Greetings!
So the team is starting work on the next major expansion pack. But we also want to keep an eye on the base game.
Right now, the recent Steam reviews for GalCiv are pretty awful with most of the people reviewing it doing so because they don't like some of the changes in v2.5. So if there are changes you would like in 2.7 and beyond, this would be the place to ask.
The Steam review system is something I have and will continue to complain about because frankly, it absolutely destroys games. When it's less than 70, a game might as well not exist. So I'll be explicit, if you want us to keep working on GalCiv III, please leave a Steam review. If not, don't. If you already have, thank you!
As many of you know, I am AI biased. But I know I'm in a minority because there is another space strategy game outselling GalCiv III and, suffice to say, AI is not its focus.
It is clear that narratives in games matter. GalCiv has a quest system ala Fallen Enchantress/Sorcerer King. But we have tried to avoid doing that because we don't want the game to be a series of scripted narratives. We don't plan to change that position in the base game but we are looking at releasing DLC that will do that if players want it.
Now, the next major expansion pack focuses on politics and government. So we'll set all that aside for now. Otherwise, it's all open. What would you like to see?
Exactly. Haven´t tried it yet, but from changelog it clearly seems as culling of tall strategies, which we SO MUCH wanted to introduce.
Sad...
Frogboy, this nerfing of everything and killing of potential strategies really bugs me.Natural counter to population exploiting should be approval. It should be really painful to maintain morale of high-population planet and low approval should have severe consequences. Not some minor effects as it is right now, but severe production maluses, damage to buildings and eventually, rebellion.Killing everything that is "overpowered" doesn´t seem to be much of a solution for a game like Galciv is!
Looking at low moral colonies, the penalties are in the 10% range. The 25% raw production bonus from high moral is substantial, but the loss from low moral isn't. Moral feels more like a system for a bonus, rather than a problem to be solved.
GC3 is a really good game and I love that the developers take pride in it and are asking how to make it better. I think you guys nailed a lot of the interface like the negotiation bar. That makes it so much easier and faster to make a deal.
The typical trajectory of one of these games has multiple phases for me.
1. Novelty. What are all these shiny new buttons/races/techs/ etc?!
2. Exploration. Increasing difficulty level playthoughs to explore the game mechanics. Win, increase difficulty, win, increase difficulty. I am the best!
3. The wall. Once I get to a high enough difficulty the computer stomps on me.
4. Research. What in the heck is happening with food and cities? What exactly does "+25% research" mean?
5. Spreadsheet. Build a spreadsheet to help illustrate the game mechanics for myself.
6. Victory! Beat the snot out of the AI on harder difficulties with my new found understanding.
7. Remorse. Did I really beat the computer or did I just exploit the game mechanics? What is the difference? What is the meaning of life? Why am I playing this game?
8. Sabbatical. Until the next game is released.
If you can eliminate the spreadsheet step then the game will be better for me. It becomes unfulfilling when there is a complex interaction between multiple components which only acts as a trap for a casual player or the AI. If there is one optimal choice in almost every instance then why provide a choice?
The example of population and improvements to production has been discussed at length. Production is simply too complicated. In vanilla gc3 to calculate hammers you need to know your (raw production+bonuses) * (raw multipliers) * (wheel split) * (cumulative of racial, planetary, improvements, and adjacency multipliers). No matter how you tweak that system you will end up with a numerically superior choice which may not be intuitive to the player. My desire is to abandon the multi-step multipliers.
Simplify the system and simplify the bonus/multipliers. Make it clear what the choices are so the player is acting strategically on a high level. Maybe divorce population from social/military construction and make population fundamental to research/income. A player could build a smog-filled industrial world with minimal population and have specialty planets dedicated to finance/trade/tourism and research filled with people. That forces a choice that is clear for the player, research or production with lasting repercussions. The lore can even account for this because the Drengin would just have a slave pit world and the terrans would have a robotic factory world. Citizens invent and make money.
I would prefer not to have hardcaps on things. Morale is a softcap on population if the penalties are harsh enough. This would force the higher population planets to be higher class because there will be more required infrastructure to house, feed, and satisfy the population. That seems intuitive to me.
My only other complaint is that there is no effective defense or zone of control. I can't bottleneck my opponent or control the terrain at all. Why isn't my military starbase a space castle that the opposing fleet must neutralize instead of flying straight by? Why can't my planet install defensive weaponry that could bombard an orbiting or passing fleet? When I completely control a solar system why can anyone just fly straight through? Why have I mastered interstellar travel but I can't put a ginormous railgun on the moon?
Streamline and clarify the mechanics then we the players get to appreciate the quality of the AI without the obstacle/crutch of the planetary production confusion.
Hello:
I like many of the ideas above, like improving the military starbase more. For one, have the effects it can generate be available right away.
Other suggestions:
- Have stable wormholes. Very important for playing large maps. They can be guarded and fought over
- Have the ability to build a stargate. It starts as one special constructor. Build a stargate at one location. Move the constructor to a new distant point, build the receiving stargate. Travel then can commence from point A to B.
- Space is boring. Have more mysterious objects or regions in space where weird, powerful, mysterious things can be found or events to occur.
- Have ancient races like the First Ones from Babylon 5 flying around the galaxy
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Doug Adams
Space is mind-bogglingly boring, too, lioneljoe. And any traveller therein prays that it stays that way.
I agree that there should be more options for the defender.
-just improve military starbases in general. You could do something simple in a patch, like buff the starting bonus to weapons/defenses, and buff starting sensor range. Oh, and increase their area of effect please. HP could be a bit higher as well, though not at the beginning of the game.
-station garrisons should not have anything to do with legions in the global pool. You build a station garrison on a planet and you get a defending legion that cannot be moved. It does not require any legions to build, and is very cheap compared to a normal legion. That way, there might actually be a reason to defend a planet and the ground combat aspect of the game would mean something. Right now, it doesn't.
Also, as has been pointed out, borders aren't respected at all. It bothers me that my neighbours can harvest resources that are in my zone of control. It's also weird to go right next to my neighbour's home world and plop an influence base down beside it. Do borders mean anything at all? Are there borders? There should be.
There are not currently borders, merely lines that show your influence.
Personally I'm pro-borders existing, and being much tighter and separate than influence.
The immediate area around planets and starbases should be borders... anything else is influence only. This could even leave great gaps in your territory, that the other players can fly through, but if they get REALLY close to your planets or starbases it could be a big no-no and treaty violations.
Just a random idea here from a casual player, but what about this for "tall" civilizations:
At a certain level of population, you can commit to a planet by building an optional improvement. This greatly boosts the population cap of the world (making it a "Tall Colony"), but reduces the growth rate of non-Tall Colonies by a percentage.
The in-universe justification could be that Tall Colonies become a location people want to live over other colonies.
Over a long period of time or in a large scale game, you could keep building Tall Colonies by sheer effort and resources. However, each time you create a Tall Colony, the percentage stacks. Non-Tall Colonies grow at 50% rate, then 25%, then 12.5%, and so on. It becomes a real choice to make.
This could also be done via a civilization trait of some kind, like "Close-Knit: These people happily build dense societies, but languish if they feel they exist on the fringe."
In any case, you balance the game for wide civilizations first and use this mechanic to frame and balance tall civilizations. The improvement itself could be given buffs and debuffs that can be dialed up and down in minor patches to ensure that statistically having a tall civ is comparable to a wide one.EDIT: You could also do the opposite, having a "Low Colony" improvement for a planet. This would mean you can't colonize it normally or it has a tiny population cap, but you quickly get a steady stream of resources from it, non-Low Colonies get a boost, or something similar.
Realistically, in order to have Tall worlds, several things have to change to keep stuff in balance:
1. Raw production CANNOT be linear with population. It's just way too gamebreaking to do so. We've discussed several ways to fix this current 1:1 ratio, and while I don't have a total solution, I've tested one on my own that seems to balance considerably better.
Raw Production = .5 * (pop)^1.1
2. Improvements (wealth/production/research) have to have low, fixed values (i.e. +.5, +.75, +1, etc.) for the basic bonus, and modest % per level (e.g. +5% per level).
3. Approval has to be changed to a penalty system. You get 100% production at 100% approval. Any approval level below that reduces production. For example, use a linear step function, so for every full 5% below 100%, you lose 5% of full production. So a 43% approval rate gives a -55% penalty. To go with this, approval sources have to be more plentiful - e.g. bring back the starbase approval modules, but don't let them stack as high as planetary ones, and remove the resource requirements for "ordinary" (i.e. more than 1-per-planet) planetary approval improvements. It really has to be possible to have a 40+ population planet with 75%+ approval, and, with a bit of work, a 100% happy 30 pop planet.
What the above does is this: to get a Tall planet, you build mostly cities and approval buildings. This gives you very balanced values (i.e. similar adjusted wealth/research/production), but still sticking below a pure 1:1 pop:production ceiling, so a Tall planet isn't some incredible powerhouse, but rather a general "everything" planet. So, for a planet with 30 pop, you're looking at about 21 raw population, which means 21 production, 21 research, and 21 wealth.
For Wide empires, individual raw production for <10 pop planets is severely sub 1:1, and more like 1:2. There, you need to fill the planet with specialized buildings to get decent values, and you'll only ever get those for one category. So, presume a class-10 planet with 8 factories and 5 population, that would be 3 raw production, with maybe +4 and +100% in production bonuses, yielding a production of 14, but a research of 3 and wealth of 3.
In short, to support the difference between Wide and Tall, you need a population:raw ratio that yields more benefits per 1 of pop at high population levels than at low levels, AND you need individual improvements to provide substantial, but not overwhelming, bonuses. The goal is for Tall empires to consist of generalized worlds, and Wide ones of specialized worlds, with you needing somewhere around 3 Wide planets to equal one Tall planet in the sum total of output across each category.
This. Approval should provide natural counter to population over-exploiting. Having planet with low approval should have severe consequences, ending with that planet rebelling - which would also enable interesting spy strategies.
I am grateful to Stardock for their hard work on balance, but nerfing is not an solution...
This is what I was saying, this is how Galactic Civilizations II worked and that way there is no hard cap, just a soft cap based on number of entertainment buildings/farms/cities one can build. Why not?
I agree to this too
I think a linear population to production, 1 to 1 model, is the way to go, personally. It is simple and intuitive. Everything else can be balanced around that.
Making negative approval more penalizing is a nice idea, but would mostly limit tall empires, which are already basically non existent in this game. As others have pointed out, tall empires will lack necessary resources as well.
Let's face it: in Galactic Civ, there really is no such thing as a successful tall empire. There are just too many obstacles. For example, one way to increase your economic output without adding more planets is to simply grow your population, but good luck trying to do that if you have no monsantum. There should be some way around these obstacles, for example, higher level farming techs provide both an enhanced farm (that requires monsantum) and one that does not.
Another way to boost tall empires is to simply provide more specialized buildings, those one-per-player buildings such as the manufacturing capital or research capital, or buff these buildings. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of one-per-player building that provides extra tiles. This way you could have at least one very high class planet in your empire.
In more abstract terms, you have a choice to spend your strategic ressources (durantium, monsatium, wealth, citizens etc.) on one planet or another. It has to be attractive to 'pool' these ressources on one world. It has to be attractive enough to offset additional tile space, empire wide bonusses and the strength of a colony capital.
Did I mention citizens? More research/manufacturing techs could provide free citizens (worker/scientist).
How about this:Every terraforming tech provides a player unique terraforming improvement alongside the colony unique?
Furthermore, I would like to bring up claiming planets again. How about this:When a planet is colonized you are forced to build the colony capital first over like 10 turns. During that time the colony does not contribute at all to the empire and then it starts building up. This means longer incubation time and longer return of investment time.
Or more if you shuttle people around using colony ships.
I like the 1 to 1 relationship of population and production.
The problem is, as others have mentioned, is that it puts the ball in the wide empire's court at the expense of the tall empire.
I am fine with a really huge empire having a big advantage over a single planet empire. But it's too far that way.
Now, personally, I wish we had refined goods. That would solve a lot of problems and it is something the engine can do but it's too big a game change. IMO, that's what cities should require. I.e. resource A + B used by building C to create resource D and that, plus food, is what lets you construct cities.
If any of you have played Distant Worlds, you will understand. And anytime someone says that Stellaris is so successful because it's "Better" you can smack them by showing them Distant Worlds.
I heard a lot of talk here about tall vs wide empires. Why verses? Why not have both? I happen to like the colony rush. I like winning it and I like making the most of my spoils.Something that I don't like is all the work needed to manage everything. This game has more micromanagement than GC 2 had. Things were also more smooth.
If there was such a mechanic to allow tall to compete with wide, what would stop you from going tall and wide?
If resources were the limiting factor, you could always get more resources later.
EditAt sometime during the game you will conquer other planets and end up wide anyway.
I think resources are a problem of the game, not a feature. I think resources makes more sense for a civ like game where you manage a growing empire (started from nothing), but not for a game where you manage planets. The homeworld at least should be a developed world that can provide for its own needs. It could choose to use steel, a new alloy, ceramic plates, fiber glass, etc or any number of things to build cities and ship or what not.I don't think a planet should have to worry about something trivial such as a shortage of iron. There should be many adequate substitutes because it being a space faring civilization. I don't think any resource should be a game changer.
I agree, a galactic resource is rare in terms of planetary resources and should only be used to construct unique buildings or exotic weapons types.I am ok with synthetics and the like requiring special resources to manufacture population, but cities and normal buildings?
I like resources, but I also don't want them used for anything but "special" purposes. That is, you should be able to build a competitive Civ WITHOUT any resources at all. What resources should do it provide a modest edge - so in a battle between two Civs of the same level, the one with resources should win. But access to resources won't counter an opponent who is substantially more advanced than you. Note that I don't count Food as a resource - that's a completely separate dynamic.
Which is why I like resources to be required only for the following:
1. Weapons and Defenses, where every couple of tech advances there is a "special" weapon/defense requiring resources, that gives maybe a 25% improvement in performance. Here, that would mean that having the resource could allow you to compete evenly with someone who had a 1 tech level advantage over you in that weapon/defense.
2. Special Unique buildings - the one-per-Empire or one-per Galaxy should definitely continue to require resources. That forces people to be selective about which of these they try to obtain, rather than a generic "rush-for-the-specials".
3. The high-end one-per-planet improvements; you should be able to build at least the first set of these freely, but afterwards, getting a resource would be necessary.
4. The very high-level Starbase modules, though I'd want them to have at least the first 3 or so in the series not to require resources.
But I am not in favor of any normal building (e.g. one where you can build more than one on a planet) EVER requiring a resource, regardless of how high-tech.
If we're using this model, I'm in favor of reducing the availability of space-based resources significantly - dial it back at least 50% from the current settings
An individual Civ can either be Wide or Tall at a point in time - not both, by definition. As your empire increases in side, naturally, not all worlds are equal, but we're talking about an average - when surveying your worlds, do they generally have lots of big population, or are they filled with lots of specialized buildings. What we want is to have the game competitive for both choices, so if you chose Wide, you can be competitive with both Wide and Tall opponents, and vice versa. And, of course, you can alter your strategy as time goes by, so you don't always have to be one or the other. In theory, it would be possible to chose the middle ground, but it's far, far, far harder to balance for 3 possible world planning strategies than it is for just 2, because then you're into the scenarios of (say): We've balanced 5 Cities vs 5 Factories, but can we do it for 3 Cities + 2 Factories vs 5 Factories, or 3 Cities + 2 Factories vs 1 City + 4 Factories? Balance issue are very difficult, and while there will be some variation due to optimal tile layout (and bonus tiles), generically balancing everything should mean that a pure City or pure Factory route is significantly more optimal than any combination one.
I like resource dependencies, and I'd like them taken further still. I think the resource system is one of the best things about Crusade, as it forces me to think about my decisions a lot more with respect to my relations with other civs, and the kind of actions I prioritize. It may be with the current design that balancing for tall empires may be impossible, and that's fine actually. I would like viable tall empires, but if it cannot be done within the limits of the current game design, and further changes with the current iterations are off the table, then just polish what you got. At the end of the day, the game cannot be everything to everyone when it comes to wish fulfillment.
That does leave open the possibility for further change in the upcoming expansion, though. So there's opportunity.
I posted heavily on this in another thread, but I really think trade resources should be manufactured, or grown by the civ..not found by luck...Resources put an artificial break on progress... rather than a balanced systematic break...Monsantium or Duranium availability is the biggest break on large populations... Morale should be the break.... building too big too fast should cause revolts... which may destroy buildings... lost production..These are mechanics that Civ has had.... it is a mechanic that is easy to understand and hard to exploit...Do that.
A very simple solution would be unique buildings that provide those resources that are absolutely game breaking (durantium and monsantum). If you grab 12 planets and still have no monsantum, you have another option - build that special building that provides it. It's expensive and you have to sacrifice a tile for it, but you have no choice. Ditto for durantium.
If population growth was by civilization, not planets that would go a long way to help tall empires. If single planets had no population caps. Where lets say if you build, or buy a colony ship then starvation is incorperated based on normal rules.
You could incorperate no limit on terriformed tiles is you have only one planet. This would go a long way towards tall. You could make the ai more willing to trade rare resources to single planet planet empires, because they are to small to worry about. I prefer a complex resource system it is more fun. I wouldnt mind bringing back trade goods.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
