I won't even touch RTS. Haven't in years. I tried it more than a couple times, and like the early portion, but overall it's just not for me.

Not gonna lie, Total War: Warhammer 1 & 2 are giving me straying thoughts though. Not because of the battles, although I do like watching them on Let's Plays, but more for the fantastic lore.

I may even end up buying those way down the line when they are on deep sale and put the battle on auto-resolve. That seems silly, but the desire is strong right now.

Quoting Moser_Alchemist,

reply 27

I'm in the turn based camp.  I like playing games at my pace not the computer's. 

My wish list item for Stardock is that they take what they learned from the Elemental games, and apply it to a alien planet strategy game.  I still go back to Alpha Centauri, warts and all,  and play it every couple years for a game or two.

 

Agreed! I re-bought SMAC in the last year. Damn masterpiece, that.

Although I want that new fantasy 4x at some point too!

I need to buy SMAC again, Windows 10 will not read the old CD due to copy protection no longer being supported.  At least I still have GalCiv

I'm in the TBS camp.  All my favorite games are TBS.  1400+ hours on GalCiv III.  1500+ hours on CIV V.  I've played RTS games, but never seem to get drawn into them longterm.  I have TBS games from the 90's that I'll still play.

I think that info on demographics would be interesting. My gut says that TBS has probably the oldest average age of any game genre, and also probably the most disposable income, too.

As I've gotten older, things like puzzle games and FPS have lost their appeal, particularly as most of the latter turn into MMO in order to play at all.  I'm also not willing to put the money into a max-graphics machine anymore ($400 graphic cards and $1500 machines to run them in are silly, when a $500 all-in PC will play GC3 for years).  I also recognize that I don't have the fast twitch to play competitively.  About the best "FPS"-style game I can do is the World Of Warships stuff, because that's actually slow paced and tactics matter as much as aiming and reactions.  That said, WoWS has to have one of the crappiest dev teams I've experienced in a long time, and it's a classic example of a company that neither understands how to make money from a game or manage their game world in terms of balance and fun (the fact they make money says more about the idiots who pay them than it does for any successful company strategy).

Back here, in the RTS/TBS world where I spend my money, I really find that the distinction is Tactics (RTS) vs Strategy (TBS).  Most modern RTSes are now pretty much Third Person Shooters, with some minor production stuff slapped on.  I'm always going for TBS, since it has three things I prefer:

1. It's interruptible. That's important as the demographic ages, since we have less and less contiguous blocks of time to play.

2. It requires a lot of thought. RTS success generally follows a formulae that doesn't change too much between major updates, and your success in it basically boils down to following the script better than your opponent(s).  A lot of that has to do with the lack of variety in maps, but it also is pretty much enforced by the limited scope of a RTS; just like there's not a lot of different winning moves for a squad of marines in a firefight, RTSes suffer from the lack of viable options for play.  TBS of course none of this applies - there can be some general principles, but overall, you're required to think a WHOLE lot more and be mentally flexible.

3. TBS games tend to be sandbox ones, where mods are varied and interesting. RTS generally are extremely constrained, because the level of skill required to add in new features is FAR too high for most people, and there's little in the way of low-hanging changes that can be made.  A classic example of this for me was Homeworld 2.  Beautiful and unique 3D space RTS.  But modding it required an enormous effort, and generally required advanced Maya skills to add new ships, and a programmer-level knowledge to make any other changes to the system itself.  Consequently, there are really only 2 mods, and not much else.  TBS as a genre almost always has a huge amount of flexibility to mod, and it's far easier for the casual person to mod it, and that leads to MUCH more interesting variety of play.

One thing here specific to GC3, and especially to us founders:  I'd like to find some way that SD could make an additional revenue stream off us.  I know, I'm asking for a way to pay SD more money, after I did the $100 I'm-so-Insane founder deal.  I feel the DLC deal included in the original Founder concept was really nice, but it did cut off future revenue completely for SD.   Maybe next time, SD should commit to a "Founder-level" buy-in that gets people all Expansion packs (for instance, Mercenaries and Crusade here), but not the DLC "bling".  I do feel it would be fair to find some way we pay $10 or so every year for additional content of some kind.  I just don't have any ideas as to how to do this.

I know what you mean.  I ended up buying a copy for somebody else.    

Not to be completely off-topic, but it's EAnybody -  I wanted something that wasn't tied to my normal handles, because I expect to sell the account in the not-so-distant future. And WoWS really needs a add-in graphics card if you want to play at decent resolution - not powerful, but something like a Nvidia GTX 650 or better if you're playing at 1080p.  I've been playing WoWS for almost 2 years now (started about 3 months after it got out of beta), and if you're looking for a company that is clueless about running a gaming economy, how to balance, why bugfixing is really important, and having a competent PR division, look at WarGaming LLC. I usually play up at T6 to T9, where I've got two dozen different ships in 4 different nations. I'm pretty much at the end of my rope with them, so I doubt I'll be playing after the New Year.

Back on topic:  for the ship design AI, I would think that a critical thing is to make it tied to both the diplomatic stats and the current tech research queue.  The AI should be looking at who is a likely opponent (and seeing what kind of offense/defense they have), then pushing for research to counter that.  In the areas of "what do I do right now" for the AI, maybe have them build in two streams of stuff:

1. Empire defense, where range modules are mostly ignored, and you tend to have low engine requirements. Attack is a priority over defense. Maybe mass allocation something like 25% engines (mostly thrusters), 50% offense, 25% defense.

2. Empire attack, where range and engines are important and defense is just as important as offense.  I'd go with mass allocations of: 30% engines (mostly primary movement ones), 10% range, and 30% each attack/defense.

I have and i Play/played a lot of games like this. Distant Worlds, Moo 2,3,4, Stellaris, Endless Space 1,2 and much more But GalCiv 3 was, is and will ever will be my absolutly Favorit! I never ever loved a game so much like this before! Iam soooo happy to hear that there will come More and More addons and approvments for years. Iam a beta Buyer and have all dlc and will have all dlc wich Comes out! Love to See how was the development goes with big steps ahead. I prefer TBS because this gives much More possibilitys to make the game moooore complex and to manage that. 

Many thanks for that great game  and for all what Comes in future for it!