I think these probosals are WAY to complicated. I believe that if carriers are to be implimented, they should be simply, because Stardock will not spend a lot of time to develop carriers. If they do put in carriers, they will do so reluctantly.

What if fighters were a fourth weapon system as opposed to a separately designed ship? e carrier back to a friendly planet to recruit new pilots and get new fighters. These fighter squadrons, when deployed, would be handled just like a separate ship in the fleet during combat, and would have to be destroyed like any other ship. In the event a squadron survived the loss of a carrier ship, they'd be lost at the end of the battle, even if they "won". This way, you balance their relative strength compared to beams, drivers, and missiles with their relative fragility and difficulty in reparation.

That's a pretty cool idea. You would need to balance it so that a carrier would be at a disadvantage to a regular 'ship-killer' at the same tech level, and that it would only shine as part of a fleet where it has escorts to protect it.

How to implement fighters into the tech tree is a different question, which has three options that I can see.

1. Have only one tech for fighters, fighters have a static defense and attack rating.

--This won't work. Balance will be skewed towards carriers in early game and away from carriers late game.

2. Have an entire section of the tech tree dedicated to fighters.

--Better (at least it removes some balance issues), but too complex, too much effort.

3. Have one tech, and dynamically change stats of your fighters based on current best weapon and defense techs.

--The middle ground. This is the way MOO2 did it, and it worked pretty good. There is a balance issue though. If fighters always use the latest tech, the longevity of your carriers will be greater than that of your "ship-killers". A way to somewhat rectify this imbalance would be to have anti fighter tech (maybe the same as point defense/missile defense tech?) so that fighters get less lethal late game.

The other question about fighters is, if it were to be implemented, how many fighter 'types' should there be? MOO2 had heavy fighters, interceptors, and bombers which worked pretty well for it, but in Galciv perhaps it would be best to limit complexity and only have one type. With only one type though, you would need to make sure that fighters prioritized other enemy fighters over battleships, or the entire aspect of fighters would be pretty boring with fighters becoming another generic weapon, people want to see *dogfights*

In any case, it's (IMHO) pretty closed-minded of the devs to decide against adding fighters because of the added complexity. Just like anything else, whether the addition of fighters is going to improve or degrade gameplay has everything to do with implementation little to do with principle. There are ways that the devs could add carriers/fighters without breaking the game *if* they implement the idea properly. And hey, since carriers are such a sci-fi staple (and could add greatly to the atmosphere of the game) it can't hurt to try.

I think the same can be said for orbital bombardment. So you don't want the game to turn into a genocide race, that's fine. But there are people out there who do like the option. Not having orbital bombardment in seems rather silly, and as long as you add sufficient disadvantages to genocidal behavior you can still limit use of the tactic. For example, complete annihilation of an entire planet could be frowned upon diplomatically, turning other races against you (even evil races would fear that you could do the same for there planets) in this way, you limit genocidal behavior to the place that it should have... the late game where you're way more powerful than anyone else and don't want to go through the trouble of invading individual planets.

On a similar note, why are troop transports usually destroyed after an invasion? Even if there aren't enough troops left to restock it you could still launch the transport with no troops and load it up elsewhere, no?

---The benifit would be that small ships will not need life support and engines, and have more room for weapons. ---

i personally don't put life support on and usually limit engines to two for more weapons


the hangers would only be wielded to the side of the ships thus not subtracting from the hps

General pants,
I searched your name and found comprehensive(?) carrier proposal
Not too interesting or understandable.
And there was too much critisism and most of it totally rubishing your idea.

And plus there is no hope for the clarification of your posts. Too messy
and its actually an effort to stay awake while reading it.

And so much text it seems as if you spent the entire night on this

So many people want a carrier in this game. It was the same way in Stars!, back in its day. There was that die-hard group that thought it could not survive without carriers. The argument made was that it provided a strategic base for those one and two man "fighters" that are created during the early game.

But in my little private world where I go during game play, there are no little one-man "fighters". Early "tiny" hulls, in my mind, are at least as large or larger than today's space shuttle. Tiny hull ships in GalCiv should not be called "fighters" at all. To me, they are more analagous to being

Another way of looking at things, is that we start off on the low-end of the technology tree and work our way up, progressing to larger and better hulls in our "navy" as we learn new technologies, much the same way that Earth-bound navies developed. So we would then look at "tiny" hulls in-game as being analogous to the ancient hulls, anyone who has played Civilizations knows the progression as well as I do.

Which brings up a point in my mind, in that ancient mariners started out first as explorers, then as traders and merchants, and then warships were developed to initially attack the merchant ships. The other side then developed warships to protect their merchant ships from being attacked, or they simply armed the merchant traders. Having to "develop" trade ships seems to be a much more artificial construct in this game than the lack of carriers.

Anyway, getting back to my original thought (assuming I ever have one, that is), today's fighters and carriers are a very recent development (I know, Captain Obvious has struck again). Any development of a ship that carries the initial "tiny" hulls in this game is as silly a notion as putting Greek triemes on the USS Ronald Reagan, in my opinion.

Then, there is the fact that airpower, as developed for warfare here on Earth, was a great-leap in destructive potential due to the fact that the airplane moved through a different medium (air) and gave the great advantage of always possessing the "high ground". The carrier was developed as a new type of ship to take advantage of this new potential. The plane possessed characteristics that the ship was totally unable to possess, the ability to fly through the air, move much faster, and take advantage of the "third dimension". Ship to ship combat before the advent of airpower was pretty much restricted to a two-dimensional arena (don't bring in the submarine either, that's a different fight altogether). I do not see a corresponding change in technology or battle tactics that would result in the development of a carrier in GalCiv. I just don't. At least not a carrier that has the capability of carrying two dozen or so tiny and/or small hull ships.

IF there were the development of the carrier in GalCiv, it would be along the lines (in my feeble mind) of the way carriers and aircraft for carriers were developed for Hearts of Iron II, where a new unit is created whose sole purpose is to be carried by the carrier. Those of you who have never played HOI are at a disadvantage in following my argument at this point. Sorry. Basically, each "unit" represents a certain number of craft that are based solely on the carrier. This unit then carries out its missions similar to other aircraft (in HOI). So, in this case, each "unit", let's call it a carrier squadron for the sake of argument, would have pretty much the same sort of stats given to individual ships in the game. A carrier squadron would have zero range, so it could only travel around using a carrier hull for movement. In fact, in GalCiv, carrier squadrons could only be represented in two areas of the game, in-orbit around a planet and in the combat video during combat.

So, as you can probably see, the way I envision carriers and their squadrons being developed in GalCiv, they would not really be nearly as important in combat as carriers and air squadrons have been in naval combat here on Earth. They would most likely be developed later in the game, at some point after large hulls. Early carrier squadrons would have stats similar to a comparable tiny hull ship at the time, and they would progressively grow stronger as technology is researched.

But again, let me state that this would not appreciably improve the playability of this game for me. I personally need a better argument for carriers in GalCiv other than "That would be kewl, dude!".

Instead of railing over the lack of carriers, I would prefer to see land combat modeling changed. There should be ground combat units (separate from the general population) that actually conduct land-based battles for control of planets. I'm not necessarily promoting tactical combat here either, nor should there necessarily be "contested" planets, although with a weekly turn-based system there could easily be. I am not happy with "combat as xenocide" as the game currently resolves it. Instead, players should build land combat units that are used in offensive and defensive operations on planets, and one of the costs of building these units would be a "pop cost". Keep it simple. One legion of combat soldiers (and their support units) would have a pop cost of 1b tax-paying citizens, plus whatever other costs that would be required.

Suffice it to say that any game could be "improved" upon, but GalCivII as it stands today strikes a good balance. It provides a good layer of strategic abstraction that makes the game playable for a large number of people. Enough of all this rambling! I have too much free time today.

I have a few things to say on this. First of all is that carriers in the sci-fi universe were created to move those ships that did not have the ability to move vast distances in a short amount of time. Which the storyline of galciv II's back story eliminates the uses of carriers as all hull sizes are available to use the hyper drive. The use of carriers in-game is useless as military usage as a carriers main role is acutally refueling and rearming fighters plus transport. I am not aginst carriers but I am not for them either, and for those who absoulotely want carriers the way I see it is to treat the carrier module as a weapons tech. I played a game hat made use of fighters and implemented the use of fighters as a weapons tech instead of having them be seperated as individual ships. you could treat the carrier module as a weapons tech as drone fighters since the star bases makes use of drone fighters as upgrade. so you will have use of a fourth weapons tech and corresonding defense as anti drone fighter guns or something. so with increase of tech the increase in damage for the drone fighters. just a useless idea I guess but seeing most other ways would be to much work for the gamers and devs gamers for micro managing and devs for coding it. the terrible part is that I don't know how to program or mod even though I really want to learn that but trying to get their. but their is a slotution add them as weapons tech with corresponding defence. and treat a carrier module as a weapon like the mass driver missile or energy weapons.

I am of similar opinion of GoblinCookie:

Using a carrier to extend the effective range and deployment speed of Fighters. However, I think it should be limited to Huge hulls only would require a "Carrier Module" with a high cost and space requirements, and only can be "carried". How I see it working, is that Tiny Hull ships that are in a Fleet with a carrier share its Speed and Range. A further caveat could be that hyperspace engines and life support modules are unavailable to Tiny Hulls.

There are a lot of downsides to this though: By the time you get to Huge Hulls, your weapon tech is probably pretty far along, thus it leaves the gate open for way over powered Tiny Hulls bristling with weapons and defenses.

Perhaps a better method is again, Huge Hulls only plus a Carrier Module (of a weapon class) that carries three "drones" per module that have only one weapon minimal hitpoints(say of whatever your latest weapon tech is). These drones would only be usable in combat, and would not be able to travel independently on the Galactic map.

To be honest though. Im just as fine without carriers, and can only imagine the amount of AI code that would have to be tweaked and balanced to use a Carrier method effectively.

Just my 2 credits, we now return to your regularily scheduled program.

Dark Avatar II looks really good and I like a lot of the advancements made.

however...PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, in the true sequel or the next expansion..add Space Carriers as capital ships to carry/protect/repair smaller fighters!

In GalCiv II there was not much point in using fighters in most modes of the game. I know some people like to argue this, but you're wrong . Most players of the game quickly discover it's extremely difficult/borderline pointless trying to run an effective military based around smaller ships, particularly on the advanced difficulties...which is frustrating because starfighters are one of the cooler aspects of the whole space sci-fi genre. They should be a very viable military strategy in what is the best galactic conquest space sci-fi game out there!

Even with Capital ships costing more logistics and taking longer to build in Dark Avatar, it's still basically going to come down to who can build the largest fleet of biggest ships the fastest.

By adding Space Carriers, you could make it so that fleets made primarily of Space Carriers would be able to overwhelm EQUAL logistic fleets made primarily of large capital ships. It would become a viable strategy for countering capital-ship-stacking superiority fleets.

For example: a fleet of four large Space Carriers would have a tactical edge over an equal logistics fleet of four large battleships by having a logistical bonus. How? By making the fighters housed on the carriers NOT count towards the logistics total of the fleet! Then you just carefully design how good the logistics bonus would be by limiting the number of fighters each carrier can carry (which when designing your ship is based on the number of "hangar" modules the carrier has). The number of fighters then presents a tactical edge based on the NUMBER of small targets presented to the small number of larger, more powerful capital ships.

In turn, fleets made primarily of Space Carriers would be vulnerable to fleets with more balanced arrays of ships that are better able to deal with large numbers of small fighters. Ie the same fleet of four large space carriers that has a good tactical bonus over the fleet of four large battleships due to overwhelming number of fighters presented, would fall to a fleet of two large battleships and five medium corvettes that are better able to deal with the larger number of small targets.

You could toy with other interesting bonuses as well. Carriers could be able to repair fighters faster than normal, making them good choices for deep assaults in enemy territory where they can recover from damage quicker.

There's so much you could do with it and most of it would slide in pretty easily to the current combat system!

Well, I'm a little curious about one thing. If the devs aren't in favor of carriers, why does the word 'fighter' show up every two minutes? In the gameplay examples, there are ships called 'Fighters' designed. In the game, the AI makes 'Heavy Fighters' and 'Fighters'. Sometimes, if the AI asks for assistance, the response is 'We'll send a fighter your way if we can spare it'. In my opinion, fighters need a base to deploy from. IE, a carrier.

I'm pretty sure someone said this, but what about having fighters as a fourth type of weaponry? They would be 'fired' from 'Carrier' modules onboard ships. You could have fighter defense modules as well.

Military starbases could also have a docked fleet of 'fighters' (i.e., star furies, or things like them). If not, they would have a module that added to the Fighter attack and defense points. Planets might do something similar with a docked fleet of fighters. They'd call it a planetary defense squadron and use it as last defense. It would only be built after an Orbital Fleet Manager and a Starport.

Okay. But does that show up in combat? You don't actually see a small fleet of starfighters shooting at nearby ships, do you?

While most of the game's data can be modded very easily, game functions and mechanics cannot as there is no scripting engine in GC2 (so such things need to be hardcoded). As such you can't add a fourth type of attack, though you could replace the existing ones or add branches of them in the tech tree. The appearance of the weapons-fire in the combat viewer depends on the animations used, so that may be possible to make look as suggested.

carriers really aren't much but a fighter bay support module that holds 4 little ships each with 1 hit point doing 1 point of damage is useful. it could add 4 little ships with no hyperdrive capabilities or armor, or shields, or defense period. very expendable at a size cost of 20 units. Think there meaningless? what if you had a fleet with 28 of them each doing 1 point plus bonuses and having 1 hitpoint plus bonuses. They would certainly change the price of poker, so everybody would have to have them i.e. arms race. They wouldn't add to logistics because there a support module and if a player wanted carriers they would just have to design them. to prevent both fleets from killing each other these guys could be prioritized to attack enemy fighter drones first before capital ships. during the full battle sim we could see them as tiny ships buzzing around the enemy inaddition to our fleet.