Hi Stardock and forumites.

I’ve played a couple of alpha games now and wanted to share some thoughts and ask some questions. But first – a little background so you know where I’m coming from.

I’ve been a 4X fan for decades, back to the original Civ, MOO etc. I’ve played GalCiv 1 & 2 and I regards GalCiv2 as my favourite 4X game of all time, I’ve put hundreds of hours in to it. I’m also very familiar with alpha games – I’ve backed numerous games over the last couple of years and have taken part in lots of alpha early access programmes, so I’m aware that very little is concrete at this stage and lots of stuff is placeholder.

Obviously, that makes giving feedback a little tricky, because almost everything you give feedback on was going to be changed anyway. That said, I still wanted to offer one or two thoughts at this early stage, particularly around the area of immersion, which is really going to be the topic of this post.

I said above that GalCiv2 is my favourite 4X of all time. One of the primary reasons for this is the level of immersion in the universe. When I play these games, I’m constantly telling the story of my empire and its society in my head, almost roleplaying , thinking about politics, treaties, planetary issues even when I’m not sitting in front of the computer. I (almost) don’t even play the game to win, I play it to create a story. I certainly don’t mind when I lose. GalCiv2 facilitated that fantastically through a number of touches – the news network, the colonial citizen opinion polls, the random galactic and colonisation events, the morality alignment, the internal politics. These are all touches which catapult the series above its competitors.

Too many other games in the genre are too obviously “games” – too concerned with the end objective of winning and not with the flavour of the galaxy or the journey along the other. Even Civ5 is guilty of this. I read an interview some years back with the devs of Civ5 where they said they redesigned the AI leaders so that they would be “aware” that they were playing a game, and that their objective was to make sure that the player did not win. Sure, this may have lead to a tougher AI (although ironically the 1 unit per tile meant that it couldn’t conduct effective warfar for sh*t) but it damaged the immersion in the game world. The civilisations were no longer building societies, they were working just to prevent you from winning. They would make decisions which might make some sense in the “game”, but would make no sense in the game world, and thus would break the illusion and reveal the man behind the curtain. From an immersion perspective, CivIV remains my favourite.

The only other game which in my opinion has matched GalCiv in immersion is Distant Worlds. Unfortunately many other aspects of that game are completely broken and its got an atrocious UI.

Other games have come along and have been good. Endless Space was enjoyable. Slick UI, lovely graphics, but the rock-paper-scissors ship design was crap, and the universe and factions were quite bland and lifeless. Stardrive has some nice touches, but again its far too “gamey”, focused on the win, not helped by the fact that its real time and you’re always feeling rushed, even though you can pause. Its also, in my opinion again, too focused on ship design and managing combat. There has been a trend in recent years in the space-4X genre to make ship design and customisation more in-depth, and to make the battles more tactical and involved, almost like a Total War situation. That’s fine, but personally, I don’t like those aspects of the genre. I’m roleplaying an emperor / president / dictator – I’m largely unconcerned with the engineers’ job of starship design. Even in GalCiv2, I tinkered a little but I largely just went with the default ship designs. Tactical battles also have very little appeal to me – heck in Total War I even auto-resolve most of the fights unless it’s a really really important one – I much prefer the empire building aspect.

Anyway, I’ve gone a little off-topic, but I just wanted to illustrate the reasons why I love GalCiv2, and the hopes I have for GalCiv3. Yes, I know its alpha and that’s probably why a lot of the immersion stuff isn’t there yet. I already love the direction the morality gameplay has gone in. It was a nice touch in GalCiv2, but didn’t really have that much of an impact throughout the normal run of the game. The new ideology system with the various bonus and building unlocks looks like its going to be a great way to create the feel or flavour of our societies. Some other things I definitely hope to see as the game develops –

Internal Politics. I’ve seen some really in-depth suggestions on the forum for this, and while I do think some of them may be a little too much, I really hope this is one area of the game SD develop some more, similar to the ideology aspect. I loved the party and election elements in GalCiv2, and I really hope this can be expanded, maybe with intrigues and random events which develop into little stories, maybe a paired back version of the Crusader Kings II court system where you may have personalities looking for ministerial postings etc. More consequences for your party losing an election and some interesting, maybe underhanded ways of regaining power. Obviously as I said, I don’t think it can be too in depth, because you can’t lose sight of what the game is actually about and it is not a political simulator. Still, the hint or suggestion of “House of Cards” style political power plays going on in the background would really enhance the immersion of the game.

GNN stories and colonial opinions. A GNN news ticker which combined random “human interest” stories from your colonies along with big news stories of recent actions in the game world (invasions, trade deals etc). Also, the little voxpop pieces of colonist opinion on their home – perhaps this could be expanded with some occasional random event that triggers when you engage with the local population to seek their opinion on their situations. Maybe something could sometimes pop up similar to the colonisation events where you have to make a judgement call – except these events would be for an established colony and could further impact the development of the planet or the morale of the population. For example maybe someone has been accused of a serious crime, or the population feel their governor is corrupt, or there’s a dispute between different groups within the colony that you need to resolve.

Something else I’d like to bring up is the area of Founders naming stars, and the impact this may have on immersion. The problem with granting thousands of people direct input to contribute names etc to a game world, is that the majority of people on the internet have shocking taste. Sorry but its true. I know SD have guidelines in place for the star names – no profanity, no copyrighted names etc, but I’d really hoped their filtering would go beyond that, to try and ensure that star names at least seemed plausible and sounded like their fit. Especially in a single player game where someone else’s crap taste is going to intrude on my game and break my sense of immersion in the universe I’m exploring. I was dismayed when I saw the list of approved star names. My sincere apologies if any forumites reading this are responsible for any of the names below, but seriously?

Red Skittles 13

IslandDog

ParadiseHideout

NotableSnake

Icecold

Rockcrusher

Littlebear

Misterfoo

Danielwang

Midgitopia

Legendarymarvin

ShadowofAvalar

DodgingRain

Billybigstar

PurpleCow

Ghostprogrammer

Pragmaticunicorn

WalkerOfChaos

So, yeah, actual approved star names. I’m hoping SD will do another sweep through their list and reject the blatantly silly stuff. Or at the very least insert a toggle switch in the options menu to allow us to disable user-generated names in our games. I would rather remove the chance of seeing my own named star in game, than suffer the intrusion of these immersion-breaking star names.

So that’s me done on my thoughts and hopes for immersion in the game. Before I finish – just two quick questions on some technical stuff on the Alpha itself – 

1)   what is the frequently heard double “beep-beep” noise? What does it signify? It seems to chime multiple times a turn and I’m not sure what its related to. It is also the single most annoying notification noise I have ever heard. Nails-on-chalkboard stuff. Can we have the option to toggle it off?

2)   Is it just me or is there something funny going on at the end of turns where you need to hit “end turn” more than once in order for the turn to actually end? Im not talking about outstanding tasks like idle ships or no research selected – all of that’s been done, all your ships have taken their movement, but you still will often need to hit End Turn twice to get it to do anything.