Galactic Civilizations IV News

Since v2.5 “Ares” and the Warlords expansion were released, we’ve put out a short series of developer journals describing the new features added to the war system in Galactic Civilization IV: Supernova.

Today we’ll look at the last component of the Doctrine system we’ve not covered yet, Targeting Priority.


I’m aware that I’ve already indirectly discussed this feature three or four times over since the updates landed, as it’s a core component of the new Ship Class and Doctrine mechanics and you can’t talk about any of that without the TP system being involved. So, rather than rehash all that information in laborious detail yet again, I’ll summarize it briefly in its context of creating a Doctrine for a Ship Class and then we can talk tactics!

For those of you that missed the previous journals, a Ship Class is a Ship Type plus a Doctrine, and a Doctrine is an Operational Ability plus a Targeting Priority.

A Targeting Priority is an ordered list of Ship Types that your Class is instructed to fire upon and destroy in a fleet combat action, sequentially one by one, until all Types in the Targeting Priority list are eliminated in their order of appearance. At this point your Class will be free to engage anything else in the battle.

Each Ship Type comes with its own default Targeting Priority but if you own the Warlords expansion, you’ll be able to change the Targeting Priority for the Ship Classes you create. Warlords also adds four new Targeting Priorities for a total of eight, giving you greater control over battles by instructing your various Ship Classes to target specific enemy Types in order.

This all sounds like a lot of GalCiv ship-design jargon without an example, so here’s one to better illustrate the point. We’ll take a look at a battle between two fairly even fleets and show the different combat results when we change the Targeting Priorities of a single Class.


Here we’ve got two fleets, Korath Clan and Baratak Grove, each with 10 fighters, 10 bombers, 6 frigates, 3 cruisers and one battleship. They’re loaded out with the third tier weaponry (Neutrino Emitters, Railguns, Avengers) and equivalent defenses, no special modules. They work out about the same Combat Rating with roughly equivalent values in attack and defense too.

I’ve made an effort to ensure the fleets were evenly balanced in terms of ship number, weapon loadout and other combat modifiers coming from Techs, Civ Policies and so on. There was a small HP difference but the other fleet got some defensive bonuses to compensate, and testing showed they got pretty even results.

Firstly, I’ve kept the Targeting Priorities as their Type-based default: remember, with the Warlords expansion you can change each Classes Targeting Priority to something new but each Type has a default setting. The Fighter defaults to Smallest Combatants (targeting Fighters first, then Bombers, then Frigates, then Corvettes and afterwards whatever else is left), the Bomber to Largest Combatants (Dreadnaught -> Battleship -> Destroyer -> Cruiser), the Frigate to Bombers (Bomber -> Corvette -> Destroyer -> Battleship), the Cruiser to Smallest Combatants and the Battleship to Largest Combatants.


The two opposing fleets prepare to engage, showing an estimate of the final result. Baratak look to come out on top this time…


The two fleets engage, with the combat Phase limit of 100 being reached.


Here we see that the Baratak Grove come out on top with their six frigates largely untouched. I can’t show the whole battle in picture format but the bombers spend most of the battle taking down the battleships, then go for the cruisers, but at that point have mostly been mopped up by the fighters, frigates and cruisers who’re all set to target those smaller craft.


Now we’re going to try changing the Targeting Priority of the Korath Clan’s Bombers to Frontline Combatants (Frigate → Corvette→ Fighter) to see if they have a better result trying to take out some of those anti-bomber ships first.


Off they go!


The Baratak lost all their frigates this time as they were targeted down by the bombers, but their badly damaged battleship did survive the encounter. I’ll let you decide if that’s a better result for the Korath Clan or not, but what’s important here is that by changing the Targeting Priority of just one Class, we’ve had a rather drastic change in the outcome of the battle. Bombers have a default Operational Ability of Giant Slayer, which was wasted in this battle targeting those Frigates and Fighters before the larger ships, so perhaps this wasn’t the best strategy for them.

Let’s try something else. This time, we’ll set our Bombers to Capital Ships (Cruisers → Destroyers → Battleships) and see how that works.


Turns out it doesn’t work very well! This was the worst result for the Korath Clan yet, with the bombers neatly defeated before they could kill a single Cruiser, again not utilizing Giant Slayer.


Let’s try setting the Korath’s battleship and cruisers to Gunships to target the Frigates and Cruisers first.


Still no luck for the Korath but the result was different again, this time many more of the Baratak’s tiny hull size craft survived, but they lost their three cruisers and all their frigates.

I’d argue that these four different outcomes we’ve seen here would be best judged depending on what other fleets both the Korath and the Baratak have in the area. Taking down a wounded battleship and three cruisers with no fighter or bomber cover might be easier for a second fleet to achieve than trying to kill a single battleship with a swarm of fighters defending it.

These results changed quite significantly with just minimal changes to Targeting Priority, usually to just one or two Classes. Imagine how different it’d be if with both sides picking the targeting priorities for all their Classes in the battle? And then consider that each has its own Operational Ability too, and you’ll see that the Doctrine as a whole will make a huge difference.

Just for funsies, I tried to win the battle as the Korath Clan using a mix of Targeting Priorities and Operational Abilities. Here I threw everything I had into killing those Baratak bombers as fast as possible, tailoring the Doctrine of each Class I had in action for that purpose.


That’s a bit better I think! Not an overwhelming victory but better than the sad, crushing defeats that the Korath were subjected to before. My intuition that the enemy bombers were the big threat wasn’t too far off the mark: here the Korath Clan have traded well, with more ships left over at the end of the battle than their plant-based rivals. I expect that focusing on the Frigates and Cruisers could also yield better results too.

Operational Abilities make all the difference when it comes to fleet actions with very balanced sides.

In most battles, you’ll not be fighting with such even forces. A Class’s Doctrine, carefully selected to complement the roles of other Classes in your fleet, will determine whether you’ll emerge as the triumphant victor or face an ignominious defeat!

As we’ve seen in the past couple of developer journals, Ship Classes in Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova consist of a Ship Type plus a Doctrine. I’ll summarize it again in case you didn’t read those.


The Ship Type is a kind of model organized around its hull size and suggested combat role: for example, a Cruiser is a medium hull-sized Type and has an inherent bonus of +10% Weapon Range, as opposed to the Destroyer, the new medium hull-sized Type added in Warlords with its -10% Weapon Cooldown bonus.

All else being equal, the Cruiser will generally engage targets more quickly while the Destroyer puts out more firepower over the course of the battle. With the Warlords expansion, each hull size, from Tiny to Huge, now has two Types.

These Ship Type abilities don’t change but further performance of each Ship Class can be customized quite extensively with both its components, a standard feature in most space 4X with few exceptions, and with our new Doctrine system.

A Doctrine has two player-selectable settings: an Operational Ability and a Targeting Priority. With the Warlords expansion, you can change both of these settings on a Class by Class basis, with more options available to each over the base-game too.

Today we’re going to look at a few of the Operational Abilities available in Warlords and suggest some hypothetical scenarios where they might be useful, in tandem with the other mechanics that constitute a Ship Class. To make this clearer, we’ll look at just a single Ship Type the Destroyer, and see how varying its Operational Abilities drastically alter how it performs in a battle.


Here’s our base-line Destroyer Ship Type.

Let’s say we’re being swarmed by lots of small, hi-tech Bombers which are proving difficult to destroy because of their advanced Armour or Shielding components, and are killing a lot of our larger ships. Furthermore, we don’t have a lot of shipyards to justify building a lot of Fighters, which are cheap to build in terms of the Construction Cost but are inefficient in terms of Shipyard turns: with our two Shipyards, we can build two Destroyers over two turns, or four Fighters…


Looking through the Operational Abilities available, there are a few options but the best one for targeting Bombers is Sentinel, with it’s +75% Attack Against Bombers ability. This will help reduce shielding and armour, and do more HP damage once they’ve mitigated those protective measures.

Set an appropriate Targeting Priority and field just enough weaponry to be able to reliably kill even an advanced bomber in a couple of rounds, and you’ve got yourself a bona fide anti-bomber warship. The Destroyer is a reasonable pick for this role as the rapid weapon cooldown rate gives it an edge over the Cruiser (although in some cases the extended weapon range on the Cruiser might work better here, it’d depend on the relative loadouts on each Type in play).

Alternatively, if the civilization fielding these bombers had skipped the Evasion boosting techs, but were instead fielding them as part of very large swarms, Skirmisher might be a better bet: the Destroyer here would be less accurate when it fired, but wield a massive -85% Weapon Cooldown rate, almost doubling its fire output.

Pair this with Kinetic weaponry components and you’re putting out a hell of a lot of firepower very quickly: the -25% Accuracy penalty here will hurt and so it’d be essential to boost it back up with two or three Targeting Computers: at just 2 Mass and 5 Manufacturing Cost each, you’ll kill those Bombers in almost half the rounds any other ship could.


Throw in substantial shielding (hope you’ve found some Elerium!) and an Ion Canon to negate the Bomber’s evasion and now those big swarms of terrifying capital ship killers are going to be easy prey for your deadly Destroyers!


Remember that a Ship Class’s doctrine can be changed at any point during play using the Edit Doctrine button in the ship designer, without the need to redesign the ship itself, meaning you’re free to experiment and repurpose the role of your Classes to adapt to an ever shifting battlefield.

I hope this quick overview gives you some ideas on how Operational Abilities complement your Ship Type’s natural abilities, and use this knowledge to face the various tactical challenges GalCiv IV will throw at you during the course of a game.

Cheers!

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Ship Types are a way of classifying the base model hull that a Ship Class is built upon, and hold their own special bonus too. We took a look at Ship Classes last week, but today we’ll go through the various Ship Types available in Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova, including those added in the new Warlords expansion.


While Colony Ships, Constructors and Miners are all technically Ship Types too, we’re just going to focus on combat vessels this time around.

Ship Types can be organized according to their Hull Size, from Tiny up to Huge, and with Warlords you’ll have access to two Types in each Hull Size category. Each type has an inbuilt ability that distinguishes it from the other types.

We’ll take a look at each one in ascending order using some of the default Torian hull models for illustrative purposes. I like the Torians, they taste great!

Remember, you can completely change the way these models look with our extensive cosmetic ship designer tools. Also, the suggestions I’ve made for usage are just that: suggestions. In line with the GalCiv series' famous principle of Play Your Way, you can customize your Classes to work pretty much however you want, but each Type does have an immutable characteristic bonus that gives them a very distinct flavor.

The smallest ships in the game are two Ship Types in the Tiny hull category, the Fighter and the Bomber. These smallest of combat vessels have a low mass, so less components, but are relatively fast and cheap to produce compared to larger hull sizes.


Here are the statistics for Tiny hull sized ships: they’re fast, maneuverable and initially don’t have much space for components, at least until the eggheads in your science department figure out military component miniaturization! They’ll not take much punishment, which is why you’ll be fielding them in large numbers.


The Fighter is generally intended to kill other Tiny hull sized ships, but in greater numbers can swarm larger vessels too, and has a +25% Evasion ability, which helps it stay alive since it can’t usually field a lot of defensive components. If you’re fielding Bombers, you’ll often want Fighters to protect them, and they’re just a useful, cheap multipurpose ship right through the game.


The Bomber gets a +10% Damage bonus and is generally intended to take on capital ships of all kinds, which it can be very effective at when used en masse providing their defensive systems aren’t too powerful (although Operational Abilities can compensate for this, particularly its default Giant Slayer).

You’re not restricted to loading it with missile weapons though, and if your idea of “bomber” is massive laser damage, knock yourself out! They’ll need protecting by Fighters and Frigates, as usually you’re going to be top-loading them with weapons and there won’t be much room for shielding or armor. When they’re massed, protected and with a bit of Tech behind them, Bombers can really chew through enemy fleets very quickly.

Next up we’ve got the Small hull sized Ship Types.


More Hull Integrity than Tiny ships but a lot slower, these generalists are designed to hunt anything from Tiny to Medium sized warships, and bigger if you get creative with them. They’ve got room for more weaponry and defensive systems too.


The Frigate comes with a +25% Accuracy bonus and by default is intended on hunting the Tiny types of ship, where that extra accuracy will help reduce enemy evasion down to a manageable level. They’ll then switch up to taking on other Small hull sized ships, and can be well equipped to do so.


The first of the Warlords DLC additions comes next: the Corvette. With a +25% Hit Point bonus to boost its Hull Integrity, it’s well suited for hunting larger ships. These are Cruiser-killers, and while they’ll not intended to go up against larger ships one on one, in wolfpacks of three or four they’ll be a real menace to Medium hull sizes, perhaps those traveling alone to replenish a depleted fleet. Their default Targeting Priority is the very largest of ships, and this highlights that they can even threaten Dreadnaughts and Carriers if properly designed and fielded as part of a well rounded fleet.


Medium hull sized warships show a remarkable increase in both Hull Integrity and the Mass of components that they can field, and are the first of the Ship Types that can comfortably carry the larger components, such as a Slipstream Accelerator (for a +1 Move for the entire fleet), while still holding enough weaponry and armor to remain competitive in a fraught fleet action. They’re also not a whole lot slower than Frigates or Corvettes either. With that extra Equipment Space, you can really go to town with designing interesting ship builds with these guys.


The classic Cruiser has, by default at least and until you mutate it to your whims, taken on an anti-strike craft role. With a +10% Weapon Range boost, it’ll target enemy ships before they get into range and can be an effective way to thin out Fighter swarms before they get in to do damage with Kinetic weaponry. This is just one use though, you’ll figure out dozens of roles for your Cruisers as their vital statistics allow them an incredible flexibility.

I regularly field at least two or three types of Cruisers with doing a different job in my fleets, from screening against Fighters and Bombers or hunting Battleships, to providing extra Sensor packages or the more exotic weaponry added in Warlords recently.


The new Destroyer, added in Warlords, is a different beast. With a -10% Weapons Cooldown for an increase damage output it excels at killing things, especially with its default +10% attack bonus from the Operational Ability Focus Fire, where it’ll rapidly thin out Frigates, Corvettes and pretty much anything else that gets in its way.

I had fun throwing a bunch of Railguns on these monsters early on, and adding Targeting Computer to increase their accuracy, setting them to target Frontline Combatants then watching them chew through anything smaller than a Battleship with relative ease.

Excellent fun! But they’re also there to complement your Cruisers too: have the Cruisers equipped to kill Tiny ships, and the Destroyers kitted out to kill whatever is hunting those Cruisers, and you’ve got a strong two-ship combo right there!


The Large hull sized ships are next, and you’ll note they’re tougher, hold more gear and are slower in combat, but not by a whole lot. Be warned, these are deadly ships and not to be underestimated by their bulk. They’ll take tons of weaponry, shielding and armor, and pretty much anything else you care to load onto them. This makes them versatile and formidable in a battle.


The Battleship is your tank: with +10% Armor it excels at soaking up damage and smaller ships will have trouble doing lasting damage to it unless they’re either very technologically advanced or they’re specifically fitted to take out Battleships and other very large Types. It can also throw out an unbelievable amount of damage very quickly, with the potential to load enough weaponry to take down the very largest and best armored Ship Classes in the game.


The Warlords expansion now adds the Command Ship, which is one of the more unusual Types in the game right now. Although as large as a Battleship it’s not designed for front line brawling, instead sitting in the back providing support to the rest of the fleet with its Command Ship ability of 10% Weapon Cooldown to all allied ships in battle. Now think how fast those Railgun Destroyers you built are going to be firing? There’s a cost though: the Command Ship has 50% less Hull Integrity than a Battleship, so it’s defaulted to not engage enemy ships unless you change its Targeting Priority manually.

Get creative with this thing! It’s a good chassis for any fleetwide-buff components you’ve got, or if scripted away from Return Fire Only, would be a good housing for special effects such as the Time Dilator, Shield Bubble and so forth.


Almost twice as large as the Large hull sized ships, the Huge Types are monsters designed for one purpose only: crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of… alright pipe down Conan, we get the idea!

With that much equipment space, a Huge hull is a one ship army, and can probably be used that way still if you so desire, although be aware that v2.5 and Warlords has added a lot of mechanics now to make hunting these intergalactic leviathans a little easier (swarms of high tech Bombers with Giant Slayer might do it, especially if it’s not well kitted out to deal with that many ships all at once).


When a Dreadnaught looms into view, the battlefield goes silent, pretending for a moment that sound is possible in space of course. Its only real downside is its speed, and the fact that it can get swarmed by a lot of smaller ships, but with +10% Shield Strength as its ability, it’ll take a lot of punishment before you even get to its armor or HP.

Even more so than the Battleship, the Dreadnaught can field so many components that your only really limited by your imagination when it comes to designing and planning its role in your fleet. Whether you go all in on firepower, tank damage from other large ships or field a whole host of fleet boosting abilities, the Dreadnaught is the centerpiece of your navy.


The Carrier is our final Ship Type, added to the game for free in the v2.5 Ares update, and has a very special ability. As expected, it delivers Fighters and Bombers into battle but comes with no Operational Ability as standard.

You can kit it out like a Dreadnaught if you want but you’re likely building this thing for those strike-craft it brings to a fleet action, providing an important screen for the rest of your fleet and perhaps overwhelming your enemy with their superior numbers. The Carrier is a terrifying element to add to your armed forces and will fill your rivals with fear!

Well, that was a lot of Ships Types! I hope this developer journal whet your appetite and planted some ideas into your mind about some of the cool stuff you can do with ship and fleet design in Supernova.

The free major Ares update introduced a host of new features and changes revolving warfare as the primary focus.

[h2]2.5 Major Updates[/h2]

• Battle Viewer
  
• Trade Route Screen
  
• Fleet Wide Commands Screen
  
• Tech Tree Update
  
• Ship Components
  
• Invasion Tactics
  
• Ship Types
  
• Operational Abilities
  
• Targeting Priorities