GalCiv3 Forums
Will starbases with a military focus ever have a zone of control where enemy ships within said zone will be drawn into combat with the starbase? This would make military starbases tactically viable and add another level of strategic depth to the game. Also will they ever be durable enough for them to be worth having?
They do have a ZOC and they provide bonuses to allied ships within them hopefully like in GC2 with weapon/defence/speed boosts for allied ships and slowing enemy ships down as well. As to direct combat that only happens if the Base is actually targeted atm.
I think military star bases should have 25% more HP and it's ZOC start at more than 5 hexes. Or maybe if a military star base is nearby and in a planet's ZOC, players must destroy the military star base first before they can attack the planet, invade with troops.
yeah, I think they need more HP, or an upgrade to do so. In my last game, I spent like 20 constructor points, pimping out critical mining SBs. They still SUCKED, and it would have be far better to build combat ships and just have them parked at the SB.
Granted, the ship support functions for military SBs can get impressive (the damage increase to ships, etc), but still, the SB by itself, no matter how many weapons and defenses you have can still be dominated by a single Large Ship of equal cost, so it seems.
I'm not looking for SBs to come close to replacing ships (they cant, they are not mobile, and they have to be spread 5 hexes apart), nor do I want heavy 'battle stations', but some more durability and punch to help would be nice, atleast give them the same firepower as an equally costing ship (include the constructor ship cost in that as well, not just the constructor module).
I believe that military starbases are mostly ignored by most players. I have only used it once, and it was ignored by my enemy. Stardock needs to nerf this mechanic to make it useful. I'll note the following issues...
1. Military starbase enhancements come too late in the tech tree to be really useful. By the time you get to them, battle fleets are more better.
2. They should have more attack & defense abilities than regular starbases.
3. They should have a larger ZOC than regular starbases, and they should come already stocked with perimeter scanners.
4. They need to be dangerous enough to enemy races that these races are forced to attack them (rather than simply ignoring them).
The Dev team needs to put their heads together to determine how to make military bases both useful and fun. As things stand, the players ignore building them and, if they are built, the AI ignore them in the game. Simply stated - this mechanic is broken.
This would be very usefull and a great addition to them!
I think thats actually a good idea. Instead of parking your fleet at your planet for a last ditch effort of planetary defense, you can park it at the military starbase in the planet's ZOC. Planetary Defenses which help fleets are only in Age of Ascension, but military starbase ship support comes in the Age of War. That could help the AI focus its defenses when its getting overrun.
I think thats a very good idea. Instead of parking your fleet at your planet for a last ditch effort of planetary defense, you can park it at the military starbase in the planet's ZOC. Planetary Defenses which help fleets are only in Age of Ascension, but military starbase ship support comes in the Age of War. That could help the AI focus its defenses when its getting overrun.
Military SBs are glorified garages and little else. Mil SBs provide viable attack bonuses to battles within their ZOC but this is far less useful than it sounds in practice.
The single most impactful thing that renders Mil SBs pretty much pointless isn't how weak they are, it's how much of a non-entity they are when it comes to being an effective defence: attackers can just swoop right past them and ignore them. Later on in the game when fleet moves run up into the many dozens (and low hundreds if you go balls to the wall on moves) fixed defences are of no use whatsoever because everything just swoops right past them. Even the moves reduction modules do nothing to prevent an enemy fleet from flying right on by.
GC3 is broken in so far as its turn based system is concerned once moves go above ~8 because there are no interception mechanics to stop stuff blitzing in from beyond FOW in many cases, weaving through all of your defences, and slamming right into that high value target that they had their eye on. There is no way to defend an empire against an attack force that can move so far and have its pick and choose of targets within its moves range. (Most people don't see this happening because the AI isn't able to exploit this, but you've surely been able to take advantage of the AI with huge moves fleets, and as soon as you play against a Human the problems that GC3 has pile up very rapidly indeed.)
Mil SBs could have a valuable role to play in fixing this fundamental problem by means of interception, i.e., as soon as an enemy fleet enters the ZOC of a Mil SB an interception battle is started or at the very least the enemy fleet loses the remainder of its moves (or some variation on that theme), but they don't ergo they're a waste of resources and effort (cf. constructor spam management). A better solution would be to do what every other sensible TBS game does and give everything with a gun the ability to intercept enemy moves as soon as they come within a certain range, and Mil SBs could have the largest of such ranges thus giving them functional strategic value and perchance making them worthwhile.
It occurs to me that a big part of the problem with military SBs is that the buffs they provide are completely unnecessary against the AI atm, as it simply can't produce good enough ships to counter a human beyond turn 100, and can't produce enough of them to match a human-sized fleet. If these two problems were dealt with, then we might find that a wall of military starbases on a hot border suddenly becomes rather more viable.
Strongly agree that military starbases are nearly useless. They become *much* more useful (and I don't think this is imbalancing, either), if they can be set to automatically engage enemy ships that enter their ZOC. You can build a defensive line with them that way. Otherwise (as has been noted), they can simply be ignored, which is ludicrous.
- They should be able to engage ships within their ZOC
- They should have improvements available that expand their ZOC
- They should be able to build up weapons and other components comparable to large or huge ships.
- They should be able to build up very heavy hitpoints and armor with additional constructor modules
It's always bothered me that there are only a few scanner upgrade levels for starbases, but I can build ships with epic scan ranges of 50+. I would expect starbase listening posts to make more sense than putting ships on station on my empire's frontier.
And if you happen to enter a ZOC that is overlapped by multiple military starbases, you get to engage multiple starbases -- it should be possible, if you care to expend the resources, to build monster fixed defenses.
1) I think this would be cool but i don't see it happening anytime soon if ever, too game changing and its not the GalCiv way
2) They have this already, you can expand by - 2 steps of 2. Thats pretty big. I don't think any more is needed but thats just me
3 $ 4) Agree, You can build them up now (wep/def) and it looks impressive but they go down way too easy for a military base. Hit point modules would be a welcome addition even if it were just for mil bases.
Other ideas:
Add fighters to your fleet in ZOC Slow movement of enemy ships
Lower defenses of enemy ships Speed up your ships
Lower HP, accuracy , fire power of enemy ships
This bothers me too.
Why not minefields around a SB to slow down a enemy fleet ?
Because minefields in space are usually one of the stupidest concepts in science fiction, especially with an unconstrained FTL system such as is used in the Galactic Civilizations setting.
That said, military starbases already have a way to slow down enemy fleets, they just don't work that well. Gravity Field Generators are supposed to increase the cost of crossing a tile by 25% and the Tractor Beam is supposed to increase the cost of crossing a tile by 50%. Five actions to cross 4 tiles or three actions to cross two just isn't that much of a cost when you're looking at ships with more than a dozen actions per turn and the region over which the movement costs are increased is limited to not more than nine tiles from the starbase.
Military starbases can already do this to a degree; the Slipstream Generator and Stellar Wake Generator reduce tile movement costs for friendly fleets by 25% and 50% respectively.
Yes, force fields are science fiction and the good old minefields are obselote in space, but perhaps usable on the planet itself ?..or are there also a force field possible what prevent enemies to invade.
OOPs sorry had a senior moment
As far as forcefields capable of preventing invasions go, this is possible in settings which allow fully-shielded planets and shields which can block the passage of or destroy large objects. The Star Wars EU has examples of such, the Star Wars movies debatably have examples of such and provide circumstantial evidence for the Star Wars setting to be capable of such, and GCIII may also have such in the Elerium Defense Shields and perhaps the Planetary Defense Domes.
As far as the minefields go, I have no particular objection to minefields of the kinds used in the real world, but as such would best be represented as a planetary defense or resistance bonus and could not sensibly slow hostile fleets, I don't see how this relates to the previous suggestion of slowing hostile fleets with space mines.
As for the implicit suggestion of making it impossible for planets to be invaded as long as there is a sufficiently upgraded military starbase within range, I am completely opposed to the idea. Make invasions more costly? Fine. Make it likely that the cost of the invasion will be so high that invasion is impractical without taking down the starbase? Fine. Make invasion quite literally impossible without destroying the starbase, though? No. GCIII has issues with the availability of invasion immunity already, and making it more available won't help, though at least a station-based invasion immunity is vulnerable to attack whereas improvement-based invasion immunity is not. If you do not have enough ships in the area to control the space around your planets, your planets should be vulnerable to invasion. Space stations of any type should not change that, no matter how heavily upgraded they are.
No worries; everyone forgets things from time to time, especially when the thing in question is part of something which sees little use.
Because minefields in space are usually one of the stupidest concepts in science fiction, especially with an unconstrained FTL system such as is used in the Galactic Civilizations setting.
That said, military starbases already have a way to slow down enemy fleets, they just don't work that well. Gravity Field Generators are supposed to increase the cost of crossing a tile by 25% and the Tractor Beam is supposed to increase the cost of crossing a tile by 50%. Five actions to cross 4 tiles or three actions to cross two just isn't that much of a cost when you're looking at ships with more than a dozen actions per turn and the region over which the movement costs are increased is limited to not more than nine tiles from the starbase.
Military starbases can already do this to a degree; the Slipstream Generator and Stellar Wake Generator reduce tile movement costs for friendly fleets by 25% and 50% respectively.
I've experimented with giving things like military/mining starbases prety significant speed reductions (ie 50%) right off the bat & it can be significant, especially aoe/aow. Part of the problemis that StarbaseRange cannot be configured on a per module basis, so if you want to have a great big pit of interstellar tarpit module.... that great big pit will also do anything else that starbase does once you add it
a work around might be to create a whole new starbase ring and place range extension and slowdown modules only in that ring
if you want a tarpit starbase you need to have a tarpit ring which prevents you from having military/econ rings and all this ring does is give you range and slowdowns
Doesn't that really depend on how that minefield is implemented?
If we limit the design to your traditional Earth-bound variety where you have a device that explodes on physical contact with the shock wave of that explosion damaging the target then, of course, it makes no sense in space. However, if we separate the generalized concept from the specific technical implementation we have a device that:
- is unmanned
- activates when it detects a target
- makes an attack against the target upon detection
- is completely expendable to the point it can even destroy itself to make that attack
I don't see why you couldn't have a military device fulfilling the above criteria so that it would also be a workable weapon system design even in the vastness of space.
One concept that comes immediately to mind is the "one-shot-laser" where the device consumes itself to generate huge amounts of energy in a very short time and uses this energy to shoot a very powerful laser beam at the detected target. A low tech variant of this is the nuclear bomb pumped laser that we, maybe, could already do if we really put our mind to it, or at least probably could engineer in the near future. A more advanced civilization might have an anti-matter trap loaded with the stuff and release it powering the lasing rods to get off a single big graser blast at your ship. But low or high tech these "space mines" could guard a very large volume of space limited only by their detection and targeting equipment and the dispersion of the laser ray. "Touching" the mine in this kind of setup is to come inside their targeting range and that could be quite large.
I'm not sure it's a suitable concept for GC3 battle mechanics but I'm pretty sure people will figure out how to make area-denial (volume-denial?) weapons in space as soon as we start shooting at each other there. 
Let's consider for a moment just how large a volume of space each tile represents. According to this post by Draginol (Frogboy), the minimum dimension of a tile is ~0.02AU or ~10 light-seconds. If we're very, very generous, GCIII ship combat ranges might be roughly 0.4 light-seconds (beams, which include lasers, take about 0.2 seconds to propagate from point of origin to target when fired at maximum unboosted range, and the maximum possible missile range is roughly double the unboosted beam range; you could also argue for engagement ranges more like tens of meters to a couple kilometers based upon the sizes of the ships and the apparent distances between them as seen in the battle viewer, and put the laser component in the pile of science fiction 'lasers' which aren't true lasers). If you're very, very lucky and happen to be mining the minimally-sized tile, you might be looking at ~600 mines per sheet across the tile, with several sheets of mines required to effectively block travel through one face of the tile for any significant length of time (moving parallel, or nearly parallel, to the minefield is not going to be hampered). If you want to block all travel through the tile, you're probably looking at something more like 16000 mines just for the smallest possible tiles in GCIII. If you assume that the average tile size around a star with a system similar to the Terran home system is ~1 AU (and in my opinion the average tile dimension is likely far greater), you're looking at needing ~2500 times as many mines per sheet (~1.5 million mines per sheet; roughly 100 million mines per tile with 25 sheets per field using two or three mutually perpendicular fields to block passage through the tile, or ~2 billion mines per tile if you want to fill the tile). Once you get out into interstellar space, the tile dimensions probably jump up to something on the order of a lightyear rather than an AU, at which point you're looking at something on the order of 1e15 (one quadrillion) mines per sheet across the tile. Mining a full tile, even with generous assumptions about mine spacing, requires an enormous investment of resources and a lot of time. This is quite simply not practical, especially if you want to apply it to every tile in a starbase's area of effect (without AoE upgrades, a single starbase covers 90 tiles, not including the tile in which the starbase is located; the first AoE upgrade increases this to 168 tiles, and adding the second increases this to 270 tiles).
Then there's the issue of whether or not the mines are sufficiently difficult to clear to actually provide a practical impediment to a ship's progress. Unless you have near-perfect containment, anything carrying a significant amount of antimatter is going to be emitting fair amounts of high-energy radiation, which should be relatively easily detected and strongly indicative of the presence of something unnatural. Anything carrying fissile material is likely to be radiating due to the ongoing radioactive decay in the material. Anything with an active station-keeping system (which would likely be necessary for mines in free space rather than in orbit around a body) is going to be quite visible and easily distinguished from natural space debris. Anything with an active power supply is likely to be fairly detectable and readily distinguished from natural space debris. If the mines are readily detectable, that removes the single greatest obstacle to clearing them; now they have to fall back on being difficult to target or present in such great numbers that clearing them is very time-consuming.
There's also the issue of whether or not ships travel with inactive defenses, whether or not a mine is capable of penetrating those defenses if active to a degree sufficient to be worth the cost of the minefield, whether or not the time between the mine detecting a target and detonating is long enough for the target to detect and respond to the mine's activation (you're proposing a mine which orients itself towards the target; it's going to be quite visible for at least a short time before it detonates), how many mines a ship must trigger before the damage sustained becomes problematic or causes the loss of the ship, and so on.
There are scenarios where space mines can make sense, but Galactic Civilizations III is not in general a setting in which space mines make sense; at best, you might do something like set put up an orbital minefield around a planet to deny certain orbitals or impede passage through certain orbitals, but this is going to have detrimental effects on civilian traffic to and from the planet and is unlikely to be something you can set up rapidly enough that you'd only have the minefield while the planet is under threat of invasion, and that minefield would be in the same tile as the planet, not something impeding passage through an adjacent tile.
Hey guys, I know its not what you are talking about exactly, but I was able to make it so a Military Starbase could have a module upgrade that provided 3 fighters to any ships, shipyards, starbases, and planets in the area. While its a indirect form of "interdiction" it still makes them way more useful.
Just curious if that idea appeals to anyone.
Very much so. Why can't a mil base have hanger and send ships out to help? Sure seems like this would be a tricky thing to do (not that I would know 
) are you going to release it as a mod?
) are you going to release it as a mod?
It's actually pretty easy tbh. Doesn't make a lot of sense, though - fighters lack FTL drives (which is why they're so OP), and so should take months to get beyond the SB's own tile.
The msb is coordinating and financing local squadrons and also detecting enemy presence early enough to send escorts.
Or at least that's one way to justify it. It's all abstract.
In order for your station to be able to dispatch fighters to any arbitrary point in the station's area of effect sufficiently early for the fighters to reach the tile at the same time as a detected threat, the fighters must be capable of a hyperspeed of at least
[radius of station's area of effect]*[threat's strategic speed] / ([station's effective threat detection range] - [radius of station's area of effect])
This means that any fighters usable for this purpose must have a hyperspeed which is at least a considerable fraction of the hyperspeed of the detected threat. This is not reasonable for the types of fighters used by GCIII, which lack hyperdrive components and so cannot have hyperspeeds in excess of the base hyperspeed of your faction. Nor will having the fighters attach themselves to fleets through a preplanned rendervous and stay with the fleets until the fleets depart from the station's area of effect help; the fighters are highly unlikely to be able to keep up with ships of the kinds likely to be used in fleets. Also, it's slightly easier to justify the ludicrously low maintenance and replacement costs of fighters if you assume that part of the low cost is due to a lack of any hyperdrive or long-term life support equipment, which introduces further issues for stations having this kind of capability. You could "solve" this issue, to some degree, with a free, invisible, almost arbitrarily-fast carrier, but now your station also needs to have at least as many of these magic carriers as there are friendly fleets within the area of effect in addition to the fighters, and I tend to feel that assuming the existence of these carriers is even more problematic than the fighters themselves are. Also hampering the response force or scheduled escorts justification is that the station needs to have almost arbitrarily large numbers of fighters and carriers available so that it can send fighters to all threatened (response force justification) or friendly (escort through area of effect justification) fleets within the area of effect, and if you want to reduce the number of fighters (and carriers) that the station must have access to, you also increase the minimum speed that the vessels must be capable of in order to provide an effective response force. The response force and, to a lesser extent, the escort force justifications also have the issue of the force not being anywhere to be seen when the station itself comes under attack.
The station providing the logistical support necessary to maintain fighter squadrons on nearby planets, shipyards, and stations is fairly reasonable. The station somehow delivering fighters which lack any advanced hyperdrives to fleets (whether justified as an escort through the area of effect or as a response force dispatched to threatened targets when threats are detected) is rather less reasonable.
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