Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
For an attacking ship with low defenses, choose "Capital" so that it will be protected by whatever escort-role ships are in the fleet. (You just need to make sure that you have some of those!)
If it has a reasonable amount of defense then you could also use Assault, although this will expose it to hostile fire; by the sound of it, that's not what you want with this one.
Support ships will not fight even if armed, depending on what version of the game you have and what phase of the moon it is. I prefer to make my support ships capital class so they are in the back but can shoot if armed.
there are probably too many roles. I tend to only use interceptor and capital. If you want to micromanage and put high defense up front and shooters behind those, a third class would be useful for your approach. I typically only have 2 types -- the front line tough hard hitters and the back are usually carriers, repair/heal bots, mercs, or hybrid transport/longrange/carrier/something that is mostly a transport but has enough other stuff to do things if sent out without buddies.
Guardians: Stays in front of Support ships. Will engage nearby enemy that are in their weapon range, but will not actively attempt to move towards the enemy on their own, their position will be in front of the support ships they are protecting.
Capital: Moves forward enough to shoot but tries to stay behind the front lines, engages from the farthest distance it can
Escort: Stays in front of Capital ships. Will engage nearby enemy that are in their weapon range, but will not actively attempt to move towards the enemy on their own, their position will be in front of the Capital ships they are protecting.
Assault: Actively engages the enemy and attempts to directly target capital ships (or the escorts protecting them). They will move forward as quickly as they can to engage.
Interceptor: Actively engages the enemy and attempts to directly target support ships (or the guardians protecting them). They will move forward as quickly as they can to engage.
You basically have 3 groups of 2 ship roles each at different attempted ranges with the enemy forces blending into those lines as you approach each other.
Group 1: Support and their guardians trying to stay out of the fight, shooting only those that come near them.
Group 2: Capital and their escorts trying to maintain a safe distance but approaching close enough to fire their weapons.
Group 3: Assault and Interceptor intentionally trying to breach the enemy lines and directly engage against the capital or support groups they are tasked with targeting.
You can find their targeting priority listed here:
https://galciv3.gamepedia.com/Ship_role
Not really, there's only 6 and it creates 3 distance zones. A back line (support with guardians), your main group (capital with escorts) and your front line (interceptors or assault tasked with going after either the enemies capital or support groups)
Any less and you might as well not have any ship roles at all, any more and you create a far more complex mess. 6 roles with 3 distances of engagement is a good balance.
If you don't want to "think" then the simplest method is to only make capital ships with escorts. But if you want to create any depth of having a group behind the capital ships or in engaging ahead of the capital ships then you need those other roles to flesh out the relative positions.
If you think of the fight being centered on the capital group (capital/escort) you just have the choice of being behind them (support/guardian) or actively in front of them (assault/interceptor)
There is some range mechanic at play, but for the most part it only applies to the support role. Ships assigned to support will actively fly away from combat, this is not visually represented in the simulation. In a long battle with a fleet with a support ship, once the other ships have died and only the support is left, you will often see the remaining ships just flying around and not firing for a long period of time, that's because in reality that support ship has been flying directly away for the duration of combat and is way out of range. This is why support ships never appear to fire until they are alone, they are always out of range.
You use brute force, some people use strategy.
Your method works by taking longer to get to where you can do that and building up enough firepower to play that way.
If you understood the mechanics better you could accomplish your tasks sooner, but that's your choice.
Because it takes longer to reach a point in the game where your brute force method is functional.
Or maybe you are only playing on the lower difficulty settings, I don't know. But ship roles give a tactical advantage when used correctly and it's an advantage available much sooner in the research / time line.
2. But the battle viewer, the only analysis tool available, does not show accurately what's actually going on behind the scenes. If you are patient enough, reading what hit/evaded what, where, when, might give you an idea, at some point, of how things work. You can never be certain of your own conclusions though, because without the tedious process of saving&reloading the game, you cannot reproduce a battle (to assess the effect of the probability of something to happen and figure out an average), let alone reproduce it with slight changes in ships and fleets configurations (to assess the importance of each modification).
3. Even if you figure out the basics on a tactical level, the game options offer so many ways of customising your gameplay, it is futile to try to assess the strategic importance of each ship/fleet modification under every possible circumstance. So, each player can only share their own, limited experience. So, what works for one of them may not work for another.
From 1,2,3, the above comments and my own long experience, it seems clear to me that there are only 2 ship behaviours that matter: EVADE (associated with a Support role) and ATTACK (everything else).
Experimenting with combinations of attack roles is fun and all, but it gets old quickly, because in the end, under the vast majority of game options I tried, the cleanest way to go is ONE attack role for ALL the combat ships in a fleet. What Astasia wrote above approximates well how the battles go (as far as I know) and the one big disadvantage of using a combination of multiple roles (the tedium mentioned by jonnin, growing exponentially with the map size) make using anything else than "one role for all" impractical.
And, since Kunovega brought it up, the difficulty settings seem to me to have virtually no impact on using the 'one role for all combat ships' principle. On lower difficulties, correct, you don't care. On higher difficulties, you don't have a choice: in the beginning, everyone is better and faster than you in most respects, everyone attacks you, each one has its own military research path with all the implications regarding the ships and fleets diversity/configurations. So, when you face multiple, different, hostile factions, what do you do, with your limited resources (research, production, diplomacy, minerals etc.)? You MUST find a way to jump ahead of at least one faction, using all the resources available, conquer that faction and take their resources while holding back the rest of the world, rinse, repeat. At some point, unless you never knew it but diplomacy was always your true calling, you discover that the straightest way to go against the world is brute force, acquired through military research and trade. The world war is won through economy, which powers everything else, and subtleties like using various ships' combat roles are a mater of preferred flavour, but basically without any impact on a strategic level.
I, personally, never design anything else than Capital (combat ships) and Support (everything else, including non-combatant ships in a battle fleet).
I think the mechanic is complete, it is just not well documented and our visibility into the effects is limited. The only real buggy part of it is the on again off again ability of support ships to defend themselves if they are even armed.
At a minimum you want Escort (heavy defense/regeneration, token offense) and Capital (minimal defense, all-in offense) so that the ships that are designed to take hits actually do so and the capitals can be designed to be as efficient as possible at smashing stuff.
Assault is in an odd situation because it will draw the attacks of enemy escorts but not assault or capital (as long as you have escorts/capitals of your own), which you can either play thematically or use as a de facto secondary escort role (design it like an escort, have enemy fire split between two ships instead of all going in on one).
Guardians are theoretically useful if an Interceptor ship is calculated as being able to take a shot at it and there are no Escorts left. (Everything else prefers other targets, assuming that there are any left.) An oddball fleet composition might also use them (Assault/Guardian/Support, for example.)