Jump Drive Suggestion

Sounds hilariously OP.

Would need to be heavily limited in some way.

The only limit i would put on it is a charge up time and/or a few turns of immobility upon arrival. This makes sneak attacks or retreats more of a risk.

All other things balance themselves out like everything else:

- it is a ship component, presumably of engine weight, so putting it on a ship means sacrificing regular engines or weapons/defenses.

- it cant jump ships out of their range, so you can't jump extremely deep into enemy territory.

Tho i personally prefer a starbase based method of reducing long distance travel time, like a highway or jump network. that takes more effort to set up and maintain and is harder to use offensively.

But i'm all for each race getting a, preferably unique, way to speed up long distance travel on ginormous maps. (i.e. i want to be able to move my fleets from one end of my empire to the other faster then it takes to simply build another fleet)

As hilarious as a few players may find this idea to experience, I can't think of any real benefit it would give to CalCiv.

I can't see using this.  I have no intention of leaving the movement of my ships to some random number generator. My decisions are already full of enough risk as is.

"Captain So-And-So, jump over to this area of the map.  Who knows, you just might make it one piece." 

"Gee, thanks Commander-In-Chief.  Here's my resignation.  You can fly the ship in jump mode and try _your_ luck!"

I also prefer this the idea of a 'jump network'. I really miss that on the huge maps.

I want my hypergates.  Simple, point-to-point transit. Relatively easy to add in, code-wise, too.

You could even limit them by number of ships per turn that could use them, to avoid things like being able to teleport vast fleets in short periods of time.

The fluff even says we had hypergates before the hyperdrive was invented.  So can we have them back again, please?

In X3 its very precise. This would be madness. Like betting on dice for no reason. Lol. IMHO.

DARCA.

We had stargates, not hypergates. The reasons we no longer use them are, that they are massive, city-sized space-installations with huge power-requirements, that you can only travel between two existing and functional stargates, and that they are slow. Sure, they are faster than using thrusters, but they are much slower than hyperdrive.

Hypergates, on the other hand, apparently use worm-holes, which could mean near-instantaneous travel-time between them (much like in Stargate SG-1). Mormegil said about them:

I have been thinking about it and I am more against this idea than I was before.  It strikes me that GalCiv 2 effectively makes the concept of vast interstellar an actual game mechanism that affects decisions.  It is a part of what makes GalCiv a successful game tor me.  Distance matters.

i can agree with that, which is why i'd rather have a way for faster, not instantaneous, travel, if you invest into it. Considering maps are going to be multiple times larger.

I'll add that this has been true since the early 1990s when CalCiv for OS2 first came out. It is, and has been, such an integral part of the game that it has become epically traditional.

Anyone ever build 16 starbases with the +movement modules next to eachother? Gives ships +32 to movement, thats your jumpdrive right there

like this:

The guy wrote some explanation too

Hypergates supplement, but do not replace, hyperdrive, in the same way railroads supplement, but do not replace, wheeled vehicles.

Hyperdrives allow you to go ANYWHERE. Hypergates allow your to go ONE specific place, faster.  Having hypergates around would add a whole new strategic dimension to the game, because people would now be concerned with fighting over critical crossroads places, not to mention the fact that bringing along your own hypergate constructor changes the strategic outlook significantly.

A good example of how hypergates can make for a much more varied scenario (and, ways that they can be circumvented) is found in Dan Simmon's Hyperion series.

I think it would probably be too much of a gameplay burden to use hypergates to "speed" travel (I mean, they'd go in, and pop out the other end some number of turns later, which opens up a whole raft of issues), rather than have travel be instantaneous between the two ends. That said, there could be a limit placed on the maximum distance apart that they could be placed, and require advancing tech to increase this distance.  Or limit the number of ships per turn that could use a given hypergate.

im not a fan of the distance limitation however if we could build as many as we wanted i could live with it

however the time it takes to get from A to B makes sense to me other options for limits could be the time it takes to recover from travel. A special cost for using them one of the 'resources' that we hear about every so often

these effects could be modified by tech to make them faster

and finally the destruction of a hypergate should have some negative effects

any ships currently en route to the exit of that hypergate should be lost

possibly have an effect which limits or disables the ability to create a new gate in that vacinity

I envision hypergates subject to the same limitations as Starbases - depending on your logistics score, and no more than a small fixed number per sector.  Also, I don't know if I made this clear or not, but I expect that hypergates have to come in pairs or endpoints, and for each hypergate, there is ONLY one place to travel.   Both limitations, I think, will keep down on littering the galaxy with hypergates.

I suggest the distance/transit limits as an additional limitation to offset the instantaneous travel time.  Frankly, I think it would be too much of a PITA to handle what goes on in hyperspace if you merely used the gates as accelerators.  It's far simply if the game mechanics simply treat them like a Wormhole - you go in one end, and immediately pop out the other, and ALL your remaining movement is gone for that turn.

I see no reason to add in any of the other negatives you describe, given that we don't treat starbase destruction in any special way.

From a game-play perspective, I don't like stargates or jumpdrives because they remove the need for a balanced military presence and increase the incentive for maintaining just a few super-powerful fleets. 

Not necessarily.

Any smart player will try to find out where you've build your hypergates, before going on the attack. Once he knows where they are, he can go straight for them, preventing you from quickly sending reinforcements. Or he could attack you from multiple fronts. Your super-fleets can't be everywhere. Not even with hypergates.

With respect to this aspect, it is true to a certain extent.

But, given the potential for maps spanning several thousand hexes, and containing hundreds of worlds, I don't see this as a problem.

Part of the issue is that maintaining huge standing battlefleets is still too easy, once you have your economy up.  I'm currently running a GC2 game right now, on the Immense Map, and I'm fighting 5 opponents, each of us averaging about 20 worlds.  I don't have too much of a problem keeping 20-25 large hulled ships, each costing about 1500bc to make.  That's a bit much - I think it would be far more challenging to try to fight a war where I can't maintain a major capital ship per world. We should seriously consider ramping up the standing costs of warships.

Really, I shouldn't have a battlefleet hanging around every (or every other) star system. I want the model of the British Empire and the Royal Navy of 1900 - the ability to move powerful fleets around, but not be able to afford too many of them.  You DON'T maintain a "balanced" presence everywhere, because that violates one of the cardinal rules of warfare:  concentrate your forces to gain a local tactical advantage, while manipulating your opponent to deny him the same.  If you can afford to have powerful fleets at every point on the map, that means the game balance is off.

Realistically, that means I shouldn't be able to afford to keep more than one medium and a dozen small/tiny ships per system at the most, and really only be able to afford to keep up 1 capital ship per 10 systems or so.

For comparison, Star Fleet at the height of the Dominion War, consisted of 150ish major worlds and 1000 or so significant colonies in the Federation, yet could only maintain a fleet with about 20 Galaxy-class ships (HUGE-hulled ships), and maybe 40 Akira/Excelsior (Large-Hulled) ships.   In the real world, the top end US Navy peaked at about 50 battleships & main fleet carriers during WW2,  but you're looking at a 4:1 ratio of cruisers, and almost a 10:1 ratio of destroyers.  And the majority of fighting in the Pacific (1941-1943) was done with less than 100 major (i.e. carrier, battleship AND cruisers) ships TOTAL on all sides.

You SHOULD be zooming around a powerful fleet via hypergates, but you should have a very limited number of them. And even there, as Ganthor pointed out, one of the major strategies for your opponent is to go after key hypergates, to cut off your lines of reinforcement.

If you can't have reasonable movement, (and, without hypergates, movement on large maps is NEVER going to be reasonable), then you're always stuck with a "fight with what you have there" strategy, which is really not very fun, unless we allow ludicrous amounts of ships to be built (and maintained).

This is easily balanced by making the travel take some time, either in the form of:  

-instant travel but your ships need to be inactive at the start and/or end of the travel, leaving them sitting ducks or,

-travel takes time (either a fixed amount or some % of the time regular travel time), with the risk that if a gate is destroyed you either loose the ships or they are spit out at a earlier node in the network.

I think my favorite system would be a series of military starbases, each with a hypergate network module, that allows jumps to other starbases with a module, but only 2-3 sectors away. This way you have to put a series of nodes in a row to go where you want, you have to make a chain or web, increasing the cost if you want to travel further, giving you great freedom to enter/exit the network at many places, but also making it vulnerable in many places.

You can jump directly from any node in the network to any other as long as they are part of the chain, but you cannot change course mid jump. the travel time would be some function of the number of nodes you jump, where the time increases with each node, but less with each. If a node on your route is destroyed while you are in travel, your ships are spit out somewhere along the route and take damage, maybe even each ship of a fleet gets spit out at different spots but that might be to much.

The main reason i choose military starbases to have the nodes is so that the AI gets pissed at you when you start building your network to close to or in their territory, but it can be a special (defenseless?) structure too as long as the AI reacts similarly. Naturally you can then also have "share gate network" treaties and the like.

unrelated to the above:

What do you guys think if hyperspace gates were visually connected on the map, similar to a trade route, for everybody including enemies to see?

i agree with this completely

making networks would be a choice as well as in do you want to build a strong network with multiple connections to each gate, or a fast straight line thats vulerable to attack

i think there should be a show lines toggle that would turn it on or off on the mainscreen /minimap much like influence, stars, anomolies etc could be toggled in gc2 i would also like to see some of those toggles available for the main screen viewer

I'm OK with allowing everyone to see where everyone else's hypergate network is, but I think the mini-map, or as a toggle-able overlay (like Androshalforc said) is required.

My image of them is similar to EleventhStars:

1. Each gate is part of a pair
2. Hypergate tech comes along somewhere AFTER you would get Warp-engines
3. You create them with constructors, and they're a separate installation, not tied to any current starbase type.
4. They count against your starbase limit (both overall, and per-sector)
5. Gates aren't usable until you "pair" it.  Pairing is a ONE TIME choice - can't be changed.
6. maximum Distance between pairs may or may not be a fixed amount, and may or may not depend on additional tech
7. I'd want maximum distance to scale with the maps, roughtly. You shouldn't have to have 50 gates to cross an entire map, but having 20 hops on a gigantic map seems reasonable. Which means, somewhere between 4 and 10 sectors
8. travel between pairs is INSTANT - if we go with some sort of speedup, it's not really different enough than adding more engines or warp bubble movement, so why bother?
9. To use a gate, a SINGLE SHIP (no fleets) moves up to the gate, and then you have some sort of popup that says "use gate?"
10. The ship transits to the other side, appears on the opposite side of the hex from travel, and then is finished moving for that turn.
11. Like distance, the number of ships which can transit a specific gate is limited somehow: either a fixed number per turn, or a variable number determined by tech.  I'd presume 1-5 per turn is the appropriate range.

And, yeah, if it's going to be effective, you want a "Hypergate Interstate" web of them, specifically with certain systems being crossroads and VERY important strategically.

Since you have to take 1 turn per "hop", it's not like you can move a ship from one side of the map in 1 turn. I'd presume it's 4-5 turns on average to get to a system that's not a hub on your network, on a reasonably large map.

There is a few problems with your solution:

-limiting the number of ships per turn punishes you for using a lot of small ships compared to a few big ships. 

-having gates only work manually, with confirmation, and only 1 ships at a time is a lot of micromanagement that gets old fast. Especially if you have to do it 20 turns in a row to get to the other side of the map.

I personally think ships should use gates in their standard pathfinding. Manually entering the network i can also imagine, but after you start you shouldnt have to redo it a bunch of times to get to where you want to go. '

If you want to put a limit on how many ships can use it at once, i think it should be 1 fleet at a time, or some other amount in terns of your logistics capacity, but 1 fleet seems the most logical and least complicated.

i disagree with several points here mainly about paired gates and related points

heres my thoughts

1. each gate is a point on the network
2. each gate can be connected to any other point within range  (either specific or scaling with map size)
3. when a fleet reaches a gate it enters the network but does not immediately go anywhere
4. at the start of each turn each fleet in the network moves to the next furthest point it can reach
5. when a fleet gets to its destination gate it will begin re-emerging which will not complete until the start of your next turn
6. each gate can handle an infinite amount of transfers but only one exit/enter per turn
7. if a gate is destroyed while a fleet is re-emerging that fleet should be destroyed
8. if a gate is destroyed fleets transferring through it should be redirected if possible or exit at the gate closest(fastest) to their destination
9. you should be able to grant access to your network through diplomacy and even charge per use/per turn/per year for access
10. it should also be possible to connect networks however i think that should require a special "conversion" gate that any ship passing from one network to the other would need to pass through

Has Anybody read the Honor Harrington Books?

You could have fast travel between a small number of stars.

This makes those stars more important as a strategic point in the game.

Ships using the those gates could loose all their movement for that round. Additionally they could be limited in the amount of ships(ize) which is allowed to travel per turn through the gate.

Just my 5 cent.

the problem here is that you want a ship to be able to occupy the hex, and NOT use the gate, just like we do with starbases (for defending the hypergate), so you can't automatically warp everything that moves into the hex the gates are in. Having the gates be part of pathfinding does, I think, solve that problem with the pop-up:  manual moves require the pop-up (so we can manually move a ship into the gate hex for defense), but auto-moves (rally, or pathfinding) use the gate by default.

I hadn't thought of the large vs small ship limitation issue, but your suggestion that the gate's per-turn limit be measured in fleets is a good idea. I'd go with just 1 fleet per turn, in that case.

I don't think Androshalforc's suggestions are good (no offense).  That's a lot of coding to implement all those states and conditions and locality inside the network, and it's overly-complicated to use and understand. Fundamentally, what we're after is fast long-distance travel, without unbalancing or overcomplicating the game.  Simple, instantaneous hypergates gets us this with lower amounts of complexity and coding, and still retains interesting strategic challenges, without having to worry about modelling the hyperspace network.