This is a rant. Been with you since beta 1 offering feedback. You released with a bunch of missing gameplay features and have been playing catchup. You are catching up, I will give you that. But you are catching up to pre-release promises. Still no star base governors. Still requesting the most expensive constructor. Still no invasion visualization. Meanwhile you are working hard on DLC and expansions, i.e. the cha-ching, while neglecting some core UI issues.
For example:
Why can we not change focus on the Colonies grid like we could in GalCiv 2? Why can't we do it from the planet list on the main screen, for that matter?
Why are there no sorts and filters in the shipyard? Why is there no multi-select for the obsoleting mechanic?
What happened with the ship designer overhaul?
Why does it take 7 clicks to set a new rally point for a shipyard?
Why can't we declutter the main screen, with all the clouds and resources and starbases that turn into a jumble of icons?
Why do I have to change the govern settings to meet my preference for EVERY planet I colonize or conquer? Why no global setting?
Why do I have to "manage" a planet just to see how close it is to population cap?
Why can't I see which production bonuses are at the tile, planet, race, or galaxy level?
Why can't I see if I'm about to get a mutually exclusive tech in the trade window, which would prevent me from researching one of the alternatives?
How am I supposed to know that the "+1 food" tech aplies to each planet, not each farm?
How am I supposed to know Precursor Nanites is a civilization-wide bonus, not just a planet bonus?
These are just a few of the UI weaknesses that make the game tedious. The only reason there are as many people playing this game as there are is that they've resigned to just dealing with it in hopes that it will get better. I'm tired of waiting patiently.
I strongly recommend a complete overhaul of the game UI. Get some experts in there, take the time, spend the money, and make it happen. Every window, list, button, action, tooltip, no sacred cows, use a hatchet if you have to. The longer you put this off, the more you are going to drive players away. As for me, you have the next expansion and two post-expansion patches to make this happen. After that, I'm out.
But should Stardock try and make the game harder for those of us who can beat the game on Godlike? I think what they do and what all game developers probably aim for is "how do the majority of people who play our game play?" With GalCiv, that means: Galaxy size, number of opponents, AI level etc. Why spend time coding things so the Godlike level is incredibly brilliant when you're impressing 0.25% (say, I honestly don't know the numbers) of your customer base? Okay, that might be the noisiest (in forum posting terms) part of your base but in basic money terms, it's not where it's at.
I wonder if the introduction of MP was meant as a "okay, you can beat the AI on Godlike, good for you! But can you beat another person who knows the same strategies and tactics you do?" ie "We know that no matter how much work we do on the AI at whatever level, someone will figure out how to beat it and then possibly get on the forums and complain about this or that and we don't want to chase our tails so here's MP to keep you entertained and keep you part of the game."
Yes, there is some reason to try to appease the power players: They are also the flag-bearers for the game. They are the ones that post on all the forums, create the mod content, write in-depth reviews, establish the game's reputation, and generate buzz.
If any business can generate natural word-of-mouth buzz, that's a potential goldmine in revenue. And if you want word-of-mouth buzz, it might be worth it to motivate the biggest and loudest mouths you can find to help sell your product.
There really aren't many good space based 4X games brought out every year though are there.. or decade. Hopefully that's changing with Stellaris and Endless Space 2 supposed to be out in 2016. For all your games flaws it's one of the best space 4X games out in in recent years.
Demands was my poor choice of word, it's mainly requests. But you have received money from people offering/marketing them certain features and you have made promises and like eviator mentioned not all have been fulfilled. In those cases I think people have the right to make demands or expect a refund.
Doesn't matter to me honestly, it would probably be a bad thing to admit even if you did believe it. If you did agree it wouldn't change 1.0 in the past anyway.
Either your tutorials really bad or there not watching it.
I bet some people who own Gal Civ 3 haven't installed it and quite a decent percentage not played more than 10 hours. Can they or people who don't click the govern screen really be classed as people who play the game? Consumers yes, but it wouldn't seem it matters what you put into the actual game just how you market the game correctly to get their purchase.
Do you ever consider that some vocal people are the top of an opinion iceberg? That they might be on to something, that others would want if they had put that amount of time and were as passionate about the game. Not everyone's got the time to argue/debate with CEO's on forums. Metrics I'm sure are extremely useful but they can't tell you everything e.g. a players frustration level when their playing the game and somethings not there or doesn't work the way they would expect/hope.
Well regardless of whether you are a godlike player or a vocal minority player, everyone can benefit from a better UI, so let's give them a nice list of our UI "needs work" issues and see if they can do it. It doesn't hurt to ask. I'm in the process of compiling a huge list now. For example, the shipyard screen, you might as well scrap it and start from scratch with the issues I'm putting together
Well if YouTube videos count, my 3 most viewed GC3 videos have about 53,000 views between them and they get considerably more views when Gal Civ 3 is on sale... I would have made a lot more GC3 videos if I was happy with it.
everyone can benefit from a better UI
this!
My suggestion if you want things: Ask. Don't demand.
We want people to be happy. We don't want to be insulted.
I asked as nicely as I knew how for more attention to the ergonomics of the game. I asked on behalf of my wrists and carpal tunnels. In the chaos of the conversation I do not know which way my request was taken. Is there a way to know how and whether that is being addressed? I have seen lists of specific requests and wouldn't want to add or repeat things, so I am asking in general, I guess.
I understand I owe much of my own pain as being my own responsibility for my own addiction to GC and a couple other games as well as a data driven career. I have bought myself special keyboards and mice and other equipment, I learned to mouse left handed to give my right hand a break. However, any help I can get in UI efficiencies and such would be gratefully appreciated.
I have emphasized to the team that I would like to see more UI work to address the concerns I and people on this forum have with the game.
Personally, I don't think people should have to use the mouse to play the game. The original OS/2 version could be played without a mouse. I don't even like using the mouse to move ships. So that's my view on UI in these kinds of games.
Frog ..you're getting way outside of the box here. I'm 65 yrs old and not ready for mind control ...
You're doing just fine. Don't let all the experts get in your way.
I couldn't agree more. GalCiv3 is an excellent game and I love it ... but I also have to say there is some UI-stuff in there that makes me sad. Not even angry, but just sad that one of my favourite games is so cumbersome in even basic interactions. I posted feedback and suggestions in several threads.
There is one question I have: Do the developers play bigger games of GalCiv3? Meaning do they play with maps where they have more than 10 ships, planets etc.? Because to be honest, most of the problems I see with the UI seem to be caused by designing it for only small maps. Examples are the notifications list, the ship and planet list - all of which become cumbersome if they get to long. Another example is what eviator mentioned, that you can't set planetary focus on the colonies list - you only start missing something like that if you have many planets. Or the starbase building which gets incredible tedious if you build more than ten. Or the simple fact that numbers on the ressources and the treasury get unreadable if they are to big. In my last game on an insane map, I had so many durantium mines and usages, that the mouse-over-tooltipp that shows all of the mines expanded way past the bottom end of my monitor.
I'm not asking to be a jerk, I'm asking seriously. Because I can't imagine anyone playing a game with many planets, ships etc. and not wanting to immediatley change the UI.
This is a terrific observation. I inquired about this myself a few months ago. According to their stats the vast majority of games are played on smaller maps, and it makes sense to tailor improvements toward the greatest number of players.
The interpretation of the stats may be a little dubious. Obviously if a small map takes less time to complete, logically you could fit more of them in a span of time. Also I'd guess there are a lot of small maps started but left unfinished as players are testing different tactics. Lastly, if the UI makes playing the game more cumbersome on larger maps, people are more likely to avoid doing so.
I prefer maps on the larger side, and maybe that is why the UI issues are more in my face.
I think it's a valid observation as well. The UI falters at the larger sized maps imo. Most people don't attempt games at higher than medium. But even that's misleading. I think most players start with small maps and can't imagine trying to manage a larger empire and so stop at the larger maps.
I still put that down to the staggered roll-out of the map sizes back in beta tbh - the largest ones have had much less time for testing, with fewer players doing that testing too (if we assume the stats are taken from game launches, which will capture everything, and not, say, the metaverse, which will only see completed games and so will be badly skewed toward smaller maps). A lot of stuff works fine on medium and below but simply doesn't scale very well to the bigger maps - and the UI is definitely much more tolerable with 10 planets than it is with 100. The general 'micro' UI is not particularly different from other games, but we are trying to use it to manipulate a much bigger empire.
The UI basically works through the player sequentially micro-ing everything, which is how most 4X UIs work (hell, most of them change the turn button specifically to make microing everything one thing at a time easier). But if I'm playing, say, Civ, or Endless Legend, I'll probably cap out at maybe 20 cities pretty late on, while on an Insane GC map I'll usually be managing 50+ planets by the mid game. I've had weak AI surrenders that have handed me more build queues in one turn than the dominant empire usually has in total by the end of Civ 5.
The only games which come close to the scale of GC3's biggest maps usually allow you to hand big chunks of managing your empire over to the AI, like DW or HOI3 do. That always feels like a bit of a cop out, though; it says the UI doesn't have macro-control tools good enough to let the player cope with the rising workload alone, so he has to give up control. That usually leads to people reporting back that 'the game plays itself' - and that's rarely a good thing to hear. You don't want to hand over control to an AI, but you need the means to dish out a lot of orders to a lot of planets/fleets at once.
That's why I think big improvements to the bulk-order interface is probably key to this one. It's a good start, but it needs more options - things like being able to use it to switch focuses, or to scrap ship types etc.
I noticed Paul talking putting the focus buttons on the colony screen yesterday. Savable and loadable Que's where you just load multiple build orders. Could be made, and named by players ahead of time. This would require one time for each different situations over a course of many games should help cut down on micromanagement, and still give the player control. This could be done for techs, buildings, and shipyards. It would be nice to modify stuff by right clicking on a planet instead of going to planet. Build Que's governing screen.
But he did not sound too promising; said it was was too small/crowded. Well make it bigger??? In GC2 you could pretty much manage your empire from that screen, This is high on my improvement wish list
This is a terrific observation. I inquired about this myself a few months ago. According to their stats the vast majority of games are played on smaller maps, and it makes sense to tailor improvements toward the greatest number of players.The interpretation of the stats may be a little dubious. Obviously if a small map takes less time to complete, logically you could fit more of them in a span of time. Also I'd guess there are a lot of small maps started but left unfinished as players are testing different tactics. Lastly, if the UI makes playing the game more cumbersome on larger maps, people are more likely to avoid doing so.I prefer maps on the larger side, and maybe that is why the UI issues are more in my face.
To use an analogy if the UI was a child's toothbrush a small map a child and the largest map a blue whale the UI isn't fit for purpose at the larger end of the scale. (If you were inclined to clean a blue whales mouth you would use something more suitable than a child's toothbrush)Personally I play on Huge maps not that big (compared to the 4 bigger maps) and the UI issues cause immense frustration and lost time for me even at that size. Playing the biggest maps never interested me but I'm sure there basically unplayable the UI isn't fit for their purpose. Now considering the game was and is marketed at being able to have a 100 opponents and crazy map sizes Stardock have spectacularly failed to deliver in this area, it may be possible to start those maps but not realistic finish them (arguably even without the UI issues buts a different topic) without losing your mind at the games inadequacies. Now since only a tiny percentage of the player base probably wants to play on maps past a certain size they haven't received the backlash they could have.
I brought up Paul the lead designers playstyle in a previous post for this reason with a turtle playstyle your going to have less of everything, planets ships the lot so even bigger maps micromanagement would be lessened but not everyone plays like that. Also the lead designer is probably busy making the game rather than playing it so might not realize these issues, we don't know what Paul gets to choose to work on anyway.
These issues have been brought up ad nauseum even since the early betas but as Frogboy stated he focuses on supposedly "what will benefit the most people". If "most people" don't play bigger than e.g. small everyone else is screwed... and that's what's happened five patches later almost no changes to UI or the alleviation of micromanagement issues, despite lengthy patch changes.
So the way I see it the player base effected by this now has to pander to Frogboy's good will and "ask" not demand for changes... considering he views certain people asking/requesting/demanding for this as irritants with bad attitude and a vocal minority who should find another game well...
So Brad since it's Christmas how much good will do you have? Are you going to throw us a turkey bone or keep us out in the cold?
We can complain about what they haven't delivered, as I admit I do from time to time, or we can help. One of those is productive, one is not. These first patches were mainly getting core game mechanics up to par, it seems (well, except DLC, which funds the effort). Maybe now they are in a position to take a good look at the UI.
I have emphasized to the team that I would like to see more UI work to address the concerns I and people on this forum have with the game.Personally, I don't think people should have to use the mouse to play the game. The original OS/2 version could be played without a mouse. I don't even like using the mouse to move ships. So that's my view on UI in these kinds of games.
Thanks for the reply. I will watch for changes.
The Stardock client asked for a reason when I gave Eviator karma for this excellent post last Wednesday. I typed that it's an excellent post and I'd happily add to his list this weekend.
Why is there no follow autopilot ships option like in GalCivI?
Why do I have to click and drag the map every time I move a ship to see the unveiled hexes? Why doesn't the view stay centered on the ship as I move it. Why isn't there at least an option? I asked for this in beta, post release, and in a dev stream. Was told it would happen in beta. Paul said in the stream (paraphrasing, been at least 6 months) that he was concerned it might be visually confusing.
Why is the GalCiv2 shortcut for moving ship parts not present? Why delete a part then make 5 or 6 more actions clicking and scrolling to get to the part again? (asked for by an op in Steam General Discussion for GalCiv3.)
Why does this incoherency that I posted in Sparhawk4242's "Show benefits of buildings more clearly" thread exist?
I'm looking for:1) Notation that differentiates bonuses applied to one object (ship/ starbase/ planet) vs. bonuses applied to an entire civilization.I PLAYED 150 HOURS of GC3 before building an Entertainment Capital because I had no way of knowing that the +25% moral bonus was applied to my civilization and not the planet.2) Clarity in defining what abilities adjacency bonuses potentiate. Hives and Durtanium refineries both give +4 raw production, yet Hives get +% bonuses to raw production from adjacency while the refineries get +% to manufacturing. The Molecular Fabricator and Industrial Replicator give manufacturing, research, and population bonuses but only it's manufacturing benefits form adjacencies and only from manufacturing adjacencies. Not true of the Social Matrix which gives manufacturing and research bonuses and receives adjacency bonuses to both from BOTH manufacturing and research adjacencies. The Krynn Consulate and Temples also gain adjacencyonuses to both influence and moral from both influence and approval bonuses. Do Slave Pits follow either pattern? No. They give bonuses to manufacturing, research, and food, give adjacency bonuses to manufacturing, research, and wealth, and receive adjacency bonuses to their manufacturing, research, and food production from both manufacturing and research adjacencies, but not from population adjacencies.All of this incoherence in implementation is not provided in the descriptions and must be discovered through trial-and-error experiment. I'm inclined to believe that this hodgepodge is the result of a bunch of legacy code that was never followed up to provide a consistent pattern. A good pattern would be adjacencies potentiating the respective bonuses and only the respective bonuses in ALL circumstances.3) Bonuses are listed with little colored icons. That could make information so clear. The mind naturaly wants to assume that there is a pattern and a purpose to these to help make the information clear. Research is always blue, tourism is always purple. Easy. Wealth is always yellow. Wait... why is social manufacturing also yellow? And if population is green, and it always is, how does making moral, resistance, soldiering and logistics are green as well clarify the information delivered?I have misplaced buildings making erroneous assumptions based on the color of the bonus's icon. Without experiment there is no way to know that the Garrison's +20% bonus to military manufacturing (red) gains adjacency bonuses from manufacturing (orange) bonuses, not military. 1) and 3) are easy to fix. If the bonus is civilization-wide, add a star to or after the icon, or wrap it in a gold border. Then change the icon colors for bonuses to be consistent across adjacency groups.ex: Orange- manufacturing, manufacturing cost, raw production, social manufacturing, military manufacturing (unless it's intended to gain from military adjacencies instead in which case leave it red) Blue- research Red- planetary defense, resistance, soldiering / (capacity, logistics, ship range? or would establishing a separate color such as Steel Grey for ship stats be preferred) Pink- approval (because it needs it's own color to make the scheme consistent) etc.Further clarity could come from coloring the maintenance icon with the type of improvement both in the improvement's tooltip and in tech descriptions where -% maintenance appears so often. If Sustainable Research says -10% maintenance with a blue maintenance icon and my research improvements all have blue icons for their maintenance then I can easily make the association and so could future players instead of having to make an embarrassing "Please! What does this mean?" post asking someone to explain it to them.
Why is auto-upgrade enabled by default? The AI doesn't use it. I don't use it. Does anyone use it? It is only sound strategy to fill more tiles with cheaper bonuses first before upgrading them. Having to manually deselect this for every planet is frustrating.
Why is there no auto-find trade route command for freighters so I can hand them over to the AI and forget about them?
Why is there no patrol command?
WHY is there no thread posted by a Dev asking for input on which improvements, modules, components, techs, traits, etc. are overpowered or underpowered and asking for suggestions to tweak them towards functional balance?
There have been countless threads by devs asking for feedback, both here and on the Steam forums. Here is one.
Not their fault you're too fucking lazy to do a simple search.
punctuation and stuff.
Have you read this:
https://forums.galciv3.com/474192
If you already have, I doubt you understand it's implications.
Here is the most important part:
A lot of the rumblings from long time players on GalCiv come from us having to re-develop features that had been put into the engine GalCiv II used over a period of many years.For example, in a new engine (both Galactic and Nitrous have this issue) accessing bits of data can be really hard until you develop the helper classes. I remember when I was helping on the GalCiv III AI, there was no way to find out the defense capabilities of the sponsors of a given shipyard (this has been added since). But in GalCiv II, there was a wealth of data accessors. In a mature engine you get something like:p->GetNearByObjects(radius);That kind of call isn't specific to any game. But in a new engine, that call has to be created.In Nitrous, I have a hard time getting access to the modules my units have attached to them because no such API exists yet. Thus, making UI stuff in Ashes gets painful until those kinds of APIs are added.
Another thing wehich would be nice is if the different 'sort' options for the big list on the right under the minimap changed the stats listed on items within it to something relevant to the sort chosen - so for example f you sort planets by manufacturing, it showed you manu, military manu and social manu etc. Having it permanently displaying population, wealth and morale isn't that helpful when 90% of the time I have no need of that data. Yes, I can hover over to get better info... but I'd rather not have to, and if I'm sorting by stat X then I probably want to know more about X at-a-glance.
The problem with coding the ai on godlike is there is only one an. If you do that with only one ai then you will have an ai that won't function right without cheating. There are two solutions to this.
First is instead of giving bonuses to higher difficulties just make the an harder.
The second is make different ais for each level. If we do this can we also have different ais for rareity and map sizes.
Otherwise please make the ais to function best with no bonuses.
Now as far as resource colors can you make them coincide with 2. That would make it easier. If you do this you would also have to add some colors from two.
There are still some options that would be nice to have from two since threes other option screen doesn't have much
Remove functional components when upgrading a ship.
Save ship designs to hard drive so I can unchecked this.
Auto design ships for players, so I can unchecked this.
This would also to put global focus buttons. That way youmicromanagementck for planets you want to change.
This is a good place to put planetary governors for those who hate micromanagement. Only changing planetary governors you want different.
Here is a good place for planet options. This way you only change these when you need to for each planet all at once, or when a planet needs to change eliminating the need to change this every time you settle a planet. Depending on which play style. I'm not saying to take these off planet but add these to global options which the second options menu is a little lite anyways.
Two actually did fine with a mouse. It's three even with the option on doesn't do it. Either way in three you have to hold down the mouse to move. Even with the mouse to move off screen it doesn't do that because to many items on screen. In two you would think except it let's you mouse threw menu's except one. In three with option on you can't move through menus, so you can't use the mouse option because half the screen won't let you. There are two solutions to three solutions to this.
First is to do liketwo, and put in off screen menus. Solves user interface problem, but adds to micromanagement in a good way. That's why no one complained of two doing this.
The second is to do what a lot of game developers have done which is to create two screens. Never heard a complaint for this either.
The third is to make it where if you right click the menu stuff on screen either disappear, or are greyed out, so you can scroll off screen with a mouse.
You could add cursor keys, but please don't eliminate mouse.
I have been playing this game since galciv1, and there are few games i rate more highly. Of course Alpha Centauri is still my number one game that no one has yet bothered to top even after all these years! Geez, If you made the AI smarter in SMAC and that was all you changed, it would be 'the' perfect game, full stop (in my opinion).
Alpha Centauri is amazing, I can't believe how badly Sid Meier botched Beyond Earth. AC has so much personality, even though I can watch them on youtube, I want every wonder just to get the videos. I also love the leader personalities a lot, you could play a bunch of quotes that aren't in the game, and I'd be able to tell you which leader I think it fits, can't do that in any other game I can think of. I don't know how copyright works in games, like if SM had made Beyond Earth very similar to AC, would EA sue him? Sure, it was a bit of a niche game at the time, but it's probably sold a lot through GOG. With Chris Roberts raising over 100 Million dollars to make an open Wing Commander/Privateer/Freelancer universe why wouldn't Sid think AC2 would sell well? How many people bought Beyond Earth thinking it had to be better than it ended up because it was the "spiritual" successor to AC?
As for Gal Civ, it suffers to some degree from what Europa Universalis (and other Paradox games) does, devs who actually like the games they are making, so they keep working on it. It shouldn't be a problem, but what it does is, at least for me, make me hesitant to play until they are done with it, even while I appreciate that they keep working it.
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