I recently picked up TA, and decided to replay all of the campaigns from the beginning. I don't know if you're still doing patches for this game, but here are some issues I've found:
1) The DL scenarios have the asteroid mining and hostile planet colonization techs from TA available for research, but those techs have no function in a DL scenario, and could cause new players to waste effort researching them.
2) Computer players appear to be able to observe events that should not be within their field of view. For example, if I build a starbase near my homeworld, the Dread Lords immediately dispatch ships to destroy it, even though they have no ship anywhere nearby that could have seen it.
3) When one of my ships is destroyed, the fog of war usually (though not always) does not return to the area it was seeing when it died. I've been able to exploit this bug by building a small ship with a huge sensor radius, flying it into a strategic area, and letting it be destroyed.
Edit: This also seems to also happen when I destroy an enemy ship. Essentially, having a ship battle of any sort seems to permanently remove the fog from the area of battle. I am using full battles, if it makes a difference.
4) After trading some race-exclusive tech to a computer player, it later tried to trade that same tech back to me. I was playing a customized race based off the Terrans.
Edit: Further testing shows this happening even without race-exclusive techs. Perhaps the AI doesn't know that I already have the tech they're offering, and thus tries to trade it to me?
5) The Military/Social/Research allocation sliders do not move smoothly. With one slider locked, moving either unlocked slider should cause the other to move in an equal and opposite manner. Also, IMHO, locking a slider when one is already locked should unlock the prior one, since there's no point in ever having two sliders locked (but that's a minor nit).
57) Ships entering a movement adjusting area (starbase effect or Yor super ability) should have their movement adjusted immediately upon entering (but should not be affected by the same effect more than once per turn).
>Tried complaining about the sliders ages ago, nothing was ever done. It would be easy enough to just dump them and go with up-down controls with the percentages in boxes.
I suggest instead 3 radio buttons and 1 numeric up/down control. Ei:
O Military [lock]
O Social [Numeric Up Down] [lock]
O Research [lock]
This way, you select which one you want to increment. You could still have the lock option to so that increments are taken from the unlocked check box. I'd like a similar control on a per-planet basis.
There are some planets that are just incapable of completing a build or a social project unless those settings are set just right even with a population in billions. There should be an option for "Round-Robin" focus in such a case, for example first you focus on the ship X turns, then on the next social project X turn , then on research X turns. This would be more efficient then being dispersed and never completing anything. Clicking on the shields on the planet just doesn't give you a precise enough control over the planet's focus.
To be honest I would rather be able to directly control the funds allocated to Military, Social and Research, with a total funding limit determined by income, and individual funding limits determined by just how many factories and labs you have available.
What this means is that you won't have to build an insane number of labs and then run them at 30% efficiency to keep up with research, if the other 70% is going towards ships and buildings.
When you are funding Military or Social less than the maximum, then Focus will ensure that a planet gets maximum funding in that area, but obviously this decreases the funding available for planets that don't have Focus in that area.
When you are funding Research less than the maximum, funding will be distributed automatically to your most effective (cheapest) labs first. Obviously, this means you could have some labs on standby still costing maintenance, but it's useful to have the capacity there when funding is more readily available.
Having a total funding limit makes it more difficult for a human or AI player to run their economy into the ground. That's effectively what the sliders do, limit your total spending. All I'm suggesting is that you should be able to limit total spending and still have the ability to prioritise projects without having to drag sliders around for ten minutes trying to find the happy place between progress and 'on hold'.
58) AI issue: I'm currently playing TA campaign mission 2, where you fight the Yor, on Tough difficulty. My starbases are tough enough that the enemy frigates can only do a point or two of damage if they attack alone. But the Yor just keep suicidally attacking that way, rarely grouping its fighters into fleets. If they grouped into fleets, they'd have a chance of doing some real damage.
The AI needs to know enough not to attack targets when it will at best do superficial damage. It should figure out that it needs to use fleets, and/or better research weapon tech.
I'd agree that this is the single most annoying aspect of GC2: You can't run a factory planet and a research planet at full output at the same time, even if you have the economy to fund them both. I'd love to see it fixed, but I'm guessing that the associated balance and AI changes would make it a major effort, not a small patch.
Yes I fully agree with all the above.
These are the main issues of GalCiv2 that really do almost break the game and make it pointless to play. Well, for those of us that think strategy is important in game. lol.
I think I'll take a break from GalCiv2 until a patch corrects this. I'm actually surprised it's been o long since they've not fixed this.
They say, NO GalCiv3, because they want to concintrate more on GalCiv2.... but I don't really see themdoing anything in regards to GalCiv2.
I really, really don't see why the funding sliders are such a big deal. I really don't.
It probably is a playstyle issue. I'm not interested in maximizing every aspect of my empire. I'm much more concerned about immersing myself in the game and playing a challenging opponent.
As the thread has scrupulously noted, there's many issues with the AI's behavior that need to be fixed. I would be quite unhappy if Stardock ignored these actual flaws - flaws from any perspective, I should say - in favor of something I wouldn't care one way or another about. To restate that: unambigious flaws that can be agreed upon by everybody are a much bigger deal then something that bothers one subset of players.
I'm not trying to attack the people who have an issue with the sliders, because I have no opinion on the subject. However, I think more people should be bringing up the actual bugs that need fixing rather then what, in the end, is a streamlining issue.
To clarify, there's two separate issues relating to the sliders. The first is purely a UI issue (#5 in the original post of this thread) that it's hard to use them to set your allocations the way you want. That's a straightforward bug, albeit not a serious one.
The second issue is not really with the sliders themselves, but with the way the game's production system works, as I detailed in my most recent post. I didn't give it a number because it's by design and not a bug, but the way that the game forces a false choice between factory and lab output is unrealistic, and frustration at being forced into that false choice makes it harder for me to immerse myself in the game.
Sometimes when I invade the Korath, I get the message that I have stolen the Germ Warfare tech and that I should now be able to research the Spore Weapons. That tech never appears on my tech tree. I've never been able to build Spore Weapons despite having "stolen" the base technology for it.
Sometimes, when I click on an unarmed vessel (like a miner or a troop transport) then I click on its destination, it will choose the most dangerous path to travel when there are two options. For example if there is a planet in the way, it will go to the left of the planet where an enemy ship will destroy it rather than go right where there are no enemy ships. For unarmed vessels, I'd rather have a safer route even if it is a little longer.
59) Not a bug, but a potential minor enhancement: Allow starbases to join fleets. It doesn't really make sense that a starbase and a fleet can't fight together.
60) When a saved game is first loaded, spheres of influence are not correctly calculated; they are much smaller than they should be, and stay that way until (I think) something triggers them to update.
61) Not a bug, but it seems very odd to me that mutual destruction is not permitted. If two ships with huge guns and low hit points both fire on each other, why shouldn't they both die?
62) Occasionally (no solid reproduction sequence), some ships seem to drop out of the active ship list, such that the Turn button goes green even though these ships haven't been given any orders.
63) Occasionally, the planetary improvement list becomes inert, and ceases to react to items on it being clicked. This state persists until the game is exited and reloaded. Circumstantial evidence indicates that this might be caused by trying to put things in a planet's build queue, or fast buy buildings, while the AI is trying to take its turns. In any case, once it happens, the game needs to be restarted.
64) The Mind Control Center does not work as it should. It appears to make flipping a planet nigh-impossible, instead of nigh-certain.
Edit:
qrtxian correctly indicates that this is an old bug report, not valid for TA.
What? This has been fixed in Twilight, though it is still a problem in the other games.
65) Sometimes when the ai makes an announcement that it's going to war, it will immediately repeat the announcement at the start of next turn (maybe two go-to-war rules satisfied their preconditions?).
66) Sometimes it seems as if I'm being attacked by invisible AI ships. This might be caused by enemy ships somehow occupying the same tiles as starbases I control. I say this because my starbases look like they're firing on themselves.
67) There's an annoying bug with the priority of the different combinations of listener and speaker in the .xml conversations file. The problem is that any dialogue option with a generic listener and speaker takes priority over dialogue options for a specific speaker and generic listener, or vice versa. As a consequence, some of the dialogue written into the conversations file is never seen during the game.
btw, earlier somebody asked why you can have ties in battle (mutual destruction). You can though, I've seen it happen a lot.
Just saw one today while running a playtest. Drengin attacked Thalan and both ships blew up. Poof.
Has this ever happened to a player battle? The wiki says "if in last round of combat surviving ship(s) destroy each other, the strongest ship still survives (the strongest seems to be the ship with highest attack)."
I've seen both ships be destroyed in the battle viewer, but on returning to the main screen the stronger ship is still there with 1 hp.
I for one don't see the logic of specializing planets. A planet full of factories makes no sense because the people working need to eat. You need food, you need research and you need factories. Starving people can't build things very fast. If your food production is less that what your population consumes, your population levels should go down. If you only build ships you won't have any fuel to put into them. Populations would go on strikes without any entertainment.
Someone who has 4 planets with a factory on each one should be just as productive as someone who has all 4 factories on one planet.
If you were to compare it to cities, having a GM and Ford factory in New York won't make the BMW factory in NY go any faster. These factories are independant.
If you compare this to the early Trade Wars games, you could focus production on Organics, Fuel or Equipment. The first keeps your population alive, the seconds allows your ships to go where they need to go and the third is your war machine.
68) Minor enhancement request: Have the tech tree display of a technology display the icons for the races that are known to possess it. For bonus points, provide an easy way to initiate trading from this screen.
Motivation: When I'm tech trading, it's important for me to know who else has the tech. Also, it's far more informative to see the other race's techs wiithin the tree than it is to see them in the espionage report as a text list.
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