Far be it for me to invite scorn and ridicule on our hard work in the form of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor but let's face it, GalCiv has long since stopped being any sort of traditional "product". We love working on it. If I didn't work at Stardock, I'd be modding it in my spare time. But I do work at Stardock so that means I still get to mod it in my spare time but I have the source code.
That said, in this post can you list the 5 things you would want changed or fixed about Twilight of the Arnor first. Not things that you eventually want changed or modified or whatever but 5 things that you would want done as soon as possible.
I'll then read through your lists and put together a summary and start working on them at night after working on The Political Machine during the day.
Don't feel bad for me, the GalCiv team wanted to go right on to making a GalCiv III but I'm integrating them into the fantasy strategy game team instead. So I deserve some scorn and ridicule.
-Brad
It appears to be missing a Linux client. You can whip one up in a few days, right?
With an attitude like that, you deserve an award, not scorn.
I only have one MUST have, for me, fix. It bugs the heck out of me..
I'll detail the circumstance I'm familiar with, but maybe the underlying cause applies elsewhere. I'm not sure if the fix is something that can be done in the data files or not.We'll use the ship, "Destroyer M1" as an example.Destroyer M1 requirements:Ion DriveLarge Scale BuildingLaser IIISuperior Deflectors*needs more miniturization*now this is where the bug comes from. It's fine to SAY a ship needs more minturization in the tech tree description, but it has to be enforced somewhere in data or code as well.Now, with the handy dandy Focus of Laser 100% and Deflectors(?) 100%, I could build this ship by selecting it in the shipyard as an automatically generated design. I have indeed researched the prerequisite techs, EXCEPT the required miniturization needed for this to work. I have only researched to this point, Basic Miniturization: +10%.Here are the ship stats the auto design came up with:Beam Weapon Attack: 9Deflectors: 3Speed: +1Hull: Large (size 80 +10% = 88)If I try to build this ship in the ship designer by myself, with BETTER lasers (IV), I can only get:Beam Weapon Attack: 9 (9 x Laser Mark IV @ size 9 = size 81)Deflectors: 1 (1 x Superior Deflectors @ size 5 = size 5)Total size = 86Hull: Large (Basic Miniturization +10% of size 80 = size 88)So, used size/max capacity = 86/88No room for an engine here, and I'm missing 2 to the deflector stats.Now, to build the ship that was designed for me by the computer, I would need a hull size of 113. That is with the superior Lasers IV used in the best I could come up with.Here are the various hull sizes for a Large hull with various miniterization techs:Basic miniterization +10%: 88II +15%: 100III +15%: 112IV +15%: 124V +20%: 140VI +25%: 160So, in other words, I would need to research up to the FORTH miniterization level to fit all the components to match the computer design.I should NOT be able to build this vessel, but the auto ship design feature puts it in my buildable ship set anyway, THREE techs short of being able to do so legitimately!That is a lot of research saved, no?
Well my 2 cents are:
1)Make the Korx true space merchants and have the option as a Super Ability...More trade routes open to them, seperate trade types, good, evil, or neutral.
2)Paradise planets...galactic showcase planet that boosts tourism economy, morale, and influence.
3)Minor races that become vassals or allies with limits on what they can or cannot do without your assistance.
4)Ability to use diplomacy to break an AI alliance other than through tech trading to start a war.
5)A notification of when a resource has been located by a survey ship much like they do now when they find anomolies and space debris.
Thank you for all the great work that makes this game the best of the best.
Wow! Talk about being a day late and a dollar short. How did I miss this thread for so damn long??? Oh well my ideas have already been suggested so here hoping things go well for the nightshift!
1)The number one thing I'd hope for is a more streamlined starbase construction system. It gets really tedious in the later stages when you often want 15+ constructors for a single starbase, and a ton of starbases. How about a system where you can put each constructor you build in a "standby" mode. Then at each starbase you could have a menu which would list the available modules, and selecting one would automatically call the nearest constructor on standby to the starbase to build it. Then you could build a big starbase from scattered constructors all from a single menu. Obviously would need some system to keep track of what constructors were on route to the base, and what each was going to build. Would also largely eliminate having to keep track of which of dozens of worlds are currently building constructors.
2)I'll echo others who've said that some way to make minor civs more than just targets would be nice. If they could become essentially affiliated to a civ, with reulting tech and economic bonuses, it would provide an alternative to just conquering them. Particularly given they are immune to influence, they end up rather left out in a peaceful game.
3)The AI's ability to spot the human preparing for an attack could use some work. At the moment I can often park enough transports to invade every world they have in position, fly in ome attack ships, and assemble a fully equipped military starbase in their homesystem without them declaring, which seems a little silly. Strangely I often get the message that they're attacking due to transports the turn after I attack, which looks even more ridiculous. I'm also still getting false positives (indeed virtually the only positives) from flying transports round within my own territory. I occasionally get this when they fly past some AI influencer base stuck deep in my territory - even if it's miles from anywhere and doesn't even have a bubble of their territory round it.
Ican only think of a single thing:
I would like that alliances can be broken through diplomacy, or something like that. I recently had a game where everybody loved everyone except for me, a lone fierce voice determined to become the only one alive. It proved extremely frustrating that even after taking out the strongest military force on the map, motivated by his declaration of having researched Beyond Mortality, I was utterly incapable of shaking up the established alliances. Not because everyone were better diplomats than me, it was because the opportunity was simply absent from the game.
I had the idea a while back, and I don't think I repeated it in this thread, to have a new kind of treaty. That is, something like a protection treaty. Where one civ is paid to protect another. It would be set up on the trade screen just as the other treaties but the amout would be paid weekly, like a trade route or like the income from an economic treaty. The amout would depend on the military rating of the protecting race.
It would work this way, when one race gets the treaty it must come to the aid of the other if war gets declared on it. For the human player, you would just be notified that you are war with whomever because they attacked race X, or that a race you are about to attack has a treaty with someone else and you will be at war with them too. The AI should look at the combines military ratings of the civs before it decides to delcare war or not.
It would be interesting if the treaty were secret but that might be too much.
Having this type of treaty with more than one race could lead to conflicts. You could either have only one to you and one that you give. This can work because it only triggers for the race that gets attacked. OR just make it somethinmg that only applies to minor races. However I think the great part of this is that you can have a stroner race as your protector while you are still weak, if you can afford their services / exstortion. OR this can be part of the KORX superability or something.
Isn't that very close to what's achieved in Alliances? I know at least Alterians work very well like that (but that is their super ability). But even the other races usually jump to the aid of long-time allies. I'd think that, as I said above, a more efficient way of breaking tihngs like that would be more needed.
There does need a way to deal with alliances between two AIs. That would've been a good new use for spies - to run false-flag operations and lower standing between two civs.
howdy!
just got the endless universe last week and it's been one heckuva week! LOOOOOOOVE the game. i end up thinking about aspects of the system while i'm going to sleep!
the few things i want changed:
1. all ships continue on autopiloted path without ENDING THE TURN. right now, if it takes several turns to get to your eventual destination, you must END YOUR TURN before the ship moves for that turn (that is, the ship only progresses on its autopilot destination at the END of your turn).
as someone else pointed out to me, this is advantageous in that something might've happened in the turn before, such that i would want to change my plans with a ship and do something other than continuing toward my set destination. that's true. but it's also the case that i might have arrived at my destination (an anomaly say) and that would have changed the way i would have played the rest of my turn.
so a SHIPS CONT button and an ALL SHIPS CONT button (icon of a boot and multipleboots respectively?) around the proximity of the turn button seems like a good compromise dontcha think?
otherwise, multi-turn paths become useless and i just force move the unit manually anyway but having to reclick on the destination. not optimal.
2. right now, there are nodes on the tech tree that literally buy you NOTHING. they are there as filler so that you can continue and develop something else further down the line. this is sloppy. violates the principle of economy of expression imo. there should be no fillers. no matter how nominal, every node should buy you SOMETHING... otherwise, it just makes me resentful! : )
every researched item should provide you with some reward and not just the ability to earn a reward further down. more immediate positive reinforcement is in order.
3. it's cool that the planet invasion stuff is rudimentary. the FLAGS are just too much though! or rather, they're too little.... come on, some kind of cool looking army graphic running through a 5 frame cycle for every race! something to evoke the spectacle of planetary invasion! or maybe change the field where you have the numerics bars (what ARE those anyway? it looks like some kinda dice roll to me but i have no idea what precisely it is) and put a cool graphic of the armies with a smaller numeric counter representing the ... uuuhhhh... whatever those numbers represent.
4. also a tool tip for the "focus" button in the ship production seems to be in order to explain what it does. it took me a long time to hunt down what it was for!
and that's it! the game is awesome. looooove it. think it. dream it... and i can't wait to sit down and play some more!
rock on.
jin
p.s. good on you for the gamer's bill of rights. but i think the ability to re-sell a game should be in there too. not that i would but just in principle. digitally delivered game? fine, you can make those unresellable. but anything that's put on a game store's shelf in product packaging with physical media... that should really be allowed to be resold at will.
Bumped... since it seems FrogBoy is in an "updating" mood!
Really, that's where you might find WHAT to fix (or consider, btw) in the next version.
Good initiative Zyxpsilon!
My requests (maybe I'll be lucky and some of these are already implemented and I just don't realize it:
1) In the planet list, if you select a planet you jump to it. would be nice to have a key to jump back to the last one selected. (I play on the largest maps I can so anything to help to quickly find something is always good).
2) ascension victories, on the larger maps. I might be alone in this but would like to make ascension crystals that have been built on to be visible to all players even if they are in unexplored territory. On the larger maps one can lose simply because one can never find the opponent's crystals in time. You get messages about them, but cannot find them. Or maybe make them a part of the espionage thing, if you get max level espionage w/a race, then any acension crystals they are mining show up in the minimap, even in unexplored territory. Un-mined ascension crystals can keep their current behavior. Of course, some people will rather this all be kept as it is now, especially those playing smaller maps, so if it were implemented it should just be an option.
3) add a minimum_number_of_turns value for research that one can set a value for in options.
As it is, later in the game for instance, some tech tree line you haven't gone down yet now only takes 1 turn to research each tech until you catch up to your current civ's level of progress. You can far too easily and quickly make up for neglecting a line earlier. This also makes different games a bit too much the same, by late game, you always end up w/largely the same techs.
To make your choices more meaningful, I'd like to be able to set a minimum number of turns techs will take to research - no tech will take less than this number of turns to research no matter how cheap it is or how advanced your civ is. So if you set it to say 5 turns, even that entry level tech you neglected until now in the late game, will still take 5 turns to get. This makes catching up in some research line you neglected earlier in the game not something you can do in just a matter of a few turns anymore. This value should also apply to your opponents of course.
p.s. I play w/tech trading off, which itself really helps along these lines. the above would make it just about perfect to me.
4) perhaps there arleady is one, but I'd like a hotkey to instantly zoom out to max zoom. hit it again, and you instantly zoom back to your former location. This is a minor thing, the way zooming in/out works now is a great time saver already and even if I had this hotkey I mention, I'd still usually just use the mouse to zoom in/out. Sometimes I just want a quick 2 second peak at the larger picture though and it'd save wear and tear on my poor old mousewheel. hehe
How could you not list Civilization on that list? All of the Stardock games are turn based strategy, so omitting Civ seems like an oversight at best.
1 AI does not use the bonus tiles
like there be a farm bonus and they stick a factory there
2. why does the AI love to build one type of building
I don't I mix it so I can build stuff and research and keep up with money
why is the AI so anti farm
3. tidal disruption why would this make it so you can't build a power plant
maybe have a planet attack that is cheap that will lower the enemy strength have 0 PQ loss
and still have the ability to make power plants. and no documentation about it
otherwise all we can do is info warfare and standard
4 make ai use transports properly and not rely on culture conquest
5. the weaker civ begging for help to fight a stronger civ is annoying
6. make a non dread lord campaign that is more dense and the enemy has more than one planet
not get planetary invasion and its over. The dread lords are way to powerful for me to want to play. and the player is way to weak
Way to Necro.
what is MCC ?
want some slam? sure
I just played through all three campaigns. First time playing galactic civilizations.
so.
1. The ai is incredibly stupid. I thought tough would be tough, so i started there... the second campaign i upped it to painful, and then crippling... still kicked ass easy. Even played one mission on suicidal. Apperently 'normal' the ai gets penelties? and 'tough' is 'dead even'? sorry but you pride yourself in your AI, but, all I have to do is put 1% in military, 49% and 50% in research and industry, max out production, and buy a shitton of colony ships, and the ai just can not compete. Youd think it would do a better job at invading my completely defenceless colonies. I see ai planets with extra colony ships which it built even though there were no planets left, and it didnt upgrade em to something useful.
2. trading influence for cash during the campaigns. nuff said. and. when you are on the same bloody locked team, the ai's would be more willing to share their special ubersecret techs.
3. the planet bonuses in the campain vary. your hw could be empty of bonuses, or have +700% research and two +100% morals. This is absolute bullshit. It makes comparing scores on campaigns meaningless when your high score is significatly based off of a dice roll.
4. same complaint, but for galaxy maps. total bullshit how map fucked you can get, or how map fucked your enemies can get... even on the 'symetrical' maps.
5. How much of this this game snuck into sins of a solar empire. seriously. what the hell. So much face-palm.
There. some serious slam. i hope you are happy.
Because really.
It is a very good game, and quite addicting. I do hope for a galactic civ 3 at some point... Though sins 2 first. Need to get you guys to fix the map balance issues in the game with multiplayer first before the single player one.
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