I really don't understand that. A game like Stellaris have a real hipe while you get much less content for more money?! In fact there you only have to build a big fleet asap, attack finish, that's it. But everyone love it.
Endless space 2,still full release but in fact still in beta version. Everyone love it?!
GalCiv III great game, deep with much content, new engine great Dev support etc... So many bad reviews!
Some idea why? Is it to complex for the most? To difficulty? The learning curve to heavy?
I really don't understand it and that's really sad. Otherwise is there the fear the devs will stop the development of the game... That would be much more than sad!!!
Thank you
Reviews have been good for GalCiv overall, and taking a look at steamspy recently, the game has done well. It has also been out a lot longer than ES2, and even Stellaris.
Criticisms vary depending on who you ask and at what time they picked up the game.
IMHO the complaints come from GC being actively updated and changed so much.
Another complaint would be that when things change people think it is a bug when their old strategy does not work..
In fairness some bugs get introduced but are being actively squashed ASAAP.
Games can have big hype live short and die or do like GC is doing and focus on the long term.
On thing that plays into it is that GC3 had its problems but was overall pretty good. Crusade (and the changes ported to vanilla) changed a lot of fundamentals of the game and now it takes a lot of time to iterate on the new fundamentals before they are as refined as they were before. This is the polite way of putting it, I believe.
Maybe gc3 is as good as or better than es2 or stellaris (I can't tell, I played neither), but every patch in GC3 is measured against previous iterations of gc3 and by comparison, it can sometimes frustratingly feel like a step back (relative to the peak of refinement). ES2 and Stellaris may be too recent for that to be a driving force.
I think that in a game like stellaris, a lot of things are hidden, and the game take a lot more time to play. So it's flaws are not as apparent.
And it target more a kind of Role playing type of gamers, who are not as competitive strategy players.
Galciv has a more in your face type of UI. This is a good thing, but it make it's flaws more visible.
And turn based games are more played in the mindset of playing to win, so they need a better AI.
I only started playing it recently, so I can't comment on pre-crusade, but at the moment, GC3 deserves to be critisized.
-AI can't grow its population, so even Godlike feels like playing on easy mode
-AI doesn't understand the fleet ship role system, so even if my technology and production are identical to the AI, I'll win battles easily, simply by making defense heavy escorts and weapons only capital ships.
There is no point introducing a mechanic into a single player game if the AI cannot handle it. The whole farms/cities thing might be interesting on paper, more interesting than the way it worked in GC2, but it's meaningless if the AI can't use it. I've contemplated reinstalling GC2 because I can't play GC3 right now, it's pointless.
I could take the time to make a mod and fix these things myself, but to be honest, I've just gone on Steam and found lots of other games worth playing, such as Planetfall, Factorio, and now I'm playing Northgard. When you consider the small budget of a game like Northgard, and how new it is, and how bug free it is, you see that there is no excuse for the current state of GC3 Crusade. I haven't played a game with such buggy AI in a decade at least.
I've been waiting for two months now for them to fix the farm/city problem. The ship role problem is a big one as well, but it wouldn't stop me from playing. The fact the AI won't build cities is a game-breaking problem for me. I'm honestly now wishing I had spent that money on a different space 4x that actually works.
I think you are being too harsh....most 4x games in my opinion have flawed ai's. You are really critical of GalCiv3 while in my experience and I have over 300 hours you get an excellent gaming experience..yes its beatable but all 4x games are easily beatable once you have mastered their mechanics. I have played most modern 4x games and this one is no worse ai wise than any other...just go to the forums of CivVI, Stellaris, ES2 AOW3 and so on and you will players complaining about those games as well...as for Northguard it is a very simple game by comparison and I would hope the ai could play it well.
What? No, just no. This is different. It's not even a complex issue, it's really just one issue - population growth. That's it. They went and implemented the massive change of global food and cities for Crusade and didn't bother programming the AI to know how to handle it. That and they made raw production = population, so now population is key to winning, but the AI is incapable of growing theirs. If they would just fix this one issue the game would be playable. There would still be other flaws, like ship roles, but as I said they do not break the game and other games have AI weaknesses as well. The lack of farm/city building, however, is totally game breaking. Nothing in the Civ games is comparable. Civ 5's AI was quite weak before mods, that's true, but it's nowhere near as bad as an AI that can't build a city in a game where the city is the most important thing you can ever build.
I don't like many of the game mechanics and features. Tile adjacency bonus makes it so that planets require too much attention. I hate tech specializations. Some of the UI don't work well. I don't like resources and how you need them to build many things. Etc.Too many changes. It makes it so that I have to figure out what has changed and relearn to play. Sometimes they change features that I liked. I for instance don't like administrators. I think I aught to be able to colonize as many planets I want and build as many starbases I want. I think adding them to try to 'balance' things was a bad idea.The game is too easy. I go for medium hulls and high logistics. Make a big and powerful fleet, so I win every battle I fight. Invade planets and repeat. I don't want to have to increase the difficulty to get a challenge. I think the AI should be a challenge, or at least put up a good fight, without needing to resorting to cheating.
koopatroopa, go back to the pre-2.5 game. Win that on Godlike and then you'll have something to brag about. To do so is a simple checkbox on Steam.
I don't think that this facts are the problem at the moment. The steam reviews over all are most positive. Just in the last weeks there came much more negative reviews.
In the most of theme it looks like the first impression is the problem. Nearly all new negative reviews where made by players which play the game less than 10 hours! They wrote often the game is to difficult and the learning curve to heavy to come into the game.
I don't understand why buy anybody a complex 4x game and break up to play after a really short time because its to difficult?!
I think there are some player which come from a game like Stellaris where you have much content that's not important for the game success and where only one tactic works ever and ever again. This is very fast very boring. Than they want and alternative game and boom its logic that than the first impression of GalCiv is very difficult!
I have all the current space 4x in my steam account and also played all of them and also read in there communities and after all that's for me the logical reasons at the moment. Or?
@hawkeyebf1
I think this thread is very instructional if you want to know what's the difference between crusade and vanilla reviews. Take a long look at the screenshot posted by mokus5679 on the second page.
All the crusade players gave crusade advice to resolve a vanilla problem. Maybe farms are not the most pressing issue, but they sure are a symptom of the same fundamental problem.
I could upload at least 3 save game files of games I won at Gifted where the AI hadn't built a single farm or city by the end of the game. Does anyone actually care, though? I mean, I could do so for those people who still don't believe that the AI can't build farms/cities just to prove them wrong. I'm not sure what's going on, though. Either everyone knows the AI is broken and they just don't care, or they don't believe the AI is broken. If it's the former, I'm sorry I wasted money on this game. If it's the latter, I can upload the files.
Edit: wait...how do I upload files here?
Hi,
I have been playing for 50 hours now, and I also don't remember seeing a single AI farm or city. So I went back with the console enabled with fow and god commands to see if there were any farms in my saved games. I didn't see any single farm nor city.
Since I'm just a noob, those 50 hours were an absolute blast and I already got my money back, but I will rather install a mod or wait for this to be fixed.
Frogboy said you can just open a text file and change this yourself. Do you happen to know which text file? And where? I would happily play with an AI mod. Plenty of people play Civ 5 with the mods that overhaul the AI.
AFAIK, the true cause of low-pop AIs isn't yet known. I think that the production bonuses of high-difficulty games is making the true state difficult to see. (Has anyone dissected Normal games?)
Until the true cause is understood, a mod fix is a crapshoot.
The true cause is quite obvious, especially to anyone who has ever modded AI before. It is actually very difficult to build a competent AI in a complex game such as GC3, which is something that a good developer will keep in mind when designing the mechanics of the game.
Warcraft 3's AI was lousy, but it didn't matter because everyone just played multiplayer. In GC, there is zero MP community, everyone plays SP against the computer, thus the AI is EXTREMELY important. It's better to have game features that are just a little simplified so the AI can be challenging, than to have really interesting features that the AI can't handle at all.
Farms/cities is just that. In GC2 it was straight-forward. You built a farm on a planet to grow it's population. In GC3 Crusade, Wardell changed it to a two step process. That is more interesting on paper, but it's more difficult to program the AI to play it properly and it's clear that Wardell and his team didn't even try. After reading through these threads it's become clear to me that Wardell is a terrible game designer. He's also got no business sense and doesn't know how to interact with people, as many people have become very angry with him personally, since he is so completely rude and arrogant. Even arrogance can be forgiven if it is accompanied by talent, but Wardell is sorely lacking in that department as well. I will never again pay for anything he's had anything to do with.
I still think DefaultShipPopulation is largely to blame.
My opinion? It’s been the whipsaw of core economic changes that keep setting the game back.
Wheel, no wheel, partial wheel, population is super important, population is less important, now super important again etc etc. I said back with the wheel disaster…pick a system, stick with it, and develop from there. And I was castigated for voicing that. Well, here we are years later, and the CORE ECONOMY of the game is still in massive flux.
Soooo, based on that, naturally the rest of the game hasn’t been able to be fine-tuned. And players are understandably frustrated with the massive changes back and forth. It doesn’t feel like the game is evolving, but more being pulled in different directions. Each time a major change to the econ happens, balance goes out the window and it takes a handful of patches to normalize again. To me, that’s not progress, that’s closer to damage control.
And while this might not be popular, from the outside and occasionally looking in (I check the forums once every week or so), it looks like the developer decided he didn’t like the criticism of all of this flux and decided to pick up his toys and go home. That’s fine, that’s his prerogative, but it doesn’t look good and it doesn’t do a lot for confidence level of players looking at the game long-term.
Personally, I still think the game has a lot of potential and there were times among the various patches and DLCs that I REALLY enjoyed it. Now? Something just doesn’t feel right when I boot it up. It started when the maps were made smaller and more crowded and even though that was somewhat relented, I don’t feel like I’ve really enjoyed the game as much since. The base changes for Crusade I thought looked interesting and I was hoping to get back into it but just when I felt like it was starting to stabilize, the whole population to production equation changed dramatically and it felt like we were back to square one with needing to rebalance everything again and rejigger the AI.
Anyways, I don’t feel I need to leave any ‘negative’ reviews but I simply don’t have a lot of confidence in the game right now. And when there are plenty of other games to choose from, it’s tough to want to keep coming back and seeing what the latest massive overall of the econ did to the game.
YMMV
MHO. Peeling the layers of the onion, I think one of the roots is--and I have expressed this before back during Galciv2--but too much of Stardock rides on Brad Wardell. It is a company of 200 people. Where is Cari or Derek as the face of Stardock? Why isn't it their company, too? Whenever somebody has a request or criticism, they address it to Frogboy. Okay okay I get it, Frogboy made Stardock. It's his baby. But one can get a little sensitive when your life's work is the focal point of so many critics. How well can the other 199 make-or-break THEIR company if Frogboy takes his family on a 90-day world cruise? See the Eiffel tower, all that? If I'm going to be p***** off about Galciv3, I should be p***** off at 200 people; not one.
Okay, so what's the cause?
No, "toxic personality" is not the cause. Where is the AI programming deficient?
If you know that then you know how to fix it. If you don't know that then your statement above is bullshit.
Okay, so what's the cause? No, "toxic personality" is not the cause. Where is the AI programming deficient? If you know that then you know how to fix it. If you don't know that then your statement above is bullshit.
I've already stated exactly what the cause of the problem is, but I'll repeat myself for your benefit. AI is difficult to program, which is why smart game developers will keep the AI in mind when developing systems in the game. Strategy games can benefit from depth, but features are meaningless if you can't get the AI to use them.
In GC2, the AI understood how to grow its economy. It used a mixture of farms, morale buildings, and production modifiers in its cities. Growing your population in GC2 was as simple as building a farm on a planet, and many planets didn't need any farms at all, the way the economy worked in that game. Often if you did want to build a farm, one was enough. You would rarely need two or more.
In GC3, population growth is a two step process. You must build farms to increase the global food supply, and then you must gather the necessary resources (promethium). Then, once you've done that, you can build cities on your planets. From a game play perspective, this is a cool system, but from an AI programming perspective it is very tricky. I don't doubt a serious development company with a good budget and good team could make an AI understand how to use this system, I just know it would be a lot of work.
Right now, the AI goes about filling up its tiles with all kinds of factories, labs, space elevators, etc. Farms aren't even on the list of things to build, which is problem one and quite frankly ridiculous that this bug wasn't caught. Even if the AI did want to build cities it would never be able to, but cities aren't on its list to build either.
So what happens is what you now see. The AI, on Godlike, is a threat for the first 75-100 turns. Once you survive to that point, you've won the game, because your economy will become bigger than the other 7 civs in the game combined, simply because you understand how to build cities.
Stardock should never have released the AI as it currently exists.
Anyway, I'm getting tired of arguing about this crap here. Seriously, there is a whole world of games out there. Stardock really messed this game up, it's broken, and one of its developers (or the owner?) comes on the forum and whines about how much he hates criticism. I was scammed by this company for 70 bucks, and that sucks, but I gotta move on. I don't expect this game will ever be fixed and I have zero interest in fixing it myself, even though I am a very experienced modder.
If the game gets fixed, I'll be pleasantly surprised. But I'm going to stop coming to this forum so often and just go about playing other games and giving my hard earned money to companies that deserve it.
It’s the fact it now takes minutes to save a game and longer to load one if at all.
That has more to do with the size of your map. People want bigger and bigger maps and more and more stars and we want to provide users with that option.
The existence of a insanely large map doesn't mean it must be played if it is slow for you.
I play only insane. That means loading the game or a save needs minutes, what is perfectly ok for me. But saving is still just seconds (perhaps 15 or so). So constant autosave is still possible
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
