Why are you putting GalCiv aside?

[Sombra]

Adding to the replay value of the game:

- A little more eye candy perhaps?

-Terrain in space: Asteroid fields damage for bigger ships for example if they pass through. Gas nebula: limiting sensor range. Black holes sector can´t be passed if not certain techs are avaible etc.

- Perhaps limiting the range of bigger ships : Forcing you to plan a military campaign accordingly up to now alwys nearly the whole galacy is in range of my attack ships.

Further improving the (already very good) AI. Playing again CIV3 a lot in the last days its incredible annoying having a computer enemy cheatring for example who always knows exactly where your cites and units are.

[Cookie Monster]

I love GalCiv and RoN but both have taken a backseat to HoI. I haven't played that in a while and with the new 1.05 patch HoI is once again a great game.

There just isn't enough time to play everything so each of my games don't get played at some point. It's only a matter of time before my mood swings back to wanting to play GalCiv.

[Harry Seldon]

What's HoI?

[peterfharris]

HoI?
Almost certainly: Hearts of Iron, a World War 2 strategy game made by Paradox, the Swedish company that made Europa Universalis. If interested try the forum at: europa-universalis.com

[Cookie Monster]

Correct!

HoI = Hearts of Iron (great game about WW2 grand strategy from Paradox)

[Pyrkaige]

To briefly answer the original topic question (apart from a simple lack of time, it being the summer and all): the main reason I stopped playing GalCiv for the time being is the AI. Not because it wasn't good; it's astoundingly strong for a game of this type. But beating the AI was the main reason I played the game a lot right off the bat, and once I got to being able to beat it regularly at all but the "built in cheat" levels, it felt a bit dry. In the Civ series, you don't play the game to beat the AI, because the AI in those games is horrid. But since there are other factors contributing to the "one more turn" feel, it doesn't matter that much. I'm probably in a distinct minority when it comes to this, but I would love to see a huge percentage of whatever coding time is available spent on improving the AI itself, especially tactically. OTOH, if there were gameplay changes that helped make other sections of the game more interesting, playing with "just" a good AI wouldn't matter.

And, for the long answer: As for the comparison between GalCiv and the Civ games (Civ3 was my favorite, despite its simplicities - culture is too beautiful a concept to not play with!), I think three things that all the Civ games have had that are not as strong a part of the GalCiv design are personalization, trade-offs, and fast end-game battles. All three of these could probably help out either an expansion version of GalCiv, or more likely a GalCiv 2.

Personalization In the Civ games (especially Civ3), you pick exactly where to put your cities in a wide setting, and there are major strategic choices involved in those decisions. There are also strategic and tactical choices involved in getting the best spots before the computer can grab them; the whole question of culture was used very well when it comes to covering land with your own culture, so you could fill in cities later. These are choices that are simply not there in GalCiv, for understandable setting reasons, but the Exploration section of the game feels weaker because of it.

So the cities in Civ feel more personal right off the bat, because you choose where to place them within a customizable map. They also feel more personal because of the tile management, as mentioned above. The (non-resource) starbases help in this regard, but it doesn't feel the same. I think that this is because the tile management in Civ is always about improving the city; again, personalizing it to exactly what you want. Apart from production increases, all the starbase improvements do nothing directly for the planets that they are by. (Bonuses such as culture and trade bonuses can certainly be helpful, but again, they aren't specific to the planet itself.) There is also the enjoyable micromanagement (for those of us who enjoy such things, at least!) of moving around the worker units in Civ and having them improve a land that is already there, and make decisions about how such improvements should be made. Cranking out constructors doesn't really have the same feel. This probably isn't something that could be added to GalCiv, but perhaps for the sequel...

Trade-offs I can't put it better than Sid Meier himself, "A game is a series of interesting choices." The Civ series have drilled down into this concept exceedingly well, and made it so that choosing poorly was something that you could get immediate feedback on, especially in tactical choices. GalCiv has been compared to chess and it feels that way, in that your choices are often about large issues of strategy that can make or break you in large ways, instead of small incremental ones.

The perfect example, and one place where Civ3 really nailed the "one more turn" impulse, involves Wonders/Galactic Achievements. In Civ3 there was often a frantic race to build a specific wonder, that you could see played out because (if you had the basic level of diplomacy) you knew whenever everybody else was building it, and if you spied on the other guys you could look at the exact city and see how many more turns they had to finish it. But the kicker was that you could not rush a Wonder, only build it, unless you got lucky with a Leader. So there was often this mad rush, especially early on in the game, where you're working frantically to pump out enough workers to build the mines around the city that was spending 150 turns building this one massive wonder... just so you could get it done 10 turns before the other guy. There usually isn't that sort of rush felt in most of GalCiv, except in the initial exploration phase, because if you want something you just lease it before the other guy does. With the changes to the lease structure this is far better than it initially was, in that you can't lease everything under the sun, but it still reduces the feel of working frantically to get something built. If the espionage side of the game were increased to the point that you could easily find out this sort of information, something similar might work in GalCiv as well.

Fast end-game battles It's horribly cheesy, but the fact that you can zoom all your troops across a continent once you have railroads in the Civ games has done wonders in speeding up the end game. I love playing on big maps in GalCiv, because I like the heft of a large empire, but I deplore the time it takes to move all the units around just to wrap up a game. This is probably one of the easier ways that the game could be dramatically improved with very little coding time spent: putting in a set of 10 mid-late game techs in the tech tree that did not take you towards the tech victory, which would help speed up your ships and eventually culminate in being able to build warp points (star-gates?) to move ships around faster. And unlike the Civ series, it would actually make sense within the game!

So there are three conceptual areas where GalCiv might be improved in order to help keep up the interest within players. The expansion pack itself will no doubt cause a lot of us to spend many more hours playing, once it's released... here's hoping!

[Chronus]

Nice post, Pyrkaige.

Apart from production increases, all the starbase improvements do nothing directly for the planets that they are by.

Well . . . technically speaking . . . aren't the tile imrovements in Civ 3 nothing more than production increases for particular cities (Food, shields, commerce)? I only bring this up because I'm wondering if you are aware of all the different bonuses a starbase can bring to planets (morale, production, increased trade). If you are aware of this then I suspect we are on the same wave length. That is . . . it's the how bonuses are created in Civ 3 (i.e. settlers) that create an additional fun for us.

It's horribly cheesy, but the fact that you can zoom all your troops across a continent once you have railroads in the Civ games has done wonders in speeding up the end game.

I can understand the wanting to end a long game but . . . uugghh! . . . a limit on railroad movement is one of the few things I wish they did change for Civ 3. The current railroad system eliminates the need for scouting, strategic placement, etc. and literally places an invading army at the mercy of your ENTIRE army (assuming all your land and cities are joined with railroads). I'm sure you've read all the arguments . . . jus getting in my little dig. (hmmm, I can't find the little "winky" smiley face).

Again, I enjoyed your post!

[peterfharris]

Pyrkaige

That was one superb post.

[Pyrkaige]

Thanks for the comments... I'm glad to see the ideas enjoyed.

Originally posted by Chronus
Well . . . technically speaking . . . aren't the tile imrovements in Civ 3 nothing more than production increases for particular cities (Food, shields, commerce)?

Technically speaking, yes; practically speaking, no. Those tile improvements also confer a huge amount of player control over the city, both with workers outside the city and the citizens working inside the city. The choices that a player makes with the workers and citizens directly impact a host of game mechanics: the growth of the city; how much it gives to the overall economy in multiple sections (science, taxes, entertainment); the trade-off between local improvement (entertainers) vs. global, and so on. That is a massive amount of optional micromanagement control cunningly designed into a simple interface. If you focus both the tile enhancement and where your citizens work on, say, food production, it will increase the speed at which your city grows. There is nothing comparable to this with the starbases in GalCiv; for that matter, there is nothing comparable to the fine-tuning of population growth within Civ 3 in general, to be found anywhere within GalCiv. That's another area where players could/should be given more control, other than the crude method of jetting settlers or soldiers out into space when a planet gets too full. When players are given optional control (there should always be useful AI backups) over useful game mechanics within these sort of games, they tend to take advantage of them and can enjoy that sub-set of the game. As long as it doesn't turn into, well MOO3.

I can understand the wanting to end a long game but . . . uugghh! . . . a limit on railroad movement is one of the few things I wish they did change for Civ 3. The current railroad system eliminates the need for scouting, strategic placement, etc. and literally places an invading army at the mercy of your ENTIRE army (assuming all your land and cities are joined with railroads). I'm sure you've read all the arguments . . .

Actually, I agree entirely about railroads in Civ3. I've no doubt that if infinite movement weren't such a "classic" part of the Civ genre, that would have been tweaked out by Civ3, because it does eliminate so many choices that players would otherwise have to make. But, one of the huge benefits to Civ3 railroads from a game speed standpoint is that they eliminate the tediousness of slowly moving around massive amounts of units towards the end of a game. (Especially combined with, ahem, way-points, which thankfully were added to both Civ3 and GalCiv with their respective expansion packs. The fact that neither game had them originally is itself a bit of commentary on how easy it is to forget about wheels already invented, when making new games within the same genre. But I digress...)

I would certainly not expect any other TBS Civ-type game to implement a railroad or railroad-type level of movement within their own games; I certainly hope that other game developers wouldn't do that. But the idea of having some type of game mechanic within the latter half of a unit-heavy game that makes it easy to quickly move limited amounts of units is worth persuing. GalCiv could certainly use it -- and no, the rubber-band starbase quasi-cheat doesn't count.

OT: These party hat smilies are quite... big.

[Chronus]

both with workers outside the city and the citizens working inside the city.

DOH! I can't believe I forgot about the worker placement inside the city screen. Excellent point!

[Vince278]

It really isn't a good game. I've gone back to MOO3 and SE4.

[Asmodean]

I've been playing it since late January. I've taken up SMAC/X again. But rest assured that GalCiv will be my first choice of game, as soon as the expansion is finished.

Asmodean

[Hywel Dda]

It's interesting to see how many posters have retreated back to other games - no particular criticism of GalCiv - but they'd rather play MooN/CivN/SmaX/HoI/etc...
Myself I played a few times - then fell back on Civ II
Perhaps the problem is that GalCiv offers a lot - but then somehow fails to deliver.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Hywel Dda
Perhaps the problem is that GalCiv offers a lot - but then somehow fails to deliver.

That would be a great way to describe MOO3 but I would say the opposite about GalCiv: It offers very little and delivers it.

[LDiCesare]

I actually keep playing galciv. The challenge on maso is the best challenge you can find in 4X games as far as I know.

[Asmodean]

Originally posted by Hywel Dda
It's interesting to see how many posters have retreated back to other games - no particular criticism of GalCiv - but they'd rather play MooN/CivN/SmaX/HoI/etc...
Myself I played a few times - then fell back on Civ II
Perhaps the problem is that GalCiv offers a lot - but then somehow fails to deliver.

On the contrary. It delivers everything it offers. I think the problem is that many find it too hard. People want to take on GalCiv the same way they take on most strategy games, but they find that that is just not possible. They need to rethink, and then it is easier to revert back to SMAC, MOO or whatever.

Asmodean

[Harry Seldon]

My biggest problem was the lack of variety in gameplay. If you truly want to be successful you pretty much choose the same techs in around the same order each time through. Maybe I'm not good enough to play any other way but many times when I deviate from the gun-toting war path I end up getting crushed.

[Asmodean]

Okay....I understand what you mean, HS, but I my mind, the really interesting choices come later in the game, when you really start interacting with the other civs.

Asmodean

[Harry Seldon]

That's true. I still feel boxed in unless I'm playing the linear strategy, though. It's the total opposite of Moo3 in my opinion. The techs are TOO important. I like to be able to choose techs that are more in line with what I need at the moment but I feel if I don't grab the early money building techs then shoot straight for dreadnaughts then I'm too far behind to catch up.

[Asmodean]

Well...a strategy of taking over your enemies by culture starbases is also viable. It allows time for massive empire building, but often involves trading off a few starsystems.

Asmodean

[Harry Seldon]

I've usually end up focusing on culture because it's the most effective way to take star systems, IMHO, but without an impressive military I'm savagely beaten back. I usually play small galaxies, though, because my PC was so wimpy. I have a new one that's strong enough to play large galaxies so it will probably change the gameplay a bit.

[Asmodean]

Yeah, but if you want to try winning without an impressive military, you can usually trade off a few star systems. This will often buy you peace long enough to get your starbases going. Then when your adversary calls your bluff, you'll need only enough fighting force to deal with local threat, if you've played your cards right.

Asmodean

[Harry Seldon]

That will work on the larger maps but on smaller ones I'm lucky to have four or five systems and each is vital to the cause. Plus, if I'm attacked too early my starbases are an easy target unless I can back them up militarily. Losing a starbase is usually a devastating event in my games.

We're kind of threadjacking this. Should we open a new one in strategy?

[LDiCesare]

I agree about the lack of diversity in gameplay. The fact that it is hard to mod things doesn't help (you have to change all the files by hand and then put them back in place instead of selecting a scenario folder from the game menu).

About the game being too hard, it may be true for some, but as far as I concerned, I play the games when they are a challenge, so no game can be too hard for me (unless I can't even get started).

[Draginol]

What would you like to see added/changed to create more diversity?

[Harry Seldon]

I have the most trouble avoiding military techs. I've always felt that if I didn't go straight for dreadnaughts that I was done for, even if I wanted to try a pacifist game. I also have a hell of a time bribing other civs into doing anything. Sometimes it seems the only techs they value are the military ones and money isn't always a good trade item.

Some of this may be due to gameplay and strategy. One of the things I don't think would be affected by this is the value of technology as a whole. It seems that there are some techs that you just have to have, like dreadnaughts. I can't really think of any suggestions to remedy this, though. God forbid if tech turned to the worthless crap it was in MOO3.

I haven't played GalCiv since I got my new 2.2 GHz machine so I've never played larger than a small galaxy. Maybe I won't feel this way if I have more room to manuever.

[LDiCesare]

What would you like to see added/changed to create more diversity?

In my opinion diversity is best achieved bu mods and scenarios. It's also about tech path you choose.
I want a galaxy where exploration/expansion is fast and then a game where it is slow (can be done simply by different range/speed of colony ships - but the ai doesn't know how to use a constructor in order to extend its range so it can settle a planet). This could be a setting.
I want a game where the only military techs you have are those that give +10 military (attack or def...) and very few new ships.
I want to be able to choose between an attack ship line (fast, ranged) and a defense ship line (negative range and speed so they can't move) which may provide a bonus to starbase defense. Or maybe use starbases to effectively freeze enemy ships by reducing their speed to 0 (the current -1 speed starbase module is quite pitiful since you'd need 4 or 5 starbases in a sector before it starts getting interesting).
I want a game where it is possible to make a starting gambit so if you go with one tech path you'll have no military but a huge production/science base, so, if you survive that stage, you can start building a military much stronger than that of the opponents.
I want the occasional event that changes the game, like fundies do, but more of this kind. For instance: A new alien race from another galaxy with totally weird tech arrives and seizes several star systems by surprise, and here you go with a powerful alien major race that can't be traded with or talked to, but is powerful enough that it might be a good idea that all majors team against it until they get rid of it, before you can resume fighting one another. Maybe a special kind of ship would be appropriate to fight this menace (a weapon useless on other races but efficient against these).

And mods that are really mods, that is thye change the core files instead of adding stuff.

[Cookie Monster]

Just thought I'd share.........


Still playing HOI. I think this is the longest I've stuck with playing one game. Patch 1.05c is out and the game keeps getting better.

I wish I had the time but like I said above, GalCiv and RoN are still on my hard drive just waiting for me to pick up again.

[Hydro]

The one part of the game that annoys me the most is the frantic rush for planets in the early game. Literally, if you pause to think you are stewed. While it doesn't completely control the game, if you don't get your share you are at a significant disadvantage (and the AI knows where all the 15+ planets are).

The only why I've found to complete is to set my military to 100% and mass produce colony ships, then send them out wily nilly and hope (new planets produce a scout first). Even them I seem to only get parity.

I don't know what could fix this, or even if others think its broken. I do know it has diminished my interest in the game since it makes it very 'linear' to me.

[Madine]

I thought StarDock did an excellent job of supporting their game. I really think that was a deciding factor in establishing and maintaining their playerbase.

I haven't played in a few months, so my analysis could be a little rusty. This also means that some stuff I listed may have been fixed/addressed already.

What would you like to see added/changed to create more diversity?

More diverse ships. I remember there being ships, and then as you progressed you would get better ships.

What about fast and weak ships for going after construtors/traders, offensive ships, defensive ships, scout ships (I think there was a sentry or something, but it was so slow that it was mostly practical for defensive purposes only).

Another problem with lack of diversity is the planets. There's a number. High number is good; low number is bad. Maybe some planets could get inherent bonuses/penalties similar to what random events give.

From a the perspective of gaining gameplay advantages, there didn't seem to be much diversity in morality. From what I understood, the main advantage to being good was good relations with other good races, and that didn't seem to play out. That could be a diplomacy system issue and not a morality system issue. There didn't seem to be any advantages to being neutral. Good and evil both had unique techs, but neither set seemed to be significantly better than the other. Evil was considered the "best" choice because it gave you economic/sociological bonuses.

In fairness being good/evil and having the game change based on that is something that afaik is unique in the 4x genre. So along with my criticism I also feel compelled to acknowledge that this is a cool and innovative feature, even if the morality choices aren't balanced.