I love how one can customize one's own ships in Galactic Civilizations II. However, I find ground battles to be quite boring. I would like to be able to customize my ground troops and vehicles. I would also like to actually watch them fight. How about everybody else? What would you like to see?
I wouldn't hold my breath for any native non-windows support.
We need real capital ships.
- Eliminate the size mod for the ships.
- Give a disadvantage to caps and damage multipliers.
- A tiny hull ought to be, to use Sins of a Solar Empire, a fighter. Maybe a medium would be a frigate, a large would be a Kodiak HC, and a huge ... bigger than a Kol.
- REAL starbases (and much more upgradeable). Perhaps even a "starbase editor" based on the ship editor.
- Tactical combat. I would even go as far as to say, each solar system should be separate and you 'invade" each system, which results in an Sins like combat. (although that's probably asking a bit much)
For social, have you ever played Alpha Centauri?
Try social engineering. The GC2 system is too simply, imperial, democracy, republic, and federation.
Fix zoom and scrolling
I would just love to have a build que for the shipyard. Number of, as well as being able to que up different ships. I really don't like that they shipyard just continues to build and build.
I like not having to refill queues all the time, but being able to customize it beyond endlessly building the same thing would come in pretty handy with transports. One of the most annoying things in the game is the amount of micromanagement required to make transports due to your shipyards running out of population, and that would be fixed by being able to tell it to build two transports, then three warships, then repeat the sequence.
There's a few things I'd love to see implimented into GalCiv.
My first is make a difference between Tinies and Huge. I don't just mean space. It's pointless to build a fighter with 2/0/0 and 0/2/0 on it when you can build a Huge for 10/0/0 and 10/10/10, 10x the hp, and for only 5x the price after you've done some miniaturization. Bigger ships go faster, too. What I'd personally prefer to see is Engine Size and Cost go up near exponentially per size, and add a 'carrier' type module allowing smaller ships to operate further away from your support zone, so you could bring a carrier into an enemy's territory and then swarm out four or five fast, effective fighter flights. In the current system, bigger is just always better, there's no reason to go back to an earlier build, or build it up, unless your logistics has space for that one random frigate in the fleet, or you're trying to slap some defenders into orbit on some new planet in a hurry and on the cheap. The biggest deal here is that 5 fighter fleet you built will degrade, even it had equivalent hitpoints, just from losing ships where the cap ship you built doesn't. Waste of money to build anything small except constructors, and maybe freighters if you're constantly losing trade lines. The smaller ships also can't penetrate the larger shields, though I'm not sure I'm against this IF the smaller ships have other uses... like I dunno... bigger ships miss them more without anti-fighter modules... etc.
Another thing I'd like to see is actually a gripe, and that's the over-complexity of the approval system, at least without having a calculator and 3 different website charts handy. That's a bit much for a space fighter game. Fine, I can't build 12 farms and have the people happy, cool, no issue. If my morale improvement says 25%, give me 25%, or show me (screentip or otherwise) exactly WHAT it's really giving me and why. The little popup in the planet's nice and all but it actually just makes you realize how much research you're about to do.
Also, as previously mentioned, please adjust the military ratings system. An example: I played peacemaker in one of my games and hid in the corner with a massive bank of econ sat's surrounding my two planets both going science full bore (had a nice corner sector position, 16 blown out econ sats can get you to the level of rediculous real fast). I built off a few fighter-scouts at the beginning just to get the initial aggressive folks to calm down and fight each other instead of me and then forgot about them drifting in the middle of nowhere when their auto-searches were done. Eventually I created two Battleships, and had about 15% of the military rating of someone I ticked off. I rolled them like they were jokes, unfleeted, and with only those two. I'm personally not entirely sure HOW to fix the current system for a better one, but there has to be a better way.
Please, for the sake of all that's sane, fix the economy spending bars. I can't have a science planet and a manufacturing planet both going full bore simultaneously. Practically defeats the purpose of the capitals as a significant goal. It's more along the lines of "Oh, look, I researched it... 'eh, guess I'll put it somewhere."
The AI REALLY needs to get aggressive at Influence centers more. You can practically run over anyone with them and they'll usually just threaten a bit unless you're really behind on the military might.
Speaking of Starbases, a few items:
1) Allow us to completely turn off specific items in the autobuild. After building eyes in the sky I don't care about sensors anymore. Honest. 2) When you're following a starbase conquering policy being able to queue where a constructor should go when the current one's done would be nice. I've had 30+ constructors in space at the same time and re-routing via the governor can be a royal pain when you want 5 here, 5 there, 2 there, and 4 over here. 3) Econ Starbases and traderoutes: In the trade screen, show us the base value, and what they're currently getting from the influence in their current position. It's very hard to tell sometimes why your econ is bouncing around like a pingpong because you forgot that the Gamorkians knocked out Econ stations 18A, 18B, 18C, and 18D in the backhills of deadspace. 4) It'd be really nice to be able to fleet them up with a defensive ship or two. Currently I can only get the Terror Stars to do that. 5) The Terror star is reusable. REALLY? That monstrousity that only took 10 100bc constructors (and half your lifetime to reach the target if you didn't build it close to them) can be re-used? My gawds. Stop that. 6) Constructors with multiple Construction units on them so you DON'T have to have 30+ constructors in the air to keep them cheap yet quickly build out a station. They'll end up the same support price (mostly). 7) Influence starbases should be able to spread influence in deadspace further then their reach. Having an influence starbase in deadspace with no influence modules has the exact same effect as one fully built out. 8)Please use a different way of showing which starbases get which types of modules out of the tech tree, it's vague at best until you memorize them for which ones the clover, the box, etc. Use symbols (gun, dollar sign, a handshake, etc) instead.
Somewhere in the main screen let us see the *entire* tech tree, and have it have tooltips for who gets what.
The illegal colonization the AI does is enough to make me want to beat the computer with a lollipop. At LEAST send a scout there first before I see a colonization ship whizzing past me.
I'd also like to second the ideas of the Damage Degradation to ships. If you're venting atmo and have most of your pieces flying off, you shouldn't be at full strength. Also UNP votes: Currently you can't even guess what your neighbors are going to do even with maxed infiltration via espionage until you've seen them enough times to know what the good, evil, and neutral civs are usually going to do. I'd at least like to work with my allies towards the same goal. Can't argue about the warship icons either. Heck, give us a set of 20 and let us assign them to different models would be good enough.
I'd love to see more variety in the weapons then just 'rock/paper/scissors' and a few space and cost points. Make scatter guns scatter, shotgunning the entire enemy fleet. Make beam weapons almost perfect aim weapons, just make them huge to compensate (call it an 'energy cost for its own reactors to power the gun' or something), so that a 2 beam vs. a 1 shield will almost always do 1 damage. Missiles in the middle (missiles track), autocannons at the other end (space is big, they are slow).
Seperate model lists per race. I like to build my "Cheap Constructor", my "SpeedScout", and my "Freighter II"'s for the race I'm playing at the time. There is no foreseeable reason not to put in a folder tree per race letting me have different templates with the same names when most people buy a computer off the shelf with half a terrabyte of space. This has to be one of the most annoying "little things" about the game.
I'd like to see more 'support' style additions to ships. The current ones (add to defense, attack, and speed) are nice, but more variety would be cool. A support ship extending a fleet's range (Refueling tanker, whatever). An orbital bombardment ship that if fleeted with a transport adds to advantage or another option on the 'attack' choices. A buoy dropper so you can leave sensor posts in the deep for a price. A flying cruise ship that adds morale to whatever it orbits.
Think that's it.
I'd like to see a change to planetary invasions. I've never liked the fact that in GC2 the entire population of a planet has to be eliminated before it is captured. A possible solution to this would be to differentiate troops from general population. The number of troops on each planet would be determined by such things as population, a global "recruitment/conscription" setting, improvements and so-on. Capturing a planet would require the invading troops to eliminating only the defending troops, leaving the general population (minus perhaps a certain percentage due to "collateral damage") alone.
Transports would only carry troops, and troop modules would only have to have a fraction of their current capacity, meaning that transports could no longer be used to ferry population between colonies (colony ships would need to be used for that). However, troops could be transferred between colonies, allowing colonies near an aggressive neighbour to have its defenses boosted at the expense of other colonies being less protected.
Separating troops from population would introduce yet another variable into the game, but I think the benefits would make it worthwhile.
I like to see some characters for each race, with an experience system, like in starwars rebellion, they can be recluted at random and win some xp or be fired.
I'd like to see a 3D environments for galactic, solar systems and planetary levels. Three environments. In otherwords, while panning, zooming and rotating through the galaxy, you see cube-shaped sectors with a 3-axis grid, stars, impassible nebulea, ship icons and paths. When you double-click on a star, it opens up to view of the solar system depicting the central star/stars, planets with orbit lines and asteroid belts. Then perhaps zooming in to view a particular planet is yet another 3D environment. Here are two conceptual pencil sketches.
A few ideas...
First, once you research Star Federation, you can invite minor races to join your empire with a certain degree of independence, like Star Trek and also as the USA was envisioned.
Second, why not allow a colony to produce more than one ship per turn? If it's got the resources, why not? And give me a QUE too! After all, GC2 will allow more than one tech to be completed in sequence in a single turn.
Thirdly, why must every planet, research facility, and so forth in your empire be researching the same thing simultaneously? Why not be able to research multiple techs at once and assign percentages of resources to each effort? And how about creating research que's for each colony.
Fourthly, when colonizing a planet, sometimes there are precusor left-overs. Why not techs?
How about making planetary invasions a whole new facet to the game. At the point of invasion, you slip into a new set of game mechanics for doing land based battles - something alongs the lines of a hex-based or square-based board game (i.e. Risk, or Axis and Allies). So now instead of having planetary invasions taking only a minute, a new dimension is added to the game and you have to plan planetary takeover square by square. Along with that you might now have the option of designing land-based weapons (i.e. Tanks, Bolos, Laser emplacements, etc.) that would be designed and dropped on-planet.
Each planet would have settings for production capacity to create similar defensive or offensive weaponry to fight off invasions as well. So production could be split between creating space based or land based assets.
Two further ideas:
Scrap Terror Stars. Honestly, does anyone use them in any games other than the campaigns? If we must have a planet/star destroying weapon, make it one that costs a lot to research and buid and can be mounted on a ship (perhaps on massive ships only, due to its size) and, like the current constructor module, destroys the ship carrying it when it is used.
(Re-)Introduce star gates, which are mentioned in the in-game history. These would be built in the same way as Terror Stars are currently built: by sending lots of constructors with each module costing a lot to build (and perhaps the completed gate having a high maintenance cost). This would allow fast travel between gates, which would be very useful on the larger maps. Like starbases, the gates would be stationary. I'm not sure whether the gates would be linked as "any to any" allowing travel from any gate to any other or as "linked pairs" requiring two gates to be built for travel between them. The in-game history states that the Drengin tried to invade using a star gate built by the Arceans, which suggests that it would be possible to allow other races to use gates you would build (and vice-versa) and building a gate in another race's territory would no doubt be seen as an act of aggression. Having star gates would make the game more interestng tactically and would provide an alternate means of getting around the larger maps without having to research all the engine techs.
There are both lore-based and practical reasons that stargates are not used. Lore-wise, they were supposed to be far *slower* than the engines we have. Practically, Brad has said that it would be impossible to program the AI to use them as efficiently as a player would. It would be a huge bonus to players that the AI simply could not use properly.
Re: Star Gates
Perhaps an option could be added to the game where there are a number of random space based star gates left over from another civilization. These would function the same way as wormholes - i.e. they move you from one place in the galaxy to another - effectively allowing two way transport over long distances. During the time the galaxy map is created, a random number of them would appear at random places throughout the galaxy. They could be utilized by building a starbase on them (kind of like building a starbase on resources in the regular game). That way you could conceivably control access to remote sectors of the galaxy if you own two or more gates.
This could add a new strategic element to the game as everyone races to find these. Of course, they are more useful on larger maps than smaller...
Negotiation before UNP Votes: When there is a vote which will benefit one race (placement of a UNP facility, etc.), it would be nice to be able to negotiate to find out how others are going to vote and either convince them to vote a certain way or let them buy your vote to make it go their way.
I cant' second these sugestions enough.
My biggest wish for Gal Civ III.
Just make it a better version of Gal Civ II. Not a completely different game.
(Like MoO3. Man did that suck)
Man, I couldn't agree more with this post, as well, but let me reiterate his first point;
Really, I already started a thread asking "What the ^&%$ good are Tiny ships???
For only maybe a couple more turns of building I can build a Medium ship instead and a Medium ship is 10X more effective than a tiny.
They are worse than useless, unless you are scoremongering.
OK, yea I can create my own Mod and sort of fix this, but...
OK, I agree with this. Good Idea. I always wished that (Sid's) Civ 2 would allow this as well.
Because it is better to get all of tech X now and then wait for tech Y later instead of waiting for tech X and Y all that time.
Yea, go ahead and add the feature if it's requested enough, but I know I'll never use it.
sorta like MoO 2?
i would like to see the return of jumpgates. i think that something that would be cool to go with that is the fact that you can instantly go from one jumpgate to another that you/an ally controls. use constructors to build these jumpgates, but they have to be close to a system (reasoning could be that they use the energies of the sun of that system to power the jumpgate). additionally, i would like to see intellegent ship movement. if a ship needs to go from point "a" to point "b" it can either go via hyperdrive (or whatever level of engines you have) to the point and take all the time required, or take a slight deter to a friendly jumpgate and jump to a close point to the destination. i like the idea of turrets, since i do not understand how a weapon system on the right side of a ship can fire at a target on the left side. additionally, weapons facing reverse would be needed to fire at targets behind the ship. basically firing arcs. i feel that the galactic guildbook should reduce the installation cost of survey sensor package to 0 not the cost.
It would get a LOT of use in fast research games and on end-string techs. If I can get Impulse engines with 40% of my research points, I'd like to have the option of spending the other 60% on something I need, not getting halfway into the mostly-useless impulse 2.
Likewise if I'm going to finish Nightmare Torpedo with half my research points left, I'd like to spend them on something instead of just wasting them like I have to now.
I never waste them. When I see I am within one turn of finishing research on something and it is the end of the line or I don't want to research the next tech I just slide my research slider down to the lowest point where it still says one turn is left and put all the extra into Military, Social or both.
But I can see your point...
In games for score, you'd still be wasting points. I have my production set up so that ships take a specific number of turns to make, so adjusting the sliders would throw that off. A tiny hull and a constructor module cost exactly 95 mp, so I would aim for planets to put out exactly 95, 48, or 32 mp, depending on whether I want to get a constructor every turn, every other turn, or every third turn. A tiny hull MSBA-fodder ship costs exactly 47 mp, so most planets are producing either 24 or 47 mp. Screwing with the sliders is not an option until I finish researching, then I can crank the military budget.
You think about this game waaaay too much.
I would just like a few options during tactical combat. I would like a system more similar to the one in 'Birth of the Federation'; Real time yet turn based. Allow me to assign targets for each ship or a group of ships. Let me assign general 'orders' to ships or group of ships like 'Target the best ship', 'Target the weakest ship', Target the biggest ship' or others i can't think of right now, but please NO FULL REAL TIME BATTLES. I HATE real time games. I don't think that fast.
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