I think there could be a better way of handling things, so here is my solution.

A suggestion for how to limit active military size for empires, and to make spam costly enough to slow down recovery.



When a ship is launched, the CP - Crew Points, represents how much of a world's populace is supporting that ship. That world will still produce resources while the ship exists, but only if that ship is docked in a shipyard. If the ship is destroyed through combat, then the system that created the ship would lose people. This means that just casually throwing ships into the grinder will represent real economic losses. Sending a ship out of space dock will reduce a system's working population, turning individual population members orange. If a world is invaded, orange population members do not count for defending against the invasion.



It is okay to stockpile ships, but launching them is when it counts against a world. A ship can be docked at any system, but the population aboard it will be returned to their system of origin. If launched again, it will draw upon the population pool of the system it is docked at.



The practical effects should be two fold:



1 - Every ship on active duty would damage the economy. Citizens aboard the ships are not able to work, making it harder for the economy to work effectively.



2 - The destruction of ships kills population, thus making it harder to replenish the military.





With this change, I think that removing maintenance fees would be a slight optimization. The ships are already draining the economy of empires just by preventing citizens from working.



I recommend only canceling out the Industry, Dust, and Science of Orange Population. This is to prevent weird things when trying to account for food.

I totally agree with the original poster. There should be a cap on #'s of ships. A limiter that scales up could just be added to the techs that add to the number of ships per fleet already in place. You could even do like Paradox Interactive does with a lot of their games and let you go over CAP for full-scale war, but have an enormous scaling dust cost associated with doing so that goes up exponentially the higher you go above the soft cap. This would add a much needed dust sink for over-bloated economies in the mid-late game. This is also a good way to emulate the expense of full mobilzation that has the potential to bankrupt even the most robust economies in the real world.

Would definitely like to see a cap of X number of fleets based on colonized systems, with a base bonus.



For isntance, 3+1 Per system owned this means you can either defend systems or attack. You can never do both at the same time.

MTB-Fritz wrote:
Its an issue for single-player too. If you allow an enemy AI to become too powerfull so that it eventually gets equal to you in size and research it wont become the glorious all-out deathmatch that it should be but simply a waste of time going through (no kidding) hundreds of battles PER TURN taking 30+ minutes even with no cards selected and auto.



The main reason why I try to crush or cripple ennemy AIs as fast as possible or leave myself a shortcut in the game (victory condition mostly). Otherwise I simply give up as I cannot be arsed to play that one out. Stabbing myself in the eyes is more fun to be honest.

It's true. Production later in the game is way too high, you can crank out far too many ships in a turn and it just makes things Endless auto battle.

Nasarog wrote:
That was in civ4 I believe, not sure about civ5. I tried to play Civ5:G&K and my laptop called 911 on me and filed aggravated assault charges. I am not shopping a PC gaming rig.

That was Civ 4, it was called "war weariness". The other difference is that in Civ 4 it basically impossible to have one city building entire stacks of units every turn (whereas one system can build entire fleets in the ES endgame).

In my suggestion, population taken scaled to ship size. A Dreadnaught consumes 6 CP, therefore 6 population. 24 destroyers equal 24 CP, thus 24 population. This means that delicate ships are not just easily lost, but they take a massive number of people with them if the glass cannon approach is utilized. Larger vessels take fewer casualties, therefore the economies of empires using them don't suffer as much in a war of attrition.



The hangers are also important for that suggestion, as they are used to store ships. A ship in the hanger isn't taking on crew to support it until it is launched. When a player chooses to launch a fleet of ships, they make the choice of sacrificing economic strength to be militarily strong. Maintenance in the game has no weight to it, because only a moderate amount of Dust is sacrificed to support a military. Losing dust, production and science equal for each citizen in the military has more oomph to it, especially since the player has a visual cue in the form of Blue Citizens turning Orange as they select ships to launch.

I think the ship micromanagement system is too bloated in general.



I say we do the following:

1) Get rid of hangars. Really, aside from hiding ships, they serve no purpose. Indeed, I say we just not allow a player to build ships while a planet is being invaded. (It's not as if it were feasible for a space ships to be built anywhere but space anyway.)

2a) Improve scalability of ships and modules. Because really, who doesn't just dump everything onto corvettes/destroyers? Clearly, defensive ships are only possible for a handful of races. Having large ships that are worth a damn would go a long way in encouraging teching and naturally decrease the number of ships.

2b) I like the suggestion above of having ships cost CP, though I dislike how complex the suggester's scheme was. Just have 1 CP = 1 population unit; colony ships can then be built into any hull with a special "colonization module" or something. (And to the "not-realistic" police: it takes hundreds of people to crew a naval vessel; the battleship Yamato, for example, had a crew of ~2800. A space vessel is likely to have greater size and complexity. You might be seeing crews in the tens of thousands, much larger than a space colony would be.)

3) Allow us to rally ships. Because really, half of my turn is spent collecting the bajillion 1-4 CP fleets being produced all over my empire and gathering them for combat.

4) Allow us to click a button to toggle re-queuing the same over and over so we don't have to run around checking if our empire is making ships or not.

Nasarog wrote:
Well, I think each faction would address the end game differently. A litte more variety between each faction in both tech and ways to win would go a long way towards creating an end game.



I think most 4x games suffer from this.



The early game is fun. The mid game can be fun, but it's a grind. The end game is usually mop up or trying to not lose and achieve some other kind of victory that doesn't rely on military power.

It's true that most 4x games suffer from repetitive nature of end game, but from my limited 4x experience, this game suffers from it far more than the genre should.



Two things that compound this issue in Endless Space are



1. The balance favors destroyer spam so much that production is as monotonous and repetitive as it gets

2. Towards late game productivity of your empire skyrockets



BTW I think it's the mid game were 4x games get most fun, right around when your empire begins to take shape and you can better imagine how you are going to achieve victory.

draeh wrote:
lol. I have the same problem trying to play from my work laptop while on business trips. Latest CPU with 10 years old graphics capabilities.

My work PC is screaming fast with an integrated videocard.. ugh!

Nasarog wrote:
That was in civ4 I believe, not sure about civ5. I tried to play Civ5:G&K and my laptop called 911 on me and filed aggravated assault charges. I am not shopping a PC gaming rig.

lol. I have the same problem trying to play from my work laptop while on business trips. Latest CPU with 10 years old graphics capabilities.

draeh wrote:
Wasn't it Civilization that had a mechanism where the happiness and productivity began to drop after so many turns while at war? This had serious economic and industrial impacts as conflicts wore on. Forcing each use of existing military to become tactically important since the populous slowly crippled your ability to make new units or even upkeep the existing ones.

That was in civ4 I believe, not sure about civ5. I tried to play Civ5:G&K and my laptop called 911 on me and filed aggravated assault charges. I am not shopping a PC gaming rig.

Wasn't it Civilization that had a mechanism where the happiness and productivity began to drop after so many turns while at war? This had serious economic and industrial impacts as conflicts wore on. Forcing each use of existing military to become tactically important since the populous slowly crippled your ability to make new units or even upkeep the existing ones.

MTB-Fritz wrote:
Its an issue for single-player too. If you allow an enemy AI to become too powerfull so that it eventually gets equal to you in size and research it wont become the glorious all-out deathmatch that it should be but simply a waste of time going through (no kidding) hundreds of battles PER TURN taking 30+ minutes even with no cards selected and auto.



The main reason why I try to crush or cripple ennemy AIs as fast as possible or leave myself a shortcut in the game (victory condition mostly). Otherwise I simply give up as I cannot be arsed to play that one out. Stabbing myself in the eyes is more fun to be honest.

Yea, that's true too.



I would add an element that if your empire gets too vast, elements from within would try to rebel and splinter off. How's that for a built in control for over expansion.

Tridus wrote:
It's true. Production later in the game is way too high, you can crank out far too many ships in a turn and it just makes things Endless auto battle.

Production and Dust output are both too high compared to the production/buyout cost of ships late-game, but that in itself wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a natural brake on the number of ships your empire could maintain. Essentially, the cost of upkeep doesn't scale up enough late game compared to your FIDS output. I don't know all the details but I believe ship upkeep is mostly based on your current fleet cap, something that doesn't really increase that much after mid-game. I would argue that the per-ship cost needs to increase exponentially as you build more ships, not linearly, as it appears to do now.

All of our recent multiplayer games have eventually devolved into massive spamming of ship fleets. This usually happens as soon as one player nears a victory condition and it bogs the game down immensely. Whereas our game turns would be no more than five minutes tops, late game turns tend to involve enormous numbers of ships, either due to players with massive amounts of dust buying huge fleets or queuing up massive numbers of ships for product, both of which take a long time due to the ship build interface. Add to that the logistics of sending all the fleets across the map and our games effectively grind to a halt where none of us can really be bother to play it out to the ultimate conclusion.



This doesn't seem quite right to me: the end game should be the culmination of a long, hard-fought campaign. It should be suitably apocalyptic, yes, but at the minute the games just stop because we can't actually be bother to spend the next six hours queuing ships and auto'ing 20+ glass-cannon battles a turn. Even if you have fleets that are infinitely better than the spam that's being thrown at you and you're taking minimal losses, the game becomes effectively unplayable. In one recent game, one of our players was raking in 20k dust a turn and could buyout 100+ ships a turn, something that itself took minutes to queue up each turn! These weren't even cheap glass cannons but Tier3 weapon-equipped dreadnoughts! Something needs to change.



For me, the problem is that the current fleet cap/fleet upkeep rules aren't working: there's very little to stop you from having hundreds of max-cap fleets at the end game. Dust income is rarely an issue by this point so there's effectively no cap on the number of ships you can build. I don't have a definitive answer on how to fix this issue but there are a few options I can think of:



1) A fixed limit on the number of ships an empire can build. This isn't unusual: most games have a unit cap of sorts.

2) Upkeep costs that scale better, so that they're still significant cost late game. Incomes of 10k/turn aren't unusual for players going for economic victories.

3) Happiness penalties per unit away from home, a la Civ.



Discuss.

Its an issue for single-player too. If you allow an enemy AI to become too powerfull so that it eventually gets equal to you in size and research it wont become the glorious all-out deathmatch that it should be but simply a waste of time going through (no kidding) hundreds of battles PER TURN taking 30+ minutes even with no cards selected and auto.



The main reason why I try to crush or cripple ennemy AIs as fast as possible or leave myself a shortcut in the game (victory condition mostly). Otherwise I simply give up as I cannot be arsed to play that one out. Stabbing myself in the eyes is more fun to be honest.

A part of the problem is that there is no mechanism to make "every move count", such as in Chess where losing pieces will eventually drive one or both sides into a corner. Maybe there could be something added to Endless Space where at certain points of the game a major wrinkle comes into play? For example, the quasar at the center of the galaxy is growing larger after turn 150, gobbling up systems as it expands. Of course, a big problem with wrinkles is doling them out in such a way, that it doesn't feel unfair to the players. If that black hole spawned at turn 1 and you happened to be near the center, you won't have a chance to do anything about the situation.



The other thing about 4X games is how the genre is centered on the participants expanding their abilities and resources. By the end game, you can just pump out ships until someone becomes physically tired from doing so. (AI players don't get exhausted...) So we must put in a upper limit to what force people can use, without making them feel unnaturally restrained by doing so. That is why my idea for ship CP draining the work force of planets was the way I made it: So that it felt natural, and put a 'soft' limit on what an empire could do. A hard limit would be something obvious, like "You can not have more than 50 ships at a time."



To sum up:



1 - We need to make every move count, especially during the endgame.

2 - Resources have to be very limited to make them valuable.

3 - There has to be a mechanism that places pressure on all participants in the game, cataclysms that escalates over time.

Nasarog wrote:
I think most 4x games suffer from this.

its true, i haven't really seen a 4x game that didn't have this issue.

Well, I think each faction would address the end game differently. A litte more variety between each faction in both tech and ways to win would go a long way towards creating an end game.



I think most 4x games suffer from this.



The early game is fun. The mid game can be fun, but it's a grind. The end game is usually mop up or trying to not lose and achieve some other kind of victory that doesn't rely on military power.

End game as of now is soooo tedious. I can't even bother to finish a normal speed game after turn 150 or so.