1.  This was to fix an abuse where the player would make a long-term deal with the AI, take all of their stuff, and then declare war on them. 

2.  Yes.  LEP needs work. Change it to -0.2 money/planet and it would be MUCH better.

3.  There are bigger issues than this.  Not a huge deal.

4.  The game was never designed for multiplyaer.  

1) There has to be a limitation. Otherwise it's open to exploitation. "Sell stuff/turn for payment in full and cancel the deal right after that." The game wouldn't work at all as a game if that was allowed. You need the rules to either forbid it or to incur a severe penalty. Forbidding it is simpler and causes less frustration because then people would complain about the diplomatic penalties that last for ever...

2) "Un-abandonable colonies?" You can ditch them. The govern screen has a "destroy planet" button. Besides, there has to be something that makes "tall" a viable alternative strategy in addition of "wide". Now, the LEP is perhaps not the best way to accomplish this, especially as it really doesn't accomplish it, because despite the current LEP wide empires still dominate massively over the tall empires. You could even argue that there's not enough LEP. Of course, there are other ways to resolve the "wide" vs. "tall" out-of-balance issue that would be better than the current LEP.

3) It's a game. The point of the specialization choices is that they are choices. The mutual exclusion forces you to give up something which is exactly why it's a good game mechanics choice. It makes you to pick a strategy. If you could just take everything then where's the choice? It's not real world. It's a game. The point of a game is to make it fun-in-a-challenging-way. While some real world resemblance is good for immersion, when designing a good game, any point where fun and realism conflict, the fun factor should win.

4) Well, here I do agree. You should be able to open the diplomacy screen from the trade negotiations window. You need at least the knowledge of "who's currently fighting who" but in general all the diplo info should be accessible. The technology level of the other guy can be deduced from the tech shown in the negotiation scree but only if you have allowed tech trading in the game settings. I'd say that you should have some kind of tech level information about other civs in the diplo report. Maybe not outright list all their techs as allowing for "military secrets" might be good for the game but, say, a "slightly outdated report" would be good. Or at least a general indicator of their tech level because their "tech rank" is already public knowledge so it wouldn't be a big deal to be a bit more informative. This might get better later as SD is presumably planning to add spy stuff to the game at some point, or so the rumor goes, and I'd guess that a basic intelligence report should cover these things.

Have you actually read this forum?

I wouldn't consider this a bad design decision tbh; more a way to defend the AI from unscrupulous play. There's better solutions (penalties with all races), but it's not as bad as letting the player get away with picking up a huge load of techs on a buuy-now-pay-later deal and then allowing him to walk away from it the following turn.

Destroy planet. I'm afraid this one is a Learn to play issue on your part.

Not really seeing this as a problem either, tbh. Specialization gives the player an interesting choice to make. There's some serious issues with them being hilariously unbalanced (there's almost always one 'right' choice and two wrong ones), but the actual concept is OK and gives the player a good reason to engage in diplomacy - and, indeed, most players who turn tech trading off don't bother to talk to the AI at all.

Um, you can see their techs during negotiations. You can see literally everything they have, in fact. If there's no techs listed, that's because you're comfortably out-teched them. Having reports available on the actual convo screen would be nice, though; as would being able to see your relations within that screen.

The biggest outright design screw-up, by far, is LEP, which just doesn't work as it stands. The design for this is fairly poor, and any way of making it work is an equally poor fudge. It needs an outright, ground-up rethink and to be either shifted to something other than approval, or for approval to be heavily reworked. Other stuff mostly just boils down to bad balance implementations - output bonuses from buildings being too high, maintenance and mid-to-late game construction costs being laughably low, carriers being just plain ridiculous, the AI's valuations in diplomacy being completely insane. Diplo as a whole still feels a lot like a placeholder, in fact, and I'm hoping we'll see a fairly large patch that reworks it.

But on the flip side, there's some very good fundamentals buried under these problems. The pop=production concept is a good move when it's balanced right (it presently isn't for the most part). The way ship combat works is also a nice idea (even though it too could use some balance tweaking) and actually makes fleet makeup reasonably important, though it needs more in-game signposting to make the player aware of how roles work. 

Good morning and thanks for reading )

marigoldran, I actually wanted to - well, am going to - put forth my sense, that this game's exceedingly targeted at multiplayer ; insofar as the single possible mode of a 4x game is enough to draw a big player base.  so I disagree with you there, but otherwise good points.

This is from somebody who really does not have time (currently) to play mp games at all.

As for defending the AI, let the bastids burn, I say.  Or squirm, or wriggle comically.  You know.  Whatever ET's do.  My guileful diplomacy is too precious to put on hold for these constrained embassies!  sometimes I feel like making a trade JUST to piss off a 3rd party.  etc.

I knew about "Destroy Planet" - the one time I used it in my game, it causes the client to crash when I mouse over the new dead world it makes.

I might be more concerned about the willingness to pay me for a world they can OBVIOUSLY see will defect back to me in 10 turns or so.  annnd wishing they used a less dorky phrase than "culture flip".  I feel like Sally from the nail salon whenever I need to talk about... using lofty and sophisticated lifestyle to brilliantly maneuver the political tide ... oops I mean culture flip, haha!

I will have a full review of the game when I've put some more hours in.  I AM lost on this forum however, if anyone who knows their way around better can help?  Where would you place a long-ish review?  Just make another post like this one, or...?  Am looking for exposure (kinda the point of a review) but I'm not really into the steam business and I don't see their client as a platform for in-depth critical discussion.  Just my cents.

1. A little to cheesyO

2. Sounds like you probably report the bug where it crashed.

3. Actually tech choices where you pick one, but can't have the other was my idea. I think it would be better with better naming conventions. Real world examples we could of went empiral right after the civil war, but we chose to industrialise instead. Yes we turned down islands we could of bought. After we see it all the time low cost vs. High tech. Turning down b58 in favor of upgrading b52. No b58 being ever built. Turning down b70 in favor of upgrading b52. Letting the soviets catch up in favor of building the b12. Building the tomahawk missile instead of the b1b. Building the f22 instead of building the f15xx, or the f16 falcon 21. For that matter the only reason the f16 came about in the first place was a low tech option to the f15. Replacing the f22 with the f35. We have at least low cost vs. High tech.

"3. Actually tech choices where you pick one, but can't have the other was my idea. I think it would be better with better naming conventions. Real world examples we could of went empiral right after the civil war, but we chose to industrialise instead. Yes we turned down islands we could of bought. After we see it all the time low cost vs. High tech. Turning down b58 in favor of upgrading b52. No b58 being ever built. Turning down b70 in favor of upgrading b52. Letting the soviets catch up in favor of building the b12. Building the tomahawk missile instead of the b1b. Building the f22 instead of building the f15xx, or the f16 falcon 21. For that matter the only reason the f16 came about in the first place was a low tech option to the f15. Replacing the f22 with the f35. We have at least low cost vs. High tech."

I like the current tech system... but these are really examples of implementation not pure discovery. Which is kind of an issue in these games. In real life, theory gets followed by prototyping and then testing... and politics infects the whole process. In these 4X games, we get that in a nice package nicely cleaned up and "purified" seemingly of the political factors. 

I think its less realistic to limit our choices, but frankly, a lot more fun. So its cool. But I don't think this argument will hold up to those who despise the limited tech choice. I suppose you could say "the politics is simulated via the choice" and thusly, vested interests are preventing your researchers from going down another path  

That's more a balance problem than a design problem tbh. They system can work and be fun, but at present the balance is so off that it's just a series of extremely obvious best choices.

Basic rule of thumb is, if you can make the system work properly just by changing the input values, then it's not a design issue - it's a balance issue. If no matter what inputs go in, it won't work, then you have a fundamental design problem. Consider a jet engine - it's a marvel of design, but will work like crap if you put in washing up liquid instead of kerosene. Contrast that to a poorly-designed jet engine - one made out of cardboard, for example. This one can have the right fuel put in, but will simply catch fire and fail almost immediately.

Lots of stuff in GC3 is currently jet engines running on washing up liquid, rather than jet engines made of cardboard. Of the bits which are truly poor design, LEP is a given, and also some of the fundamentals of the way the AI works - it's heavily scripted with few triggers, which is causing Froggy (and modders) quite a few problems in getting it to hold up past a very short period into the game. We can more or less get good play out of it for a couple of dozen turns, and decent play for a couple of hundred turn more, after which there's so many variables which we can't tell the AI to adapt to (or even to check for) that scripts become useless.