I'm enjoying my time back on Galactic Civilizations. The team is working on lots of neat things for the upcoming version 2.0 update which is due this month.
Here are a few highlights:
Administrators
There's a new resource called administrators. Your capital world provides N of them where N is based on the size of the map. Building a starbase consumes one. You can get more by researching government related techs but that means you're not researching weapons or economy techs.
The practical effect is that it takes a little pressure off the idea that you have to spam out starbases and also gives some advantages to smaller empires who can now choose to use their starbases to improve morale and productivity in their home systems.
Better diplomacy
When I play other games, I tend to cheese. There have been patches made for games over the years to counter some of my cheese. There's plenty of diplomacy cheese in GalCiv also and thanks to player feedback, I was able to b-line my way to it.
But it wasn't just cheese that I wanted to improve on. I wanted the AI to do more trading and less "give me stuff please". So I worked on the diplomatic system to work harder on coming up with trades. It'll probably be one of the first things players notice. More AI talk with more interesting trades.
One new system I spent some time on was the concept of redlining.
When I inevitable have to work on contracts in my "day job" at Stardock/Mohawk/Oxide I do what is called redlining. That is where I make marks on a proposal as to why I think we should pass on it or cross out things that won't work for us.
One of the first things I did when cheesing GalCiv was to use the old technique of manipulating the aliens to do things that weren't in their best interests. Now, to be fair, most people don't do this kind of thing but once you do it, it's hard not to do it.
So in response, I implemented a redlining system that you code-geeks might find interesting:
I noticed that the game passes around the trade offer a lot:
VOID IAIOpponent::AppraiseTradeOffer(CDiplomacySystem::ActiveTradeInfo* pTradeOffer, CDiplomacySystem::ActiveTradeInfo* pOtherSideTradeOffer, ObjectID forPlayerID, ObjectID otherPlayerID)
See the pTradeOffer there? It was the full detail of what was being offered and the AI looks at it in lots and lots of different ways.
So what I did is add a vector of redlines to it. That is, the AI can be evaluating an offer and say "Hey, this tech is too valuable" or "Those guys are too tough" and add that redline to the trade offer.
Then, when it gets back to you, you see why they rejected it. And in the process of implementing it, I went ahead and got rid of some of the things I was exploiting like how easy it was to get other people to do your dirty work (you can still do it but you need to have a lot of persuasive ability or have a much better deal or both).
UI: This will be controversial
I don't expect this next change to be universally loved and I haven't gotten approval yet from the GalCiv III lead designer, Paul Boyer to check this in.
But anyway, I really really REALLY hate the ship list thing. That is, when I go to pick a ship to build, it gets filled with tons of auto-generated ship designs. None of the filter options work for me (i.e. I don't like them).
So instead, what I did was make it so that when you first load up the game, only your favored ships are shown and the other ones are folded up. Then I made it so that if you click on the label (like Beam Ships) it'll unfold the other ships.
Now, the trickier thing I had to do was when designing a ship. I wanted my ships that I designed to automatically show up in the favored list. It was annoying to design a ship and then have to go look for it.
So now, when I design a ship and save it (in this case, I'll call it the Intrepid class).
Ironically, this proved a lot tougher than you'd think because the ship design screen deals primarily with saving files where as the ship build list actually deals with UI handles (which don't exist when you design a ship since you haven't added that ship to a listbox list yet).
But it's done.
There's a lot of other stuff going into 2.0. Today I'm working on late game AI stuff.
This free update is due this month. Stay tuned!
Going from your "Modding Help" post, your using a 1.83 Map file, which removes Administrators since they were not added to this file untill 2.0. You will have to add them in. Unless your happy not to have Administrators.
Look at the top of your resources and relics quantity list.
After this night patch we have on insane map only 32 administrators + 50% from research!
Please, change it, it is impossible on insane-size map almost without bases... Yesterday it was almost 90, and is it not enough to play normally.
Looks to me like we would need a game setting for starting administrators to directly set the desired number for the personal play style within a certain range.
It got tweaked because players were saying the starting N number of starbases was a bit much. Overall I quite like the system, but in my run through I thought the initial number could be reduced in order to force you into thinking about where you would use them a bit more, particularly early game. However, If I'm reading the latest patch notes right you get a lot more from teching up now. Unless you were a starbase mirco-manager prior to the admin system (how do you like them clicks? ) I don't see how it makes a game impossible, especially when you can build out planets themselves way better than the AI ever could by virtue of using specialist buildings and planned hex hubs alone. Currently the AI can't really compete with the production a decent player can get without significant bonus' because they don't use hardly any of the special buildings (the reason I would like AI govs to have another pass).
You actually get quite a bit more than that. If you go through the tech tree you'll see you get 20% bumps to it per high level tech plus a couple that give you more admins outright.
I don't like the idea of administrators limiting the number of starbases you can build. I may not have played this game as much as others, but my experience has shown me that spamming constructors and starbases is a good way to fall behind on military ship construction. Shouldn't this and starbase maintenance be factors that limit how many starbases you build?
Only in early game according to my experience. Later it's no problem to keep up a good military *and* spam constructors ...
I still support a soft cap rather than a hard cap..
Administrators represent free to build starbases....once you run out starbases cost 1000 credits to build and say 25 to 100 credits a turn to support.... This can be reduced with research but never eliminated.
if a player just REALLY needs that starbase, they will be able to build it. But at a loss of revenue or other options to spend money.
I really think that just eliminating the over-lapping stacking effect of economy starbases would go a long ways to cutting down on the constructor/starbase spam. In other words, just make it so that colonies can only benefit from the effects of 1 starbase. Just that one change would alleviate many of the problems of tech research snowballing too fast late game, problems of the AI not being able stay anywhere close with player production, constructor spam, any many many many other minor and major issues.
Just a thought.
Er... no, that would just kill the concept of "tall empires" dead. Do not like.
A hard limit (with bonuses from tech etc) is fine with me. It might be a bit more 'realistic' to have a softer limit and make starbase maintenance costs above that limit grow in an exponential fashion, but I don't want to have to evaluate whether or not that would be "worth it" - I'm not an accountant. Hard limit preferred. I think Brad is absolutely going in the right direction with Administration limits.
You know how planets sponcer shipyards. This is already in the game can we have this as an optionally sponcer starbases. Have a screen like shipyards for starbases where instead of planets you could have shipyards. You could have one shipyard, one shipyard for multiple starbases, or multiple starbases for one shipyard. This would be for automated constructors. If you didn't want automated constructors then you wouldn't need a sponcer. This way I could dedicate shipyards without a lot of deleting. Cutting down on micromanagement. If you had multiple starbases for one shipyard the shipyard take turns sending constructors to starbases. The starbases would become empty when there are no modules.
Can we have Back the shipyard shutdown button.
Bach! Yes, we need more classical music!
Sorry
Have you considered instead of just consuming 1 administrator per starbase, you consumed a partial administrator per starbase module? Perhaps a starbase consumes 1 administrator, but each module consumes 0.1. Letting you make decisions about how generalized you want starbases to be vs how many you need. That gives you some nice tall vs wide gameplay I'd think.
Another idea: make administators not a fixed number, but give players a starting number according to galaxy size like now, but let new administrators appear over time by chance, setting the probability to raw production / x % per planet with x = 20 or another plausible factor. Tech then doesn't influence administator count, but lowers that factor, increasing administrator generation chance.
Introduce an improvement called "Administrator Academy" that gives a bonus to administrator appearance rate, say e. g. 3%. There could be several levels of this building with increasing bonuses.
If a starbase is destroyed the administrator dies, unless it is equipped with an "Administrator Rescue Capsule" module which gives the administrator a certain chance to survive an attack. This module could also have several levels with increasing survival chance.
Well, I have 71 now, this is all, that I can, I researched everything in this thread. It is tiny quantities for insane map, that is too small, to build necessary bases. It is a pity, that you don't play, and even try to play on the insane maps with this quantity of administrators. Especially when distant clusters. I talking about when huge spaces, when I need to build the bases just to get the neighbors, I even don't say about the mines, precursor's artefacts and build the economic bases.
this is a good idea
I am not pleased with the cap on star bases. I only found out about administrators when playing the Mercenaries campaign. I now cannot reach the Drengin!
It seems a silly idea, in my experience hiring an administrator is dead easy, hiring a scientist or engineer is not. My principal problem is building ships fast enough, yes I am probably doing something wrong but limiting a players ability to collect minerals and relics "to favour small empires" appears daft. The game is meant to be a 4X, Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. Are you saying GC3 is no longer a 4X game? Perhaps you should have called it Small Galactic Civilisations.
Finally limiting the map size is crazy. If my machine will not handle an Immense map then use a Large or smaller. I will now have to use an Insane size map for any future games, which is looking less likely. Space is Huge, really huge, bigger than you can imagine etc. I want lots of space out there. I can then limit good worlds to few, making even size 4 worlds valuble. I want bigger maps not smaller!
Disgruntled of Alpha Centauri.
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