Also, AI is not meant to attack with fleets of only one ship, I think they intend to merge them before attacking. It just thought about it re-reading the release notes :

Fixed an issue where AI does not merge its fleet before to attack.

So you would prefer stacks of death?



No, the current size of fleets is good but there has been discussions about the actual number of ships to combat having 6v6 battles.

Arghy wrote:
If someone sends over 300 CP worth of ships against me i want the option of taking on all 300 CP worth of ships in one go. It really pissed me off to see that this issue is still in release

+1



That is the first thing that I noticed, I wanted big ass battles. Suddenly I had 20 fleets but I was only able to have like 6v6 ships in battle (around that)

Nosferatiel wrote:
But the good old stack of doom would be 100 ships in one stack instead of 10 ships in 10 stacks. Sorry if this wasn't clear.

i absolutely loathed the old civ style of, my stacks bigger than your stack so i win, combat style

Everyone keeps talking about limits, but I think a much more prudent solution that really won't break the game too much would be increasing the current CP limits. (And obviously, telling the AI to combine fleets when it can. That sounds more like a bug than a feature, though.) As someone before me said, giving heroes the ability to increase a fleet's CP would be useful, and adding in more technologies would make this much more reasonable, too. The battles don't seem to be very intensive at all, insofar as graphics and CPU is concerned, so doubling, tripling, or even increasing it by a factor of ten would probably not be too harmful. Chaotic, sure...but that's how battle is, and it'd make it all the more awesome.



I've heard some brief murmurs of a new branch of the tech tree...perhaps Logistics that increase CP could be a major part of it? What do you guys think?

Theres no point in limiting fleets--allow heroes to form 'grand' fleets which combine smaller fleets and losses incurred during combat replace themselves so you'd actually get all 3 rounds of combat.



As the game currently is it wont stand up to the competition that is coming out--i actually felt cheated when i saw the other 4x games coming out.

TheManInRoomFive wrote:
I think it is a good idea. However I would not limit the total amount o ships, but the total amount of fleets allowed. A limit that of course should follow your progress. But imagine a competitive game, where one player just spams fleet above his systems. How many turns it would take to put down 200 fleets of crap ships.

Perhaps limit the number of fleets relative to the number of controlled systems? After that number is exceeded you get progressively higher and higher maintenance costs per fleet. Meaning you could field a lot of little fleets but its going to cost you.

LordReynolds wrote:
you still cannot avoid the simple fact that quantity is a quality of its own and this must also be represented in the game.



If the opposing empire has the output to drown you in ships then buckle up, arm the combat heroes instead of buying a bazillion admins, and then start munching down the enemy fleet horde.



Most of em will be hero less while yours have heroes which will be fed xp.





Unless your techbase is so hoplessly outmatched that even a group of decent fleet leaders can't help you (and then why the heck are you even complainig?) out of the pinch then sorry, you deserve to get roasted.

I just killed 47 goddamn sower fleets in a row it took over an hour of clicking manual and hitting the same goddamn 2 cards every battle. Why the hell would i play this game if i knew eventually the game turns into hours of repetition? Oh yeah it was A SINGLE FLEET that killed all 47 sower fleets due to proper ship design, fleet makeup and card choices.



Know whats more retarded then stacks of doom? avoiding combat because you know its clicking a single button(or waiting for it to do auto). If someone sends over 300 CP worth of ships against me i want the option of taking on all 300 CP worth of ships in one go. It really pissed me off to see that this issue is still in release--in every single game i have seen the AI spam fleets and apparently the only answer we have is auto it and lose ships and prolly the war because auto calc has horrible attrition or spend hours fighting the same goddamn battle over and over again.



Talk about game breaking this pretty much completely removes one of the X's, you can explore, expand, exploit but holy hell dont try to exterminate. I'd bother to offer a solution but this is a well known problem and there are tons of answers to it in other games.

LordReynolds wrote:
oh yes. 50 dust per turn. uh huh.

You do realize that dust production isn't even in shouting range of industry output and that tieing dust cost to industry cost (which are higher by a fck ton) will net you ridiculously absurd numbers?



Now i really don't know about you but i commonly do not have planets laying around producing a thousand dust each...

1. 1k Dust per system is a quite reasonable late-game figure.

2. Early game, tying upkeep to Industry cost wouldn't increase it relative to now (since ships are cheaper then). Late-game, the only reason Industry outstrips Dust is that everyone specializes in Industry due to buyout costs increasing superlinearly with Industry cost. Unless you use the retrofit exploit...

you still cannot avoid the simple fact that quantity is a quality of its own and this must also be represented in the game.



If the opposing empire has the output to drown you in ships then buckle up, arm the combat heroes instead of buying a bazillion admins, and then start munching down the enemy fleet horde.



Most of em will be hero less while yours have heroes which will be fed xp.





Unless your techbase is so hoplessly outmatched that even a group of decent fleet leaders can't help you (and then why the heck are you even complainig?) out of the pinch then sorry, you deserve to get roasted.

Last night, I played a 392 turn game as the Sophons, eventually ending in my favor. It was during the last 140 turns I ran into this issue and I'm wondering if I'm the only one.



The AI builds WAAAY too many ships - and at the end, they were all Dreadnaught-class single-ship fleets. It took me FOREVER to slog through all these damn fleets.



As part of the tech-tree, along with raising the number of CMD points per fleet, could we also unlock progressively the total amount of ships we can build? Or could this be a hard option with a selection of 5, 10, 20, or 50 in the options?



This is one of the things I hate about 4X games and I never see it addressed.

I have also seen this where the AI seems to field near infinite amount of ships over the course of the game. I can never match it unless I literally put all of my production into ships. Some max limit would be welcome so the combat would be about tech, composition and battle cards played instead of superior numbers. If the numbers even helped as the AI seems to be very weak when it comes to outfitting the ships.

I see 2 problems about spamming ships.

The first is spam of low cost ships, which will make 1 fleet. If you send 10 to a system, even if 1 or 2 dies, you can be sure that the system will be blockaded, or if there's a fleet, intercepted, and so for the strategic ressources. With warp drive, you can even do it on your whole ennemy (pilgrims can do it really easy). And it can be really hard to clean lots of 1 ship fleet in your inner empire. That will stop your science research (blockade), stop your trades routes (so lower Dust and Science) and making strategic ressources unavailable.

The second is Stack of Doom. As LordReynolds, I see this as normal in 4x. That don't make any problem in MP, but when you fight AI, the AI can really easily make lots of stacks, because of his FIDS bonus, and happiness bonus. This makes the use of "cheated fleets" (aka destroyers kamikaze fleets) really needed, which is not in MP (actually, I found a way to destroy kamikaze fleets which works greatly), but I tested it only with high tech against hisshos, so I am not sure yet).



And UE is the only faction that could handle a big fleet if dreadnought were costing 50 Dust per turn. You can pump dust production to absurd level with them and high tax rate, i've already made 500 dust on a system (a very good system) at turn 60-70 (in fast) and i'm not a great UE player.

Avoid the Stack of doom?

What sillyness is this? Yo ucannot avoid that from popping up, its a natural occurence when it comes to 4x games that have, say, somewhat limited travel mechanics.



Since warping without pathways takes looonger and everyone will see you on sensors, you cannot circumvent choke points efficiently.

Natrually the opponent stacks his fleets on that chockepoint to press his advantage.

Its natural. A given. It is common sense. Focus your own forces then go smash some. I do not really know in what spheres your thoughts usually lounge around but it has bee nthis way since EVER. No amount of ship limiting will address this "problem" because its not a "problem" at all.



If the op force has managed to build up to the point of it sending you massive fleet stacks, and you in return have slumped at your game and are not able to stem the tide than sorry, you deserve to lose. You have basically failed the game. The game being starting with one colony and then working towards reaching one of the victory conditions you have set beforehand.



Simple.

If you cant take the heat the oppoent puts you under, you have basically failed the level. Restart and try to not suck this time around.



Navys need to be able to become as big as the player can afford, if you do not do that, you punish good empire builders for basically being good at playing the game.





I certainly wish we could have more efficient means of resolving battles between huge fleet stacks, but any sort of limit is simply retarded.

I think part of the problem is that ship maintenance is a flat 2 Dust per CP; I think it would make more sense and be more of a factor if it were, say, 1% of the ship's Industry cost per turn, so an early-game scout might cost only 1 Dust per turn, while a endgame uber-Dreadnought (yeah, yeah, I know everyone spams Destroyers in practice) might take 50 Dust per turn.

oh yes. 50 dust per turn. uh huh.

You do realize that dust production isn't even in shouting range of industry output and that tieing dust cost to industry cost (which are higher by a fck ton) will net you ridiculously absurd numbers?



Now i really don't know about you but i commonly do not have planets laying around producing a thousand dust each...

I think part of the problem is that ship maintenance is a flat 2 Dust per CP; I think it would make more sense and be more of a factor if it were, say, 1% of the ship's Industry cost per turn, so an early-game scout might cost only 1 Dust per turn, while a endgame uber-Dreadnought (yeah, yeah, I know everyone spams Destroyers in practice) might take 50 Dust per turn.

What really bugs me is seeing a 200 turn Cravern with almost all planets used up, and they can build 49 fleets of 17-19 CP without any resources.



How do they do that?

Nosferatiel wrote:
Gameplay-technical the reason seems to be that the devs want to avoid "stacks of doom". Just putting all of your fleet, sending it off against the others stack of doom or steamrolling over everything.



Lore-technical the reasoning is that each fleet needs support and above all organisation. That's why the fleet limit can be improved by research that deals with those two limited resources.

Hmmm......are you saying to much strain on the game engine to have more than two fleets per battle?

As far as gameplay goes......I thought the combat mechanics of MOO3 worked very well.......except for the lousy graphics.



I just can't imagine two enemy Admirals of multiple fleets that happen to meet in a particular star system......just standing by sending in one each fleet at a time to do battle. Doesn't make tactical sense. What would make sense is to align your fleets according to firepower.....put the short range Kinetic or Beam fleets up front, with the Missle fleets providng fire support behind.



Could the game engine handle something like that?

Just do what Master of Orion 2 did.



Each player has a soft cap on how many ships they can build, costing minimal maintenance.

*Right now defensive structures are mostly useless - so change their function to increase the soft cap (like building star bases)

When a player goes over the soft cap - the maintenance fee is harsh (MOO2 was 20 per CP over)

Ships of different sizes require different numbers of "command points", which are provided by orbital bases, which are major construction projects for small colonies. You can research technologies which increase the command points provided by orbital bases. An empire can be ruined financially if its fleet requires more command points than its orbital bases provide, because "buying" extra command points is very expensive. This severely limits the size of empires' fleets; before you research technologies which increase the command points provided by orbital bases, you can have only one frigate (smallest type of ship) per starbase or one battleship (largest type of ship in the early game) per 4 starbases without having to "buy" command points.

Nosferatiel wrote:
Gameplay-technical the reason seems to be that the devs want to avoid "stacks of doom". Just putting all of your fleet, sending it off against the others stack of doom or steamrolling over everything.



Lore-technical the reasoning is that each fleet needs support and above all organisation. That's why the fleet limit can be improved by research that deals with those two limited resources.

Problem is, we still get it. Only instead of it being 100 ships in one fleet, it's 40+ fleets filled with 14 ships each. We need something to counter this sort of thing.