How does combat work?

from GalCiv4 Forums

Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere.   I was curious if someone could explain how ship combat works in the game.  I've been a GalCiv player since the first game so understand the basic dynamics.  

Essentially, I am wondering what role Defense plays for ships.  In GC3, I vaguely recall that the Defense acted as a sort of HP role such that in a longer combat, the Attack rolls would eventually wear down the Defense and start taking away from actual ship HP.  Frankly, I didn't like this system as Defense was only useful to blunt attacks (there is more nuance but that was the general idea).  I would have liked a high Defense to always blunt weak Attack numbers (e.g. Attack Laser level 1 could never touch a ship with Defense Shield level 4). 

Any clarification on how it works in GC4 would be greatly appreciated!

galactic civilizations iv
13,860 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

The short answer is that we don't know. Stardock has never presented an explanation and since they keep fiddling with the parameters, any explanation would be out of date anyway. (For example, wrong-type shields have recently been dropped in effectiveness from 50% to 10% vs. correct-type shields, but they never indicated what the baseline is.)

We're pretty much expected to reverse-engineer the combat mechanics ourselves, with nothing but the battle logs to go on. Believe me, we've asked.

Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

lol, ok here's the thing with how combat works... it's all a very wide range of numbers right now so it's very hard to see from the battle logs what's going on. the weapons are actually a chance of doing dmg from 1-max weapon range, not sure if it's per weapon exactly. and defense does the same thing, random number between 1 and the defense number that is used per hit (from ship total i think, not weapon). and that defense number blocks the dmg number i think, not a hp shield. ship roles work the same as in gac civ 3, which is very complex atm and has ships just randomly targeting other ships first and last based on ship role. not entirely sure of this stuff though since the ui doesnt show much and the battle logs are very hard to understand with this system, plus the system keeps slightly changing. that 50 to 10% non optimal defense was actually just changed i think to be the square root of the def instead of 10%, not sure exactly how that works yet though.

hopefully more info on that will come out within the next 2 weeks since the game is launching on the 26th now.

accuracy is set at 80% for all weapons, all weapons have same range and rate of fire too btw.

 

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Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Thanks for the responses.  I would like to say that I'm optimistic that a good combat system emerges, but many GC3 players were left waiting....  

I was really hoping there was more transparency about the combat but it sounds like it would be better for me to check in on the game in a few months and see how it's going. 

Reply #4 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

In my opinion, this is another critical failing of the Galciv series - opaque mechanics and a total failure in conveying important information (either through tooltips or a Dev supported wiki).

Reply #5 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting Surge72, reply 4

In my opinion, this is another critical failing of the Galciv series - opaque mechanics and a total failure in conveying important information (either through tooltips or a Dev supported wiki).

I'm having a hard time visualizing how a launch can be successful without some form of documentation of how the game works. I'm incredulous.

Reply #6 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting Basilisk83, reply 2

lol, ok here's the thing with how combat works... it's all a very wide range of numbers right now so it's very hard to see from the battle logs what's going on. the weapons are actually a chance of doing dmg from 1-max weapon range, not sure if it's per weapon exactly. and defense does the same thing, random number between 1 and the defense number that is used per hit (from ship total i think, not weapon). and that defense number blocks the dmg number i think, not a hp shield. ship roles work the same as in gac civ 3, which is very complex atm and has ships just randomly targeting other ships first and last based on ship role. not entirely sure of this stuff though since the ui doesnt show much and the battle logs are very hard to understand with this system, plus the system keeps slightly changing. that 50 to 10% non optimal defense was actually just changed i think to be the square root of the def instead of 10%, not sure exactly how that works yet though.

hopefully more info on that will come out within the next 2 weeks since the game is launching on the 26th now.

accuracy is set at 80% for all weapons, all weapons have same range and rate of fire too btw.

 

 

In addition to what Basalisk outlined I would add a couple of things:

  • I believe that an attack will always do at least 1 damage if it hits.  (so a 20 beam attack against 30 shields still results in 1 damage).
  • I'm not sure how much accuracy matters presently.
  • With battles every ship will select their priority target at the beginning of combat - so even if that target is destroyed, ships that had selected to attack it will "miss" (because they fired on a ship that was destroyed after the weapons were deployed, ostensibly).
  • Right now the battle dynamics favor larger fleets of smaller ships vs smaller fleets of larger ships.

(We believe) that the battle system will continue to see some changes prior to full release (or in the post-release patch cycle), so the advice you're getting here may only be only situationally useful, depending upon what those potential future changes may be.  And the UI "battle predictor" may not be very accurate at this particular moment.

The changes from last patch to this patch have been good and improved battle (from what I've gathered), so any additional changes are likely to be making battles better and more intuitive.

Hope this helps!

-tid242