Great! We love questions down here at the hell-kennel
Keep 'em up.
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1) Is it possible to have fleets with several hundrend ships or are the numbers lower?
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Fleets can be any number of ships. But in order to keep things a little realistic, (and not have to give you ships that are cubes and triangles
) we have taken a page from real navy doctrine and limited the number of ships that can function in combat at any given moment. For instance, you don't see the US Navy showing up at a fight with every single ship they have. It would be anarchy and a friendly fire cookout. We have a C3 support system (and specialized command sections) that sets the upper number of ships you can command in a fight. The fun thing is that we take into account that your possibly massive fleet may be waiting in the wings. So when one of your ships is destroyed in real time another ship enters the frey from your reserve fleet. If you have a command vessel in the fight then you get to choose which ship comes in.
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2) My guess is the answer to this one will be no (as it reasonably should) but I will ask anyhow. In cases (if any) of very different civlizations, is there a chance of having also very different weapons? Meaning not just different attack numbers but also different type of attacks, beyond perhaps the beam/laser missiles/rockets combo?
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I suppose the answer to this is yes and no. While there is no weapon system SPECIFIC to any given race, the probablities of the random tech tree make some techs more likely for a race than others. That being said, there is a LARGE number of weapon, tech and section options that make the combos you mention somewhat tame. Perhaps an example from last weeks playtest will help...
I have been border tussling with another Tarka player for a couple dozen turns. Fending off some of his small raider fleets. Generally using a class of cheap torpedo destroyers (cheap cause I use old engine tech for them since I dont intend to send them off...just defend planets) combined with my sattelites to make his trip in from his spawn point to weapons range of my planet very painful. I find a couple of his frontier worlds and decide to hit back hard. Assuming he has realized how well my defences work I assume I am going to be facing the same trick. So I design a class of point defence cruisers to shoot down missiles and torps and then a in close knife fighting pair of cruisers and destroyer designs with high speed engines becuase I plan on closing in fast and chew him hard up close and personal with mass drivers and energy cannons.
I head on in with a medium sized fleet...I leave my command ship in the back of the battle and head on in. Check sensors display and yep sure enough here comes the flight of destroyers and they spit out torps at me and hold position. I switch back to reality view, set up flanking point defence cruisers to break up the missiles and torps and then dive on in...when my first cruiser explodes for no apparent reason just as it enters driver range...I mutter "wtf?" and check sensors again. Only to discover the ships around his torpedo group are NOT the escorts I thought but bloody minelayers...
Whackiness ensues.
I get beaten up badly, retreat. I come back mutter "fine, you lil bugger. I have better torps AND better missile warheads...you stand in your lil cloud of mines and I will just pulp you from a distance". The second battle of Korasek II takes place 3 turns later but when I switch to sensors to target my ranged stuff, I realize the sneaky bugger has built a destroyer with a sensor jammer and I can't see his torpedo boats and minelayers on sensor manager and therefore can't target them till I am in visual distance...Luckily I had designed a heavy PD ship that used PD drivers instead of the lighter damage but more accurate PD lasers and was able to do a lil close in minesweeping while I hunted that jammer. I also began to research shields in a hurry.
Does this help give you an idea of the relationships between weapons, designs, tech and real time combat that we have been aiming for?