Small vs large ships

But you will need to research bigger ships first. and researching always makes something outdated like smaller ships.

Well lets look at current aircraft, there are bombers designed to do large damage to slow targets and fighters designed to shoot down bombers and other fighters. Some fighters can do a little of both. You could look at star wars and many other space war games that have these kind of dynamics which make combat more strategic and more reason to have many different kinds of ships.

I just think it would expand the strategy of ship battles and make it more fun.

I have also always loved cloaking devices which could be related to current day submarines. You have ships that can cloak which are generally weaker defensively but deadlier offensively than large battle ships, then you need special ships just for hunting and destroying cloaked ships in your fleet.

I think these elements make it more interesting than just here's my Super Ship, it's the best shp and can beat everything by itself. So instead of your fleet of super ships, you have large ships to give and take large damage, fighters to attack enemy fighters, bombers to attack their capital ships, ships that have powerful scanners for detecting cloaked ships etc.

Here's one more thing that would be awesome, the ability to house smaller ships in larger capital ships, allowing you to put smaller engines on fighters but carry them at the speed your large capital ship can travel. Then the fighters could be released as a choice when desired, allowing you to not waste them on smaller battles. This could be done by using a docking bay module you could mount on your ships.

I don't know if these things can be modded in or not, but they'd also be great for an expansion pack for the game!

I don't think a mod can do this. But it would be VERY nice to have, still.

I have been craving to create real battleships, with weapons BATTERIES. Where researching weapon techs means you can also build smaller variants that do less damage, so you can spread out more weapons mounts over your large hulls.

Basically, your tracking system (large guns track too slowly to effectively fight small, agile craft) could be implemented based on the weapon size, and would, of course, require smaller weapons (doing less damage) that would not suffer this targeting disadvantage.

It would add more weaknesses to craft. You could choose to build "fighter killers" equipped with small gun batteries, but that would hardly ever pierce the defenses of a big ship.

You could build Capship killers (Homeworld Ion Frigates, anyone?) that would sport a small set of big guns (similar to how it is now) but would be vulnerable to small enemy craft that would be hard to target with these bigger guns.

I also very much love the idea of carrier ships. Your concept of docking modules is very nice. To be able to carry 2 small or 4 tiny fighters per module would be truly great - but I don't see this coming before GalCiv3, if at all.

A problem with the gun thing alone is, there is no "miss" right now. Gunfire always hits, it simply does no damage if the defense roll is better than the attack roll. Of course, the attack roll (or the defense roll, or both) could be modified by hull size, so that larger ships firing at smaller ships would be at a disadvantage, while smaller ships attacking larger ships would suffer no such modifier.

For example, an easy way would be to subtract 20% from the attack value for each difference in hull size, i.e. a huge ship would only have 80% attack power against a large ship, 60% against medium, 40% against small, and 20% against tiny. You'd require lots of gunpower OR smaller ships to get rid of fighter craft, which in part would offset the much higher cost of said fighter craft (weapons and defense prices should also possibly be modified by the hull size, making them cheaper on smaller hulls).

This way, even the modest defenses available on small craft would allow for reasonable survivability, and make them worthwhile, tactically.

my main concern with small fighters is their speed
i can pack 2-3 good engines on a large hull and still have good weapon / defense, with a small hull i cant do that
i'd say make engines A LOT smaller on small hulls and a lot bigger on big hulls, after all their mass is higher

the only reason to build small fighters imho are military starbases: 10 small fighters near a fully equipped military base are very strong
(but a huge hull with high def will - sadly - still beat them, 1x 100 def is so much better then 10x 10 def)

I've found late game, fleets of 21 tiny fighters to be very nice. Considering every ship can only fire at one ship once per turn, you'll lose a few ships, but they'll take out a fleet of 3 large hulls easily

In a recent Tough game my frigate sized ships (terran) were no match for the Dreng fleets. Following advice I got from these forums, I built fleets of small hull boats with only weapons, no defense and was able to swarm the Dreng fleets. I took some losses but the small ships were easier to relace than larger capital type ships. (and cheaper too). I love to build large BattleCruisers, loaded with weapons and defenses, decked out with jewlery pieces...Visually impressive !!!!
But sometimes you have to build what works.

This game is more strategic and less tactical, what you are asking for is more tactics that might happen in Gal Civ 3 but as for now your stuck with the current system

I've found smaller fast ships not very useful in the game, one large ship with high defense and many weapons seems to trump all

Even as far as cost, I can have one huge ship with an upkeep of 30, and my smaller ships are around 10. The single ship that costs 30 is worth WAY more in combat value than the 10s.

These statements aren't always true. The balance between big and small ships changes at different points in the game. In the first half of the tech tree, I think you're right, bigger ships are better. Each ship has more hp so they are more likely too survive and be repaired than to be destroyed. They make better use of engines, as MegaVolt said above. And they make defenses worthwhile. At this point, big ships had better be stronger, otherwise it wouldn't be worth spending money to research the bigger hulls.

But towards the end of the tech tree, the balance shifts back towards smaller ships. At this point, weapons and defenses are much more powerful than before, but hp values of ships are not much higher. The trick is that each ship can only shoot at one enemy ship each round. If a ship with 100 attack shoots at a huge ship, it has a good chance of destroying it in one shot. But if it shoots at a tiny ship, it can't do much damage and most of its firepower is wasted. So fleets of tiny ships are very potent, and they're much cheaper than a fleet of huge ships using ultimate defenses.

So I think small ships are overall balanced versus big ships. It's just that the balance changes as the game progresses.

but if you get the big ships then you can finish the game before you get to the second half of the tec tree.
I always get big hulls befor the other races so there at a disadvantage
by the time they've got them i'v concerd half the planits and can win through infuence

the other races never seam to update there old ships, so attac the planits with lots of old ships with youre new hi-tec ships and they'll fall like flys

Well maybe these ideas can't be added to this game, but I think it would be awesome to add them to the next one. I think this game is really cool, but I think these few tweaks could put it in the category of untouchable classics.

Tactics ARE strategy.

What I was saying was if a big ship has high defense, a smaller ship can't have enough fire power to do ANY damage, and so even if my big ship can only kill one small ship per round, it will pick them off one by one without even taking a scratch.

Perhaps another idea to add in would be combat vs travel engines. Combat engines would be impulse, ion etc to increase maneuverability for combat, where travel engines are warp etc for travelling long distances. Fighters would use combat engines and be carried by large ships with travel engines. Travel engines would be much larger, so using them on smaller ships would reduce weapons and defences, but combat engines would be less effective(requiring many more of them) the larger the ship.

I would also like to see some kind of ground combat strategy implemented, but I KNOW that wouldn't be until the next game if at all. I think it should take more than a week to fully conquer a planet, and some kind of land battle minigames would be awesome. Different kinds of land untils like troopers, vehicles and aircraft/aerospace craft. Perhaps smaller star ships could be modified to allow use in land battles etc.

These are just things I think would make the ultimate space strategy game, which this game is so close to being.

Maybe we should move this thread into the ideas forum, as that was more my intention in putting the info here.

Tactics ARE strategy.

I think what the poster meant was you are looking for a tactical system in a statistical game. Just wanted to see if that could be clarified.

I've tried a few games with a mix of hull designs from small to large, and found that a nice spread of different hull sizes will do quite a bit of damage, no matter who gets iced first.

Typically, though, a 6-8 weapon dreadnought will wtfpwn much better than a small group of 2 or 3 weapon corvette/destroyers.

Tactics ARE strategy.

tactics are the chapters, strategy is the book.