Nailed it.

Maybe the solution would be to have different classes of sensors. So you have your normal operational ship sensors for normal and small scouting craft and then large-unwieldy sensors for large exploration ships.

Good points. However it is not a linear progression. Also those arrays are MASSIVE. It doesn't make much sense when a ship has more sensor range than a planet or star base.

I've used sensor ships since at least the early GC2 game, and it was pretty easy to get a 15-range ship there rather fast. Mid-game in GC2, I'd have a sensor ship with 15 range and 5+ engine movement and ultra-long range for less than the cost of a typical small ship armed to the teeth.

Personally, I'd like to see it turned down a bit from GC3's current level.  Maybe only allowing one copy of each technology per ship, or just limiting the number of sensors per hull time to some modest number (e.g. 2 on a small, 3 on a medium, 4 on a large, etc.).

It's all good...

Blaze, I see your point and I am certain you have the best interests of the game in mind. It seems cheesy and you want the game to be free of cheese. It is the nature of all good men to stamp out cheese and corruption wherever it is found.

I often find myself often wondering, one of the X's stands for exploit and as long as an exploit is available and the devs haven't seen fit to remove it, why let it bother you. They will never get them all. Just don't use them yourself and it is as if they do not exist. I don't use this exploit to the extent described. I build the biggest I can from turn one, and that is it for me.

What about building 12 or more econ bases around a planet? Is that not an exploit. I don't do that one either. I could but I don't. It is just too much for me and it detracts from the casual nature of the game as I see it. I try to play the game in the way I tend to my business, Pragmatic, with an occasional lapse into Benevolence Hell, I love this game, but I don't even finish 90% of the games I start. I play until it gets tedious or stops being fun. The few exploits I use and how I bamboozle the minor races should be of no interest to anyone as long as I am not bragging about my high scores

If they start recording high scores like they did with GCII, I will be more on board for attending to details like this. 

I hope you appreciate the good humor in which this was intended.

Putting multiple telescopes in parallel allows one to create an interferometer that gives greater resolution. Although the visual range is the same it becomes possible to resolve smaller features (ships, planets, starbases) with more sensors.

Sensor range is, in theory, infinite. We already have telescopes that can see almost to the edge of the observable Universe. But we lack the resolution to directly observe planets near us. Improvements in resolution, not range per se, is what sensors should be viewed as.

The location of the sensors can move faster than light, but necessarily the sensor scanning range? Not a criticism, just a thought.

Maybe they need to add a tech that addresses FTL communication, scanning, etc. The Ansible, (Ender's Game), Hyperspace Communication, whatever. There could be modules that stack, if one insists.

The problem with sensors is that you generally don't want to put them on any warship because this will reduce the chances of you winning the battle as you'll be producing less ships for the same amount of production. Especially when there are way better option available, such as non-combat sensorships who accompany warfleets, and which are far more effective in granting sensorrange.

First, a sensormodule should give a ship an attack bonus on a low scale. This should be a one-per-ship bonus, unstackable. This would give a true reason to put sensors also on warships. Next, in a fleet all sensor-modules should be able to work together and thereby, increasing the sensorrange additively, but with a heavy diminishing at higher numbers.

Sensormodules on starbases need to be heavily buffed. Such a huge and stationairy object has a much better foundation for long-range observation than moving ships.

Further, I'd like to see sensors that give range only in a single direction. These could be powerful listening posts aimed towards hostile territory, maybe even rotating with the starbase each turn. The advantage would be that these sensor could peer farther, however not in all directions equally.

Diminishing returns on sensor range would sort this out.

The issue of assuming that sensor range represents a number of probes being sent out is twofold. One, it requires that you have the ability to launch large numbers of probes in short periods of time. Two, it requires that the probes move very, very rapidly. If you assume that your ship has a sensor range of R tiles and a speed of S tiles per turn, and that each probe has a scanning range of r tiles, then the probes will need to move at a minimum speed of (R - r)*S/(1 tile) to allow the ship to scan out to its maximum sensor range in the time take by 1 move action, and you will need to launch (6*R)/r of these probes in the time taken by a single move action to fully cover the area within your ship's sensor range. If you increase the sensor range of the ship by N tiles, then you increase the minimum speed required by N*S/(1 tile) and you increase the number of probes required by 6*N/r. If a sensor module represents a probe-launching device, then it likely has the ability to launch X probes per time unit, with each probe moving at some speed s which is independent of the number of sensor modules. If each sensor module represents a part of a kind of probe catapult, then you're likely to see each sensor module increase the speed at which each probe moves by some amount but adding additional sensor modules is unlikely to significantly affect the launch rate of the probes. Either way, you're only halfway there - you need both the launch rate and the probe speed to increase linearly with the number of sensor modules installed, but you can only reasonably expect to see at most one of these terms increase linearly with the number of sensor modules installed.

Assuming that the probes have their own warp drives does not help this (and there's a reasonable case to be made that the probes could not be equipped thusly, at least not while being capable of the speed required), as then you run into the issue of requiring the probe launch rate to be proportional to the square of the number of sensor modules installed, which is unreasonable.

Diminishing returns has its own problems. Namely, it can be quite a bit of a pain when you get bonuses and discover that your ships are now wasting space because that 10% bonus to sensor range means you now need 5 modules rather than the 6 you previously needed for your 8 sensor range, and that those 6 modules are not currently enough to push your sensor range out to 9 with the 10% bonus, so you ought to redesign the fleet to take advantage of the extra space you've managed to obtain from that bonus. It can also be a bit of a pain to figure out how much of a bonus you'll get for something with diminishing returns, which could become rather annoying with the upcoming mutually-exclusive technologies. +10% sensor power per sensor module isn't so useful when sensor power is converted to sensor range as R = 0.5*sqrt(B + S), where R is the sensor range, B is the base sensor power, S is the total sensor power of the sensor modules equipped, and sqrt(y) is the square root function. It also makes comparisons a bit more of a pain; maybe instead of an inverse square law we have R = B + sum(s/n, n = 1, N) where R is sensor range, B is the base sensor range, s is the bonus per module, and N is the total number of modules added. Is it better to increase s by 10%, or reduce the size of each module by 20% (=> up to 25% more modules can be installed for a given amount of space)?

Be careful what you ask for, or you might find yourself playing Spreadsheet Civilizations or Galactic Spreadsheets rather than Galactic Civilizations.

Re OP, in GC II I never added sensors to combat ships either. However, I built a couple specific sensor ships, that also had long range, and good move rate. These were used to scout ahead of my combat vessels, and withdrew when encountering enemies - those would be dealt with by my strike fleets. They also had survey capability, so during peace times, they were used to hunt anomalies, or as "early warning" ships, guarding my borders.

So far I used the same method in GCIII  -unless sensors do have a direct impact on combat though now (dunno) it works for me.

Gamey? In a game? Unbelievable!

And in the end it's a trade off. Sure you can build a sensorships from turn one, but it's rather unwise, as you don't even have a survey module at this pont, and it means you put less resources into other fields (like colonization) at this point. Later building a sensorship means you don't build a combat vessel at this point.

I agree it would be better the AI was capable of utilizing sensors (and a couple of other things) better, but having artificial limits does not seem to be fun for me either. I also found the mega-event in GC giving supersensors to everyone a rather weak replacement for incabable AI (in this field) and overall rather annoying (why invest in research when it's given for free by event later).

Quoting GalCivius,

reply 48

Gamey? In a game? Unbelievable!

And in the end it's a trade off. Sure you can build a sensorships from turn one, but it's rather unwise, as you don't even have a survey module at this pont, and it means you put less resources into other fields (like colonization) at this point. Later building a sensorship means you don't build a combat vessel at this point.

 

I agree it would be better the AI was capable of utilizing sensors (and a couple of other things) better, but having artificial limits does not seem to be fun for me either. I also found the mega-event in GC giving supersensors to everyone a rather weak replacement for incabable AI (in this field) and overall rather annoying (why invest in research when it's given for free by event later).

 

 

It is gamey in that it is unbalanced as hell in comparison with planetary and station wide sensors... that... and the AI never use the tactic which make it a gamey tactic. A HUGE benefit the players don't need against the AI. 

And how do you define "artificial" limits?

It is a balance issue... either strengthen planetary and station sensors to be in line with ship borne sensors and have the AI use it to or limit how we can attach sensors or how they scale. It is rather simple really.

You can't be serious when you say that building a sensor ship take away from building a combat ship?

Knowing where the enemy is, his size and capability is THE best defense you ever will get as a human player.