Spaceships Personality

Interesting rundown of efficiency solutions for space travel...

GC2 does a fair job at it if you consider variety rather than specific components to be added through design steps; Colony, Constructor, Transport, Trader, Hull sizes -- all of which are "specialists".

If we were to limit quantity (and, indirectly... probability amounts) of available variations, we'd simplified not only combat or capacities but also, gameplay complexity.

It's not that a game MUST be easy, it's that you have a choice to "create" you favorite context by limiting your designs to general but useful outputs from a shipyard. Otherwise, the win-lose conditions still remain a goal to obtain by any means necessary - including diverse assets represented by your ships, from choices i might add.

Explore with scouts, gain advantages with fleets -- match the enemy's best or lose.

In fact, players provide the fastest & the toughest WITH models which already have a personality if only by extra sensors or more efficient Attack/Defense ratios that require even, range.

The "problem" I'm trying to expose here is regarding spachips/fleets micromanagement and scale issues specially in late games. In MOO2 the battles involving the maximum number of ships took too long (even in automode) and become numb boring. GalCiv2 launched the concept of logistics that limits the amount of ships per fleet but then there is no limit to the amount of fleets you can have (that i'm aware of) besides your economy constraints. After some time (late games) there are just too many stacks of fleets and the battles become again numb boring and repetitive. I experience this systemic flaw over and over in space games. Reducing the number of ships by increasing their requirements and increasing their personalities with leaders (heroes ...) could, in my opinion, help balancing a bit this "problem".

However I have to admit that if correctly handled and balanced it should be possible to manage a great deal of ships and fleets but the problem is that I did not yet saw any game offering that possibility with sufficient enjoyability (specially in late games).

Oh well, then what you are discussing is the AI algorithms happy_trigger_beat_the_human_minds by overwhelmingly producing ships to crush with numbers rather than some "personality".

Nobody claims war games should be an easy ride into satisfactory limits, nor do they have to be boring enough that your superiority factors always defeat any maximum oppositions fleeted or not.

They wanna fight, let them or lose for not being smart enough to match THAT resilient (coded in, btw) attacking power.

It's not gameplay balance either, in fact. But more about ruleset, conditions offered.

We have extensively theorized on such "bigger_numbers_win" (as it pertains to AI capacities, again i must add) in this thread for GC3 suggestions -- you may find that our conclusions were a bit strange too.

Something must be done however because in late games things get really too complicated with so much stuff to do.

I think the key areas to improve are "better level of Automation" and "higher level of Abstraction". These are surelly needed on late games. With the right level of automation where local governors could handle the job for particular galaxy sectors it could be possible for the player to keep handling fleet management because now you have reduced your area of intervention. With a higher level of abstraction it would be even better. The idea of managing fleets instead of individual ships is a very interesting one. At some advanced stage of the game the player could switch the abstraction level (if he wanted) to make only the big decisions on particular topics. Examples: Option to attack a particular planet; Option to make an agreement with a particular race; Option to start building a new spaceship design, etc .. The player could sit back and watch his empire from a bigger perspective and decide to focus his attention on what he's really interested to. Maybe focus the attention with a particular negotiation, or spaceship design plan (like when the Emperor Palpatine was completelly obsessed with his plans for the Death Star and seems not to care with other trivial businesses)

Give us more automation/governor options and more abstraction levels and maybe its possible to manage thousands of ships in late games.

Re: the initial concern of 

I actually think GalCiv finds the perfect balance here.  For each race, for each size and role of ship there is a standard template.  (There are also different ship types for different weapons fitouts, but since in any one game you tend to mostly stick to a given weapon path this doesn't affect ship diversity much).

eg. There is a Drengin Missile Corvette, a larger Drengin Missile battleship etc.

There are hundreds of possible loadouts for any given ship design but they are minor variations on a theme.  Different types of Klingon Bird-of-Prey, to use your analogy.

The problem with this approach is that, at current levels of technology a skilled human player is always going to be vastly better than the AI.  Most players are always going to be reluctant to hand even partial control of their empire over to sub-optimal control.

You'll notice that the AI Governors currently in GalCiv2 are essentially macros - they do exactly what you have programmed them to do and no more.  Any more autonomy than that gets frustrating for the player as the game starts doing things he doesn't want it to.