I reckon it's a bit early but heck: the earlier the better. Get the developers to think about these issues BEFORE they develop it.
Was playing a bit of Gal Civ II again. Drath Tech is HORRIBLY overpowered on larger maps. War Profiteering. (Shudder). Once you bribe the AI to war, the tech generates at minimum 20,000 credits per turn.
Gal Civ has several issues in all three iterations:
1. AI doesn't put enough engines on its ships.
2. OP combinations. For example, in Gal Civ II War Profiteering + ability to insta-buy starports, colony ships, and factories on your planets = Insta Win.
3. The percentage system doesn't scale well. Universal +% modifiers are too powerful.
4. AI doesn't know how to do the early game colony spam thing.
In other words, balance is a major issue in all three iterations. Game doesn't scale well to larger maps.
So here are my ideas for future iterations of the game:
1. No universal % modifiers. None. Building synergy leads to FIXED production, research or money bonuses. This gets around the problem of exponential growth.
2. The number and type of buildings you can build on a planet is limited by its population. Not enough people? Then there's not enough population to work the buildings.
3. Each star system can only have 1 economic starbase. Every time you build an economic starbase you have to assign it to a specific system. Military starbases, however, can be built anywhere.
4. Economic starbases provide large FIXED boosts to all planets in the system. None of that percentage silliness.
5. Combine shipyards with economic starbases. In other words, starbases are shipyards and vice versa. Makes sense if you think about it.
6. Starbases are the bottleneck for space production. More population = more planetside production. BUT: without an economic star-base, the production can only be used for building stuff on the planet.
7. Make everything that travels in space super expensive relative to buildings on the ground. Make constructor and colony modules ESPECIALLY expensive.
8. Space is dangerous. Traveling into dark, unexplored areas far from your cultural boundaries can cause your ships to die for no reason.
9. Forget about pirates. Instead, there are space monsters that roam the areas outside civilized boundaries. The further from the boundaries, the tougher and the more numerous they become. Use the same template for every monster, but adjust its hit points and damage based on min distance from nearest cultural boundary.
10. Consequently, colony ships are going to need to carry weapons if they intend to travel far from your cultural boundaries.
In other words, turn space travel in Gal Civ into a Dark Souls-like experience. Make space travel more expensive and nerve wracking. The more nerve wracking it becomes, the more rewarding it is if you do it well. It also punishes aggressive early expansion.
Cut corners with your colony ships so you could expand faster? Fine. There be monsters out there that might eat your colony ship.
Also, new colonies don't automatically listen to you. Every time you expand to a new planet, you have to upgrade a "bureaucracy" building in your capital. Otherwise you have no control over what the new colony does. The upgrade and upkeep costs of your "bureaucracy building" scales exponentially so if you want to micromanage you're going to have to pay with in-game currency.
Colonies with large population can become capitals, too, meaning that the player is encouraged to build up the population of new colonies so they can avoid the problem of exponentially more expensive bureaucracy upgrades.
edit: I don't mean to suggest game devs in general are bad at their games, many of them quite possibly are good at it. But my point is that them being eclipsed by some players is inevitable, given the game being engaging enough.
Horemvore's AI for example tries to resolve these issues (Ship blueprints, colonoizing strategy) and has a couple of changes from me, which makes the AI play in a more optimal in terms of planet development and tech strategy (e.g. aggressively using hive tech).
Heck, call me mad, but what does actually speak against implementing a community made AI into the official game once it is sufficiently tested (+ properly giving credit ofc)?
https://forums.galciv3.com/478680/page/1/#3643877
What I would dare claim SD being guilty of is that the implications of their systems are not intuitive. But once I thought about them I think many systems like coercion and the implications for the structure of a planets economy are quite beautiful. An optimized planet has a lot of farms on the ground (somewhat preserved nature) and people work their jobs in starbases.
Also one the note on colony rushing/ early expansion:Part of the reason it is effective are the bonusses on colony capitals. You are essentially investing 100-ish manufacturing into:- 5 raw production- 0.2 population growth (+100% if it was on your homeworld)- 5 food- 3 approval
now count how much manufacturing and research you would have to put into building these improvements at the start of the game. And I am not even counting the extended cap of what you can have through the newly available tiles.
The game is simply built around starting in the expansion phase and then being about the evolution of your civilization.
I think what you want is a GC that is more about exploration and less about empire role playing. I sympathize with that idea, but I don't think it is the core idea of it. But why not try to develope a mod for this? As I mentioned above, GC3 has an extensive .xml infrastructure you can edit and of the top of my head, the stuff you want actually is in there!
Turn pirates into space monsters? -> change their blueprints or play around with the space monster mega eventYou don't like %-bonusses? -> ImprovementDefs.xml has everything you want!... and more
As I was saying, I liek the idea of a more exploration based 4x with a more hostile galaxy (to the point were you may even have to fight for your survival against occupacional hazards). I might actually try this mod, if you made it.
Where? The only balance issue I've ever run into is because of starting location which is by design to be random. The game does exactly what it is, it's a sandbox game designed to give the player as many possible options and the ability to play 1 map for months if wanted on the largest possible maps.
The only scaling issue I agree with is tech/research rate.
This could be an option but, this would reduce the reason of why you research certain techs, or have certain race/faction specials and even why one would colonize one world versus another. I strongly disagree with this...
If you limit one, than why don't you limit the other, after all I can stack military starbases just as I stack economic and get my ships extremely powerful in the area of effect. You want to spend your time building economic starbases that's fine, I'll fly my fleet into your territory and destroy them all, nice waste of time by you.
Isn't this just a repeat of your point 3? Then all your military starbases should do the same, as well as mining starbases and all other starbases, while we're add it why don't we just make every ship just have one set of weapons/defenses and only a certain attack and hit points too...
They are two different things, although I think you should be able to upgrade shipyard defenses.
So if we had the technology to boost production here on earth by collecting additional solar energy in orbit, creating new technologies w/ zero gravity ect... you wouldn't?
Why? You could mod this if you want. The game would drag out even more, all this does is slow expansion which you could do by decreasing the effect of engines as well. If this was the case all you would be doing for sure is clicking that turn button for the first 100 turns not doing anything in the galaxy and isn't that the whole point for the game Galactic Civilizations?
So you're telling me that your space ship is just going to explode? Exactly why? After all as far as technology wise the fictional Universe of Galactic Civilizations is far more advanced than current technology here on Earth and our ships/long range space craft always just explode for no reason right? All destroyed space craft have been lost either re-entry or escape from Earth none, after we left the planet and were traveling through outer space. Apollo 13 sure had many other issues, however, did not completely destroy the space craft and the crew was able to be saved. So you're telling me that factions that have technology which matches or comes close to that of the Star Trek/Star Wars universes would have a harder time keeping their crews safe and their space craft stable and not exploding for no reason? They don't have sensors to know what's ahead of them, they just run into things? This is by far the worst suggestion here.
The game does have space monsters, they act similar to pirates and get stronger as time goes on.
You can put weapons on colony ships if you would like. This is why when I'm colonizing extreme worlds middle game I tend to stay away from poorly defended areas if they don't have weapons. Nothing in the game currently prevents this from happening and does happen.
Why? This is Stardock's vision for their game using a template they had from their previous games of the same title. So let's scrap that and copy another game and completely abandon our game and why many fans like our game versus other games.
Now I'm not saying that Galactic Civilizations III is perfect and I'm not saying that I would have made all the same choices for the direction of this game but, the game is fun and I enjoy this game more than I do many other games out there that will either nickel and dime a player for more dlc's (which Stardock does offer but, they also presold the game with them included for those that had the foresight and want the entire game which I personally love about Stardock) or, make the game so shallow that you've conquered the game and are done playing it a few hours after you started playing it because there is nothing more to accomplish.
Game's too easy to break. No point in playing. Roleplayers tend to suck at min/maxing, and vice versa.
Civilization series games don't use many % modifiers for precisely this reason. The highest %modifiers you can get in Civ games is maybe 100% (where you're doubling your base production) and that's only at the end of the tech tree. In Gal Civ you can get these % modifiers at the very beginning.
Too easy. Thus: boring.
Military tactics effectively don't matter. If you get your economy up, you can steamroll your opposition.
Anyway, i managed to achieve some good productivity FINALLY, but its way too much!! Its like i am starved starved starved all the first period of the game, then suddenly in a short period i am flooded with productivity and realize the game is pointless because i am now way overpowered for it to be a challenge.
Well that is more of an AI problem than gameplay. I like the idea of space monsters. No reason to get rid of pirates.
Space pirate monsters! Why not?
No, it's more than AI. The reason the AI can't be balanced is because if they were "balanced" to take advantage of exponential growth mechanics in the game, the human player would lose very quickly and it would be no fun. So either the human takes advantage of it and craps on the AI or the AI takes advantage of it and craps on the human. There is no middle ground.
There are already space monsters they are green and fly around although rare. I believe it's a mega event.
I don't understand why you think this. Would you care to actually explain why you think it is impossible for a computer to be as good at a thing as a human?
The game isn't fun with exponential growth. At least not for anyone with any semblance of mathematical talent.
The AI starts with bonuses. Add in a heuristic where the AI can take advantage of the exponential growth processes in the game and you can never catch up. Thus game not often. Make AI dumb so they can't take advantage of the bonuses. But you can. Game also not fun because the numerical bonuses the AI gets don't matter much if you're better at taking advantage of the system.
Also, spamming out econ starbases to get more bonuses gets repetitive, quick.
Non sequitur. Space exploration is too easy.
Well in the programming perspective there is no problem comparing, or doing math. It does this very well. Not in HTML, but in most non script languages. Decision making ng is really good, but it is imperative to have a value system based on numbers. Without a default skript it would be imperative to predict all variables. But why unless it was watching the player. But wait if the player has stats to monitor ai why not let the ai use them to dictate it's play style augmented with map size and victory conditions.
Nonsense. That is why there are difficultyy tiers, so that everyone can play on theirs. You only need to balance different heuristics for different difficulty tiers. highest tier gets the best heuristics (and maybe some small bonus), done. By the way, feel free to read my first post again, I asked a couple of questions there.
You should really try to mod GC3 to ahve flat boni on all buildings and see if that makes it any less exponential. You are aware, that these % boni are additive, right? 3 basic factories is a modifier of 1+5*15% = 175% and not (1+15%)^5 = 201% (ignoring adjacency). That one is linear growth (until you have to upgrade)(ignoring adjacency again).
The difficulty tiers are just percentage-based bonuses though. It's not "AI". Regardless of whether you used a flat bonus system or a percent-based one, the game is always going to be easy/difficult based upon the real, true, AI of the system. If the logic isn't written to take advantage of it, then it doesn't matter if your growth system is flat or percent. Only the output matters (in this case, Research/Production/Wealth/Growth).
Changing to a flat-bonus doesn't fix the real issue. It's a red herring. The AI is the real issue.
Linear growth or exponential - doesn't matter. What matters is: is the rest of the game balanced for the bonuses. The current answer is 'yes'. You're chasing the wrong solution to the problem.
Let's examine:
In any discussion about the bonuses/growth/power of the game, you have to look at input and output. The output is what you spend these "power" on: research and production. The game is designed to accommodate the exponential growth.
Look at the jump from Large Hulls to Huge Hulls; look at the research required and the production required in a shipyard to build them. If you've researched engines, weapons and armor as well (and miniaturization specializations to cram more of them on a single hull) then outfitting a Huge Hull ship to the gills requires a non-linear jump in production power. The game accounts for this; it depends on this. Same goes for research; at various stages the bump is so significant to learn certain research that a flat-bonus system wouldn't help the game any. The hurdles for the AI would still remain. Let me repeat that because it's really important: the hurdles for the AI wouldn't change.
This is really no different than the math for a RPG; it's the same equation: damage out, damage in. If you give characters an exponential growth in damage output, you have to accommodate that by generating enemies that have enough hit points to soak up the damage. If you leave those enemies as they are, with hit points that accommodate exponential damage, and then you suddenly nerf the damage growth down to a linear equation for the PC, the PC reaches a point where they can't realistically kill the enemies anymore, because they lack the basic damage capabilities.
The "balance" is what counts, in the end. It doesn't matter if you use a linear equation or an exponential one. What matters is that input and output are balanced.
In GC3 terms, you'd end up requiring so much research to get Huge Hulls, for instance, that it wouldn't be fun to play. Nor would it be fun to try and build them... It would take forever.
As it is, the game is well balanced right now for the progression of bonuses.
So the issue here isn't the exponential equation. The real issue here, the heart of this whole deal, is the AI, which doesn't adjust; it never plays "smarter".
What you're wanting is the AI to be "smart" enough to take advantage of the math in the way a human does; to make optimal decisions that result in optimal results. And I agree: that would be ideal. The current difficulty levels are not "artificial intelligence" at all; they're just modifiers to production/research/growth, etc. That's not making the computer opponents smarter, it's just giving them a significant advantage; it's house money. It's like playing Monopoly, only instead of starting with $1,500, the AI gets to start with $3,000 and everything is doubled (dice rolls, cards pulled, money earned, etc). It's given them God-Mode to play with, basically. But it does nothing to make them smarter.
GC3's growth, modifiers and bonuses are well balanced for the tech tree and shipyard production, as currently coded. What the game needs is true AI, not some hacked-up cheat-bonuses. Best we can do on that front is mods.
I also think you are missing his point. Sure there is a balance point for any growth formula you apply, but depending on the formula you get the power ratio if they don't play at the same efficiency. Or - what I think is his argument - don't play at the same formula.
We assume some mystical true power formula P1(t) = P0 + e1*t for player one and P2(t) = P0 + e2*t for player two, where e1/2 are the efficiency at which the players use their time (i.e. their skill; can also contain boni if useful to the AI heuristics) and t is the time that has passed. Then for the power ratio we get:
1 <= P1/P2 <= e1/e2 ; if e1>e2
If you do the same for the Power formula P1(t) = P0*exp(e1*t) and P2 analogously you get:
P1/P2 = exp(e1*t-e2*t)
and therefore
1 <= P1/P2 <= infinity ; if e1>e2
The power ratio can spin out of control, whereas in the linear case it converges.
The case of different formula should obviously be even worse. This is the case I usually observe with the AI.
------
Putting the imbalanced case aside:You currently can't even mod the AI to the same efficiency as a good human player. Because it is not reactive to the situation in many cases (building improvements, tech order, ship blueprints, ...). You can tweak it so the AI does the right think at about the right time but it will always remain an approximation with tools currently available to modders. You can't give it simple instructions like:
If( food - population < 1 and number of farms < optimal number){ Build Farm; Move Farm to the top of the queue; If( planet is full and manufacturing bonus > optimal bonus){ Replace manufacturing building with Farm; }}
Because you are missing the If condition and the move to the top of the queue and the replace function (I am not saying you need this exact heuristic in order to have a strong AI behaviour, but it is an example for a good check that could run every turn). You can only give it an order in which to try to build things, edit: you can actually make it depend on planet size, the standard AI just doesn't use this option. (I know what I am gonna do tonight )
(You can still squeeze a bit of performance out of the SD's AI with what is given (*cough* make it use hives *cough*))
Bottomline to my opinion is:
- SD's AI is too weak to tell what a game with a more lolid one would be like - The balance is fine enough for single player, I like GC3 for it expect for the hardly adjustable tech speed - what is needed are AI tiers with different heuristics to accomodate differently experienced players - a better interface for modders could also go a long way towards a better AI
You can not compare the bonus of these two games like that. GC3 is Additive %, CiV is not which is why CiV limits or trys to limit the use of % bonuses and GC3 requires the use of % bonuses.
You currently can't even mod the AI to the same efficiency as a good human player. Because it is not reactive to the situation in many cases (building improvements, tech order, ship blueprints, ...). You can tweak it so the AI does the right think at about the right time but it will always remain an approximation with tools currently available to modders. You can't give it simple instructions like:If( food - population < 1 and number of farms < optimal number){ Build Farm; Move Farm to the top of the queue; If( planet is full and manufacturing bonus > optimal bonus){ Replace manufacturing building with Farm; }}Because you are missing the If condition and the move to the top of the queue and the replace function (I am not saying you need this exact heuristic in order to have a strong AI behaviour, but it is an example for a good check that could run every turn). You can only give it an order in which to try to build things,edit: you can actually make it depend on planet size, the standard AI just doesn't use this option. (I know what I am gonna do tonight )(You can still squeeze a bit of performance out of the SD's AI with what is given (*cough* make it use hives *cough*))Bottomline to my opinion is: - SD's AI is too weak to tell what a game with a more lolid one would be like - The balance is fine enough for single player, I like GC3 for it expect for the hardly adjustable tech speed - what is needed are AI tiers with different heuristics to accomodate differently experienced players - a better interface for modders could also go a long way towards a better AI
Hit the nail on the head there! The current AI is very Linear, due to this, as modders all we can do is make it more efficient at been Linear. Its quite a big let down tbh, for a 64 bit engine I was hoping for more.
I disagree that you are under powered at the start, and then overpowered. I can churn out ships at 1 a turn regardless of where I am in the game, 30 turns in or 300 matters not if you have built your planets right. Same goes for research, 3-5 turns constant.
Eco starbases are a part of the game, deal with it or mod them out, simple. The game is modable (Although its not highly modable yet) for a reason, take advantage of it. if your unhappy with the current system, it would not be hard to mod it. Set Min Range to 8, increase the bonuses for modules, 4x would probably be about right and you now have 1 SB per system initially, 3 at a push (would depend on system proximity and how good you are at min/max)
You can apparently make the governor planet class dependent, but you can't tell the AI to use several different e.g. Homeworld governors.
Stardock ... why you tease me so?
Yay Marigold is back.
What you need to do Marigold is wait for the Expand-alone. Lets see what that brings. Also try these mods..
Try Horemvores Star trek mod. Load it all up. Set difficulty to Godlike insane size. Go and try to win. Come back and tell me how bored you are. Seriously I am glad you are back BUT you need to post your threads in a less condescending way. Your posts come off as an attack on the proficiency of the Stardock developers and its rather offensive (or would be if i worked for Stardock).
With that said, I am glad to see you are back Marigold. I got nothing to comment as folks here already said as much. But you should try Horemvores mods and see how you do.
Cheers.
Just to be clear here:
I don't think ANYWHERE in any of the GC games does exponential growth in modifiers occur. There are lots of places where polynomial growth occurs, but the two are as different as they are from simple arithmetic bonuses.
Exponential: (( Base + 20% ) + 20% ) +20% = Base * 1.2^3
Polynomial: Base + 20% + 20% + 20% = Base + 60%
Arithmetic: Base + Mod1 + Mod2 + Mod3
And, no, neither Exponential nor Polynomial automatically are worse than Arithmetic. It all depends on the size of your constants. In the case of having a fixed constant per building, you introduce two problems quickly: to get higher production, you require a steadily increasing amount per building, if you don't want to force people to build vast quantities of buildings. So, remind me again, what's the difference (really) then having a series of three buildings that give a +5, +15, and +30 set of fixed bonuses vs ones which give you a +15%, +30%, or +50%? It all depends on the math of the other things going on, and that's JUST AS HARD to balance as using percentages, and just as easy to break.
Right. Does anyone still remember the Drath from Gal Civ II?
Exactly how was War Profiteering "balanced?" It was either useless (very small maps) or absolutely overwhelming (very large maps).
My point is: I don't care what sort of AI you try to make. With the technology around today, the game CAN'T be balanced if the economy uses the growth system it currently uses. It's the wrong strategy.
What we need is an AI or a system that allows the AI to beat you when it's behind. That would make the game fun.
ROFL stomping the AI gets boring after a while.
So, uh, maybe that's the No 1 Reason why they decided to introduce multiplayer, marigoldran?
"Look, there's no way we're going to beat the min-max folk. Whatever we do with the AI you know at some point they'll figure out the Min-Max Method and then bitch about it on the forums because 'it's too easy, Stardock!' Um....tee-dee-tee...What ta do...What to...HEY!! Multiplayer! Let the min-maxers take on each other!!"
As you yourself say "I don't care what sort of AI you try to make"...Even if Stardock did the AI to use the strategy you're proposing, which IIRC is exponential growth rather than linear, you'd figure out the way to beat the AI at some point so then we tumble back to Square 1: The AI is Too Easy To Beat.
Basically, I agree with trims2u, without going through and working out the maths: Balance is a bitch and easily breakable.
Yeah, except no one's playing multiplayer. Not that I'm aware of.
They don't have Battlenet like Blizzard does, so there's no easy way to play or find games.
Do you play mulitiplayer much, Blondini? All talk and no game. Is that what you are?
Quoting original post.
1. Easily fixable in a mod, change Ai blue prints.
2. Easier said than done. I'm sure the devs thought this was balanced when this started. The problem is there will always be bugs. They even tried a new engine, so they tried starting from scratch. That causes it's own sets of problems, but you got to keep up with progress. All they can do is fix problems as they arise from players one by one. You should start posting bugs, so they can fix them.
3. The only problem I ever find with this is when the Ai. doesn't do this well, but people then complain it's to hard. A complaint that should always be ignored.
4. I thought that was a problem when people started complaining about to aggressive colony expansion. They need to bring back advanced Ai algorithims, so we could have it both ways with everything.
1. opposite for me I would like to see taxation back, maybe a little scaled down for balance. Local and global sliders for me. Now what I have noticed which is silly is that research and manufacturing doesn't directly transfer into that. I could see making that unchangeable while you still allocate spending. Spending allocation makes the game more fun. One of the reasons I'm probably done with civilization except maybe four. So we can agree to disagree on this.
2. I agree there needs to be some supply and demand if not enough people then it would actually cost with no production. What would be good would be a tool tip letting you know it's not a good idea to build this right now. Maybe a supply, and demand system based on population growth of a planet, and the rest of the empire, but this might be considered leading instead of open gameplay.We could also add corruption from overpopulation, or not enough infastructure, or to much infastructure for the population.
3. more concerned about the Ai here, but you could always play that way no one stopping you. The extra resources would then applied elsewhere.
4. Moot, more tiles this way for other stuff.
5. moot
6. Sure that way I would actually be required to build economic starbases instead of where I find more important at the time which is the whole game.
8. I think you meant there is a chance of getting lost. The wording could be cleaned up hear.
9. Can't we have both.
10. Still that chance with pirates.
Quoting post
he's actually talking about industrialization. realistic. A unindustrialized nation can never compete against an industrialized nation. Some people have made this complaint it is silly.
A reasonable solution for expansion is first bring back the economic wall, or require resources for building anything except constructors. Now if you do this instead of counting one per resource it would require not sure how much per turn probably will take some balancing.
Not really supporting exploration game. That was one of the drawbacks of escape into unknown. Did like their resource requirement for building even though I thought it needed more balancing for resources.
Quoting post 2
agree, but you could always make things better. If less micromanaging means less decisions that affect game play then I'm against that though you could leave automated options for those who want them.
I think the economic starbase limit applies to the fact you could do the same thing stardocks does by putting a limiting number of modules on a starbase instead of only gaving one, and the only letting you have one per system. I feel the same way about constructure spam moot.
Games do make things super expensive or cheap. I think resource gathering for manufacturing with still a rush buy option instead, and economics do need a little fixing kind of like what 2 had.
Good point on technology, but I leave this area up to the experts the devs.
quoting 3
I thought that civilization was a little unrealistic on it's industrialization.
Our economy is how we won world war 2. You not liking realism. The reason why they credit the south for losing the civil war was industry. remember we wanted Robert E Lee to comand our army when he turned it down. He was picked over george mclellen.
quoting 6
Can't really argue with the point that a human would be required to learn a challenging game.
quoting 7
would rather random monsters over a mega event can we mod them in.
quoting
Marigoldran did you just ask for a dumb Ai. I would have to disagree 100% with that.
quoting 10
You must play smaller maps try bigger ones you don't go far fast on insane; also, you slow down game play that would make exploring more difficult. I basically have to disagree on that premise. I would say play a bigger map. That is why I pushed for an insane map, but I don't like the way Birth of an empire ie Birth of an federation did it's exploring. I would like a better solution. Besides that solution wouldn't work for an insane map. Any ideas for exploration.
quoting 16
You are talking about the game this is possible to do tbh.
quoting 18
exponental growth of the empire to fit the required needs of better tech. I think he means manufacturing times base production does civilization have base production. I think this is more dependent on resources. You can't do that in empty space where the ground has a lot of resources. I think that is closer to what he means.
I'm also going to try to speak hear because civilization doesn't have classes for it's cities, and at least on the same continent can connect all it's cities there is no litit to how many buildings you can build. To counter this you can only build one building per city, like if we only had colony buildings, and player achievements. In galactic civilizations we don't need a building limit; because we are limited by class, and terraforming, so we can't build an unlimited number of buildings on our planets. The mechanics are different. Dumping planet class, and adopting more of a civilization build que would do this.
https://forums.joeuser.com/473534https://forums.galciv3.com/472121
You guys might be interested in this it's about a feasable ai if they wanted to do the work. It is a dummied down version of a cooler Ai.
You either make the AI smarter, which appears difficult, or you make it harder for humans to take advantage of the flaws.
The second choice is much easier to program in.
One of the things Gal Civ II did well is that it made the humans suck at the beginning. We couldn't expand like the way we can in III. Well, unless you got Drath tech and War Profiteering.
People do play multiplayer, the reason you don't see many games available in the lobby is because most games take hours/days/weeks to finish. Therefore when there is a new game up, that player most likely won't be starting a new game for a while.
Games are find to play and join the main problem is finding committed players to play at a normal time when everyone can play. Myself I play twice a week with another player and usually playing on average 4-6 hrs a week we complete 1 game in 1-2 months. Now I haven't attempted a 3+ player MP game since early on so I don't know how stable it is on anything more than 2 as even that isn't as stable as I'd like.
Personally I'd like several upgrades to MP to make things better as a whole for MP.
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