Refitting of ships

I understand where you comming from, if you are looking for more realistic gameplay. But you always have to weight cons and pros. This could lead to some heavy micromanagment of units which might not be fun in the end. I think, as long as unit is within your own empire influence, it would be nice compromise. Very often people have ideas and features, which sounds realistic to them, but they are not so fun ingame. And for me personaly, fun is more important then realistic game.

I would agree that rearming and refuelling in the middle of nowhere would kill the sense of realism that I find quite important in a space-strategy simulation which is, at times (due to that sense of immersion), more than a game in a similar sense to a focussing chess match (sex / some kinds of music  is what I what I call 'fun'), unless that fuel could be generated by the ship's onboard power supply?  Also, by refitting do you mean repairing as well?  I'd be surprised if repairing at the cost of a single turn was allowed in GC2 (I didn't play it) but you could imagine that the replacement warheads are somehow teleported in and the refuel comes from the ships internal power supply e.g. resetting and cleaning the fusion reactors, maybe so that it runs at a higher efficiency 8)=

The upgrade process don't always happen in one turn. Its can take several turns if the ships are far away from your planets and starbases. Considering that all ships have 1 hp in this process, they are quite fragile.

Also the prices for upgrading is determined by rush buy rates, not by by the cost of building them on planets. Overall, you are paying 10x the difference (I think its the difference) when you upgrade. Often, it is cheaper to simply build new ships than build new ones.

Ok, to be more precise: With refitting, I meant upgrading to a newer ship type. I don't want to manually refuel/rearm ships, that's too much micromanagement.

Ok, in my games upgrading took always 1 turn, maybe I wasn't far enough away from my bases.

Ifupgrading on a colony would be a production project, you wouldn't pay rush buy rate, so it would be cheaper to upgrade (and keeping the experience).

Upgrading on a colony or a starbase would also protect the 1 hp ship. Of course, you can also do this in GC2 by putting some warships on top of the upgrading ship. But this wouldn't be necessary any more (if the base is armed).

Thanks for clarifying but I'm shocked that something so lazy was in GC2.  Didn't you have to research it first: 'remote upgrade' or something?  Because a free Leonardo's Workshop for all races (you remember that important 'Wonder' from Sid Meier's Civ2?) is hard to see how that level of automation would fit in with a galactic expansion project.  In fact even that Wonder from Civ2 (which took a long time to build and only one race could do so) only upgraded the core units up to a point, leaving you to manually disband when a better type became available.  That seems more like active military management which I feel an important aspect of empire building - a better system than 'here have a brand new ship right next to your arch-enemy's homeworld' at any rate.  The time it takes to upgrade is no concern if you've already wiped out enemy forces that could reach your fleet while it's upgrading, but maybe it was perfectly balanced risk.  Perhaps more veterans can verify.

Definitely hoping that feature is not in GC3 because it would detract from the reward sense of relatively peacefully conquering a world and being able to build fresh defenses on it while your ageing fleet stands guard until ready to move on with a powerful new one.  But what you are suggesting sounds pretty reasonable for a monetary and/or resource cost or perhaps requiring some kind of friendly installation (e.g. a shipyard) on the planet.  It would be interesting to hear what the other veterans think of it.

Well for that matter, rush building a huge hull battleship in one week is kind of ridiculous as well.  Even if it is from a star port.  And same goes for planetary improvements.

I wouldn't say no to limited ability to rush build, rush upgrade everything.  Perhaps make it a game option for those who don't care.  Perhaps if you have to research a technology and then it still takes multiple weeks.  So paying for a rush build would reduce the time to build a project by half or a third or something depending on tech level.  And upgrades to ships would take a number of weeks based on how much difference there is between types and your tech level.  Ships not in orbit take at least an additional week (so two weeks minimum) to upgrade with distance scaling much more than it does in order to account for the time it takes to rush parts out to them.

I wouldn't be upset if they do it the GC2 way but it does bother me that I can at any time upgrade my ships in 2 or 3 weeks to the last version no matter where they are.  No need to keep ships up to date if your military rating is high enough, you can do it on the fly when you need to.  Right now if I suspect war might be coming, I keep researching so that when it breaks out I can design new ships and upgrade my whole feet right then and there.  With this disabled, when I suspect war is coming, I would have to start upgrading here and now so that I can be ready in 10 weeks if it happens.

Just my thoughts.

Do you need to research starship construction before you can build ships? Do you need to research planet improvements before you build planet improvements? Do you need to research hyperdrive before you go faster than light... no wait the lore says that everyone got those techs one way or another.

We're not playing Civilizations, where basic technologies (like the wheel or electricity) have not been invented yet. We're playing a game where every major player is beyond the end point of a Civilization game. Realistically speaking, many major problems would have been figured out and solved before any game you play in GalCiv 2.

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Also, you expecting a great deal amount of detail for GalCiv 2, a game that was hitting the computing resource limit available at the time. Its not that the devs were lazy, it was they couldn't do much more.

GalCiv 3 might now have the resources to handle all the details you are talking about. However, the question then I ask is, would tracking all those details do anything for us? Its not like the previous games kept and tracked every iota of detail in previous games. Those games didn't suffer, so I don't imagine that GalCiv 3 would suffer without it either.

Another way to look at it would be that all the ships you and the other players build represent the only military and civic based ships. No doubt there are countless civilian ships of all races flying around doing what they do in their daily lives. Just like in real life not every boat, car, and plane is the product of the government. I would even say that once a tech has been researched that technology will be available to these civilians and some then make it available to the player at a cost. Civilian traders are common in many space based games. I think to put all of this on the player would detract from the "grand strategy" and make it more of a "tedious strategy"  

That was actually the "lore" reasoning behind the rush buy and upgrade abilities: you paid civilian contractors to do it for you. You even had four companies to choose from, with differing payment schemes but the same instant build time.

Hello and thanks for not flaming me for commenting about a game I've not even played!  I'm just saying I agree with the OP that if something feels impossible IRL, no matter how advanced the technology, it takes away too much from immersivity which is not necessarily 'fun'  I want to sweat and panic and earn my territory when I go to war.

It's fine for rush-to-buy on a planet because you're paying civilians who are already there to do it, but equipping a smouldering battleship in enemy territory is a ludicrous place for civilians to be.  And it would be very expensive to man every ship with skilled engineers at launch that could jury-rig old tech to be something like new tech on the fly.  Maybe this is reflected by the very expensive cost of refitting in space, but then the jury-rigged tech should not be as efficient and/or reliable as that which could be achieved at a shipyard.

That said, I understand that GC2 was released what, 7 years ago?  And GC3 will be more complex, I think, because Stardock seem to welcome complexity, judging by the variety of items in the ledger of our UI - graphs screen.jpg "Leases", for example, what might they be for?  Excited to find out.  Indeed, I need to be more patient, in general, for alpha release.

Agreed. What I want to point out is that even a capable civilian contractor can't do magic - it takes time to completly refit a big starship. And we're talking about military hardware here, often cutting edge tech for your civ. I don't see many civilian contractors having the newest mass driver weaponry simply on store. That's why I'd say military buildings (like starbases and star ports) can have those tech available.

 

Agreed. What I want to point out is that even a capable civilian contractor can't do magic - it takes time to completely refit a big starship. And we're talking about military hardware here, often cutting edge tech for your civ. I don't see many civilian contractors having the newest mass driver weaponry simply on store. That's why I'd say military buildings (like starbases and star ports) can have those tech available.

I'm going to have to beg to differ on this. A lot of high-end government tech comes from civilian companies under contract. Also there's logistics to take into account. If your big shiny battle-ship is sitting next to an enemy homeworld then you can guarantee there are support ships aplenty close at hand, ammo haulers, fuel tenders, ect. Given enough money, time, and logistical support anything can be done anywhere. That being said, I agree it should be hugely cost/time inefficient to prevent "cheese" but I don't think it should be limited to just bases and planets.

It can take an extreme amount of time to upgrade in GalCiv2 if you're far away from a planet or starbase.

I don't remember if the max is 133 or 233 weeks, but either way, it makes upgrading impractical.  Your ship will be at 1 hp the whole time.  If your ship is outside of its movement range, you can run into this. 

There are several ways you can find your ship outside of its movement range.  I come across it most often when I buy a ship from an AI.  You can also lose range by losing a key starbase or planet.  

It makes sense to me that distance affects the ability to upgrade.  It would take time for support to reach them.  Your inflight repair abilities are also said to be affected by distance, but I don't know how severely. 

I don't have any particular problem with the upgrade system, so long as the costs are appropriate. If I've been hoarding BC for a while and not spending, why shouldn't I be allowed to open the vault and hire an army of contractors to get the upgrades done? If my ships are relatively near support, it wouldn't take that much longer.

It's one of the ways they can make stockpiling BC interesting, rather than always spending it ASAP. I just want them to avoid what happens late game in Endless Space - where production & dust scale so far out of control that you can refit entire fleets every turn because you have so much money. (Also you can rush build an entire new fleet every turn, on top of the one your production systems can already build every turn...)

 

You don't ever have to deal with more than 3 week upgrade times in GC2.  All you need is at least two ships of a type.  One close and the other can be anywhere on the map.  When you upgrade the first click on "upgrade all ships of this type" and it caps the upgrade time to about 3 weeks.  If you can afford it, it is almost always better to upgrade all ships of a kind even if they are in enemy territory.  I almost never even lose one to enemy action during that time, though you still need to be at least a little careful.

I use the "upgrade all ships" option whenever I can afford it, but I never saw it cap the upgrade time for my far-off ships. Some of my more distant ships take 5 weeks or more to upgrade. It never made a difference where the ship I issue the upgrade order from is.

 

in gc 2 you had the option when fast buying/upgrading to pay several different ways

option 1) pay in full

options 2-3) pay part and then pay X credits per tern for Y turns

option 4) i believe was just X credits per tern for Y turns

so the leases i believe were how many credits you were paying per turn for past rush's and when they would expire

 

Which ship you choose doesn't matter.  But when upgrading individually, I sometimes see 5 or more weeks to upgrade.  When I upgrade them all, I have never seen more then 3 weeks in the time estimate.  I suppose it was possible I was just lucky when I click upgrade all, but I play on immense maps and have ships all over the place and I haven't had a long wait for upgraded ships that way yet.

Put me in the camp that disliked the ability to upgrade ships while out in the middle of nowhere.  It feels cheesy.  The fact that you could convert a colony hull into a warship hull was even stranger.

Ships should have to visit a starbase (equipped with a refit module) or a planet with a starbase construction facility.  In addition, there needs to be limits on how many ships you can upgrade per turn at those facilities.  For base-line starbases, this should be about 1/10th of what you can do at a planet in one turn.

This opens up the possibility for focusing a particular starbase on "upgrade" where you build it out with multiple ship bays plus ship bays big enough to handle huge hulls.  So now you have an upgrade path to pursue for your starbase.

Planets could be handled the same way, where you upgrade your ship construction facility to handle large hulls and increase conversion/upgrade speed.

I've just tested this in my game, to make sure, and it doesn't work. I sent one my ships deep into enemy space, until the upgrade time was 5 weeks. Then I used the "Upgrade all" option on one of my ships near my planets. The upgrade time for my far-off ship is still 5 weeks.

Well if you tested it then that settles it.  I was just lucky or perhaps didn't notice the few times it wasn't the case.

The current model for upgrading might be an exercise in stupidity, but it's an efficient exercise in stupidity.