Hi,
I'm a long time player of GalCiv and I've been here since the early days when it first arrived on PC as GalCiv and I was one of the Jedi Knights on the metaverse (shame that died - it helped with building a sense of community I feel). I can remember painfully spamming constructors to cover the galaxy in trade boosting starbases, then influence bases, then industrial ones, etc. as each exploit was nerfed... Ever since I've always had a soft spot for Stardock and I've tended to buy their games up until Sorceror King which was a cake walk with its awful AI. It seemed like Stardock was going for the casual gamer market not the in-depth strategy market, which makes commercial sense. Anyway, I'd held back on buying GC3 - the reviews on metacritic didn't inspire confidence either... One Steam sale later - I decided to buy the game and post my first impressions after a few games at gifted level plus one on normal.
TL;DR - Overall I like the game, the battle scenes are great but at the end of the day it's just it's a prettier GC2 with far worse gameplay. As it seems like a step backward - I'd give it 4/10. Detailed reasons below.
1 - UI
The UI needs masses of work, much of it is counter intuitive/results in extra work IMHO. The most important one for me personally is the autolaunch for shipyards - there doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off. It would be much less work if I could just empty the shipyards every ten turns or so. On a large map I seem to be knocking out 20-30 constructors per turn fairly early on which all need to be set to guard mode individually every turn (it seems that when ships are produced - they activate the fleet they join at the shipyard?). This is an unnecessary game killer is you want to play at higher levels. While on the subject of shipyards - the rally point systems works well except for when it needs to be switched off... I have to delete the rally point. This happens quite frequently - i.e. when there's a starbase upgrade due to tech advances I want the constructors to stay at the shipyards where they're produced and upgrade local economic starbases then switch back to the rally point where I assemble constructors to be used for other purposes. These two simple changes would shorten my turn time by 90%. When using rally points the ships randomly do/don't assemble into fleets - all I want here is consistency, one way or the other.
Another good UI addition would be the ability to change what's being produced socially at a colony en mass, i.e. being able to change from military subsidies to cultural ones across the board. This would save a lot of micro management in the late game. The various terraforming techs are implemented in a way that adds to micromanagement unnecessarily. Each time I discover a terraforming tech I have to go around each planet, add the terraforming building into the queue, then go back to each planet again to build the actual building itself. Why can't the two just be combined? i.e. you can build your trade center or whatever in the same tiles as you can currently build the terraforming enhancement but at the cost of the building plus the terraforming required with only one trip to each planet being required. Workload halved for the same effect. There's also extra workload when remodelling a planet, the original building has to be cleared before you can build on the tile. Why can't you build over the older building? Fewer mouse clicks for the same effect.
When producing ships I never use the standard ones - can an option be added to prevent them from showing up at all? It adds to clutter on various screens such as the upgrade screen.
Is it also possible to add the features for mass upgrades of a fleet? The same for disbanding. I want to be able to do something like press ctrl+D and decommission an entire fleet.
Is it possible to add an option for fast piece slides? I seem to end up zooming in on empty areas of map before I hit end turn to speed things up a bit.
2 - Race traits
The coercive trait, which allows you to set colony production individually at start is totally OP, it allows for absolute specialisation early on for every planet, it's pretty much doubled what I can get out of my colonies early on which translates into a massive mid-game advantage and easy victories. Same with the colonisers trait, you can get some great industrial output ten turns quicker than everyone else. It leads to some pretty awesome early industry capability way ahead of any other empire. Most of the other traits seem a bit under powered in comparison to those two. There's also a potential exploit, which I haven't tried, using the map generator and the adaptable trait. Not sure how well that would work though - depends on how frequent you can make extreme worlds. These traits may be unbalance on purpose for all I know however it does mean that everyone else is at a disadvantage.
3 - Colony buildings.
From my games so far I think that population & industry are king. In my last game I tried increasing world population to give good base stats for everything, then adding a bit of industry and going all out for economic starbases. Then if I wanted to produce more science I would just set industrial production to research. The high base pop, starbase bonuses & social production would mean that research point production was pretty damned good. The output didn't seem to be hugely less than specialised research worlds while being far more versatile (i.e. if you want money just switch to an economic bonus) and more easily upgraded due to greater industry levels. I've only tested this on a small scale and I could be very wrong here....
It doesn't seem to matter if you have morale buildings or not - just upgrade the local starbases with happiness modules and all is A okay. That's an entire mechanic which can be ignored with no real penalty. Never seen morale go below 96%.
Tourism income is pretty poor. It uses up masses of tiles for small amounts of income, just covering the world in banks and farms earns far more money - am I missing something here? It seems to be pretty useless even with max tech. Another mechanic which can be ignored...
The ability to move the colony HQ or place it at start would be pretty awesome. The autoplacement of it limits the potential of a planet. The same goes for planetary resources.
Money/Production/Science - there's too much of it in the game full stop. You never really have to make a choice between I want this but I need that, etc. Guns or butter? In Gal Civ III you can have your cake and eat it.
4 - The AI
Is bad. Like really bad. It feels like there isn't an opponent at times and I've never had this problem with a GalCiv game before. The AI seems to be totally incapable of fighting a war at all, I'm struggling to believe that anyone has lost a game to it except on the very hardest levels with a dire start. This is almost as bad as Civ V when you could conquer the world with five/six units due to the AIs (continuing) inability to deal with 1UPT/artillery. In my last game I lost nine ships conquering a large map and that was because I didn't want to go through the hassle of decommissioning/upgrading an out of date fleet and mounted a suicide run on an enemy planet. The major problems as I see them are:
i) Poor ship design choices. The AI wastes space on modules like range extenders - could it be trained to build a starbase. One constructor is cheaper than building that module on every ship and it increases combat potential of every single ship. The AIs choice of weapons/defence modules is also pretty poor and it's fleets tend to be homogenous - in every game so far I've won wars pretty easily by just building one counter ship to whatever the AI throws at me. The AI empire then dies as it can't kill any of my ships. There is some evidence of a limited ability (very limited) to change ship design based on battle results. Generally by the time this happens it's all over. The AI should keep a reserve of ships with different damage types - changing part way through a war when your planets are being invaded is too late. Why does it put all its eggs in one basket?
ii) Limited ability to form a fleet and attack - there are loads of one, two and three ship fleets running about but they don't seem to attack even when they start the war. The AI can send the odd large fleet but only one or two. Why can't the enemy send large forces at me? Why can't the AI use its logistics ability to field large fleets? I know it has the tech - I normally sell them logistics tech before declaring war as killing a few larger fleets is quicker than killing lots of smaller ones, a trick I have from GC2. If the AI is going to start a war why hasn't it built shed loads of warships beforehand?!?!?! This would seem to be as basic as programming an AI gets.
iii) An inability to build/attack military starbases & ship yards. Almost every enemy attack has been along one narrow corridor with no military starbases in support. My response is to build a military starbase in the way and leave some hard-counter ships there. War won. The AI should be building some fast ships which can strike my starbases before I can respond. Then heavier ships move up and destroy my now unsupported fleets. The same with shipyards - half of them are empty and could easily be destroyed by a couple of fast cruisers limiting my ability to replace losses.
iv) Exploits - in one game I researched shield defences to max and gifted mid-tree beam weapons to everyone. Low and behold the AI switched to beams and I conquered them with ease as they couldn't damage my ships. I've only tried this exploit once so it may just be coincidence. The whole escort/capitalship/support thing seems to just not work for the AI at all - high DPS capital ships with few defences running around on their own, or with one escort, are glass cannons waiting to be blown up. The escorts the AI builds need to be a hell of a lot tankier for that whole idea to work. I seem to get the best results by ignoring it completely and just building good all rounders with high defences where ships are concerned. Again - this is a mechanic the AI appears to be trying to use which is inflating its losses and minimising mine.
v) It doesn't do planetary invasions. I've seen like two by the evil races. I've intervened in a war between two AI and destroyed one sides fleet leaving their planets totally defenceless. Literally nothing left on the map but their planets. The AI didn't invade a single one and moved its ships around aimlessly, most not even going near their enemies defenceless planets. What is going on here?!?!?! Tech wasn't the problem as I had sold everyone planetary invasions far earlier and I could see that they had transports moving around the universe.
The AI in this game is truly awful. It's like there isn't an opponent.
I am also a long time fan of Galciv games and i recently tarted playing Galciv 3 last couple of months.
I have observed a couple of things why the AI is not performing well, but the main one by far is ship range. I do not recall ship range being such a big issue in Galciv2 like it is in Galciv 3? Range is a good game aspect, but can we really expect an AI to understand it as well as the player?
The other big AI weakness is targeting priority..... because of these new ship categories - capital, assault, guard etc..... and of course Escort is the one players can exploit in a big way against the AI. In Galciv2 it was much harder to manipulate the targeting priority of the AI.... it will never attack the low weapon, heavily defended ship first.... your high defense ship has to have a high attack as well to draw fire away from low defense ships.... and those low defensive ships have to have their attack rating limited or else they will start drawing fire.
Ultimately I think combat in Galciv2 was far more AI friendly.
Apart from that, i find i do really enjoy Galciv3
Gifting a weapon while you have superior defenses for is not an exploit at all. You spent the time researching it. Its a pretty good way to warmonger actually and I do it as well.
I disagree with you on most of your points. I have been a very long player of GCII and have been here since Alpha and I can say in 'my opinion' the ai is FAR better than GCII. GCII has the benefit of scripted actions, something that the current ai is lacking. You are comparing nearly 6 years of ai development to 1 year. Apples to wool rugs, no comparison at all.
The UI is as functional as can be and can always use improvement. I agree on that point. The ai can wage great war, step up your game to 'gifted' which is slightly higher than normal. You will see FLEETs of ships. Currently the ai cannot cope with player controlled research/production when the 'wheel' is in play. Its one reason we are getting a 'stand alone' which REMOVES the player production wheel as it should have been at release.
Go back and play Normal but do not use or touch the wheel at all. The ai suddenly is able to keep up 'slightly' with you. Once you specialize research and production worlds it will start to fall back behind. Again this is all normal as the way production works can and will be changed.
Gal Civ has always been about player designed ships. The ai gets production bonuses and we get better more efficient ships that counter larger fleets. In time the ai will use your own designs against you. I have seen my best designs show up against me and I go..WTF?????
/thread......
Your economic ideas are somewhat problematic.
Population is indeed powerful, a high raw output is far superior to just stacking up more and more production, but skipping specialized worlds is highly inefficient. It's quite feasible to get 100+ raw manufacturing on a death furnace world, but if you have 100+ raw manufacturing, just a single structure will give you far more research or money than you can get from producing it with manufacturing.
A couple games back, I had a 600+ manufacturing world. This world was horribly inefficient, the tile layout was deplorable and my placement of structures non optimal. I had my slave pit and death furnace by themselves, adjacent to each other. I could have had massively more. When I started producing research, I was only making 200, less than a third of my production. My production, on the other hand, was quite large for a research world, but you can easily top out a thousand income on the right planet with the right selection, you will never make anywhere near that much using population and manufacturing. A high raw production is very agreeable, but there's no substitution for having several hundred percent in modifiers on top of that raw production. Producing research and money is exceedingly inefficient.
For your research criticism, might I suggest you slow it down? There's a significant range to the research setting, and it's easily modified if very slow just isn't slow enough.
Maybe i should step up from Normal then.
Threads like this make me think I'm not even playing the same game as everyone else.
UI:
On the UI suggestion you had for terraforming, do keep in mind that every terraforming technology has different placement rules. The higher level ones can be used on a larger selection of tiles than the lower tech ones. On some high quality planets the two lowest tech terraforming usually can't be used at all because all valid tiles are already unlocked. So implementing the 1-click building you propose would also have to have a check in place to prevent wasting say a terraforming that can happen on any tile on the planet when one of the really wimpy ones would work.
As for the designs, dear god I would love the option to disable every ship design every game. I do NOT want the game to save my designs from game to game, and I hate wasting all the time in the designer making 10-40 ships obsolete every time I invent a new technology. I'm with you 100% on this one.
On the mass upgrade feature, I am ambivalent. If it works for you great. For me, the cost to upgrade is so high that I think I've only used upgrade in less than 1/10 of my games simply because I can never afford to do it. A mass upgrade would be completely wasted on me unless the cost was reduced by one or two orders of magnitude at the same time.
Races:
On the race traits, your results are clearly different than mine. For me the production wheel does nothing but bankrupt me. Back when it was the default setting and coercive didn't exist, we all just got the production wheel for free, other players had posted detailed instructions on how to use it, some of them turn-by-turn instructions. I would follow them and it never worked out well for me. Rapidly I'd go bankrupt and the game then forces the wheel on every planet to 100% money and disables changing it until you're not bankrupt anymore, which just means I can't build anything anywhere and am still bankrupt, so all I can do is move existing ships and end my turn until someone kills me. Some games I would lose without ever meeting an AI. Colonisers is great if you play with a lot of planets. One time I had 15 worlds. Usually my games end with me having 8-ish. colonizers is mediocre at best in these circumstances. Same with Adaptable. depending on map settings I usually find less than 5 extreme worlds in the whole galaxy, and usually I never find them before the AI does. You did mention using the map editor. That would certainly change things I suppose. But it depends on your starting location. Which I don't know if you can or cannot control.
Planet Ugrades:
On morale, here's a screenshot of part of a custom race's traits, notice I have the +2 morale selected. http://imgur.com/ZfojiVb. Now, here's my homeworld on turn 1: http://imgur.com/ccA8fql. Notice the 90% morale. By midgame I'm usually down below 50% even with the diplomacy technology for +4 morale and one entertainment center adjacent to my capital. Once I get some economic starbases built I can usually recover back up to ~90. How do you manage to keep such high morale? I would kill for a race special ability that makes morale go away completely the same way synthetic races can ignore food.
I totally agree on tourism. I have tried taking the +2 tourism racial trait, plus the special race ability to start with tourism income enabled and used Serenity as my homeworld and still didn't get enough income to match the planet's maintenance midgame.
My experience with production and tech is completely the opposite of yours. I never have enough of anything. Probably because you have many more planets than me. Also the production wheel seems to work for you.
AI
My experience with the AI is again, vastly different than yours. At normal (and easy when I play at that level for unlocking accolades) I see the AI build new ships with different defenses and weapons often. They overbuild junk and don't upgrade, but they change stats outside of war pretty constantly. I do see the loads of tiny fleets everywhere, but unlike you they will attack successfully. Typically when the AI declares war on me, within 3 turns every starbase and shipyard I have is destroyed as each tiny fleet takes out one per turn. I typically do see them building huge fleets before war. Most of my games, again on easy and normal the AI has 5 or more ships defending each planet and each shipyard plus another 10-15 ships in 5 or 6 stacks of 2 or 3 ships each swarming around the map aimlessly or parked outside my starbases and planets (only once they start to hate me). So if an AI player has 5 worlds, I usually have something like 60 enemy warships on that border and they have another 30 defending the planets and shipyards. Starbases are typically left unguarded.
The biggest weakness I see is not using too much range but too few engines. My fleets move 12+ and they are moving 3. On the other hand, they usually can defeat my ships 1:1 until really late in teh game, so if I get into a diplomacy death spiral (where the AI is making demands every few turns and I either agree and go bankrupt or disagree and piss them off, then repeat a few turns later) and multiple AIs start declaring war I usually lose pretty fast. A secondary weakness is that unless I give it different military technologies all AI players give preference to red defense (projectile) and yellow offence (missile). Because they all do this, first its easy to counter, and second their early rounds of war with each other are stupidly self destructive. Some of the more peaceful races that don't develop any military tech just stack beams and shields. Watching them go to war is always comical.
The issue with transporters seems to be that some transporter fleets are just inactive. They never move anywhere or do anything. If the AI moves the transport at all, then it will use it to attack. Otherwise it just sits parked outside the shipyard where it was constructed and gathers dust.
On starbases, I've seen one game where an AI had 1 planet and 57 starbases. They had the second largest influence after me beating out neighboring races with up to 9 worlds. They typically build mines on every single resource and research stations for every artifact and one or more economic starbase and shipyard per planet. This lets them spread pretty far across the map. I've never seen the AI fail to build starbases.
My typical game settings are insane or one step down galaxy, uncommon stars, uncommon planets rare habitable planets uncommon extreme planets, no events, abundant minor races, no pirates, no anomalies, no ascendancy, rare artifacts, occasional UFP, and 12-16 AI players. I've recently started using tight clusters rather than spiral galaxy. Doesn't seem a whole lot different. Maybe having so many planets and resources like your setting makes the AI unable to know what to do with them?
@psychoak, how do you get over 100 raw production?
The Death Furnace is good for an easily obtained 110% raw production bonus on one planet, you can maximize further by putting high manufacturing boosts next to it for even larger bonuses. 50% base, 10% level bonus.
Slave pits boost food, research, and production, making them powerful manufacturing and research centerpieces that also boost population. In combination with a healthy food buildup, you can easily hit 50 plus population on all high quality, non precursor worlds that aren't being focused on money generation.
Hives boost raw production, with percentage multipliers, a fully ringed hive is worth a 30% bonus without even using multiple point adjacencies, another easy way to hit sky high raw production in combination with high populations.
Three economic starbases are worth another 30%, just with a Death Furnace, 150% is achievable with just a single level 2 bonus. At a 150% bonus, you only need 40 population without any other modifiers. You can break 200% with hives, and the percentage food boosting structures will let you go far beyond 40 population. There is also a Gaia Vortex, worth another 5% raw production adjacency bonus.
At end stage with technology, every faction can achieve massive raw production, regardless of ideology, but with a Death Furnace, one planet can simply be sublime. Having a few thousand points between manufacturing and research on one planet is not an unobtainable goal.
I thought hives were thalan tech tree and slave pits are drengin. Who gets both?
Thanks for those tips!
No one, you don't need both. You can get a 190% production bonus on a Death Furnace with Terrans, if I've done my math right, before any tile modifiers, so 220% if it's on a plus 3. You get 40% from maxed out government, and 30% from three economy starbases. That's 290% right there with just a Death Furnace, no Hive needed, which only requires 26 population to hit 100 raw production, minus flat raw production modifiers, such as the durantium refinery, which is one of the adjacent objects to hit that 17 level adjacency bonus.
On a thin atmosphere planet, with a terran food multiplier surrounded by a full ring of farms, you'd get 94 population from the 47 base and the 100% modifier. This is 366 raw production before other research modifiers, planet bonuses, etc. With such a perfect setup as a fully ringed Death Furnace combined with a full ring of farms on a thin atmosphere planet, 400 is well within reach.
Five tiles dedicated to farming should be good enough to get around 100 raw production on the typical planet.
Thanks again!
@Gavin - my idea about the terraforming, I said combine the two - you would still only be able to build the improvement in the correct squares just with fewer mouse clicks!
As to having more worlds I normally get about 8 or so in the initial colony rush on a large scattered map, I have no idea if that's about the same as you? What I've been doing so far is as follows and it's working like a charm:
Manually send your scouts to nearby stars. I normally send the quicker scout to scan outer planets in range and the slower one starts from Sol, one goes clockwise the other counter clockwise. When I discover habitable planets I always colonise the ones furthest away first and I tend to use the first coloniser as a scout too sending it to the nearest planets - it's pretty quick and has good range, if its spots a planet I colonise with it ASAP.
When colonising I always choose pragmatic first for the free constructors and go for a nearby durantium resource and use that to rush buy a durantium mine on my homeworld (and another planet if I feel rich) - the production boost is huge in the early game. The other one or two I use to build economic (industry) starbases around my capital.
I set all my planets to 50% research, 25% social and 25% military with my homeworld as the shipyard. My first research priorities are engines and factories; I tech trade every ten to fifteen turns for cash. In the early game I normally get up to 30K or so? I use this money to rush buy research centres or my research worlds which makes me tech faster, more to trade, more money, more rush buys, etc.
In terms of building on the homeworld I build/buy a few farms and cover the rest in factories and a durantium mine. At my shipyard I knock out 5 colony ships then a constructor for a second shipyard. I pare the ship designs down to the basics, i.e. my colony ship normally just has a colony module, my constructor just has a constructor module and their production times are pretty quick. I've found that for closer planets producing colony ships a few turns quicker more than out weighs a speed advantage - you can get two basic colony ships for almost the price of one of the stock ones. Once that is done I'll add an engine to my colony ship design to race to nearby habitable planets. I always build a couple more fast colonisers with a range enhancement or two and send them off in the hope they find trading partners or a nice planet! Next I build basic constructors like crazy and spam economic starbases around my planets, I aim for five on my homeworld and 3-4 around all others. The industry and morale modules are what I concentrate on and it's not long before some of my worlds can produce one basic constructor every turn. The finance modules I leave until I have spare constructors and am actually taxing people which doesn't normally happen until mid-game. My tech research funds my empire. MUAHAHA!
My build order for other planets is pretty simple - three/four factories depending on world size, one/two farms and leave until it has auto upgraded to my latest factory design. Industry and getting constructors out is my priority, colonisers and a free factory is so helpful here. Then I split my worlds fifty/fifty between finance and research worlds. Research building seem to take a lot longer to build so I rush buy quite a lot of my research buildings. The only exception to this is the small planet in my home system - max industry. At some point my homeworld will switch from constructors to producing warships and normally manages one a turn easy - I use the govern function here for max ship production.
On the topic of the govern function - market worlds produce very little research so I set their slider to 50% wealth and 50% military when I finally start to raise taxes. With research worlds I set it to 50% research and 50% production. This minimises the waste caused by world specialisation to nothing.... It gives a huge early-mid game advantage,
That's pretty much my standard early game - I'm now trying the level above gifted, can't remember what it's called and I'm winning pretty easily.
@psychoak - you're right that just adding one specialised building will increase production massively for one attribute and I said something to that effect in my post. My point was that if you go crazy for industry/pop and you're not using the govern trait it cuts out a huge amount of waste from specialised worlds wasting a large portion of their spending (i.e. research worlds are pretty bad at producing lots of industry and wealth - every BC spent on those wealth and industry on a research will be much less effective). If you use starbase spam as well for all of their lovely bonuses the total difference isn't actually that big while being more versatile. The versatility comes from being able to switch from one boosting project to another at will (i.e. military subsidies to cultural).
In the one game where I tried it I got the UP chair and then the 50% influence bonus. I was able to switch from military to culture production and start culture flipping nearby planets and gain a cultural victory. The UP bonus and my crazy industry output was totes OP. I was only able to switch instantly from a military conquest strategy so quickly due to the versatility of my planet setup. The other alternative would have been to rebuild my planets as influence planets which takes longer. I think this illustrates my point more clearly - it's not a maximally effective use of my planets - but reasonably close and much more versatile.
Having max industry also meant that my planets upgraded in no time at all maximising planetary output ASAP, having a knock on effect of producing starbase spam that much more quickly which increase industry, etc.
Well, culture production is actually reasonable to produce. You have a base of 1, irrespective of population and focus, so your manufacturing focused world is going all out on that 5% per 10 points of manufacturing, rounded up. If you've got a 300 manufacturing world, that's more than double the base culture spread.
A ~300 manufacturing world with 100 pop and a 400% production boost, will be nearly a third of that when you switch to wealth focus, and your wealth modifier from economic stimulus will be 60%, maybe only 55%. That's less than a Banking Sector, just one. Your 58 raw production in your focus doesn't even get to 100 with 60%.
If you instead had a 100% production boost and a 300% income boost, you'd be making ~240 wealth before stimulus was even applied, your greatly reduced bonus in the neighborhood of 25% is less of an impact than a single structure.
It is more flexible, but it is in no way efficient, by the end stages, you're losing hundreds in income or research off every planet you're using this way. You should instead be removing those manufacturing structures and replacing them with research or economy where applicable, using your high base production to get them out in a still reasonable length of time without need for the modifiers, creating hundreds, or even thousands, of research or wealth on each of your planets.
I said above several times that it won't be as efficient - I've agreed with you. Still works
I'm currently working on the accolade for winning an insane map, but it is going poorly. My last twenty games the first ai I encounter already has like between 6 and 18 planets compared to me with just my home world and like one or two planets.
The trading is another area where your results are completely different than mine. Even with a racial +1 or +2 diplomacy and open borders, the ai won't ever agree to more than like 150 credits for a tech. Even late game techs like large or huge ships they offer at most 300 or 400 and once as low as 9. No, that is not missing any zeroes. Nine credits for large hulls "this is fair".
So I never give techs out. I only trade to get techs.
If i remember correctly, there's a Precursor world that comes with base influence of 10 or 20. I had three influence starbases around this planet and, let's just say that planet brought the nearby planets under my influence. Fast.
That could be. I don't have any dlc so I don't know about those.
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