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Reply to HUGE Off-type Defence Bug in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

The obvious fix seems to be to degrade the square root value and then figure out how much of the theoretical value should be left after the hit... basically, off-type weapons will degrade defenses faster. The thing to watch for, though, is that players can't just stick a single off-type weapon on a ship to degrade the defense while the rest of the guns do the actual damage. The damage from the on-type weapons from ALL ships in the fleet would need to be appli

Reply to [DAv1.5x] Nerf Defense! (lol) in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Looking at the comments in this thread, I decided to do a test of whether off-type defences are actually working properly. Based on the results of the test, I can say definitively that they are not. I created a scenario where a huge ship with a mass-driver attack of 199 attacks a huge ship with 14 beam attack and a beam defence of 345. Since the second ship's defence against mass-drivers is only 18, the mass-driver ship should completely walk-over the beam defence ship, with a reasonabl

HUGE Off-type Defence Bug in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Off-type Defences are broken. I created a scenario where a huge ship with 199 mass-driver attack and 84 hitpoints attacks a ship with 14 beam attack, 345 beam-defence and 92 hitpoints. floor(sqrt(345)) = 18. A ship with 199 attack can expect to do about 100 damage per round, or around 82 damage through the shields. The mass-driver ship should mostly kill the defender in one round, requiring at most two rounds to finish it off. In contrast, the beam ship could only expect to do

Reply to [DAv1.5x] Nerf Defense! (lol) in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Well, I read the whole thread, and from what I saw, there's another point missing. Maybe it's not this way anymore, I just bought the Gold edition this week, so I haven't really played much. yet, great game though. However, in the manual, it says that for defense, you have to roll the value. It seems like everyone so far has been assuming that you always get full value for the defense. The reason we often ass

Reply to Strong and Weak AI players: A Survey in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Looking back, most of my experiences of Drengin domination were in DL. In DA, they can do well, but it does seem that they have too high an opinion of their strength and are increasingly burdened by a bunch of useless corvettes.

Reply to [DAv1.5x] Nerf Defense! (lol) in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

If there is a problem with off-type defenses not degrading properly, it's not happening consistently. In my last game my ~200 beam defence huge ships were getting damaged quite handily by Drengin missile frigates.

Reply to Possible to win without initial economic bonus? in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Since everything depends on economy in the long run, is it possible to play without inital bonus in economy? I think the economic bonuses are very useful, and I generally pick then now that I'm playing higher difficulty levels, but I played lots of games of DL without economic bonuses and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be too hard to win at painful. My current game is masochistic huge without tech trading, so they have some pretty serious built-in

Reply to Strong and Weak AI players: A Survey in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

In most games I've played, if the Terrans have a reasonable start, they are a serious threat. The Terrans and the Drengin seem to be the strongest from my point of view.

Reply to 1% Military / 99% Social / 0% Research (focus research) in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

Edit: Well, now I'm just confused, because I'm getting a big bonus to all my research (beyond the 127%) that I can't explain. So this really doesn't have anything to do with focus. I sort of remember getting a research boosting event at one point. I remember it's tendency to drain my finances. Did you see anything like that?

Reply to Ideas for improving the United Planets in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Those are some nice ideas, mrudis. I'd certainly like to see them. Unfortunately, I think changes on this scale (and changing the combat system, etc) are beyond the scope of what Stardock has in mind for updates. Still, what you describe is pretty close to how my 'ideal UP'. Of course, getting the AI to take full advantage of this additional flexibility would be a nice piece of work.

Reply to Defence too powerful!! (perhaps) in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

The only weakness to this strategy is that at the end of your turn, your monster high exp ships will often have hp of about 1, so any attack on them would wipe them out. I try to build my ships with enough movement so that I can retreat out of the range of AI after I have done my damage. This is a pure attack strategy, there is no room for the AI ever attacking you. When I was in this war with the Yor, every time I tried to take out on

YACS (Yet Another Combat System) in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

The combat system in Dreadlords was startlingly simple, but it managed to capture some interesting dynamics. Some things I liked about the DL system: 1. Simplicity. 2. Big-ship weapons help to penetrate big-ship defences. 3. Big ships can run into problems swatting the very small ships. Some things I consider drawbacks of the DL system: 1. A little too easy to make large ships invulnerable to small ships. 2. Defence was a little too streaky. If your defences

Reply to The reasoning behind nerfing defense? in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

However do those corvetes "scale" with the tech level of the game? I mean: at the start those could be strong, but in mid-game where ships have 20-30 attack ... The ships don't get better, but they do get more of them. Eventually, their main purpose is to annoy the player with their sheer numbers.

Reply to Poor AI - am SO dissapointed!!!!! in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Right now the AI does a pretty good job of doing this which is all your thousands of simulations will show. It can design ships. I'm not disputing that. All I'm merely attempting to point out is there is a lot more involved in intelligently creating fleets and moving them around a board in an effective manner. That is what would take 4 weeks to accomplish for the same reason it can take a chess AI an hour to move a single piece.

Reply to Understanding combat question in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

I think there's a bug involving non-optimal defenses: they don't degrade. Really? That sounds pretty bad. I wish there was a combat simulator built into the game, so we could just try it out. It can be kind of time-consuming to engineer that situation in a game.

Reply to Poor AI - am SO dissapointed!!!!! in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

However this is an impractical solution in terms of how long the AI actually has to make that decision. Think about chess AI for a moment. The longer you let it think the stronger it plays. Sometimes it can take it upwards of an hour or more to make a single move. I don't think the time to simulate battles is that impractical. I find it hard to believe that simulating a typical fleet engagement, striped of all graphics, would take more t

Reply to Understanding combat question in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

In DA, weapons roll individually, but defences are degraded when they hit. 4 of their ships have about 400 missile attack in total. The defence on one of your dreadnaughts will stop about the first 190-200 of that, then start taking full damage. So I'd expect the first ship of theirs to appear to do nothing, the second attacker maybe get a couple of points in, and the 3rd and 4th attackers in a given round to do full damage. So with 200 unchecked missile attack, they would probably do 100 damage

Reply to Focus is Goofy in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

So by setting an econ slider to say 100% research but then setting a planet to focus on military production results in lesser research and not as much military as if you had them at 50/50. This is not always true. If I have a planet with lots of research infrastructure but no factories, then setting research to 100% and focusing on military production *can* generate more military production than if I had gone 100% military. It's almost certa

Reply to Poor AI - am SO dissapointed!!!!! in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

[quote] Again how many games did it take you before the AI needed twice as many ships as you have to win? I doubt anyone was able to wipe the galaxy with the AI in their first few games. I know I sure as heck couldn't. It took me several games to understand the underlying mechanics well enough to have a shot in heck of making the AI look silly. [\quote] There's no doubt that AI programming is pretty tricky and we shouldn't expect a real intelligence any time soo

Reply to Does Spying anger the AI? in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

When I catch a spy, I have no way of knowing who sent it. I assume it's the same for the AI. As for ways of souring relations, I find that declaring war on them works well.

Reply to Focus is Goofy in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Is it bad that strategies like these are possible? They are powerful, but I don't use them because they're very inflexible; you'll never be able to research quickly if you only have factories. In a sense, minimizing research infrastructure in increasing flexibility, because you don't have a big infrastructure commitment that's useless when you are also trying to build up your worlds or produce ships. However, I don't think it's

Luck of Heroes in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

Since reading about the DA combat model, I'm starting to think that 'Lucky' is a pretty darn good pick for 1 point. A race without luck will roll (0 to weapon rating) for every weapon. The average damage is rating/2 and over a large battle, you are going to get pretty close to the average damage. A race with 25% luck rolls from (rating*0.25 to rating). That is, the minimum roll is 0.25*rating and I assume it's uniformly distributed across that range. So a normal race with a 4-d

Reply to Poor AI - am SO dissapointed!!!!! in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

I think the AI would benefit if it incorporated the concept of an offensive task force. That is, it doesn't need to escort its transports, it just needs to make sure they end their turn on the same tile as a friendly battle fleet. A possible composition for an offensive task force: - 1 to 4 full-logistics battle fleets (enough to certainly defeat at least two full-logistics enemy fleets). - 3 to 8 high-speed interceptors - 12-20,0000 troops formed into maximum

Reply to The reasoning behind nerfing defense? in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

You sure you're playing DA and not DL? He was fighting the Drengin super-dominator corvettes. Since they only have three attack, a fleet of 5 will only do 7 or 8 damage per round. 8 armour will therefore stop almost all of the damage from the initial round, and subsequent rounds have zero chance of getting through.

Focus is Goofy in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

The way planetary focus works is very odd, and can lead to very strange build strategies. Take, for instance, a situation where your overall spending is 100% social. A factory planet, focused on research, will generate far for research than a research planet, focused on research. Somehow the factory workers, without labs or training, are way better researchers than those people with all their fancy computers and giant installations built specifically for research . A change of the