How to keep ship spam down.

I doubt we'll have this problem, considering that Frogboy said this:

"I don't plan to have the AI design ships in GalCiv III in the sense it did in GalCiv II. I will give it a bit of a try but the ships have a lot more sophistication to them this time (very easy for a human but much harder for a computer, traveling salesmen problem here). Instead, I am planning to have the AI look at every ship design any player has ever designed and do evaluation on that and pick from that. So the better players get at designing ships, the better the AI will get."

Instead, the AI will spam lots of mediocre to pretty good ships, which serve as nothing more than a speedbump for our ultimate ships of doom. Which are, in turn, used by the AI next game, utterly crushing us. 

In all seriousness, I really hope Frogboy's plan will fix this. It got really annoying sometime.

I think it'd be easy to cut down on ship spam. Just make the game so that it rewards larger more powerful ships and have the AI favor larger more powerful ships, decommissioning or upgrading the ones that get rendered obsolete by technology.

At which point we'll instead have people complaining about how small ships are useless once larger ones are researched.

Really when you think about it, they should be. X-wing's only beat Death Stars in movies!

Fate,:beer:

Isnt it already the case?  In galciv 2, larger hulls always give you more bang for your buck. And obsolete ships do 0 damage to a properly defended ship, making it totally useless, Beside for military ranking in diplomacy.

In my last game the Drengin declared war on me, convinced about their higher military they could give me a whoopass.

One stack of 5 of my highly shielded medium sized ships destroyed 20 full fleet in one turn suffering only like 5 damage.

It's been quite a while, but IIRC small ships were useful if you were outgunned because they couldn't all be destroyed in one hit. I had a lot more success fighting the Dread Lords with smaller ships than with bigger ones until late enough in a game that I had really advanced equipment.

Besides, this time we have carriers and fighters. I'd expect the intention is for those small ships being launched from the big ship to be useful.

And video games.

Yeah I'd have to agree, it does already happen to some extent.

High-quality small ships could work if the logistics were low enough, or as defenders, or if larger hulls had a high enough cost.

I seem to recall the same, I think ive beaten the dread lords with legions of small chips during the campaing, this might be true for when you are extremely outgunned and facing limited number of ships.  ( Like the DL campaing. )

  But in my actuall custom games, it never happens.

Smaller ship could always be used as a desperate measure because of their lower cost and construction time. But in practice I tend to use hull plating, high defense and make use of the upgrade feature as much as possible.  Result My ships are very tough and survive battles and get to very high level. I recall I had a medium hull lev 25 ship with like 160 hp in my last game

It really depends on if there's a need for such units towards the end of the game.

After reading the replies on this thread, I have to wonder how many people want cakewalks at the hardest difficulty setting.

I hope there is a anti-fighter ship role. Bye bye tiny!

DARCA

Tiny hulls could be absolutely devastating with proper starbase support. All weapons, one with a fleet firepower module, and stuck under multiple military starbases. If the enemy is weak enough you can use the speed boost modules to fling a fleet of 30+ tiny hulls at an enemy fleet, or you can wait until they are closer and you can engage them under at least some of the array bonus (and get back into position in one turn). Starbase boosts are on a per-ship basis, so you get 5 or more times as much bonus power from a fleet of tiny hulls as you would for a fleet of huge hulls.

My big concern isn't cakewalk at the highest difficulty, but mop-up in TBS games in general, Stardock games in particular, tends to be very tedious.

Ok cakewalk games is my primary concern in games. Please lets not make the Ai easier, but I am in support of Ai using player ships. I would like to see the computer making better ships.I think that the Ai being dummied down is a good idea.

There is an option to upgrade your ships.

What is the problem with the Ai having lots of ships. A few good huge hull ships can handle a lot of smaller ships.

If you can't fight the Ai what is the point of when the Ai's don't like you. Are you saying that you don't want games where the Ai don't like you enough to go to war against you when the game is really about that.

This post is about ship spamming with an idea of logistics limiting how many total ships you can have like sins of a solar empire.

There's a difference between wanting a cakewalk (no challenge) and wanting a meaningful challenge (aka more than a speedbump).

Speedbumps aren't really a challenge, they're a nuisance.  We want something better than that.

Hence my question. There are a lot of replies here that are complaining about the difficulty of dealing with "ship spam". I see that as one of the challenges (yes, I think of it as a meaningful one) of the game. I am wondering why they don't want the challenge.

Can you be specific on how you want this implemented because I would not want a challenge feature removed without a better one in place. I would definatly would want a challenge over no challenge. I wouldn't want to see this feature removed without something more challenging in place of it. No feature is better than a more challenging game. 

I am currently playing a game with super modified DLs. With nine civs including the thalan, krynn and torian, and others on crippling difficulty. the ship spam wasn't disorienting for me. If I wanted a fleet gone I would just blast it. I haven't seen any number of ships I couldn't keep track of as of yet.

I am actually under the impression that the AI will be to smart. It might very well start calling it sell Skynet and calling it's ships terminators.

and I am tempted to make a AAR or AA on my game as DLs are on nine worlds and have destroyed most of my decked out starbases with nothing more than fleets of two medium hull ships! One space station killed 6 or more before it succumbed to its fate. When I got bigger ships the tode turned. I couldn't have do it without the large/huge hulls.

As for the ultimate tiny/smaly hull ships the DLs made with maximum miniaturization and weapons. They were obliterated by a few mediums. Small/tiny hulls are slow and weak and fragile in comparison to other sizes. and the cheap cost dose not IMO make them good enough to be the pride of my Navy. Just defenders confined to a sector.

DARCA

Sounds like a good challenging game! have fun!

Only if I get my way. Wouldn't it be awesome if down the road in history class to read that after decades of research on artificial intelligence if instead a game designer made an intelligent machine for a better game. Wouldn't that be awesome. Imagine that all sky net was a game not a military defence program.

and I am tempted to make a AAR or AA on my game as DLs are on nine worlds and have destroyed most of my decked out starbases with nothing more than fleets of two medium hull ships! One space station killed 6 or more before it succumbed to its fate. When I got bigger ships the tode turned. I couldn't have do it without the large/huge hulls.


DARCA[/quote]

Ok it sounds like the right strategy you are just taking to long to invade the Dread lords planets.

I have indeed found that in almost any circumstances in GalCiv2, larger hull ships are always preferable to smaller ones.

Not only do they have better HP/cost ratio but also more weapon space/BC.

But that is not all, since attack/defense during combat is calculated on a per ship basis and not on a per fleet basis, larger ships will always be better at negating enemy attacks when using armor and better at overcoming enemy defense when using attack.  Even at a similar technology level, a heavily armored battleship might be able to dispatch a very large amount of small ships, that cost a lot more in total, without even barely suffering any damage. 

So despite being longer to build, they are more cost effective.

I agree Mr. war.

As for the DLs they started the game with me and were on the other side of a gigantic galaxy. (they can go anywhere since I gave them 200% range bonus) I currently am sending forces along with the rest of the galaxy to wipe them out in the form of terror stars and my custom Mk.V Dreadnoughts.

if you want to make "super DLs" I made a forum on it. Gaunathor helped me do it so it works. (half of it might be insane babble. But I wasn't...thinking clearly when I wrote some of it tho.)

DARCA

Define "ship spam".

If you define ship spam as "the enemy is smart at having lots of ships in various places so you get punished for just having one super fleet", then it's probably fine.

If you define ship spam as "there's ten thousand ships on the map and each turn takes 20 minutes of tedious moving things around that don't particularly matter", then it's not a challenge. It's tedious.

Endless Space could suffer from it in the late game, where production got so out of hand that the AI could build fleets a turn. Without a hero most of those fleets were totally oblitterated when my level 20 admiral's fleet showed up. Next turn they'd make more, and I'd wipe those out too. Repeat ad nauseum until I could take the system. At some point autoresolving all the meaningless combats (I wasn't taking damage) stopped being challenging and just became "click the same button sequence 15 times at the start of every turn until the AI's useless fleets go away".

That's a brand of ship spam I can do without.

I'm referring to the latter, which is a common problem with the AI in Stardock games (maybe new things in GC3 will help solve that)