should go along the lines of if your movement points are larger than some value based on their sensor range then you should get a better initiative. This would encourage people to have faster ships and also have a large sensor grid set up. Also keep in mind this would work in reverse to. If the AI had a fast enough ship and your sensors wasn't all that good they'd get the free shot as well.

As an aside I would, though, mention that it would be nice if an equivelent to Orion's "Reinforced Hull" technology was adapted for GalCiv2, that you could add a branch of research that would allow you to place stuff on the ship to increase it's HP by some factor.

I've thought more about this, and come up with what might be a better solution to the technology and shield issue. As technology increases, it's base damage or protection should also increase. As is stands now, a level 1 does 0 to 1 damage, where as a level 10 does 0-10, and since you only roll once, half the time ten level 1 weapons will do more damage than a level 10 weapon. This does not seem fair, especially not with shields. A really high technology shield should defend better against level 1 weapons than level 10 weapons, even if there are a ton of those pea shooters. How about something like this: min = L*6 - 8 ; max = L*6
Level Min Max
1 1 6
2 4 12
3 10 18
4 16 24

Now, three level one weapons can do 3-18 damage, but a level three weapon will do 10-18. The higher technoloy isn't more powerful, but it is likely to do more damage. Also, rolling for each shot would make things a lot more fair. This would make a huge tech difference powerful, but not impossible to beat. A fleet of x-wings could still take out the deathstar, but it'd become much less likely

Surprise attack: I meant something like what fox said, if you move from outside their sensor range into an attack -in one turn- they're caught unaware.

Cloaking would be similar, as well as 'sensor masking'. A cloaked ship would get a surprise attack the first round, unless the enemy already had a surprise attack and then no one gets a bonus. 'Sensor masking' would be similar. If they attack they get a surprise attack, but if you attack them no one gets a surprise attack. Basically, they'd be invisible until they got within visual range (1 parsec). In both cases, the ship would be visible for the next turn, before disappearing again. Cloaking and Sensor masking could have 4 levels as well, and each increased sensor tech allows them to be detected.

I really like the reinforced hull idea, you sarcifice some internal storage space and just add some more bulk to the ship.

Thanks for the discussion. I'd love to see any of the suggestions added to the game.