Greetings!We are so excited at the number of people playing GalCiv III. Now, the question is, what NEXT. Stardock's perspective is that your purchase doesn't just get you the game "as is" but rather is the beginning of what will be a multi-year journey of updates to the game.So in this thread please list FIVE things (no more, no less) that you would like to see in an upcoming free update (and by upcoming, I mean, by end of Summer). Preface that list with the understanding that these should not be expansion pack type things (i.e. "full blown interactive invasion" or sophisticated espionage system). To get the ball rolling here is my list:#1 Steam Workshop support. That means, I want to be able to easily download other people's ships and custom civilizations.#2 Massive, community driven AI update based on the expertise of all the players (rather than just internal devs playing it).#3 Anti-Micromanagement UI improvements. That is, kill constructor spam, make managing a huge empire more interesting and fun.#4 Better, more satisfying fleet battles (both visually and in terms of player decision making)#5 Major diplomacy updates. Let me have full blown diplomatic discussions with the AI.That's my list. What's yours?
Steam version here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/598198173700392501/
YES!!!!
Trying to limit my list to things that I think might be achievable w/o ridiculous amounts of rebuilding
#1 fleet management: change ship roles "on the fly" (so I can change a ship from assault to escort to guardian depending on how I want it to behave in the current fleet)
#2 battle viewer: capital ships should turn and broadside. I know, in space, broadsiding doesn't really make sense, but it's so purty!
#3 diplomacy window: hide trade screen items based on knowledge. so no ships, starbases or planets that are not in your field of vision. no techs that are more than 1-step removed from your current level of research.
#4 planet screen: "brand" the planet screen with the colonization event and bonus information. That way each of the planets would have its own "personality" driven by the events of the game.
#5 starbases: allow mining on any starbase. (bonus, reduce the minimum distance between starbases).
>> Things to make Auto upgrade of ships tilted toware the what the player wants/needs
1 Would love to see ship Attack/Defense sliders like in GC2 that governed (set the priority) the blueprint for upgrading the ship models weapons/defenses
2 A ship blueprint slider to set preference for speed vs range. Similar to the GC2 A/D slider
==
3 Ship SENTRY/GUARD commands could use some love.
Sentry: Idle – wake on any ship entering the ship’s sensor range
Guard: Idle – Wake on Enemy ship entering the ship’s sensor range
** Long Term **
Patrol routes would be really cool (I know, lots of work)
Add Idle – Ship goes to sleep and only wakes on player command
Guard1: Idle – Wake on Enemy ship entering the ship’s sensor range
Guard2: Idle – Wake on Enemy ship entering the ship’s attack range. Mark enemy
As the woken ships destination.
4 Anti-Micromanagement UI improvements. That is, kill constructor spam, make managing a huge empire more interesting and fun.
5 Massive, community driven AI update based on the expertise of all the players (rather than just internal devs playing it).
Thanks for asking
#1 - Fix all outstanding UI issues. (I still can't see ship icons for custom designed ships on my machine [?])
#2 - UI improvements / more info (the per-planet Governing Triangle is 3 screens deep)
#3 - AI improvement (i'm already happy with it, but better is better)
#4 - Reduced-graphics options for us poor, sad people with low-spec machines.
#5 - Find better uses for currently "useless" things (military starbases, military improvements, surplus durantium)
1. Money to have a purpose
2. Better mechanics to balance wide vs tall empires
3. AI that can specialize worlds.
4. In fact, just AI that can think locally tbh
5. A massive upgrade to the diplo system. Get rid of the multi-turn lockout, which is just annoying. Let me threaten the AI. Make the whole system a bit more 3-dimensional.
Ooh thanks for asking, I really appreciate the Stardock philosophy of continued support for products. It makes a huge difference to the long-term enjoyment of games!
#1 - Not so much a feature request, but it can equally take programmer time: a little engagement with modders on the modding subforum. We've had quite a few threads where people have wanted to know about stuff, and there just doesn't seem to be any documentation explaining how the file structure works or anything like that. We also frequently find base game errors while modding, which could help the team squash bugs. The work being done in the Balance Mods subforum could also save the team some time in testing out ideas.
I think that mods (especially races and ship-styles) will be one of the strongest parts of the game's long-term appeal, but currently the process of modding is plagued by crashes which are often hard to track down.
The more experienced modders often step in to try to help, but it's a very trial-and-error process. I was lucky enough to find someone who would hunt through the Debug.err with me on the latest issue I was experiencing, but the bug appears to be something in the actual ship designer system.
#2 - AI which can specialize planets, with both governor settings and buildings. I'd like to feel I'm competing against the AI on semi-equal footing, not just running out the clock till I can out-produce it's handicapping bonuses with more efficient planet specialization. I strongly suspect this is the main reason why the difficulty curve slopes downward during the game.
#3 - AI which is limited by FoW so that it focuses on its present location and immediate surrounding oponents (and doesn't magically know where to send its colonizers, making exploration more relevant) - I know you're working on that, which is great
#4 - A way to switch out the template being used for a particular design through the in-game interface. If I like the look of one Large hull, I'd like to be able to tell the game to build its Battleship type designs on that hull from now on. I know people have been asking for custom Fighter designs for a while
#5 - Ability to choose custom colour schemes for your ships. I'd like to be able to change my engine-glow or cockpit light colour without changing my hull colours - but that's not possible with how colour selection is set up. Unfortunately this is currently *extremely* hard to mod, requiring the replacement of two base game GFX files (not xmls), which I personally am not 100% comfortable with.
And n
1. Map editor
2. Same as TurielD's request for either more forum feedback from devs or more documentation/instructions on modding
3. Mod folder support for Schema, Enums specifically
4. Espionage
5. Intuitive tech tree editor, either via program or Excel files
My wish list entries would be...
States and/or Regions in GalCiv3 as seen in my thread here:
https://forums.galciv3.com/459216/page/1/
Also the ability to customize the colors on any faction/race logo. Also described in a thread here:
https://forums.galciv3.com/455433/page/1/
1) Battleviewer - Bring back the other viewing angles it had originally or fix cinematic to follow the action more closely.
2) Be able to delete ship templates and obsolete designs.
3) Be able to colour ships on a R/G/B basis or expand the colour schemes we have atm.
4) get rid of the Large Empire Penalty or not have it start till you have 50 planets+.
5) Up the fleet Logistics above GC2 levels (58) Preferably to max out at 100.
I second this idea!
1. Better and more transparent fleet battle system. (Weapons fired per mount instead of per ship please)
2. More racial tech tree differentiation
3. Economy changed to something closer to GC2 that doesn't require such extreme specialisation of planets. (ie. Pop -(taxes)> Credits -(planetery improvements)> Research/Manufacturing instead of the Pop generating everything directly and the multiplicative nature of improvment bonus with pop + adjacency making specialisation clearly superior).
4. Screen that summarises all Empire wide stats and bonuses.
5. Actual government system instead of fudging it with techs.
6. Tech Tree, Ship Component and Planetary Improvement editors like TotA.
7. Cap diplomatic activity per time period between any two civs similar to Stardrive 2.
8. A way to deal with foreign starbases in your territory short of war.
9. Give track of population of different races separately. Have the racial composition of worlds have consequences depending on who is in charge. Planets with high levels of another races more susceptible to being culture flipped by that race. Certain combinations of races prone to causing civil unrest.
10. Option to disable tech brokering.
1. Stat modification calculation.
Re-evaluation of the stat modification formulas. Currently percental modifiers are cummulative which lead to very strange and game breaking effects. All object stats seem to be modified like this.
I would like SD to, where possible, use compound percental modifiers. (Glaring) Example of what i mean is the ship maintenance: If you have any maintenance cost reducers like the techapod hive and the living ships tech you get a maintenance of -5%. Instead of this modifier calculation to result in (1 - 0.05 - 1.00) = -0.05, i would like calculations to be (1 - 0.05)*(1 - 1.00) = 0
2. Proportional instead of constant population growth.
Instead of the .1 population growth a more 'realistic' proportional growth with curve off toward the food cap.
3. Info lookup during diplomatic interaction.
When i am trading a tech with the AI i want to be able to check my tech tree. For example to check if i already have one of the sibling specializations of the offered tech specialization or not. Or to check the location (and/or composition) of a requested star base.
And least a cancel button in the tech screens. So that i can look tech up without actually changing the tech i am researching.
4. xml consistency checking.
During game load the xml files are only checked for syntax. I would like to see that the xml engine also checks for consistency. Because at the moment, let say that i create a ship class in xml and i make a typo in the blueprintname, then the game starts fine, but crashes/hangs during map generation without an error.
The current system of complete file replacement is to coarse. I would like to support for a more granular modding facility. Something like the xml patch Operations Framework as defined in the RFC 5261, with which it would be possible to say something like 'change a single tech' without having to copy the entire tech file and change that single tech. This in turn would allow multiple mods to change multiple techs without that the last loaded mod would undo all the changes to the techs specified in an earlier loaded mod.
And i want some changes to the underlying xml structures but that can't be explained in just a few words, therefor that must wait for another day.
My requests are more simple (I hope)
1. a way to either cancel all project-type 'improvements' in the planetary build queues with a single click, or the act of completing or acquiring a terraforming tech would include cancelling the project-type 'improvements' so they come up as idle colonies again.
2. The option to zoom to the planet from the Govern/Colonies dialog.
3. A tab for galactic info that would display habitable planets without colonies, sortable by either planet class, or distance from currently selected object.
4. An option to turn off core ships. In playing insane maps, there is a very small window where they are useful, and getting spammed with them from ship graveyards generates a lot of useless ships.
5 Anything Anti-micromanaging would be very welcome. Sometimes it takes a couple hours to wade through 1 turn when you have 350+ colonies.
1. On the constructor spam thing, I'd like to be able to select what constructors are built by the automated constructor system, as well as specifying when you request the constructor what you want to build with it, that way it will arrive and build automatically without requiring your attention. I don't care too much how the interface is for that, but some way of queuing up starbase improvements or even having starbase governors, ala GalCiv1's colony governors, would be nice. It might be nice to be able to have several constructor types and pick the one that will get there the quickest when you combine build time + travel time. I often build small hulls with constructor modules and no engines for doing the nearby upgrades quickly. Would it be possible to queue up future tech's improvements on a starbase and auto-request constructors as those techs become available?
2. I'd love to have a way of putting a "skunkworks" project at a shipyard. Something that will soak up extra building time if no other ship is being built there, but is lower priority than anything else. It'd also be cool if you had a way of suspending that project before it is actually finished so it can be held in reserve in case a war breaks out. I can do this by hand now, but it involves a lot of micromanagement and attention. I might make some shipyard build some massive ship that takes 50 turns, then start dropping it to the bottom of the queue once it gets to 1 turn left. If I need a big ship suddenly, I just push it to the top of the queue and finish it. Actually, expand this out to saying I'd love to have at least 3 levels of priorities in my shipyard building queues. Things I've explicitly said I want built right away, then automatically built things, then finally low priority autobuild stuff. We already have this to some extent, but it'd be nice to have a bit more automation by selecting the priority levels of things and if you want them finished automatically, or if they should be mothballed until explicitly finished.
3. Better queue management buttons! On planet and shipyard queues, I'd love a button to move the selected item to the top or bottom of the queue.
4. With the habitat improvement/etc interface it would be lovely to have a way of distinguishing the tiles that only habitat improvement or above can do from the ones that the ultra-terraformer can do later. I currently often wait to use habitat improvement and the like until I've researched ultra-terraformer so that I don't waste potential tiles on the planet. I do ultra-terraformer on every tile that I can do it on, then I build all of the cheaper but more powerful tile recovery buildings, then sort them by turns to build manually. This takes a lot of time.
5. Similar to the automatic constructor building, maybe an automatic freighter requesting system would be nice. Select a foreign colony, say you want to start a trade route, and pick the source planet, and it enqueues a freighter to build and send.
Sorry to derail, very quickly. You don't have to wait for Ultra-terraformer. The tiles available to you for ultra-terraformer are the same tiles offered to you for soil enrichment and planetary improvement. (except of course, with those you can only pick one tile.) so if you save either of those techs, you can flip back and forth clicking on soil enrichment and then habitat improvement to see which tiles are new.
Yep, I had thought of that, but I usually use those right away because you get them at the phases where you need a tile or two extra right away, and otherwise I'd need to keep detailed notes (on paper, or spreadsheet, or something) on every planet for which tiles are soil/ultra capable.
It seems like a simple thing that would be best done as part of the interface.
My list is exactly as yours Brad. Looking forward to these changes. I am happy to see that devs look at the direction, which makes the game much more interesting for myself as well Thanks for posting and keep up with the good job
Thanks for asking!
At the moment, my main issues with the game boil down to UI frustrations and lack of proper documentation. Improvements to the AI, on the other hand, are going to determine the game's staying power in the long run.
Just focussing on #5 would suit me fine. I want to really be able to use the Xploit part of 4X. Making Diplomacy full-powered starts that process (you said not to go on about espionage, so I won't).
I hope your focus on Diplomacy does mean only your Friends show you all of what they got. That those races less than Friendly to you do treat you like some weird stuff that ended up on their shoe/horn/whatever....
Nerf the Upgrade Ship thing: A ship should only be able to Upgrade to something in it's own Class (Survey Ship to Survey Ship II, for example.) Certainly, no upgrading in size/role (no moving from Survey to Attack).
One other thing: SCALING. Various values like LEP or bonuses should be SCALED according to map size.
Many things said here and also a few things i would like for my playstyle:
1) I would love an option to automatically choose 'Quick Battle' anytime i move unto an enemy. That pop up window is really useless for me.
2) Two new fleet commands: "Hunt (weaker)" and "Hunt (any)". Both would make the fleet roam space and engage enemy fleets.
3) A way to take over starbases by force IF they are in your area of influence.
Thank you for a great game
1 filters. everything needs filters, ship designers ship list, planetary buildings list, etc. also the ability to sort the colonies list in the main screens right thingy by name
2 see sweatyboatman #2, also, a battle simulator
3 an option in planetary governance to not be affected by global governance settings resets. like i have a bunch of specialized planets (or some that are in the build up phase) and i reset all planets in global gov to e.g science, i don't wanna have to flip through every planet to find those three that i manually want to govern
4 atm i can ignore researching the invading techs, trade for planetary invasion only and start invading, which seems a bit too easy.
5 starbases, and their upgrades, should cost (much) more maintenance. because atm setting one up or not is not an interesting choice to be made. them being more expensive would also negate the constructor spam thing a bit and make money more relevant.ouh, should i really invest into mining barracks? for that one additional durantium? atm a choice only limited by my ability to build more constructor ships.
6 ability to define default ship schemes ... can't think of any other use than request constructor from starbase though (i want a cheap basic constructor, not one that is loaded with life support)
7 a function to generate bug reports from within the game, like it then autouploads the savegame file with my description of what happened - because some of your customers might be too lazy to report through the forums.
8 ability to jump to planet management from the shipyard sponsors list.
hi sd forums.
Brad, I hope you & Paul will learn a lot from reading all these posts, and try to determine why these things weren't in the original design. After 1.1, you two can also check out the mods site to see what other people think should be in the game but isn't. That said, thanks for giving us the opportunity to help you make the game better. I've already seen a lot of very good ideas here (and a few flaky ones). Here are my 5 wish items...
1. Tiered Colonization. You already have some planets that can't be colonized until era 3. You should have the same for era 2 as well. Era 2 planets should not be quite as valuable as era 3 planets (say 10-14).
2. Allow AI to specialize planets. This should be tied to difficulty level. At the lower difficulty levels there might be partial specialization (say 5 tiles) or limited specialization (say planet size 11 or higher).
3. Better AI Fleet Construction. Especially regarding 'fleet' speed. I'd also like to see some fleets be 'task oriented' for efficiency, and optimized for the weaknesses of specific/current opponents.
4. More Ideology Triggers. Paul has already said that this is in the works. Decisions & actions should effect ideology. If a player is engaging in early wars, this should be pushing him/her towards malevolent. Ideology could be effected by such things as excessive colonization, excessive starbases, excessive mining, relations with minor races, etc.
5. Improve Metaverse Scoring. I don't know of a single player who is happy with the current metaverse scoring system. It should be reflective of the player's entire game experience, not just tied to quick victories. Sometimes longer games indicate more intense struggles and more obstacles overcome. Different types of victories should be weighted differently. Higher difficulties should count more. Closer games should count more. There should be a formula that equalizes each type of victory with a starting score of, say 70, and adds pluses and subtracts minuses to reach a final score. Games where some players score 4,000 pts while the majority of players score 12-15 pts is simply a travesty.
6. Bonus design request. One of the most irritating UI elements for me is when moving the map view, the selected ship somehow becomes unselected, and I have to wrap-around until it becomes selected again. Suggestion 1: stop this from happening. Suggestion 2: Allow the 'C' command to center the screen on the selected unit.
Thanks again for offering me the opportunity to make these suggestions.
Okay some of these I'm sure were above, however, I have missed...
#1. Annoying bug fixes, according to forums, which are not always the best there are still the following bugs some have been around and informed since early beta some main ones below.
#2. Automatic upgrades for shipyards or set building que as constructors dock. (The current method gets horrible as one gets a high number of star bases.) Also if constructors are docked and new module becomes unlocked have it auto upgrade if selected.
#3. More UP Resolutions/Bring Mega Events back.
#4. Multi-player Love (Better Lobby system, can see games in progress as well as open games, can see better settings for the games in progress, the ability to name a game.)
#5. AI Improvement, if they are loosing, have AI see this and attempt to ally and team up against the human player to attempt to turn the war back over to their side, including researching collectively (one AI researching one thing while another researching another and sharing with each other.)
Yea... my list will only contain things already said:#1: AI improvement on every level - difficulty impacts how intelligent AI is working, not just bonuses which are just cheating.
#2: I really dont like to read, how many ppl play the game and find it too easy (mostly by rushing in the beginning). I just dont rush like this, thats why my game was still hard for me, but for those who like, it should be much more challenging (based on AI - see #1)
#3: More support for intense playing - like playing on insane and even more planets+ressources than abundant. Atm the performance is a big issue - much lag and it broke my game - after 400 turns, I cant save a game anymore.
#4: Optimize UI
#5: More satisfying battle - On one hand, it looks pretty simple, on the other hand, I dont understand it (like ship roles. For example: I wanted a ship, that is firing from far distance. I made a ship with missiles, which had much more range, than anyone of the enemies. I wanted that ship to stay out of range of enemy weapons, but still fire missiles with their superior range. But there is just approach or stay completely out of distance - or maybe I just dont understand it.)
I also would like to have bigger fleets, but it should make sense to have a wide spread of different hull sizes. Atm i have the feeling, that huge hulls are OP. 10 logistic points for 600-700+ hp, while a medium ship needs 5 logistic points and only has ~180-200 hp. And you can pack really alot of weapons on your huge ships, so you can one shot (two shots when it got shields) medium ships. And star bases should be harder to kill. In the beginning they have a nice defense, but in the later game, they are just scrap. They should be harder to kill than a huge battleship, so it really needs good preperation to kill (or even invade) a well defended star base. War should take time, not just running over an enemy.
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