Stardock's Brad Wardell talked with Strategy Informer about Galactic Civilizations III taking advantage of 64-bit, Steamworks, multiplayer, and more.
Strategy Informer: You’ve said that your game is going to only work on 64-bit computers – that’s quite a statement. "Brad Wardell: The vast majority of our users have 64-bit Operating Systems already, so it’s really not that big of a thing. For us… 64-bit is just about memory, we wanted to have a much richer galaxy. Even GalCiv II, back in 2006, we were bumping up against that 2 GB limit. We had people who were like ‘oh, I really wish we could have even larger galaxies with more detail’ and we’d say ‘yeah, we’d love to that too, but we can’t do any more. We’re out of memory’. In a strategy game… I mean I’m playing Battlefield 4 at the moment, which I love, when it’s not crashing… but in that game you have 64 people, but you only see a small part of the map. In a strategy game like GalCiv, we have to keep the whole Galaxy in memory. There’s no way around that."
Read the full interview here.
Lot's of great stuff. I'm really curious how the new diplomacy mechanic will work in praxis. Same for ideologies. I'm also really happy, that single-player will remain the main focus, and that the races won't be equal.
Wow, that was some ugly formatting on that page
At least it had a bunch of good content. I especially liked what was said about 64-bit. We really should move to that as a community, because 32-bit is only holding us back at this point. Kudos to Brad for saying to hell with it and just doing it already.
EDIT: And I'd also like to point out to Brad that some of us almost always play as evil
I'm sad that it's that far out I was hoping Summer/Fall 2014 release, they're talking about a Spring 2015 release, oh well, let's get it right I'm sure it will be great.
Later release Better Game I`ll go that way every time!!
.....Some races will be better than others in multi player......(get over it)
.....We are not going to cater to Multi-player at the sacrifice of the Single player game...<<<< This sells me!
Lots of good stuff in that article.
Its not going to be tactical (thank goodness)....
Its not going to be MOO! (again thank goodness...)
Add: some of us almost always play as "good"
I myself am a fan of evil. I loved the evil robot. Oh and getting money for all the trade of other empires, temple of evil rules.
I love neutral, because you never know what I might do. That is true evil.
It would be nice to get away from the Good vs. Evil model, and hopefully Good is dumb as well. It was a great annoyance to me. It had got so bad that doing evil until you researched "Xeno Ethics" was a good strategy. Becoming good there after only required a large sum of money to be payed (or to be paid for by lease). It was bad enough that I used to research "Xeno Ethics" early so I could avoid random events (thereby keeping a good conscious), so that I could be good without being crippled for doing so.
I usually hold off on researching or trading for Xeno Ethics so I can get the random events that potentially give me extra research bonus/influence/moral so on, then once I got it accidently I'd pay to be good
I do that too lately. I try to hold off researching it until after the colony race (often some time after that). I like getting worlds that give ship quality bonuses (they often become my primary factory worlds). The primary reason I research "Xeno Ethics" is to get the good techs (which usually give bonuses to defense and such).
I mean it’s a single-player game first. We’re not making any promises to have some kind of multiplayer balance or anything like that. If one race is better than the other in multiplayer, well, that’s too bad!
YES! Finally, balance is fun and all, but it isn't necessary for a fun game. Everquest and EQ2 and Dota2 are great examples about how not caring about class balance can still create a fun game w/o all the moaning about balance. Just create a race that fulfills a role, and feels powerful in the role. The right player will come along and do wonders for it. Thats what I'm talking about, thank you Brad Wardell
Go to the article linked to in the opening post and read both pages of the interview.
Yeah, he knows that...hence why he said in the article that no one wants to play as evil and I felt the need to mention...
Never mind - at least we've completed the circle now.
has any Steamworks multiplayer ever been good?
they sell it to all these devs by namedropping stuff like CS, L4D, TF2, etc. but all those games use servers
then when the games that actually use steamworks come out, the networking is complete garbage (eg. civ 5, aoe 2 HD)
I wonder how the '64-bit' requirement is going to go over with galCiv3?
The 6GB of RAM check on COD:Ghosts, as well as the DX11 requirement, is literally causing FPS gamers on the PC side of al lthings, to lose their marbles. There's a weird irony of calling the game "PC unfriendly" when it has requirements that only PC rigs could meet.... People have so much cognitive dissodance sometimes.
At least he admits the tech tree is kinda 'lame'
Honestly Satoru1 that's one of the things about a lot of the "hard core" gamers, is they are basically career whiners. What I mean by that is if a game is released that is below their specs they go "Oh they dumbed this crap down for the "casuals" and their crappy rigs!"But if a company makes a game that actually stresses THEIR rig then it's "OMG These f-tards don't know how to make a good game!" while the OTHER-other hardcore gamers with rigs that can meet those specs easily descend upon their "kin" like a pack of laughing hyenas going "Oh hey I don't want them dumbing this down to meet your "casual gamer" rig!"I for one am glad to see a company go "Screw the neckbeards we're going to get complaints either way, we might as well make a game as spectacular as possible and take advantage of modern machines!"
That's just the thing about Ghosts, though -- nobody would be complaining about the huge requirements if the game deserved those requirements. Instead, we have people with top end machines, people with dual GTX Titans, having awful microstutter, lag and hiccups on the menus, locked FoV to 65, capped FPS, no way to change mouse acceleration or sensitivity... and, visually, the game looks WORSE than Black Ops 2! Now, if Battlefield had those insane requirements, nobody would be surprised, but this is Call of Duty. The maps are tiny, the max player counts are anemic, and the graphics look dated.
Now, talk about a game like GalCiv III, where having a 64 bit requirement would give it new features. It's a sequel to a game we've been waiting for since ages ago. That's the kind of game that's worth 64 bit. CoD Ghosts is still the same damn game it's always been, and that's why people are so upset about its high requirements.
No offense but people with SLI rigs should be used to stuff NOT WORKING all teh time. The fact that many many games have some weird issue in SLI rigs, yet people keep insisting stuff should work with SLI. I've got no real sympathy for those who dive into that pit knowing full well what it entails and yet complain when it does.
Also no one complaing about teh DX11 or memroy requirements is actually looking at teh quality. They just want to run the game on their rinky dink systems and are finding literally anything aabout the game to bitch about so they can justify that.
Note that 64 bit doesnt' mean the game LOOKS better. And thats the fallacy in Ghosts.
Question. Can a civilization change its ideology? For instance, could the Drengin discard its ideology of excessive cruelty, slavery, consumption of intelligent species? Could they adopt a more benevolent ideology?Back in GalCiv 2 Twilight, a random event might change the Drengin from Evil to Good alignment, and I find it weird that their tech tree remained largely the same (they still had access to slave factories, pain appliers, death furnaces, etc). Basically, I'm wondering if their ideology changes, would their tech tree change to match the changes? Would other traits change as well?
That event was so rare that I was never able to definitively test it out, but I'm fairly sure that "event" was simply a very small random chance to occur when the AI civ researched Xeno Ethics themselves. There was a small chance to pick an alignment that doesn't match the civ's normal alignment, and if it happened the game announced it.
I kind of can't wait to look at their idealology looks like. There good vs evil option was a little unfair. I plqyed evil because it was the only logical option on the game. If it was more fair I would probably be neutral. I wouldn't want to sacrifice the game for multiplayer. I will want to play some of u on multiplayer. Just judging from some of the posts I think some of u want a piece of me anyways.
I was thinking U could add a Tech tree option for the races who change alignment that is geared to much for a specific alignment where it doesn't work. The game could have three tech trees these could even be customized tech trees even. One for good, neutral, evil to replace the species when they change their alignments when it doesn't work to keep the tree, or u could just change to the tree for default. This way it would make sense when they changed alignment. The tech trees would have to have level on the techs so the tree would transfer interchangeably. This tree could also be acessed by Xeno ethics; maybe even giving a player a choice to change tech trees. The reason I want to also give this to Xeno ethics not just the event is; because, this way the player can choose to aces this tree just in case he felt his races tech tree wasn't suited for this alignment change.
Sounds promising.I like that single player is not being compromised in both events and aliens stats to make way for bland multiplayer balance.I also like the idea of diplomacy having meaning.
I hope the combat is a lot better in both player involvement and the weapons tech has an actual meaning rather than the simple and dull system in GC2.Weapons should be like cool spells with different effects that mater in combat.
Xeno Ethics has nothing to do with it. For example, in my last game, the Drath had moved from Good to Neutral. Eventually, they turned Evil. However, they never researched Xeno Ethics. In fact, nobody had it at that point of the game.
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