Personaly, the one thing i have always wanted to be able to do is something the AI takes for granted.

I would like to use the proposed "declare war" option as a warning, give me X ammount of Y or i will declare war on you! and they either do it or boom, ya go to war.

Hi there ... I am really looking forward to this expansion. Here are my thoughts on Rights of Passage

Rights of Passage
The Rights of Passage sounds like a positive enhancement. I don't think Civilization's way it deals with Border's etc would really work with GalCiv 2 simply because its easy to have planets swallowed by culture without having them flip. Anyway, I think it would be more interesting if you could IGNORE this one movement limitation by declaring in the treaty screen "Ignore Soverignty", which will cause a big relations hit with that race and a little hit for every turn that this Ignore action takes place. If they "Accept Soverignty" then they no longer take that little hit every turn but go back to 1 space per turn without that right of passage treaty.

But if territorial boundaries are defined as cultural boundaries, that could lead to some interesting recursion problems for your planets in enemy "controlled" areas: orbits are considered yours, but space immediately outside of orbit is considered theirs. So, once out of orbit, the ship would get moved back into orbit. Only to be moved back out of orbit. You'd have to make sure ships were moved only once.

And, then, is this exploitable? If I merely have one planet deep inside my soon-to-be enemy's territory, is the orbit around that planet considered to be the "nearest" non-enemy territory and all my moved ships would end up there, ready to attack? Or, would that orbit only be good for ships "homed" to that world? What would happen if I moved ships from other planets to that one so they'd be protected until I built local ships? Or, what if there were no shipyard on that planet?

I'm very enthousiastic about the possibility to have some kind of border, however I don't like the drastic measures proposed here like severe speed reduction or 'beaming' ships across the galaxy. That's not my idea of fun.

No matter how unrealistic a game is, it's fun and believable if it sticks to its own rules (internal consistency). In the case of Galciv, it is about a galaxy with time in weeks and space in 2D. I think the game should stick as close as possible to this concept. Else you get the 'fakey' feeling that others mention.

I like strategic options. You should be able to do anything you like, but there might be a price attached. So I would like to have some option of sneak attack and fast travel through friendly territory should be possible. I realise though that an important aspect of the problem is that the AI should be able to deal with it without major modifications.

I like a diplomatic solution the most I think. That you can travel whereever you like at any speed if you have an agreement. But if you don't have the treaty you can also travel at any speed through a territory but diplomatic relations could suffer if they weren't good to begin with and depending on the amount of armada's you seem to think you can fly through someone's neighbourhood.
It would be very nice if some friendly neighbour just said, 'we like you and all, but we don't want to contribute to your war efforts so you should move your ships of our territory' (with severe suffering of diplomatic relations if ignored, cancelling of trade routes or treaties for instance!).
You should also be able to demand from AI players to remove their ships from your territory. This solution might add a nice middle ground between peace and war to the game and some more feeling of identity to different areas of the map without drastic gameplay effects such as teleporting ships or crawling high-speed explorers.

Thanks for asking our opinion!

This all would work much easier if your planets couldn't be swallowed up by opposing culture boundaries.

Cari, the problem here is that influence borders shift all the time and I can’t be sure that I have all my ships on my side of the border. Especially if the AI is the one declaring war. My ships may not be able to get back to my border in one turn.




I tend to think this is overblown. I just finished playing a suicidal game with the "you must wait one turn before attacking" UP event in place, which should eliminate the whole sneak attack problem...In most cases, my ships were actually starting from my Influence zones or close to them. It's just that I bring everything to war from turn one and the AI doesn't. This is a particular problem on large maps where the AI knows how to fight individual ships and even fleets for the most part, but it doesn't have an overall strategy. Sneak attacks can help, but they are not really necessary.

I wasn’t planning to write this in anticipation of this question...But the game I mentioned above I just used as a play along with me game in the Galactic Diplomats private forums. I’ve reposted it over into the AAR section. So here is exactly how to consistently beat Suicidal AIs on a Large Abundant all map with links to saved game files throughout the game. Sneak attacks are not critical to it, but the build up is absolutely critical.

Suicidal AAR

BTW If you can figure out good, reasonable game play ways of forcing me to kick it down a notch, I suspect you will have a lot fewer suicidal wins. I would also suggest Wyndstar's Altarian research only AAR as deserving a look as well. He pretty thoroughly demonstrated another method of accomplishing Suicidal wins.

I dont like this idea. I also dont like the nerfing ship engine idea. I think if you are in another cultures sphere of influence it should reduce your range by a set percentage. This way you will not be able to penetrate very far into another emire but if you share a planet on the edge of another empire and its in their space you will still be able to get to it. The advantage of a border treaty is that you could pass through their shpere of influence without a range penalty.

This will satisfy the people who want realism also. Since you can say that there is no support facilities that you can use in the foreign empire unless you have a treaty that allows you to.

I don't know for an absolute fact how anyone beats the suicidal AI. I certainly have suppositions and I'm also sure that there are multiple ways to do so and just as sure that there are some folks for which sneak attacks may be the only way.

Sometimes in the early part of a game I often think how the heck can I win this one. Anyway there are a number of ways to gain an advantage. The first and foremost is to simply out colonize the Suicidal AI and end up with more planets and resources. This is an extremely tall order but one I have managed myself on a rare occasion or two. There are others such as Magnumaniac that can do this at will as a matter of course, but here we are talking about folks that can walk on water.

There are a number of other ways involving diplomacy to either get two opponents to go after each other and then pick them off once they've weakened themselves or otherwise gain a strategic advantage over one AI. Or diplomancy can be used to gain a tech advantage. Or you can build a uber tech research planet that produces 20,000 RP's a turn to quickly out research your opponents.

Even without a uber research planet the AI can be outresearched in critical areas by simply concentrating on that area. The AI tend to research evenly across the entire tech tree so even though they have tremendous research, income, etc. bonuses if you stick to a limited set of critical weapons research you can easily have more powerful ships at the point when war breaks out. This does of course force you to give up a lot of otherwise "useful" research and to focus on what you consider "critical" research, but this is the kind of choice that most folks would consider a true legitimate strategy.

Or the simplest way of all is to just try to initially survive by doing just enough to not be a target (the SCC can really help with this) which can give you the time to gradually build yourself up to the point you have parity with at least one of the weaker AI's and can take them over.

Regardless of however you gain that initial victory it's pretty much determined that once you conquer one AI you generally have the planets and resources to straight up battle the remaining AI's even with their huge bonuses, at least as long as you can take them out one at a time and keep them from ganging up on you.

In any case I support this proposal and have always supported the idea that sneak attacks should be somehow restricted. It's just that I thought that the engine nerfage wasn't a complete solution and that it came with the baggage of making ship logistics in my prefered gigantic galaxies more of a headache than it already is.

Another possible method of sneak attack control that I've heard and would have no real problem with is to restrict a fleet to attacking a single planet. Once a fleet attacked a planet it could use any remaining moves to make continued attacks against non-fleeted ships in orbit but could not be used to make attacks on any other planets during the same turn. Or another idea is to allow the "guard" function to define a ship or fleet that would have to be engaged before the planet it's guarding could be attacked. Assumedly this ship/fleet would have to be in the vicinity of a planet to do this, perhaps proximity to a planet would be sufficient to place a fleet on guard and force it to be engaged.

From what I remember of the discussion, Brad's objection was not so much that you could sneak attack but that by doing so you could avoid engaging an AI's potentially superior fleets and ships thus allowing an inferior attack force to beat a superior enemy on the first strike alone. Any method that would "force" someone to essentially reduce someones navy prior to all out invasion would be a reasonable answer to this objection.

This is a classic issue with sea battles in general which is certainly a reasonable model for space battles. In general, battles in open sea cannot be forced because the inferior fleet can almost always escape. The only thing that can "force" an engagement that one side or the other doesn't wish is the threat of an invasion that can't be ignored.

Hopefully this provides a few thoughts on the matter, but I don't object to limiting sneak attacks and I'm sure there are a few folks that may have to turn the difficulty down a notch because of it. I certainly like this magical expulsion of combat ships from your and your opponents ZOC better than engine nerfage because it otherwise doesn't effect how long it takes ships to get to rally points or how long it take to build up a starbase, etc.

However I'm not sure this proposal is really enough. It merely forces your ships to outside their ZOC. So now instead of sitting right next to each planet people will just line up their attack forces outside someones ZOC and still probably be able to wipe an enemy out in short order. I think perhaps the best solution is the one planet attack per fleet/ship per turn. If someone has enough fleets to dedicate a top line fleet to every planet an opponent has then it's no real big deal whether or not they wipe out the AI in a single turn or not. That was already a foregone conclusion.

You could even combine this ZOC control along with one attack per ship per planet. I think that would still be far preferable (to me anyway) than the engine nerfage that keeps me from playing DA.

Every time I hear this from a game developer I mentally cringe.

This is not a constructive approach. I know what is realism, and I know why it is important. But you dismiss it in favor of fun. What is "fun"? What are we supposed to write in response to your idea then?

You can say: 'Ships that move out of enemy space for no apparent reason is fun.'
I can say: 'No, realism is fun.'

No conversation that revolves around "fun" will ever be meaningful, because the concept itself is meaningless in this context. It describes state of mind of a person, not a criteria of a game. I don't see how you can base a meaningful design decision purely around that.

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I dislike the proposition, because it's a synthetic feature. Even fictional entities should retain relationships from real life. So, why should ships be forces to move out of enemy territory after declaration of war?

I'd say the answer to sneak attacks should be taken from real life. Why nations don't use sneak attacks?
1) Political and social reasons. If you would attack someone without declaration of war, then other nations as well as your people would not like you very much. Heck, most of the time you need to escalate tension gradually, and have a 'reason' (ofter made up by yourself, though) to attack someone.
2) In RL you can't stack your military on the enemy territory, because the nation who controls that territory will declare war on you firts.

I've been slowly ramping up to Suicidal play for some time now, and I absolutely agree. I am consistently able to defeat AIs: NOT by surrounding their planets before attacking, and NOT by whizzing around at high movement rates.

It's not even so much where you build up your forces before hand as is is how you build them up.

When I assess a neighbor for conquest, I look at their warships, both in space and around their planets. I figure out roughly what I will need to throw at those ships to beat them, then figure out how many transports I will need either to take as many planets as I want (if the enemy is small) or to strike a devastating first blow (if the enemy is much larger than me).

While I build the fleet I want for those objectives, I usually do my best to get that enemy involved in wars with other civilizations. If it's a powerful enemy, I drop spies on important improvements and give aid to their enemies.

I will select one or more jumping-off points for starting the war, often near enemy planets or fleets that are in my space anyway. When I go to war, I use concentration of force to systematically degrade the enemy's ability to strike back, dogpiling on his isolated fleets if necessary to knock them out and sending faster ships after his transports whenever I spot them. I usually wait to go after territory (planets) until my warfighting capability in a given region is greatly superior.

Planning - both in force buildup and in the exercise of strategic options - is what really sets the human general apart form the AI general. It is difficult to get the AI to anticipate devious actions, but until the AI can conceive and efficiently execute long-term war plans, it will always fall behind an experienced human player even if the opportunities for deviousness are removed.

Ok, I admit that I use this as a cop-out. I cringe whenever someone complains that something isn't realistic because I don't think that should be the definitive deciding factor.  I wasn't so much claiming that it was more fun to move your ships 100s of parsecs away as objecting to the objection that it's unrealistic.  The argument that it's far too gamey and arbitrary is a much more valid objection in my eyes. 

I love this game, and I love the developers. Thanks Stardock, for not only listening to us, asking our input, but also, continually supporting the games, improving product quality, and just being my favorite game company. I can't remember the last time I bought a game over $20 in price, but I bought yours because you guys care about your customers, and you get it right right out of the box - even if you can make it better after, it's a great buy right off the shelf. That is why I'm willing to shell out more than $20 for your game. (and I had a gift card, but I could've gotten AC/DC Back in Black AND ZZ Top Eliminator for the price of the game. They went back on the shelves.)

Thanks Stardock.

Now that I've said that, this idea is not going to keep people from winning on Suicidal. That said, I'm not planning on doing any sneak attacks myself. But anyone who wants to, can. It's a single player game, after all.

There seems to be an easy work around for this issue, and that would be to build an influence star base by the enemy. In one turn you could have a patch of your own territory on enemies front lawn, and by the time they get around to complaining about it the trap will be sprung. All it would take would be four or five more ships (and the tech of course) and it's right back where things started.

I wouldn't mind the requirement to declare war, nor some form of delay (albeit a short one) built in. But, requiring ships to return to a fluid border or an arbitrary planet would seem to be over doing things. It seems like you are punishing everyone for the actions of a few, which are done not against any person, but against a single player AI. Granted, it's your game to design, but I don't like the idea of the game getting tweaked around based not upon game play improvement, but upon hypothetical strategies used against an artificial opponent that are deemed "unfair" or "cheesy".

Certainly this is the case. Really not that much planning is necessary, just ensure that there is enough stockpiling of transports and ships prior to declaring war.

Many the war has been declared by the AI apparently without the transports to back it up. The AI mostly seems to have enough warships and fleets around but they make attacks on a planet reducing it's defenders only to sit and wait 5,6 even 10 turns for the transports to arrive. If they just have the transports ready to go when they declare war (like the human does) then this would be a big improvement. Any amount of time between the warship attack and the transport invasion gives the defender the time to marshall defending fleets to take out the attackers and then let the transports impale themselves once they do arrive.

The problem is that although these kinds of suggestions are logical I've no idea how to implement them and the presumption is that if they could have been implemented then they would have by now.

One other possibility is to realize that perhaps making a change that allows the AI to defend against sneak attacks is not really the best course of action. I've always been a firm believer in the idea that the best defense is a strong offense.

However all of these kinds of suggestions represent substanstial changes to the operation of the AI and are clearly not going to happen as a "fix" to a relatively localized problem.

I would say that the best suggestion that plays to the AI's current strength, which is the huge buildup of defensive fleets, and requires the smallest change to game mechanics would be to require folks to defeat any fleets set to guard a planet before they can invade that planet. That would at least require someone to face the AI's front line fleets, which if they can defeat in straight up combat then it's clear they deserve to win anyway. This protects against a cheap victory by using speed to avoid the AI's ships and just taking all his planets before he can respond. It's also not all that unrealistic to assume that if a defender has stationed guard fleets that they wouldn't just sit idly by while an enemy warps in takes the planet and warps out, even if there is a large speed disparity between the two fleets.

Ok, I THINK that I have talked Brad out of trying to counter sneak attacks, so he is now pondering other ways to make it harder to win on Suicidal without penalizing players on lower levels.  I'll see if I can get approval to un-nerf the engines as well.