Logistics and Super Fleets

from Stardock Forums

So why don't you have fleet combat in GalCiv?

Because we don't want fleets to be a tactical advantage.

Why not?

Because then the game would end up where you had a handful of "Super fleets" ala MOO or HOMM that go around the game.

Why would that be bad?

Because GalCiv's map is free form. It's not a bunch of jump points or very distinct paths. Ships can move anywhere. A handful of super fleets would take away a lot of the strategy of the game because GalCiv is ultimately about clashes of civilizations, not tactical combat. It's about who is building the superior civilization. Therefore we want our game to be won by the people who can create the strongest economies, the most powerufl industries, the most advanced technologies. Not the guy who has managed to out tactically fight. 

Rommel was a great tactician but the allies were the ones with such immense logistical superiority that they had enoguh spare room to send over chocolate bars and cake across the ocean.

So then what?

The thing is, I would like to see eventually, maybe not in GalCiv 1 but in some future sequel some level of tactical combat and most definitely ship design.  We need a way for a civilization to express its technological and industrial superiority in more specific, meaningful ways than just "bigger, better" ships.

And we don't even go into logistics which, IMO, is a failing of GalCiv. We should have found a way for logistics.

But I think I've come up with a way to have logistics:

The fleets.

What if to sovle the "super fleet" problem we put a limit on the # of ships in a fleet? And that this limit is based on a civilization's "logistics" capability?

And in fact, a ship would use up X logistic points. So a battleship might use up 3 logistic points whereas a fighter might only use 1.

So at the start, you might have a logistics capability of say 10 points. As you reserached new technologies, you would improve that logistics capability so that you could have larger and larger fleets of more and more powerful ships.

Best of all, logistics would be a totally different tech path so you would have to go out of your way to improve this area. This would open up other kinds of strategies. Lots of wimpier ships in a fleet or a few big capital ships on their own?

Throw in ship design where youc an make trade offs to try to get the logistics requirements of the ship down and you have a pretty solid game mechanic.

Add to that have the # of starbases you can support in the game based also on this logistics ability and then that ability rises up thereith your economy ability and industrial ability and morale ability and culture ability.

Once you do this, you can have ship design and manageable fleet combat without making tactics overwhelm the game. The fleet combat merely becomes an expression of your civilization's strength and your overall strategic ability.

The game play translation is that the end game portion does'nt involve tons of units flying around. The number of distinct units running around in the game remains relatively constant with those units being merely combined as your abilities increase later in the game.

What do you think? 

8,477 views 62 replies
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Sounds like a really good idea for Galciv 2!
The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
It could work... How would a 'fleet' be defined? As ships in a single map square? It would be a bit annoying not to be able to group lots of ships together for simple convenience (rather than for a tactical bonus).

Personally, I'd like combat to be a bit more tactical. Let's see some 'nebula ambush bonuses' and area-affect attacks that damage multiple ships.

PS On a related topic, hurry up and fix the fleet defence bonus bug! At least with the other abusable bugs, like the buy-anything-for-half-price bug, I can make a conscious choice not to use them.

~SDC~
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Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Awesome idea, I like researching and I like fleets so it works for me.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
i like the idea, but im guessing this would be for GalCiv 2. im guessing it would be way too much work to make a patch to add this into this version of galciv.

what would be neat is to give preferences to the AIs -some would prefer to build fleets of lots of small weak ships, while some AIs would prefer smaller fleets of big, strong ships.

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
i especially like the star trek-esque "fleet hiding in the nebula" idea.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
I think it can work. I would suggest that the bonuses be kept small to moderate because it is highly likely that humans would be able to take greater advantage of this bonus than the AI. For one, we are currently more economical with our starbases than the AI and thus would have more logistics points to form bigger fleets.

It could work... How would a 'fleet' be defined? As ships in a single map square? It would be a bit annoying not to be able to group lots of ships together for simple convenience (rather than for a tactical bonus).
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We could have Civ's Army equivalent. Forming "tactical bonus" fleets would require creating a separate unit. In that way, we could still fleet ships for movement normally.

PS On a related topic, hurry up and fix the fleet defence bonus bug! At least with the other abusable bugs, like the buy-anything-for-half-price bug, I can make a conscious choice not to use them.
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It's fixed already in the current beta build, Matthew. So the fix would be in the Xpack.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Interesting. Coming up with a fair set of logistics costs probably wouldn't be easy, but it'd be an interesting approach.

What happens if you have one or more fleets at the limit, and then you lose something which causes your limit to go down? Automatic instantaneous fleet shattering? A penalty until the fleet's broken up by the player?
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
What happens if you have one or more fleets at the limit, and then you lose something which causes your limit to go down? Automatic instantaneous fleet shattering?
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Ooooh, the thought of doing this to those cocky Altarians...where's EBZ when you need him?

Frogboy, nice idea - and to take it a step further, how about having the "ultimate" technologies in the Logistics track (say the last 3 or 4) be available ONLY to neutral empires (alignment in the 35-65 range)? Neutrals tend to get the short end of the deal in GalCiv because of good- and evil-specific techs, but if there's one thing that they're historically good at, it's making the most of limited resources with good planning (the Swiss, etc).
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
Good idea, but I was kind of hoping to see some changes in combat abilities.
For instance, instead of just click and attack once, you could attack twice or even three times at the same turn with the same ship(this should require certain tech and ship type), or you could launch missiles or even small star fighters from carriers(ofcourse this should be very short range). Or even you could add some kind of massive main gun that requires some hp of the ship but boosts attack power. There are lots of things you could add to ship battle abilities.

I'm pretty much sure you thought about the things I said above, but to me if fleets can't really do anything with formations or don't do battle in real time sequence, then the fleet idea is just a bunch of ships stacked together(at least that's what it is now).

I might be asking big changes in the game, but you know we humans demand more and more satisfaction no matter what you do. ;p
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
how about a specific military strategy (feined retreat, blitzkreig, maginot line, cavalry (mobile), infantry (shield wall), artillary (long range), that could be selected and researched which defines the tactical advantages of the players ships. this would see the ships upgraded over time (new icons!), with the ship specific tech from the tech tree enhancing the strategy in an individual way. hang on am i in the right thread?

:)
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
Sounds like we're discussing the limiting starbases idea again :)

I'm a big fan of logistics being important so long as they're simple and don't start adding lots of micromanagement. An early suggestion in beta was to link logistics to the shipyards with each shipyard giving 1 point, and each shipyard enhancement giving another point. Would need to be balanced against planet frequency.

Other great reasons for adding logistics are that starbases suddenly become more strategic decisions, and resources may not all be grabbed within the first few turns.

Paul.

~SDC~
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top
I would prefer logistics points to be a function of the general economy and logistics techs rather than linked to specific social improvements. Else we may see shipyards sprouting all over crappy planets just to get superfleets which would be disbanded once the job is done.
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
I think the concept of fleet and logistic points is a good one - and is consistent with the concept of the game.

It would be a nice addition, particularly in defending planets. I think this would actually make the game more difficult, because while the AI is not good at managing starbases or attacking, it does often protect planets with a number of ships. This would correct the problem where a player's single frigate or capital ship will cut through a stack of AI ships to clear the way for a transport.

My maintenance is often lower than the AIs, because I only ever have one ship on a system to defend it (with 4 maxed military star bases and tech lead on a medium map - this can be a corvette late in the game against AI dreads - but that is symptomatic of the AI starbase problem.)

-Cypher

~SDC~
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
I like logistics for starbases, but really don't like the idea of fleets for tactical combat. What does the limit mean? You will have an advantage if you have e set of ships together, but because of logistics, only one fleet acts effectively, while another one at the other end of the galaxy doesn't. I would hate it. Call it a number of generals rather then logistics. Make these generals able to command a set of ships, and have techs to train generals in academies.
Whatever the rationale, I don't like tactical combat at all.

As for ship design, the only point in ship design is the special abilities weapons. It doesn't require tactical combat, but if you give some ships special abilities, they could have the option of using them when going into a fight. Like 'do you want to use the black hole generator tactics?' which would provide an advantage against other tactics and other kinds of ships. If ship design is just to move attack/defense/hit poitns around, it's not very interesting.
Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top
If one wanted somewhat more flexibility than identical limits in each fleet, perhaps one could introduce C3 variants of each ship. Logistics / Command technology paired with, for instance, Battleship technology would allow a substantially more expensive but no-more-formidable-than-usual C3 Battleship. C3 ships might have a base command rating of, say, 1 given the earliest logistics tech; then, pair this with a facility ("Starship Academy") that locally boosts this ability (e.g. ten-fold). Then, for every 10 command points (given a ten-fold factor) in that fleet, that fleet can be that much larger without penalties, perhaps in a non-linear fashion. Alternately, one could add dependencies so that you needed a Starship Academy to even build a C3 ship there (which would be a much cleaner way), but that might be harder to do than just piggy-backing on the current planet/ship ability system. Lose your C3 ship? Your fleet, if too large, becomes disorganized. *shrug* It'd provide an in-game explanation.
Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
I like the previous posters idea of command ships, but it can be taken one or two steps further. The concept of (for lack of a better term) wings can be included, with less costly than the C3 ships but more costly than normal ships can be produced to lead a wing. Wings could just be normal fleet procedure, so you wouldn't need the specal leader, but they would again raise the logistics limit. Also an logistics experience factore for only the leading ships that can accumulate by battle or sitting at the academy. It would allow some stratagy, you could send out small fleets to delay the enemy while your large fleet stays back gearing up for war.

To go back to WWII much like the allies did before Normandy when they sat there troops in England to train and prepare.

Sorry for getting a little long winded.

Back to the orginal point about fleets, I think it would work out well if different ships carried different weapons, or had different rankings in each weapon type. So your battleship might have 9 in missles to take out other cap ships but 1 in point defence so it in turn can be taken out by missles. It would end up like a larger game of rock paper sissors.

That's enough for now

-Mo
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
hang on, wasn't command points a MOO2 thing?
Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top
Evil Steve -- MOO2 did have a command points system, which was used to provide a soft limit on the total ships (regardless of whether or not they were in fleets; oh, and bigger ships again cost more). T'was a soft limit because you could go over, but it cost you credits.
Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top
logistics would be a good thing for ships, it could add a layer of effectiveness to the combined use of arms.

One thing that could be added though is the idea that the further you get from your nearest planet or starbase, the more logistic points are required to maintain your fleet. This would put a soft range limit on how far fleets could go and would seriously impede endgame super-fleet tactics.

If you tied the logistic maintenance to nearest starbases they couldn't just take the planet, set up shop and extend their range. They would have to build infrastructure and have constructors to set up a starbase with a shipyard or something....which could be focused on by the enemy and attacked.

It would throw some interesting trade-offs in the sense that I could have a fleet of smaller ships that could have a greater range because they logistically cost less to maintain, where a fleet of larger ships would only be able to go half as far but be much more powerful.

As your tech went up, you could do a MOO1 thing where as you got better ship technologies the costs of the logistics on the older ships goes down a little.

Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top
Okay here's my 2 cents:

Logistic points are a good thing, but not for the same purpose that Moo used command points.

GalCiv already has a method for putting a soft limit on number of ships which is simple, effective, and realistic: First you pay to build ships, then you pay to maintain them. There is (I believe) even a moral penalty for certain political parties if you military buget gets too large. Tweek these controls already in place rather than add a new one. Conceptually, I don't think logisic points have anything to do with your ablity to have a large militray fleet.

The only exception to this would be in maintaining a fleet far from a home sector. A ship should cost more to maintain the further from home that it is. (As should non-economic starbases) Logistic points could then lower the maintanence cost for these far-away ships.

However, logistic points would make a difference in how effective ships would be in battle when organized into fleets, and this is where they should be applied. If my fleet has 0 logistic points and a million "Death Quasar" class ships it would be totally inneffecive in battle, probably blasting each other into sub-atomic quarks thorugh friendly-fire. Wheras a smaller fleet with lots of logistics points would get some type of attack/defense bonus similiar to what experience levels do for ships now.

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Reply #23 from Stardock Forums Top
The thing is, I would like to see eventually, maybe not in GalCiv 1 but in some future sequel some level of tactical combat and most definitely ship design. We need a way for a civilization to express its technological and industrial superiority in more specific, meaningful ways than just "bigger, better" ships.
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GalCiv would be enhanced immeasurably. I'd pay more money to see this in GalCiv 1.

mo.
Reply #24 from Stardock Forums Top
Modus Operandi, you az uncloaked...

:)
Reply #25 from Stardock Forums Top
We maybe crazy but I would also pay to have this in GalCiv1. Especially if GalCiv2 is a distant future away. With this and the minor Bug Fixes it would be awesome. Then roll this into GalCiv2 with better graphics and some new features, and then with GalCiv3...