Hi,
Just coming back to galciv 3 for crusade after a very long break and I go to my usual setup huge galaxy with around 10 players so plenty of space for everyone and you can build up before the inevitable war.
Map loads I zoom out to see where I am in the galaxy and..... what?? my first ship can cover half the galaxy with no tech, on abundant stars there must be no more than 100 so that leaves 10 stars per player and they dont even all have good planets so maybe 2-3 good ones per players and its so close to everything.
I tried the other sizes and insane map size seems to look like the old version of huge and they expect us to play 40-50+ players on that its so cramped its ridiculous.
when did the change happen? why?
Frogboy shrank the larger maps back in the 1.9 to 2.0 timeframe, and that carried over into Crusade. There was a mod available that restored the sizes, but it will probably have to be reworked for Crusade.
What was the reason for that? performance? gameplay? I rather like super huge maps like old times...
Gameplay. It isn't related to Crusade one way or the other.
With the changes to Crusade, I can probably make the map bigger.
That said, it's pretty disheartening seeing Crusade at 41% because people think Crusade is changing map sizes.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/527070/Galactic_Civilizations_III_Crusade_Expansion_Pack/
For what it's worth I havent rated the game yet on steam, I'm waiting to complete a game first
And from my first 70-80 turns I have a lot to relearn I am dead last in everything lol... and thats just on normal
But it did isn't it? I checked the GC3 MapSizeDefs and compare it to Crusade one, Crusade knocked most of size down about 33-50% except for Tiny and Insae which aren't touch. The difference between second largest and largest one are too huge. 160 hexes for Excessive and 320 for Insane. It was 290 for Excessive and 380 for Insane before Crusade hit. But really, i bloody annoy how those people start the game. See the map size get smaller then plow in to complain without playing the damn game first. At lease finish one session or two you mongrel bloody hell. Bigger isn't mean better all the time. It is like they trying to compensate for something.
I haven't finish my own session yet but i quite enjoy Crusade so far even the overall map size is smaller. It make the game less boring. Less end turn with nothing happen and more interact with other factions.
Whether it is Crusade, or 1,9, or whatever, a lot of users "Feel" the difference, including old time users like me. I think it may be time to compromise with the user base on this one somehow. If it is not a performance issue, you may as well spoil people.
Disclaimer, I play Insane mostly, although I do take smaller ones occasionally, and I would play bigger sizes if they were available. So, don't go by me.
That is disheartening. I think these people haven't played the game in a long time because the map changes were many updates ago. I have had almost 1000 hours for GCIII, I have not played it in 3 months since reading about the changes coming from Crusade... I am pretty sure I will pack on another 1000 soon. Great job Stardock!
It infurious me because if they want the same damn pre-Crusade size back, it only take them one bloody minute to copy/paste the MapSizeDefs.xml from GC3 folder to replace GC3Crusade one. It annoy me how the sodding DLC just came out not even 3 hours and these people whining about it like they are special snowflake without complete the frekken game session first. They REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE like an autistic kid and refuse to ask for fix or help, only crying out loud.
Ok I looked into this further and it does appear that the largest map sizes ARE smaller (in terms of sheer number of tiles. They are much larger in terms of number of objects).
I can only assume that the mapdefs from whatever was the version of GalCiv when Crusade split off (1.9? 2.0?) is in here.
For tomorrow, I'm having them sync the two so that they're exactly the same. I'm really sorry about that. I'm somewhat...flummoxed since I changed everything else about the map setup except for map sizes.
The MapSizeDefs in Crusade are the ones from 1.9, not the ones from 2.0. Changing them to the ones in 2.0 should stop most of the complaints about the sizes of the galaxies.
For those who are more insane than the usual insane, I have something to report. Larsenex asked about sizes larger than Insane in this post. I did some testing then and found that the game crashed if the value for MapSizeDef for Insane was increased by 1 or more above the value of 380. Today, Brad made a comment somewhere, I think the Steam forums, that it is possible to have larger map sizes in Crusade than those that exist. I decided to find out if Insane could be made larger, so I made a mod and have been increasing the size of Insane maps to see how large I can go before the game crashes. I have increased the value of MapSizeDef to 500 so far (31.5% increase) without a crash during galaxy generation.
I tried more sizes, all the way to 1140, without a crash. However, the galaxies looked to similar, so I tried zooming out and seeing how the bottom edge looked against the UI on the screen. They all seemed to be the same size the galaxy with a value of 380. I need to do some work to see if the galaxy sizes are actually increasing with values larger than 380.
Left a positive review on steam. I was going to wait until my first game was complete so I could leave an honest assessment but I've played enough to be VERY impressed already. Oversight or not, the game is unjustly being ravaged in reviews over this issue IMO.
Map size in current release is dreadful, especially given the number of 'recommended' AIs. For a 'Normal' map, I had an AI homeworld 10 tiles or so from my start. I am using the 'Sol' system and 'Mars' was colonized by someone else before I could even build a Shipyard. It feels severely claustrophobic.
Ok so I've sort of been following the map size thing and am disheartened by the whining dumbasses on steam, but I do have a question:
Once the dust settles, how big will the various map sizes be? And when should I expect the dust to settle? Right now GoG has something called "2.1".
Thanks!
Hello. Even under pre-Crusade, I always used bigger maps with more sparsely-spaced celestial bodies, and I also remove half of the races and all of the pirates.
Space is supposed to be BIG and mostly EMPTY. It SHOULD take longer to get anywhere, especially in the early game when I haven't yet built advanced drive systems.
Plus, playing a space game on a crowded map just feels wrong. Space isn't supposed to be crowded like Beijing, Hong Kong, or New York.
Give me room to move, don't overfish the river or overhunt the deer in the woods, and don't poop upstream from me or I'll declare war on you. How human of me!
Brad said on the Discord chat yesterday that there'd be a patch coming to fix the map sizes, probably later today.
The patch for the map size problem is now available, I just downloaded it.
Yep, I just got it on Steam. Checking it out now...
When the map changes were originally made in 2.0 there were long threads of comments dissatisfied with the new sizes. Stardock changed the largest map sizes back to default but wouldn't touch the rest. I know you can remove players, but the default game mashes all these empires so close together that it just kills the first X in 4x, which I think is the best X. There's no time to explore if within the first few turns you run into another empire.
They should fix the "recommended player" tooltip since they change map size for like 3 times already. It is misleading and create trust issue against player.
Yes, this is it exactly. The game feels extremely cramped with the default map/opponent set-up. Yes, I can adjust it, but I don't want to have to play multiple games just to get to the 'right' number. Obviously that 'right' number is going to vary between people but right now it's set to ultra-claustrophobia.
If the projected number of habitable planets were displayed based on the settings you pick it would solve so many problems with map selection/galaxy options. Then people would at least have rough idea how long their games will last and how many empires they should roughly select.It's been a problem well before GC3... the entire series. I'd put money on it the only people who have a clue how many habitable planets they can expect on certain map sizes are those who have looked in the MapSizeDefs file.
We just changed the map sizes not the recommended number of players. But that's still good feedback for us. One suggestion is to set your stars/planets/etc to common. I just started a game with those settings and I feel like I have plenty of planets to explore and space to grow. Here's my starting corner: https://www.screencast.com/t/ClnWqRNa6sVg
But shouldn't that be the feeling for a 4x game...room to explore and grow before you conflict? If so, why isn't that the default option? Options are great, but players are typically going to gravitate to the defaults (at least until they have experience with the game). And honestly, based on my experiences with the initial released settings, I'm not surprised by the negative reviews. The game I started was beyond frustrating and I ended up just quitting out with little desire to play again.
I will, of course, try again with the new map sizes but honestly I think the default experience should be very positive and unfortunately, that certainly did not happen with Crusade.
I was literally playing yesterday and since crusade was installed, the maps have been ruined.
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