We're back on a weekly schedule! *crosses fingers*
As usual, lead designer Paul Boyer will be appearing on our official Galactic Civilizations III live stream at http://www.twitch.tv/stardock. We'll be streaming our internal build again this week, so you can enjoy a sneak peak at the big patch that is very close to showing up in our Elite Founders' Steam clients.
Come on by the livestream tomorrow at noon Pacific (3pm Eastern, 9pm CET) to ask Paul your questions and check out some new features -- and maybe see what a GalCiv ship looks like in real life.
Please do feel free to drop any questions you may have in this thread as well, and we'll try to get to them on the stream.
Previous streams can always be found on our YouTube channel, so swing over there to get caught up.
Looking forward to more sneak peaks, this next patch is looking amazing so far, just wish "Christmas" would come already!!!
As for questions, there's been some great discussion about borders in the game, could we have some comment about this concept and how (if at all) this is being changed from GalCivII and what it might look like? I personally like the diplomatic implications and ability to 'threaten' when people enter my turf when I don't want them to.
!!!!
I'm on the verge of using my ass as a musical instrument, I'm so excited! Better be good! And show planets this time!
I'm excited to see if Adam presents his new ship for us on this build. The last was a radar gem.
I want to see what we can break
Is there a 'projected patch notes' area I can find or look at? The first comment implies the coming patch or its notes are available.
i had a question about shipyards
how do shipyards work in regards to rush building?
in gc 2 an economy empire could rush build a ship on every planet (that had a star-port) every turn for as long as it had sufficient funds.
in 3 it looks like shipyards will be able to make multiple ships per turn as long as the production is there but what if my empire is focused on wealth?
do i define an amount of wealth to turn into production? can i blow my entire savings and buy an armada of ships in one turn? or will i just have to buck up and say these planets are production focused so i can get ships?
1)Are the Night lights layered in the planet.dds???and how detail of a tutorial are we going to get to help with modding the game.
2)any plains on moons?
3)also how will the rings around planets be done?
Starting in just a few!
Can't seem to comment in the stream.
No zoom on the minimap is a game-breaker. Zooming the main map is nice, but zooming the minimap is absolutely essential.
Not sure where you want the feedback about the questions mentioned in the stream you I'll just put it here:
I don't think it's a very good idea to reveal all planets until it's really like in the last fifth of the game (mich like Civilizations Satellite). It would just take out too much of the exploration aspect of the game.
However I think revealing the stars could even be more expansive. From the stream it looks like all you can tell is that there is a star.But what do you think about seeing the type of the star? And it would be even cooler to have planets around it depending on the type of the star.For example: "Neutron star: Neutron stars are dead stars which were not massive enough to form a black hole when they died. The chance to find a habitable planet here is non-existant" Or "Blue Supergiant: Blue supergiants are very short-lived, very hot stars. Therefore it's very unlikely Terra-like Planets formed in it's orbit".
This would not just the game an element of "do I want to check out the white dwarf or rather the red giant which is farther away but it has a bigger chance to have habitable planets" but give also some astronomical stuff for players to geek out /learn about. Of course that would also mean you would need to drop your pink stars and you would need to do some research, but I think it would add a lot to the game.
Another thing which came to my mind in the stream: If you can see the ship building in the ship yard, you should be extra careful about multiplayer.
You don't want to force players to redesign all their ships to "hide" which ships they are building. It should either not display it at all - or also have additional ways to display it, so that the shape isn't the only source of information.
Aesthetically, I would prefer not to have all the stars showing on the main screen, however, game play wise I want this to help me better compete against the AI who "mysteriously" seems to always know where all the stars and good planets are.
I like this suggestion, Star Trek: BOTF did this quite well and added another layer of decision-making when exploring with limited resources and again it allows me to at least feel I've got a fighting chance against the AI to send my explorers to the best system given my circumstances.
As for the Starport (Spaceport?) name change I like the idea to change the name to Shipyard, makes more sense - the button on the top of the main screen should be 'Ship Design/er' IMHO.
By the way thanks for touching on the borders question, I know its a long way off but was good to hear some thinking at this stage - I do hope that there will be the diplomatic mechanism for the player to express concerns when the AI is intruding or expanding and not just the AI doing this and that the AI will take these seriously in its decision trees.
Keep up the amazing work guys, looking fantastic and and it keeps getting better!
1. I don't like that you're thinking about having a tech that shows you what class distant planets are. I think you should have a tech that shows you where planets are. Potentially even about what class planets are such as planet class up to 8 or potential 8-12. Such as right now we as a planet can tell planets are around stars and estimate it may be earthlike ect. But don't know for sure.
2. Love that there are more tiles on the planet screen.
3. Planetary Invasion should be age of war and should take a little bit to get to, this will keep from rushing a weaker empire right away, Let space be explored and colonized prior to stealing colonies.
4. In research are you able to click a couple techs ahead and have it auto research to that tech?
5. Diplomacy should also be used for communication between players in multiplayer? I hope they have better communication in multiplayer in Alpha-3 as the steam communication form sucks.
I have to disagree on that. The threat of military conquest is part of the game. That's the point of diplomacy. Age of war is talking how many turns into the game? If you don't have any sort of defenses at that point and didn't see the invasion fleet coming, shame on you.
Anyone can invade any time but if too soon then the chance of success is small and as time and military knowlege goes up so does chance the invasion will work.
I agree with this. Matter of fact I'd like to push this a little more in specifying that it shouldn't be easy to detect planet classes. Leaving some of realism aside, I think it makes exploration more intense and rewarding not knowing where you specifically are venturing off to. An example of what I think would be enjoyable:
Planets that are 100 tiles away from your nearest sensor or more (sensor = anything you own; planet, starbase, ship, etc.) would give a very vague reading of Planet Class 5-15. This means the planet could be 6, 11, 14, etc. The thing here is you don't know what it is specifically, and there's a vast difference between a class 5 planet and a class 15 planet.
Planets that are 50 tiles away from nearest sensor or more give a less vague reading of something like Planet Class 8-14. You have a more specific reading so you can somewhat gauge what the planet will yield.
Planets that are 25 tiles away from your nearest sensor or more give a reading randomization of 3 (Planet Class 12-15), and Planets that are 10 tiles or less give you the correct reading.
I think something like this would still give the enjoyment and mystery of exploring space, while eliminating the RNG and bad luck that could occur when blind exploring (like in GalCiv 2).
EDIT: Also, maybe this could scale with game size to some extent.
This is exactly what I was thinking, perfect explanation. Gives a reason to explore
I like a lot of the ideas here about making stars and planets visible in more stages and/or tied to distance away. Hope they do something with it.
it makes sense that you can see all the stars right away, the ability to do that is very low tech, but seeing planets and type of planets, or type of stars, yes it makes sense to put that on the tech tree. So i vote for the stars on the big map right away, and a tech to see more details. As for the minimap, I would like to see the stars in the gray of what shows. Zoom, pan and all that, not really something I think adds much value in the minimap. These are my two cents. For what they are worth (literally $0.02 )
I don't have a problem either way. It is a matter of reality vs game play.
If we are sending 3 billion souls to colonize a planet, we will know what they are going to find when they arrive. Considering whqat we know now, imagine what we will know when we attain warp drive. We will know everything there is to know about our destination
Perhaps this realism does not appeal to some due to making the game "easier". Maybe this could be an optional feature, similar to rare planets and rare anomalies.
I see nothing wrong with having a tech that reveals planet types. You can always opt not to research the tech and give the AI another bonus to make the game harder
True, and I do agree with your realism points. But conflicts with realism here are minor at best; there are FAR less realistic entities in the game as is. Also (please correct me if I'm wrong here) I don't think the definition of a Planet Class has been specifically defined to gauge our realistic assumptions on. For instance I've always seen understanding the Planet Class as understanding the logistics capacity for the planet, as that is what it defines. I've always thought that as far as things like atmospheric composition, diversity of natural resources, etc. of a planet go, these have always been known. It's just knowing the logistical capacity for a planet, which would be based on having knowledge of all of those things plus more.
Options, options I agree with completely. However the optional feature should definitely be the "realistic" approach, simply because time and time again has shown that improving gameplay is always > realism when it comes to games.
Despite what I've said, I wouldn't mind the planet revealing technology in the game still. So long as it comes towards the middle/end-ish of the expansion period, thereby still providing the enhanced gameplay of exploring space first and for the majority of your civilizations exploration. Hell, you could even try to rush this technology so that you can enhance your exploration window of complete Planet Class certainty from something like 25% contribution to your total exploration to 40% (I can explain this last point further if it doesn't make sense, but basically enhance the window that you've had this technology helping you explore vs. having to explore by default).
Here is the YouTube link for this previous livestream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv_mTwTlLhI
In Gal-Civs so far Planet Class has only been about the number of useable Tiles [/hexes] available on any planet, plus in "twilight", other info on whether the world was habitable or which Terraforming Tech was needed to make it become habitable.
If GC3 takes Planet-attributes further, by having mineable ores/minerals/jewels or a valuable commodity on hexes not just Tile production bonuses, then all well and good, especially if this will give you some sort of bonus in the later game. Maybe say, Cesium(?) for a speed boost from a more powerful fusion drive, or whatever elements can be useful in other ways also. Or is this type of thing reserved for asteroids and/or dead planets ?
I missed the podcast and would like to catch-up with a text-based transcript. People's enunciation on podcasts is dismal as you can generally tell by the attempt to decipher it that the voice recognition software struggles to make sense of the slurred sounds of "normal" speech and regional accents.
Have just seen the podcast on utube and the last paragraph/sentence goes double, it was so boring. I don't think I'm gonna like the finished game.
Correct. I was pointing out that I don't believe Planet Class had been defined in a realistic context, not a gameplay one. I already understood the gameplay definition of Planet Class from GCII, as you have just defined. This is why I stated that I believed the "realistic" context of Planet Classes was understanding the logistics capacity of a planet, since in gameplay that's directly what it defines.
I missed the podcast and would like to catch-up with a text-based transcript. People's enunciation on podcasts is dismal as you can generally tell by the attempt to decipher it that the voice recognition software struggles to make sense of the slurred sounds of "normal" speech and regional accents. Have just seen the podcast on utube and the last paragraph/sentence goes double, it was so boring. I don't think I'm gonna like the finished game.
I know that they plan on having strategic resources in space as seen in the podcast (seems mostly if not completely within nebulae), but I do think it would also be interesting to have some resources found on planets as you suggested. I would say that these should be more related to empire bonuses and utility (like Warp Drive upgrade as you suggested) vs. military (which I think they made a good move by having them in neutral space to fight over). I do think that the space resources should be more prominent though, seeing as they can be easily fought over in space which gives a bit more balance and meaning to space warfare vs. having to conquer an entire planet completely.
I don't disagree with having an updated version of resources in space and these being more prominent in game-play, perhaps what I was struggling to identify as an idea was making at least some planets be more valuable because of a Tile/Hex bonus, and now I think about it further, I think these planetary bonus resources should be something Tradeable if the Space-resources are going to enhance things like a speed boost from using them in a more powerful fusion/warp/hyperwarp drive as was stated in the podcast [Ilirium I believe was mentioned in this context, mined by a starbase next to a Dust-cloud containing the glowing resource].
I agree with Siylenia's Reply#23 that the majority of resources should be fought over in Space, and if the planetary resource is tradeable then you just have to buy or sell it (depending on whether it's your planet and resource or not).
I think the buying/selling of planetary resources is a great idea; it could also be used as a diplomatic tool as well as serving its economic use via buying/selling (like selling a planetary resource to buy additional votes in the next United Planets vote).
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