Game Balance and Ship Range

Clustered stars would possibly help (?). I use Random and there's often big gaps of space with no stars or planets.

You're right about range, though. As much as I wouldn't mind ship range being nerfed, it wouldn't solve the problem. If something's out of your range, you just build a one-constructor influence base or whatnot.

The one-constructor star base is still vulnerable, however. It would suck to have your super-duper fleet have to turn around and fly all the way home because some cheap fighter took out your base.

True. I just use 'em to reach galactic resources or establish trade routes.

Interesting to see what happens if you establish the latter and the base is destroyed . . . . wonder if all of a sudden you lose a bunch of trade routes, hm.

Is it possible to reduce the range of starships in a text file? It's really puzzling why the designers would make it so large relative to even the largest galaxy settings.

I don't mind starbases being used as extenders as they can be taken out pretty easily however I'd like to see some kind of requirement on starbases perhpaps being within X range of an occupied planet or some sort of penalty being exercised or the range it gives you being cut by some %.

almost like island hopping in the pacific during wwII. and makes territory and turf wars over otherwise insignificant planets more interesting.

You can mod the range a fair bit. The actual range computation has a lot of factors. There are a lot of bonuses and map-dependent minimum range values that you can't mod around. You can get a pretty good range system if you apply a racial range penalty, remove bonuses from range techs and make life-support modules larger. On a huge map though, even a ship with basically zero range will be able to fly from one system to the next.

Yeah, I fondly remember range limits seeming to be more of a factor in the original "Master of Orion", with longer delays encountering races across the map and more opportunity to create defensive "choke-point" worlds. One caveat though, I have not actually gotten to run a gigantic map in GCII since my old computer starts to chug above large... that likely makes a big difference.

I will need to experiment with some of the changes Entropy Avatar suggests. It is obviously a difficult balancing act between having range limits adding cool strategic considerations, but not causing excessive game balance issues early if some races are unlucky enough to not have any planets near enough to expand at all.

This just reiterates my adoration for the work Stardock has done to make GCII so infinitely flexible and mod-able. What a great game!

Range does scale to map size. On a tiny map, the starting space miner has a range of 1.1 sectors, on a huge map it has a range of 4.3 sectors. I kind of wish it didn't scale, it would make big maps really feel big.

I dont know, if it didnt scale, that really would make things go too slow.

I´m playing on a huge map and it has been almost 10 years game time, and I´m beggining to destroy the other races. Ok, I took a lot of time tech evolving, but with range issues, it would take forever just to get all the colonies together.

Anyway, even if you mod it, it could always go to waste if you get the "Unlimited Range" precursor Megaevent.

Is there a way to mod the range scaling and eliminate the precursor megaevent?

I remember MOO also..and the fun of having turf wars over otherwise insignificant planets really was a ton of fun.