I agree nothing special I like combat the way it is now but if we couold just have the ships stack like I said even in a limited capacity it would make game better in my opinion

Does no one have any creative solutions?

The main argument against this is the idea of 'super fleets'. blah blah blah

That is so easily countered. No fleets to start. Make it a military technology. Have fleets work just like in Civ3. The first fleet tech allows 3 units. A Higher up tech increases this to four. Maybe another one makes it 5. Sprinkle in a tech or two dealing with maybe defense or hitpoint bonuses of fleets and voila, problem solved. Place a limit on the number of fleets a civ can have, possibly based on number of systems or tech related.

If the AI in Civ3 can handle armies, I have no doubt the AI in galciv could do the same for fleets. I do think it could be a nice addition for the bonus pack this summer, and add another aspect to combat without getting too tactical.

A simple solution, without more tactic and less strategy, while considering the fact, that masses can be useful at times:

Make every fight cost at least one HP whatever the stats are.

If you had 120 Star Fighters (and an upkeep of 120 btw.) you could kill one Ranger (at the cost of 120 Star Fighters).

You could even implement this in a sort of fleet, so a group of 120 ships of any class would do 120 damage. Of course you would loose as many ships of this fleets, as the stats are saying.

Wouldn't take much to program, wouldn't break the game, while making stacking at least a little bit useful without having formulas and bonusses and all that, just 1 damage per ship. It would be easy, easy enough for an AI to understand I think.

I agree limited fleets are the way to go in GalCiv. Make it a technology advancement. And only little fast fighters should have there efforts grouped, not capital ships. So if I escort a nice ship with a bunch of little fighters, then they can group there attack together to protect the big ship in the middle. I can't picture the dev. won't even consider this.

Please, don't let this thread die. It is one of the most brilliant feature that could be added to the game.

Hello all.

I'm a new player for this version of GalCiv. Just got it last night, and barely had a chance to get started. I did play the original OS/2 version back in the day, and enjoyed the heck out of it.

Though I admit my n00bness for this version, I would like to make a suggestion about fleet combat handling. This is what I have in mind:

Ships in a fleet fight together. When a fleet is committed to a combat, all of the ships are stuck in.

(Internally, at the beginning of combat, the game lists the attacking fleet's ships top-down in order of attack value, and defending fleet top-down in order of defense value. This will be important in a moment.)

On a fleet's shooting turn, each ship in the fleet takes a shot at an enemy ship. The attacking ships fire in the list order above. The target they pick is the first recieving ship that hasn't been shot at yet. If the attackers outnumber the defenders, they roll back to the top of the defender's list when they reach the bottom. If the defenders outnumber the attackers, then the list position is saved for the start of the next turn.

In this way, superior numbers can serve to soak damage across the fleet, absorbing casualties with weaker ships, and somewhat preserving (though distributing damage to) the tougher ships.

At the start of combat, the best attackers go after the best defenders, trying to take them out quickly. As the combat turns roll around the fleet lists, though, the fight can get all mixed up in subsequent turns. So, big nasty ships can wind up (so to speak) running over little weak ships, and little weak ships can make a wrong dodge and come under the guns of the big guys.


That's the simple model. There are also a couple of options that would lend themselves:

(1) Fighters, as a class, could behave differently in fleets. If there are only fighters or other small craft in a fleet, then they fight normally. If they're in a fleet with big ships, then they act as harassers instead, distracting the enemy while the Big Guns line up for a shot. In this case, they remain a target in the fleet list, but do not fight. Instead, each squadron of fighters raises the minimum attack & defense rolls for the big ships by one. (This doesn't make the big guns bigger, so the raised minimum roll cannot exceed the normal maximum roll, or some game balance appropriate proportion of it. Say, half?) Opposing squadrons of fighters would offset the enemy fighters.

(2) Carriers could be created as a new class. They would be able to fleet in with fighters, and carry them beyond normal range. When out of range, fighters could not unfleet from a carrier. In this case, the carrier would automatically be the last ship in the fleet list (make the fighters go first!).

(3) Events in combat, or special abilities like stealth, could affect the enemy fleet list order. A raider, for example, could take it's first shot at the freighter. Loss of the "flagship" (whatever's at the top of the fleet list) could randomize the rest of the fleet list as the ships fall into disarray.

(4) Wipe-out rule... if a ship in it's shooting turn rolls over the maximum defense value of the receiving ship, and the damage kills the receiving ship, then the overflow damage is passed on to the next ship in the list.


I think this would provide fleets with some realistic utility, spreading around casualties. I don't think it would make uber-fleets, because nobody's maximum ratings go up. It would also give fighters and older craft a reason to be kept around.

I realize this would be a fairly major overhaul, just to get the basic rules in place. But, I think it would be worth it.


Comments?

As a side note here, I think the bonuses given by starbases --for ships as well as econ., influence, etc.-- are an important issue here. If the human player is maxing out these bonuses while the AI isn't, you're going to see great imbalances.

Yes, I've got starbase on the brain.

I do like the idea of carriers but I don't know about using the existing fighters perhaps an research option to provide micro fighters to carriers like star bases would be cool but that is a diff discussion all together.

As for the fleets perhaps small fleet stacks 2-4 ships and combat would be resolved as usual where a stack of 4 corvettes fights a stack of a frigate and 1 fighter. Perhaps just a simple total HP for each side and whichever side hits 0 of course losses and the winning side allocates the damage between the surviving ships. So in the above example lets say the Corvettes total combined HP equals 48 and the frigate and fighter equal 50 (all hypothetical HP numbers as I am at work) and the Corvettes beat the frigate and fighter stack but sustained 32HP of damage. Those 32pts would be distributed to the 4 corvettes equally meaning each Corvette takes 8pts of damage.

This I hope would be easy to do as it should have same principles as 1-1 combat does only this would help smaller ships fight larger ships as 1 Frigate could certainly handle those 4 corvettes on a 1-1 fight as happens now and barely sustain any damage but in this scenario the Frigate and Fighter lose but still severly damage the corvettes (assuming base HP is 12 and each took 8 leaving them each with 4HP left).

Again no fleet attack or defense bonuses just add up straight numbers like in 1-1 fight and fire away and damage is dispersed through the group.

Lot of suggestions here...any response from the devs?

According to Brad; posted earlier in thread -- no fleets ... period. Makes this thread seem futile

The result of having 1 on 1 battles instead of stacked battles is to give the SMALLER force a relative advantage. Take a 10 on 1 fight, in "Reality" the single ship fleet would have to survive 10 shots from the "Stack" to its one shot fired. Thus, the single ship would do very little damage before being destroyed. With a 1 on 1 model, the single ship has an even chance (assuming equal attack / defense scores) of destroying 1 ship before it is destroyed. At the very least, it will significantly damage at least 1 enemy ship. This means combat is essentialy attrition driven. If two fleets meet, one has 5 ships, the other has 10, then the larger fleet can be reasonably sure that it will come out of the battle with 5 dead ships and 5 totaly undamaged ships. In a "Realistic" system, the 5 ship fleet would be destroyed and the 10 ship fleet could expect about 2 destroyed ships and 1 damaged ship. Or if damage is spread out, then 5 heavily damaged ships or 10 lightly damaged ships.

So whats my point? Well, combat works just fine that way it is IF the intent is to give the smaller fleet in an engagement a boost. It does effectively eliminate the "Mega Stack" or "Empire State" formation so common in games which model fleet combat more realisticaly. I mean, concentration of force is a well known axiom of war right? Actualy, the "Mega Stack" is the result of a failure to model in command and control limits in a fleet based game. To reduce the effectiveness of the Mega Stack, the combat model needs to PENALIZE stack formations to some degree NOT give bonuses for stack formations as some people think are "Realistic".

Here is a model that might work.
Give each ship a "command rating". The ship with the highest command rating is the fleets flagship. A fleet can attack with as many ships as its command rating will allow.

Example: a fleet of 10 ships consisting of 1 Battlship with a command rating of 4 and 9 fighters with a rating of 1. The fleet could attack with 4 ships. Any 4 ships but its likely that the Battlship would be one of them since it has a high attack value. Each attack should be directed at a different ship in the opposing fleet. If there are less than 4 ships in the enemy fleet then attacks are divied up as evenly as possible. This system would lend a bit of realistic "Fleet" based combat without introducing the "Mega Stack" into the game. Its still advantageous to field fleets instead of single ships but you will have many fleets instead of one mega fleet.

Another possible option is to allow ships that exceed the command rating of the flagship to attack but at a much degraded value. Thats a bit more complicated to manage though.

This system would also allow the introduction of "Carrier" type ships. They would not be TRUE carriers in the sence of carrying fighters but rather command ships that have a low defense value, low attack value and high command value. The command value could be limited to "Fighters" thus a valid fleet might be 1 "Carrier" with attending "Fighters". The fighters would be the primary attack piece and could attack with the carriers command rating.

Rob

whsv, though you have some interesting ideas, I think it overcomplicates things and the AI wouldnt be able to take advantage of such features. And the way you explained how fleet combat would work is similar to how armies in Civ3 work.

Wrath_of_Dog, yeah Brad did say that, but his only arguement was 'super-fleets' and as I pointed out, that argument is moot with proper implementation. I would hope he would keep an open mind about most ideas, but then again he is an android, so yah never know what that positronic brain is thinkin!

Rob the thing is that 2-4 ships in a fleet max does not equal a Uber Fleet thus negating one of the worries gamers and designers have. 2nd I think we have to think of solutions that will require little to no code changing and I think with the model I proposed (which incorporated ideas from other posters as well) would work and not be too complicated to code or for the AI to utilize. Need some more discussion on this though

Devs...? Any comments? I think it's a very valid thread that should be taken into consideration.

I love the game but this feature would make it more natural to the game nature. It would give us ability for tactics.

Two approaches not yet really mentioned:

Add a "Fleet Disadvantage" such as friendly fire along with limited stacking and a minimal fleet advantage to discourage superfleets.

Add a typical 4X weapon that causes x units of damage to all ships in the stack. That was how the Bulrathi dealt with the Alkari. Suddenly 400 gnats gone in one shot.

I don't get why this thread is so long... you already got your answer, it isn't going to happen! This game isn't about fleets, never was, never will be. Give it up. And it's not like the dev's arn't listening to you, it's just that Brad has a vision of what he wants this game to be and fleets arn't a part of that. If you want a realistic fleet system you go and develop Galactic Fleets and play that.

~SDC~

I realize that it would add complexity to the program, and to the human interface. I think it would be nice to have fleets that move and fight together, but it's lack is certainly not detracting from the core of the game.

This is only speculation about how the AI processes rules, but forming a mixed-type, mixed-quality fleet shouldn't be terribly difficult, if the AI knows how to approach and form-with.

Movement and target prioritization would be the same as always (dependent on the lead ship in a fleet). Added would be rules that make a ship approach and form-with other same-faction ships.

The ruleset would be something like:
For Fighters:
* Find a nearby SF world with fewer than X ships in orbit and orbit it.
* Find a nearby SF (Same Faction) fleet with no fighters and join it.
* Find a nearby SF fleet with fighters and join it.
* Go fight.

For various Transport vessels:
* Find the lowest-rated nearby ship or fighter not in orbit; form-with it; become fleet leader.
* When accumulated one or two escort craft, go do transport stuff.

For other ships:
* If there is a higher-rated ship around, approach and form-with.
* If there are no higher-rated ships around, go fight.


This would cause fighters to join up with various other ships as escorts. Older ships would join up with new, higher-rated ships to go out and soak casualties. And transports would gather escorts.

Again, this is all speculation on how easy or difficult it is to add AI rules.

I must say that I'm in the group that says "dismiss 'realism' to some degree". Are there any chess players in here? How realistic is chess? Not very. How strategic is chess? Incredibly. Anytime I hear people talk about "realism" in a science fiction oriented environment, I have to chuckle. Who here can prove that in a battle of 10 Dreadnought STARSHIPS vs. 1 Dreadnought STARSHIP, the 1 couldn't take out 1 of the 10 every time? I suppose you could refer to science fiction movies, or a TV series. All you have is "implied realism" or "perceptional realism". Realism as you think it should be in a situation that does not even remotely exist.

Frogboy and company have made an incredible rich STRATEGY GAME in which they are attempting to make the computer play by the same rules. Personally, I could hardly ask for much more. As long as the rules, strategies, and tactics apply evenly to each side, I can live with that and enjoy it.

~SDC~

As for having the answer... That's fine! I realize this is a wouldn't-it-be-cool-if thread, not a dump-new-reqs-on-the-devs thread.

It sparks discussion of some fine ideas, and that's plenty for me.

(It would-be-cool-if, though...)

Even with the pronouncement of "no stacks", any way of limiting the stacks to like .. of the value of the best ship in the fleet... :notsure:

Yes Im new at this and its my first post. (love the game BTW)