Campaign Items

Another possible problem: challenges and campaign fleets are no longer interchangeable. There are many challenges that would violate the fighter to carrier rule/ratios. Of course you could ignore that without problem (and leave the campaign’s challenge selection system as it is) it would just create a dichotomy of challenge fleets and campaign generated fleets. Campaign generated fleets would not have the fighter power challenges could have.

That would also mean that you’d need to build a balanced fleet before you moved or do it without fighter support. Which is how I played my first campaigns, just cruisers. Waiting until you had carriers and fighters would keep the “turn 70” rule in place.

Not that this would be bad - just speculating on probable outcomes.

PS: When I started to write this post I was thinking you’d force the random challenges to match the fighter/carrier rules the player was limited to. I can see that this would not be necessary, the current system would work fine. Slowly, over time, most of the campaign fleets would/will be other campaign fleets?

That is not necessaraly true. Depending on how many FT per carrier bay, making dedicated Carrier’s for the sole purpose of transporting fighters becomes a viable tactic. Games with more fleet diversity then GSB have FT specs. Nothing but FT and Carriers… And they are universally the most profitable spec to use
That’s why i even came up with this tactic

Yes, the fighter to bay ratio matters a lot. Without knowing that formula speculation is…well, speculation.

isn’t all of this speculation, though?

Also, on a REALLY unrelated note: does installing the campaign modify the executable file?

I’ll dump my observations and ideas in here, instead of making a new thread, perhaps some ideas will help…

In my opinion it is to easy to go for an extrem approach. Meaning going with just one kind of ship and simply build enough of them to crush everything. Keeping a mixed fleet combat ready is quite a hassle when you meet fleets that will completly crush all your cruisers/frigates/fighters in one battle (while the other parts will win the battle). Another problem is, that you could have a big amount of fighters with a carrier to support them, and once the carrier is dead, you loose the battle, because your health dropped too much even if the fighters would probably still chew through the enemy.

I’d like to see an option to build a whole fleet instead of a single ship / squadron at a time. Hopefully a fleet where you already done all the positioning and orders to your satisfaction so the fleet can more easily deployed at the start of the battle. If there was an option to rebuild lost ships if the fleet is with a shipyard of the appropriate size it would make it easier keeping those fleets in combat.

My hopes are that with an easier access to complex ship formation dedicated ship fitting will be made, as they are easier to incorporate into tactics. The number of extrem fleets will hopefully drop then, too. If a few dedicated anti fighter ship will be enough to kill lots of fighter, mass fighter tactics will loose the appeal as more mixed fleets will have those as they would be easier to replace without an extra sheet to write down which fleet lost which ship.

Using several of those basic fleets would create big battles, while you would only need a few clicks to rearrange the blocks in the deployment screen.

Perhaps also a ‘Build in x turns’ button? So you could order a big fleet in a system away from the front and it will slowly build the fleet while perhaps increasing mantainance…

Perhaps I’ll come up with more ideas once i got some sleep… cu

I wouldn’t say that was overcomplicated. You could even just change the Academies so that they train X number of crew and Y number of pilots each turn.

What would make me want to buy GC is some prospect that I’m going to be able to play the game, at least on the easier difficulty settings, with a ‘normal’ fleet. I appreciate that some of GSB’s more extreme elements (massive fighter swarms, extremely high armour cruisers, etc.) present an interesting challenge when there are no consequences to losing - I can always just go and and figure out a similarly extreme countermeasure and play rock-paper-scissors. However, if I’m playing a campaign, where there are consequences for losing, I really don’t want to worry about running into some single-minded fleet that overwhelms anything I have at hand, as I can’t really construct the appropriate countermeasure on demand.

Also, the idea that we have to use fighter swarms in order to do well is particularly offputting, because I don’t find fighters nearly as interesting as the other ship types in GSB - they’re so small that there’s very little you can do in terms of interesting customization (there are, what, 5 sensible Fighter builds, total?), and the way that they zip around in battle means it’s very hard to follow what’s going on.

You can run a campaign with a normal fleet, it just has to be a large one. “Balanced” (or rather, Rainbowed) fleets will die to a spec’d fleet of EQUAL size, much less a larger one

Back to the campaign; my Fed campaign with fighter swarm approach got all choked up by the update that added pilots. . .

So now I’ve got this enemy fleet that appears to have something with zero engines (boo, hiss!) staring across space at my cruisers, which are order-blocked (unintentional, otherwise this wouldn’t be a problem) from moving (slow cruisers form a wall and are in formation with faster cruiser behind; faster cruiser can’t go forward because of cruiser wall; formation cruisers that make up the wall won’t go anywhere because the fast cruiser behind them can’t go forward. . .nyuck nyuck nyuck, mixing and matching captured cruisers. . .).

How long will this last???

10 minutes plus at 4x speed so far. . . LOL.

RC

UPDATE: just noticed I’m actually creeping forward VERRRRRY SLOOOOOOWWWLY, I wonder if that is making the game continue even with no firing for 15+ mins. . .

I seem to remember campaign battles being cut off by the timer, am I wrong?

RC