Hey there.
As a huge fan of the larger galaxy sizes in GCII (especially immense), I have noted one huge flaw that prevents me from getting full enjoyment out of the game; the time-consuming empire management in larger galaxies, which makes everything a huge struggle, even relatively basic things that should take no time at all.
I'll give an example; in my custom race's games; I place a Biosphere Modulator, a factory, followed by a farm and a morale building on every planet, as this confers a massive benefit for relatively little cost, and makes other production simpler and faster. However, on an immense map after I conquer a huge, 200-planet empire, I have to painstakingly do this arrangement for each and every planet, which can take hours if you include other buildings as well. It's not fun. But what if I could tell my computer to automatically place those four buildings on every planet I own? It would save me a lot of time.
What to take from this is that I shouldn't be forced to manually do such a repetitive task, as it diverts my attention from more important things and more importantly, is a huge drag to do. With even larger map sizes, planet counts and opponent counts basically confirmed in GCIII, this has made something dawn on me; I have to manually oversee all development on those planets! Hell 'naw!
Add to this the prospect of building and directing starbases, asteroid mines and other such infrastructure for such a large area, and the whole game devolves very quickly into a painful grind.
I would like if Stardock took the time to include helpful automation tools (perhaps similar to the current governors?) that would enable us to skip over the more tedious micromanagement and get back to actually playing the game's more meaningful offerings. Of course, there are people who enjoy this for whatever reason, so it should be optional.
What do you think?
Wait until the Alpha is released. They have already been coding for months, and their original concepts are already in tablets of stone for the initial Alpha release. Right now they are dotting the i's crossing the t's for Alpha release. Until we see that, it just becomes circular speculation.
Currently being in Alpha, huge amounts of the game could be still be changed, only when the beat launches will we have a relatively complete set of launch features. It's not set in stone yet :3
Some things are set in stone, some are pressed in clay. Others might be drawn in sand. Certainly the core features are sufficiently complete that changing them is out of the question (going back to squares, for example), but other things are probably still a bit more loosely defined. Especially something that's mostly UI like this is. It may be that automation of tedious tasks will be left until a lot later, after a couple beta cycles to make sure the manual version works as intended.
I wouldn't mind being able to automate what I don't want to deal with. Isn't there a way to mod the game, and change the user interface. If they don't do this I think this mod wouldn't be a bad idea. I like to be able to control as much of the automation as possible. What I'm talking about is that I like to set the variables on the automation. I might want to only manually run certain aspects of the game, and let the game do the rest. What I want to control may change, so I would like to be able to change my options later.
I like the idea of being able to automate this to an extent. colonize use governor X then let me know so i can choose the final buildings
some things that come to mind
1 ) multiple programmable "governors" this way i could quickly choose the basic specialization of the planet based on location / planet quality
2) the ability of the governor to use bonus tiles effectively and possibly be able to ignore bonus tiles if i so choose (300% bonus food may not be your best choice)
Planet Governors would be useful, however the AI would have to be pretty good to convince a player they do a good job, and it also requires huge amount of programming.
In my current GC2 game I am using the planetary governor feature and find I can do just about all of these, but maybe not as easily as you describe. When I colonize a planet and assign a governor to it the social development queue gets set up with the buildings I have programed for that governor. I have chosen not to include any of the "farming" buildings for just the reason you stated, but handle those manually as needed. It also seems to do a good job of taking advantage of the bonus tiles for the projects I have programmed into the governor. It also allows you to choose if you want buildings to be upgraded when the research of a tech for an upgrade is completed.
I am also seeing some minor glitches in how it works.
Being able to automate some of theses repetitive tasks would be nice, but another question to ask is why are these tasks repetitive in the first place. If every time you placed a building on a planet, you where making a deep an meaningful choice, I don't think you would be asking to automate it.
If planet management is even remotely similar to the way it was in Galactic Civilizations 2, there will be different improvements that enhance a planet's abilities and incomes/outputs. Undoubtedly some of them will be able to be built multiple times, once again leading to the problem of ponderous micromanagement with many planets.
Even if they completely overhaul the planet mechanics in GCIII, I can't see the end-game empires with hundreds of worlds being playable and manageable without some sort of automation helping us out.
I don't think the number is really the problem. If you have to make 99 choices in a turn that is fine. (As long as each choice is deep / meaningful.) It might take awhile to finish your turn, but that's fine. Your not timed after all. (Maybe it would be a problem in multiplayer?) It's my reasoning that management becomes annoying when your no longer making meaningful choices. Like the example in the OP where you build the same four buildings in the same order on each planet. (I wonder what you do in class 4 planets?) If you always do the same thing on each planet, you have stopped making choices.
I disagree, because ultimately 99 planetary building choices that repeats itself every turn is displacing real gameplay, and distracts from the broader picture of whatever is happening
I think there are quite a few tools that could probably be added to speed things up. For example, it would be nice to be able to specify that you want to build 5 ships of type X at a planet, or build 2 type x ships and then4 type y ships. Another thing might be allowing players to select multiple tiles and specify a single build order for all of them. Or having recent events organised into categories, for those rounds after you blow up a lot of ships. There are probably quite a few other simple tools that would help to speed up the game without having to delegate to AI.
Oh yes a ship queue would be a nice addition. It's so common in strategy games that I forgot that GC2 didn't have one, or at least one one that was easily assessable. What if in addition to setting the build order of you ships you also could set the first order of each ship. Like maybe in the list you have three scouts all set to go into auto explore when they are buildlt, then after them 4 battleships ordered to move ti a rally point and group.
With planet tiles maybe you could have the ability to click and drag more then one tile at a time and select one building to plop down on all of them. Like you could drag a box around a 4 tile section and then set a factory to be built on each tile with a single click. Also maybe a stamp tool where you take one cluster of buildings and just copy paste them on different tiles. Oh and maybe to put both ideas together we could have a screen that shows the tiles of every planet you own all on ton scrolling screen. That way you can get a good look at every planet, see where you might need buildings ,and place them down quickly.
Then there are a few things you can do with the queues themselves. Like saving and naming them. So you have your war production full of battleships and then your peace production filled with constructors. Maybe have each saved queue on a little hotbar that you can just click to change between them. A button where you can select an item and jump it right to the front of the line.
Honestly, the biggest Quality of Life improvement for building planets would be a favorites list for buildings. Most people will only use the same 5-6 buildings on each planet, with another 6-8 used situationally. Being able to have only those buildings on the list would be a big improvement.
Building a lot of buildings isn't a huge problem, at least for me. Picking the few tiles that have bonuses or something is pretty quick, then it's just a matter of clicking repeatedly on the stock market until the planet fills up. Reducing scrolling by removing the buildings I never use is all I ask.
Wait... so you disagree with me... but you agree with me?
No. Their post was right under mine. They where disagreeing with me and agreeing with you. I no doubt disagree with their disagreeing. (It's also possible we both agree, but are talking in slight different terms so we don't notice that we agree.)
I got a descent idea U xouls make a planetary que, or a planetary and ship building que for when u colonise a planet. For a planetary and ship building que this would mean after u build starport then u start building ships. There could be multiple ques. One could be set for all the pq that wouldn't include certain pq's. U could also turn off the building que for the planets u pick, or a certain range of planets. U could pick a que for a certain kind or all the extreme planets.
I also like the idea for a resource que where certain planets could be set to build constructors when a resource is found in range. U could even set this to rush but the ship. Though if u set it to rush buy the ship it would b your responcibility to keep enough money in the treasury. If u don't have enough money then the rush buy option would b set to build the constructor instead. This option could be smart enough to not drop your spending below -499 bc next turn on accident. This could be set to send one constructure to the resource and then go back to the previous resource. Or this could be set to stop sending constructures when there r no more upgrades to the starbase either way.
Here's my idea of a ship que it wouldn't necessary hold just one type of ship, but u could set up a pattern of ships to build one after the other.This wouldn't negate the ability to build one ship over and over.
The above things could be set so they don't show up in the Gnn news until they were completely done when the que would be empty.
Here is another idea that may or may not work. With some idea on how to work windows or system mechanic I know this would be possible U want a search option for redundentcies when the Gnn show up. When u press this. A menu would pop up with a list of the kind of redundant builds, One example would be colonies. From here u could have a list of options to do. Ships would be easier. Options r like do nonething, build a specific item, or in case of a planet upgrade a certain item. I would like to be able to use this to not upgrade a certain item, or terraform. In case of a planet U could run out of tiles. In this case the game would do nonething, or leace it on the list for u to see when u r done with this function. When u were done with the redundancies then they would b removed off the list. This shuld have to be something u click on when the builds r done. In case U don't want to do this.
This is an idea I got from some of the replies. Hey Willy how about this idea. Would this help. Hey Arcus what do u think about these ideas. would these help.
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