Gratuitous Space Battles Catch-all

It is a bug, lots of reports. I guess it'll be next week before it's fixed.

Ok, so I played the demo today after adding this one to my wishlist a little while back, and had a great deal of fun. It's a lot to take in from the get go as I have no idea how good my fleet really did, based on what options I chose. Like could I have done better had I chosen a different weapon, or more armour or shields etc.

I have some questions though...

1) Does it have multiplayer in the sense that I can design my fleet, and send it against my friends fleet and see who wins?

2) Is it worth going for the complete pack? I'm thinking of waiting till the steam mid year sale when hopefully it goes to 75% off again.

3) Are there any good tutorial videos that show me some good ways to start designing my ships?

1) There are online challenges that people can make. I am not sure if you can play real-time vs your friends though ? (I have never tried)

2) If you can get it cheaply. (see below)

3) Not that I have found, but some good reading material about it online (forums).

Ok, so I really want to love this game... but, the campaign is terrible, in my opinion. I like my galactic conquest games to not be brutally-ass-rapingly difficult, like I have found this one.

For example, I build my fleet, take over a few planets (usually 2). Then I get swarmed by a massive fleet of enemies, that were designed by players that know the game a heck of a lot better than I do and lose the aforementioned fleet (and my planets). Game over, on easy.

This has happened to me three or four times, so I kinda lost patience with it.

That said, watching myself getting destroyed is fun (ie space battles purdy!!).

I had what I can only describe as a passionate one night stand with this game, played the crap out of it for about 5 hours, and haven't played it since... now I'm sort of reluctant to start it up again, I'm not sure if I want a stable relationship with Gratuitous Space Battles.

Redwing wrote:

I had what I can only describe as a passionate one night stand with this game, played the crap out of it for about 5 hours, and haven't played it since... now I'm sort of reluctant to start it up again, I'm not sure if I want a stable relationship with Gratuitous Space Battles.

Heh, this pretty much summed up the game for me as well. We had a weekend-long fling, and then it was over.

HantaXP wrote:

1) There are online challenges that people can make. I am not sure if you can play real-time vs your friends though ? (I have never tried)

2) If you can get it cheaply. (see below)

3) Not that I have found, but some good reading material about it online (forums).

Ok, so I really want to love this game... but, the campaign is terrible, in my opinion. I like my galactic conquest games to not be brutally-ass-rapingly difficult, like I have found this one.

For example, I build my fleet, take over a few planets (usually 2). Then I get swarmed by a massive fleet of enemies, that were designed by players that know the game a heck of a lot better than I do and lose the aforementioned fleet (and my planets). Game over, on easy.

This has happened to me three or four times, so I kinda lost patience with it.

That said, watching myself getting destroyed is fun (ie space battles purdy!!).

The campaign is crap, but the extra races keep things fresh, though the vanilla version is plenty good enough for a good number of hours worth of fun.

Apparently I have this. I forget when I got it and clearly haven't played it.

But... the DLC packs are all on Steam sale for $1.49 right now.

So should I buy any of them? Which ones are good, bad, ugly, etc?

Avoid the Galactic Conquest one. The rest add more units and items to the game, I'd say get em all.

If you like this game, you should really, really check out Space Pirates and Zombies. The combat engines are somewhat similar, but I think SPAZ is a much better actual game. This is more of a tactical simulation.

SPAZ is still $15 though and not on Steam. Waiting for the inevitable Steam sale on it at Christmas or next summer. ;)

garion333 wrote:

Avoid the Galactic Conquest one. The rest add more units and items to the game, I'd say get em all.

Hm, thanks. Those are all cheaper than GC too so that works out.

I am so late to the GSB love party.

I just bought the complete version on the steam summer sale and it is the best $$$ I've spent in years!

I am currently running with a panther build that includes:

3 fast recharge shields
3 cruiser missile launchers
2 fusion beams
1 cruiser laser (awesome short range fast firing weapon that will make mincemeat out of anything without shields)
1 cruiser defense laser
either a droid bay or the one that gives the most crew
one supercharged engine
2 power generators (whatever covers the minimum needed, 2 rank 2's or a rank 3 and a rank 2)

I really like the missile launchers. I had originally gone with multiple warheads for the extreme range shield busting, but the damage is just not up to snuff and the minimum range is too high. So I sacrifice some range for much more damage and good shield and armor penetration.

The missile launchers and the fusion beams make quick work of enemy cruisers and frigates at medium-medium long range. And then of course if someone gets into the short to medium/short range, the cruiser laser just rips it for 10-12 damage, 4-5 times a second.

edit: the galactic conquest campaign looked way too intimidating. they should have had seperate modes for that too. Say, for instance, they had an additional smaller campaign mode with only 8 or 12 planets instead of what looks like ~30 planets.

Galactic conquests was also rather bugged. Something players do sometimes is make ships without engines. makes them a really easy target, but allows them to stack armour and shields on them. However, immobile ships can't retreat... And if you get in a battle where both fleets are wiped out and the only thing left on either side is an immobile ship, the battle deadlocks.

You can retreat in this game?!

Am I missing out on issuing commands during battle? I thought the battles just played out and you could only change the speed at which they played...

retreating is a part of Galactic Conquest. The ships you end a battle with are part of your permanent fleet. If they blow up they are lost. So if you run into an obviously losing battle, you can elect to flee. Otherwise the battle is to the death, like normal GSB.

Just thought I'd point out that two weeks ago, we were given out first teaser of the next race to enter the game: The Parasites.

IMAGE(http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/parasite_tease.jpg)
IMAGE(http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/screenshot_06-08-2011_14-52-44.jpg)

Currently Cliffski has posted that he's playing around with an anti-missile defense that returns the missiles back at the firer, rapid-firing low-damage plasma torpedoes, and anti-fighter flak guns. Though whether or not they make the cut will remain to be seen.

Anyone still actively playing the game? I'd love to throw some challenges back and forth!

We should have a tournament! Though I'm not sure how to set it up. Round-robin style would not work because the game is set up for opposing fleets. If you win your fleet is better, if you lose you just make a better fleet.

Perhaps themed challenges?

Tamren wrote:

We should have a tournament! Though I'm not sure how to set it up. Round-robin style would not work because the game is set up for opposing fleets. If you win your fleet is better, if you lose you just make a better fleet.

Perhaps themed challenges?

Could always just send challenges to everyone. Say: Round 1 I send my fleet to everyone, we count defeats vs wins against it. Round 2 you send your fleet and we count defeats vs wins, etc. You know, a good old point system where everyone gets a chance to fight each other before the finals.

Could also do it that everyone gets three chances to defeat that round fleet, with a point going to the attacker for each defeat until victory is achieved (the victor getting points for that win and how ever many remaining).

I don't know, just tossing ideas out.

Something just reminded me of Age of Empires I/II. I really liked those games back in the day, but after completing the campaigns I spent most of my time setting up maps with multiple armies and the like, set all the players to AI and then watch it unfold. The AI was pretty crap back then, so it usually turned into a giant mess, but I enjoyed playing with my army men and structures, effectively.

No wonder I like this game so much.

Anyone pick up the latest DLC? I'm planning on it once my obsession with all these mp games I'm playing dies down.

garion333 wrote:

Anyone pick up the latest DLC? I'm planning on it once my obsession with all these mp games I'm playing dies down.

I'll be picking up the parasites once money isn't so tight. Which I hope is soon. Very soon.

I haven't been able to launch the game in the past few weeks. (this game is not available error)

I wonder if I can just delete the local content and then reinstall but I just haven't gotten around to it.

After some recent discussion in the spacegames thread I decided to pick this up again. Turns out I've been buying all of the DLCs as they come up on sale for pennies and I own all of them except for the Outcasts. The last time I played was years ago and I was curious to see how it stacks up.

The game is still pretty damn good. The basic premise of building ships and watching them shoot the crap out of each other with LAZER BEAMS is quite fun. I've been going through the campaign using nothing but various fighter designs with a surprising degree of success. Fighters offer a fantastic cost-performance ratio, a full squadron of 16 fighters will cost you about the same as two frigates or 2/3 of a cruiser. The downside is that GSB limits battle size by total fleet cost and the number of pilots you have available. Every ship requires one pilot, including the fighters, so you can quickly hit the unit cap when massing multiple squadrons. On the upside when using fighters you tend to hit the pilot cap long before you hit the price cap and this can result in massive honour gains if you actually win the fight.

As the cornerstone of my strategy I've started experimenting with ship designs that support the fighters instead of fight the enemy directly. One thing fighters struggle with is shields and armour because their low power guns have trouble punching through cruiser grade defences. But there are all sorts of special weapons you can mount onto frigates and cruisers that will do stuff like knock down shields or disable enemy guns from firing. One cruiser design I'm work on incorporates carrier landing bays where damaged fighters can land and repair, greatly extending the lifespan of my squadrons.

If you like minmaxing to the 'nth degree you will love this game. I spend about an hour just testing out antifighter weapons while designing a flak frigate. There are really only a couple of options. Quick moving beam lasers that can track fast targets, these come in frigate and cruiser sizes. Anti-fighter missile launchers which are frigate only, they deal big damage like most missiles but have very poor armour penetration so they can only hurt fighters most of the time. And tractor beams which grab onto and slow down enemy ships and fighters making them easier to hit. In GSB chance to hit is calculated by comparing a weapon's tracking speed and a ship's movement speed, tractor beams add weight to the enemy ship which reduces their thrust-weight ratio. The most effective design I could find was just using a full set of 4 missile launchers on a frigate. Beams did decent damage but according to the post game statistics they have a hit rate of less than 25%! Missiles by comparison had a hit rate of 66%. Using tractor beams cut the miss rate by a significant amount but also reduced the overall DPS because it replaces one of the weapons.

The commands you give to a ship determine how it behaves during a battle since control is entirely hands off. They can have a dramatic effect on the performance of a ship and figuring out the exact combination of commands is tough. For instance I discovered that my flak frigates improved in performance when I told them to concentrate fire on wounded fighters instead of having each turret aim and fire independently. But at the same time their performance dropped dramatically when I told them to cooperate and aim at the same fighters targeted by other ships. This is because multiple missiles would be fired at the same fighter where only two would do the job, the rest then self destruct from lack of a target, hence wasting much of my DPS.

--

I had one random crash but other than that the game runs like butter. Through some kind of coding black magic the game loads all battles instantly and despite the number of calculations that must be happening in the background the game never EVER uses more than 5% of my CPU! Even when I turn the battle speed up to 4X and things start to blur the game tends to idle at 0% cpu most of the time. This is nice because it is freaking hot in Vancouver right now and I can't play any game that uses my GPU or CPU too much because my pc fans rev up into a jet turbine.

The galactic conquest mode is pretty neat too. You war for control of planets which grant you resources to build more fleets and so on. The enemy fleets you face are player generated and unlike the campaign if things go south or you get in over your head you can retreat your fleet and come back better prepared. However conquest mode has some pretty gnarly bugs. Basically what happens is if you use a ship design in conquest mode it "locks" that design and prevents you from deleting it. This is incredibly obnoxious because if you later make a change to the design the game will not allow you to save the new design with the same name and overwrite the old one. Eventually your list of saved designs gets cluttered up with these old ships you can't get rid of. I basically broke my game because I deleted my campaign and it didn't free up the locked designs. I had to resort to going into the GSB files and deleting all of my ship designs and campaign files.

So yeah, I can see conquest mode being fun to play. But I'm not going to touch it until I have a full list of optimized ship designs I don't need to change.

I know they added new ship designs in the latest expansion pack. But did they add new weapons and equipment too?

One of the other modes I enjoyed is the never ending onslaught mode. I am sure others have gotten to unbelievable levels but I am happy with the success I have attained with it and can't see going much farther since that mode can last a long time even at 4x speed.

Gratuitous Tank Battles was such a disappointment. The features were interesting on paper but added more complexity than fun. I hope the dev revisits GSB and makes an interesting sequel.

GSB 2 website. I was sure I'd seen an interview recently, but I can't find it. Apparently there is a big "surprise" feature he has not spoken about yet. Game's not far off, though, I think.

fangblackbone wrote:

I know they added new ship designs in the latest expansion pack. But did they add new weapons and equipment too?

Well the only DLC I don't own is the Outcasts, which adds a new set of ships as well as 6 new items. They are race specific however.

Yeah the only ones I don't have are the parasites and the outcasts. The tech looks interesting: multi tractor beams, flak cannons, missile reflect, etc.

I may have to look for them when they go on sale. It has been so long though since I've played I have no idea what is good anymore. So I will probably have to start from the beginning. Check that, I changed computers since I last played so I will definitely have to start from scratch. That is not a bad thing really.

I just finished a campaign battle and scored over 30000 honour by undercutting the enemy forces by 50%. I did the battle once for 20000 honour and decided to try again without my fighters, turns out I didn't need them and scored another 10000. Now I have unlocked everything except four alternate ship hulls for 4000 each.

I've been figuring out a lot of little tips and tricks to optimize my fleet. For instance making dedicated anti-fighter ships is a waste of time. A single ship by itself will never shoot down enough fighters over the course of a battle to make back it's points even if you mount nothing but flak weapons. Using flak frigates as escorts to protect multiple ships is also a waste because the cost-benefit ratio is even lower. By putting this purely defensive ship on a leash you make it even less effective because now it can't roam and seek out fighters to target.

Yeah. I have found that I really can't go with anything other than a general purpose cruiser. Load it up with shields, armor, repair machines, a tractor beam, 1 anti-fighter laser and the rest long range missiles and particle beams if I remember correctly.

I do have a couple of special configurations for fighter that are mission specific. Some battles they thin the oncoming fighters and then go straight for the jugular by annihilating destroyers (the middle class ship) and then the bigger targets.

Man I need to start playing this game again. "Infested Planet" scratches a similar itch with the caveat that you trade in unit control, capture points, enemy generators, enemy waves and place-able turrets, for far less unit customization than you have in GSB.

I so badly want to try your technique of using only fighters to reap huge currency rewards.

Um well scratch that. I have fired this thing up again and am completely addicted. (thanks alot...)

And I have gone the 100% frigate route. I tried fighters but the pilot cap is quite often way too low to get more than two squads which limits things quite a bit.

However, my frigates are are absolutely devastating. And all that is required is a few shields, a few torpedoes, and engine, a laser and anti-fighter missile. The build is incredibly cheap at the upper 700's, fast and effective.

With my frigates it is quite easy to get 15-20k honor per round and in one massive battle I saved 54k honor. I have nearly all the upgrades bought with only a few hulls left and cruiser gear.

I have been messing around with the empire's weapons platform ship. They are certainly lethal but I have a hard time keeping them alive =( This is more than likely a reluctance to putting something other than a weapon in a weapon hardpoint... (it has 7 systems and 8 weapons slots)

Oh and the other thing the frigates are much better at is chasing down fleeing enemy cowards! .7 speed is so much better than .006 speed and it cuts down an order of magnitude on battle times.

Oh and I'd like to add that I played from 9 am to about 4:45 pm pretty much straight. So thanks...

fangblackbone wrote:

However, my frigates are are absolutely devastating.

Fascinating! I generally used missile cruisers as the backbone of my fleets, with some fighter support -- and gave up on frigates as useless.

Just hearing about the range of strategies people have used makes me want to fire the game up again. Except that if I do, many hours will pass in which I should be doing other things.