Which, like MoO the third, will suck terribly and force everyone to move on to a newer, better game . But seriously, this logistics idea will have to be hardcoded, or else people will make mods that give thousands of logistics points, completely defeating the entire purpose of having logistics in the first place.

Just a minor nitpick...

Fleets (and the navies they belong to) are strategic weapons, not really tactical. Therefore, the absence of tactical emphasis in Galciv is a bonus rather than a detriment.

However, there are more factors to consider...

Generally, the bigger fleet always wins, assuming technological and performance parity.

If one side has a new technology/doctrine, or is simply better trained then their odds are greatly enhanced. However, as in the case of Jutland, the British still "won" (the Germans won tactically - ie sunk more ships - but the Brits won strategically - the German fleet never put to sea for the duration of the war), therefore this rule is secondary to the first - that the bigger fleet will always win.

Conclusion: Moo still depicts a semi-accurate portrayal of Strategic combat with their super-fleets. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the only way to win in Moo. It gets boring after awhile.

Galciv has 4 different and equally satisfying methods of winning the game. Throwing in "tactical" combat would be nice, but is it necessary?

In terms of the logistics discussion, don't we already have this in the game? I draw your attention to two concepts: maintenance, and Starbases.

Maintenance, the amount of BCs per turn that need to be spent in order to keep a unit functioning, performs the same role. If your empire doesn't have a sound economy or industrial base to begin with, how can it finance a super-fleet? Ships, weapons, people - they all cost money. If you have the money then you can support the fleets, which means logistics takes place in between and in the background. If you don't have the money, then you don't have the logistics and you can't have the super-fleet, not unless you want to intentionally bankrupt your empire...

Starbases also help deal with logistics, if a starbase is assumed to function the way naval bases do (which is a bit iffy in the game) ie they hold facilities that can repair and resupply a ship, extending its range and combat abilities. Starbases do extend range of ships, and they do support your ships (speed modules, combat modules, trade modules, repair modules). And they happen automatically, freeing you to think of other concerns. In other words, your starbases already contribute to the logistics of your fleet, by extending their range and enhancing their combat ability.

I would humbly submit that if you want to improve the game then rather than add a new idea/function or mechanic, simply enhance or expand the existing elements. Make starbase modules that take into account logistics. Shorten ship ranges, making it more imperative to build starbases (which may mean making them cheaper; perhaps if their function was solely military outpost?). Research tech that can decrease maintenance costs.

Lastly, this is just my opinion.

Cheers,
Stofsk

I'm in agreement with some of Stofsk's points here. There's no need for a separate logistics system; you could simply code in fleet bonuses, but limit fleet size by the total maintenance costs of the ships in it. This limit could then be set to rise in tandem with one or more tech branches (i.e. total fleet maintenance maximum is determined by the number or propulsion and communication techs researched).

Stofsk,

In addition, there could just be a fleet premium to the maintenance costs. This could be an additional percentage of the maintenance costs as a function of how many fleets you have. So if you have 6 ships with the following maintenance costs:

2, 3, 3, 2, 5, 5 = 20 total maintanence cost

Putting them in a fleet would add say 10% making the maintanence cost 22. Make the number of fleets relevant like:

(fleet cost = n * 10%)

Add a second fleet as such increases the cost:

2, 3, 5 = 10
2, 3, 5 = 10
fleet cost = 10 + 10 + 20%(2 * 10%) = 24

Using an idea like this would use existing rules for logistics(economy).

B

Great. I would really like shorter ranges for fast ships and slow constructors needed to extend range. That would make for a different experience. Tech that decreases maintenance costs is a neat idea.

Brad once proposed this very idea. He even called it a logistics tech. Plugging a logisics module into starbases would then reduce the maintenence cost on the starbase and ships in that sector.

Here is a link to Brad's original thoughts on a logistics tech. Contrary to what I said in my last post, it is in a somewhat different context than the current discussion, but still worth checking out.

Check out post #21
http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?id=44383&BID=GF&page=1#56064


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There isn't much room to shorten them. Two ships already have a base range of 0 in galaxies smaller than average.

~SDC~

I would avoid makng it too much like the Army feature in Civ3. It sounded like a good idea, but what actually seemed to happen was that you (rarely) grouped together a bunch of units into a single unit that wasn't very effective because it could only attack once per turn.
Or maybe I was doing it wrong.

~SDC~

one problem with fleets would be that every meeting between equal or close to equal fleets is that the result will end up with 50% or 80% or 100% losses. most human admirals would simply retreat even if winning at some point earlier to avoid catastrophic losses and phyrric victories.

I strongly disagree with having money be the limiting factor on such things.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the Ottoman empire and other islamic states tried to buy their way into being world class powers.

And in fact, we have that today. You can't just buy good doctrine, goog logistics, etc.

Doctrine is a key difference.  The western powers have become monstrously powerful militarily not just becausethey have good weapons systems (the Islamic states in the Ottamen succession certainly have made sure to have the latest greatest in western military technology) but because of the doctrine and logistical train behind them.

You can't just spend money on logistics and doctrine. It's something that a civilization has to make a conscious decision to make a priority over a long period of time.  Germany couldn't invade the UK in the fall of 1940 because they didn't have the logistical ability to do so. they had lots of money and weapons but lacked the logistical ability to put that force together to invade Britain.

Trying to dismiss logistics as something that we can throw soe money at in the form of maintainence trivializes the importance of logistics.

Material wealth is an important advantage in carrying out war for sure. But it is not the only thing.  A civilization has to choose what path they want to follow with that material wealth.

Paying soldiers and maintaining equipement (maintainence) has nothing to do with a civilization's ability to keep them supplied and develop doctrine for forces to work together more effectively.

Hate to rain on your party, BUT..
You need to keep new players in mind.
All these comments are from experinced players.

It is already difficult for a new player to work out how to play this game....lack of a good printed manual.
That should be your top priority for Gal Civ2.

If you make it too complicated for a newby, he, or she, will give up and the game will get a reputation for being impossibly difficult, even if it isn't.

This is another great idea by Brad, and it's clear he's thought alot about it. However I ask the logistics idea should be expanded upon further. But first let me get out of the way my wish list.

1) Ship design, a la space empires III /IV. This would be a huge improvement in the game. You can easily incorporate missiles, new techs, etc. This would then beg the question, do you want tactical combat like MOO or do you want strategic combat like we have now. If the later, then it's hard to see how ship design could help more, unless you want to make fundamental changes to the units, make them of a rock/paper/scissors (or tank/infantry/artillary) rather than a 'bigger and better' unit

2) New functionality for the ships - able to create mines, planets, etc.

3) Fleet combat. But you really have to think, if it's strategic combat then I don't think fleet combat would be that much of an improvement. But if it's tactical combat, then it would, and Brad idea of a number of 'command points' or whatever limiting your fleet size.

Now on logistics, I would think that has to do with the ability to heal/resupply your ships/fleets and the ability to advance into enemy territory. So I think another dimension of the game would be logistic control over a certain area, governed by the amount of ships/planets/starbases you have in a certain sector. I can see issues with CPU usage and AI coding here.

Also I think ships should be damaged in enemy space. This is done in many strategy games as a similation of loss of combat effectiveness.

I'm sure we can refine these ideas further, but this is a start.

Well, I'd say logistics and training are two separate issues.
Training needs a long time to have an effect, but if you cut the training budget, soldiers' performance won't drop right away. On the other hand, logistics has a much more immediate effect - take away their ammo, and they can't fight. Give it back, and they can shoot straight away. The similarity I see between them is they both need infrastructure to set up, and money to maintain.


If you want to have training and doctrine included, you could have a fleet-wide bonus, based on the training facilities you've built across your empire and they money you're pouring into them. These things have a capacity, too - e.g. one training facility can train 10 ship crews (ignoring ship size for now, but it could be used here as well - 10 small ships or 5 big ships, for example), maximum, and costs 10bc to maintain. If you give it 5bs, it can only train crews half as effectively. If you've got 20 ships, you can't just give it 20bcs and give them all magic training - you need to build another facility.

You could have the given bonus as a calculation based on the amount of training done across the empire in the last X years, with preference given to more recent months. E.g. having no training money last year and 100% funding this year is better than having nothing this year and lots last year.

You could do it ship-by-ship instead of fleet-wide if you wanted, but that'd just make things more complicated IMHO.


Logistics could be done a similar way, only with the effects much more immediate. One logistics building supplies X many ships if it's got full funding. If you've got more than X ships, build more logistics centres. The difference is, logistics penalties are based on the immediate funding (or let's say the funding from now till a couple months back, to take account of the time it takes to get there).


Re: costing more for being in enemy territory. You could do this without throwing money at it by increasing the actual demand a ship places on the facilities.

e.g. a logistic or training centre can handle:

12 corvettes OR
6 battle-cruisers OR
3 dreadnoughts

if they're in your heartland,


8 corvettes OR
4 battle-cruisers OR
2 dreadnoughts

if they're on the border,


4 corvettes OR
2 battle-cruisers OR
1 dreadnoughts

if they're stomping around in enemy sectors.


So, if you've got 8 corvettes and one logistic centre, you can keep them on the border and pay 100% funding, or bring them back to your core space and reduce funding to 66% (since it can handle 12 corvettes at home). But if you want to invade someone, you need to build another logistics centre AND increase funding, otherwise you're corvettes cop a penalty for only having 50% logistics.

It'd be easy enough to manage across the empire with a couple extra numbers and one slider somewhere:


---
Required capacity: 300
Existing capacity: 400

0----25----50----75----100

You've got a slider you can move to adjust funding. Add a little red line (which you can't move directly) on 75% to say that's how much they need for maximum effectiveness in this case. If you put your slider below it, the supply drops after a couple months. Above it, it has no effect. There's no point in supplying more than your ships can carry. If you need more capacity built, you see the red line at 100%, with a little red plus sign to remind you to do something about it.

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Frogboy,

I agree with you that money isn't the be-all or end-all when determining a civilisation's ability to protect its interests. I think having logistics in the game would be a GOOD thing.

It just seemed to me that we already had similiar things in it, such as maintenance - which I'll concede I'm wrong about - but also starbases. Why can't the latter play a bigger role in terms of the logistics strength of your empire? This would enhance their strategic usefulness.

If the amount of ships/fleets you can have depends on your starbases, then there's an ADDED reason to lock in on them and take them out, while keeping a squadron behind to protect your own. Obviously, a starbase on a Military resource would be more valuable than any other, but all starbases could be logistics centres for your fleets - perhaps a base number to begin with, then upgraded through the use of Tech or modules (or both)?

Logistics centres on planets would be another neat idea. It would have the added effect of making a particular planet worthy of your attention, as your fleets would probably have to be near it (depending on how the logistics system works).

Just an aside: why not put in tactical doctrines instead of tactical combat? What I mean is, two fleets meet each other in space; instead of blasting each other in a cute animation, you get a pop-up from the Fleet Admiral or whatever, informing you of the coming battle. Because you are (in game terms) the CnC it wouldn't be proper to give orders directly - like give orders to individual ships etc - but you could tell your Fleet Admiral that you want them to attack, retreat, defend, capture, raid, harass, do it slow and cautious, or quick and reckless, etc. It would look like the invasion strategies menu that pops up when you get to assault a planet, you start off with a few tactics to begin with (like the basics ones) and then, through technology/research, you can add more: what about something to do with damage control tech, which offers the slow, cautious approach? Or perhaps the reverse, with dmg control you have less risk if you go in fast. What about overloading your weapons capacity? You get a bonus to the amount of damage you make on the enemy, but you have to pay more BCs for maintenance.

Does anyone like this idea? Am I making sense? It just seems to me that most of the people who post don't want Tac Combat in Galciv a la Moo - this would keep the strategic 'feel' but also offer something new.

Cheers,
Stofsk

I just thought of something else to go with my idea - if this logistic funding replaces some of the current military funding, you could reduce your military maintenance (a little bit) by bringing most of your ships deep inside your borders so they need less supply, and giving them even less money than that, so they're under-supplied. Of course, if you get attacked, you haven't got many ships at the borders, and even if you bring logistics funding back to 100%, it'll take a few months for the penalty to disappear.
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Just a few clarifications:

As a hard core gamer I very much would love to see star bases provide logistic modifiers to nearby ships and fleets.

The problem is, as a game mechanic, it would create what we call "fatigue points" (a game design term). Moving units into a sector without a starbase making you break up your fleet would get quite tedious.

Hence anythign that lets you create a fleet needs to be global.

Regarding fleet battles, I don't think it would be "fun" for most people if they had to pick some sort of textual choice every time they battled. There are lots of battles late game.

The point of excessive organizing and re-organizing is a good point.......it could wind up being really irritating problem after a while.....

how about logistic specific ships/units - a vanguard that sucks BC's, slows down yer fleet etc

I was thinking about logistics as causing an empire-wide combat penalty ship by ship. I didn't really consider different rules for fleet - i.e. a logistics centre can fully support 8 corvettes at the border, it doesn't matter if they're separate or fleeted.

About fleet bonuses - I've got no idea what sort of bonuses would work, just a couple points about grouped ships. You mentioned the irritation of disbanding a large fleet every time you left friendly space and remaking two smaller fleets. I'm gussing by the way you talk about grouped fleets, you want them to fight as one unit, but stronger than the individual units just added together. Does that mean you're considering a rule like "a fleet can have 8 corvettes on the border, or 4 corvettes in hostile space"?

What you could have is a maximum fleet size, which isn't determined by your current resources, but by your doctrine/logistics research. If you haven't got level X doctrine (a bonus that goes up like all the other bonuses we've got), you can't group 6 corvettes into a fleet no matter how many logistics centres you've got. Once you have that tech, you can make fleets that size - IF you have the logistics centres and money to support it.

Also, if you had the same fleet-size limit across the empire, then people could still send their fleets around without disbanding and recreating them - the only difference would be the extra maintenance cost (and possible logistics penalty from lack of logistics centres) if they enter hostile space.

If people want to move 50 ships at once, but their maximum fleet size is 5, they could also make an "admin fleet" with no size limit - that is, a simple mob of ships with no combat bonuses, that attacks and defends one ship at a time. Or a mob of small fleets, so each 5-fleet fights as a single unit and you've got 10 of these units in the mob.

There is room. Reduce range of one ship to 0: The colony ship. This will slow down the expansion phase in a very dramatic way, since you'll have to first build a starbase where you want to settle.
Also, mod techs that give +1 range so they come late.
Plenty of room.


You can have a setting for your ships. A civ-wide settings says all your newly created ships (or ships of a given type) use this strategy, and you can locally override a ship so your USS Hero uses a brazen attack strat where all other survey ships use avoidance strategies.

logistic points shouldn't cap how many ships an empire can have, as has been stated already, the game already has a mechanism for that, money. The American navy doesn't have just one fleet but many fleets it sends around the world. The logistic points should govern how big and how efficent these fleets are. The cap on number of fleets is what your economy can afford.

also

What about land forces? In reality you can just pick up citizens from one planet and drop them somewhere else. Imagine the cost involved in supplying and mantaining an army 10 billon + strong, and people bitch about taxes now!

Exactly.

I said this a few posts back, as others have as well. Even Frogboy's example of WWII Germany illustrated the point: Money makes big armies, logistics make them successful.

How about adding a fleet maintenance or other type bonus to all those shipyard facilities planetside so planets can be used to extend range and as C3 for larger fleets. Also a tech for starbases (ala Star Trek) could be added to give coordination bonuses for fleets. Just a thought.

Actually that doesn't work on maso because the ai receives a +1 range bonus which wrecks the whole thing .

Why not make upkeep costs non linear so the more ships uyou have the more each ship costs to maintain, based on loigistics skills? Like no malus for the Logistics skill first ships, then +X% per ship over the limit:

e.g. with ships of upkeep 10:
Logistics 0 = 1 ship upkeep = 11, 2nd ship costs 12, third 13, etc.
For 10 ships, the upkeep cost is 155.
Logistics = 5. First five ships cost 10, then 11,12,13,14,15. Ten ships now cost only 115 to maintain.
Logistics could also decrease teh 10% factor, so it could be only 5% at logistics=5 for example, meaning the cost of 10 ships would then be only 106-109 (depending on rounding).

This ties logistics to money, but money doesn't allow you to build huge fleets, unless you have the same logistics skills.