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Not that we've figured out as of yet. Because it's alpha most likely the majority of these haven't been added, but just a few put in place to confirm process is working. The whole culture point system is being reworked.
Actually he mentioned that the COMPASS is going away, to be replaced by a "spectrum."
Other than the fact that when you gain an ideology awareness point, you lose an ideology from an opposing ideology (i.e. if you gain a point of individualist, you lose a point of collectivist), the basic premise remains the same. You still gain ideology awareness points that you will later redeem with culture points.
I agree though, most likely most of these missions have yet to be implemented.
Was hoping I was missing something
Here's a really strange ship pathing problem. If I try to send this constructor to the tile indicated, it picks a sensible route there:
But if I try to go one hex to the southeast, it picks this route:
Well, I've played 2 games to completion. After thinking about it, here is my feedback.On default sized maps, it takes me till about turn 500+ before I win the game. This is with crippled AI, so this is about as fast as I've been able to play. At about turn 250, I still had planets in my home sector to colonize. Without colonies building shipyards to build colony ships, it seems that the explosive rate one could expand their empires at has been significantly slowed.Late in the game, like turn 400 and onward, the game suffers from lag. In the worst of it, I'm starting to wish the game finish doing its thing before letting me know when I can play. Right now, the game keeps popping up new windows while I'm trying to do stuff with a different window. For instance, I'm loading a transport, then the game opens 5-6 windows about what my survey ships have found.I don't like random techs. I like being able to make transports or slipstream travel a priority.Something I've considered about random techs is, some games only have random techs after you are given the foundation needed for a star empire. In games like Stellaris, you already have the ability to travel the stars, build colony ships, build starbases, scan anomalies, and invade planets.I think there should be a guard command. I think having only sentry was a horribly bad idea. Without guard, I have to tap space bar every turn for every fleet I want to remain stationary. I do like the repair command; it helps to keep my ships alive.There needs to be a command that allows you select a lot of ships at once. I'm looking for a ctrl + a. Or a select a ship, press and hold shift, and then select another ship and get all the ships in between the selected ships.Leveling up a lot of ships is a lot of work. I've had fleets of tiny hulls who have level up to level 9, so thats 8 upgrades per ship. However, I've been finding myself using resources to upgrade the weapons of my ships. I tend to do that after a few levels used for hp upgrades of course. I hate to spend resources on ships I'll likely lose.
Another big difference between Stellaris' random techs and GC4's is that Stellaris has 3 random techs being researched at a time, one in each category. You don't have to worry about whether or not you'll keep drawing sensor and culture techs when you need larger ships.
I wouldn't mind having random techs, so long as they were better chosen. Maybe a couple more choices, with one being forced from each tree, perhaps. Or, possibly, giving us the ability to research 2 techs at once, one from half the trees and the other from the other half, giving us a larger chance to get the techs we need from them.
Thanks, Publius. I hadn't caught this. Double-click on the citizen and select a specialty. Completely missed this mechanic.
I started the game with "abundant" anomalies and am getting steady culture points from missions through turn 98 so far. Probably not the best solution but a solution within current mechanics.
I noticed this, too. I was fortune that my near neighbors were peaceful, but by turn 97 in a slow tech game I got only my second military tech choice. If things were more hostile, like it sounds from your game, that would put me at a serious disadvantage early game. The armed shuttle is pathetic compared to pirate ships and space monsters.
It's been so long since I played Stellaris I'd forgotten this. Yes, having multiple main paths and random choices within each would help. The player still has the same research points but can choose to concentrate them toward one tech or spread them across multiple techs. That would allow better flexibility, especially early game. If things are relatively peaceful, the player could concentrate on planet quality and colonization techs. If things are hostile, concentrate on military techs.
I noticed the same thing. At turn 101, I've purchased every executive order and planet order that makes sense and I still have 64 control points. A faster cooldown for executive orders might help.
I agree in principle that more automation choices is a good thing. Let's walk this one through, though.
Ship pathing sucks. Ships don't follow a straight course, which often puts them in hostile areas, especially early game when pirates and space monsters are abundant and defense non-existent. In my current game, to ensure a colony ship gets to a high quality planet several systems away, I have to escort it with a survey or scout ship. Move the survey ship two hexes, check for baddies, move the colony ship two hexes. Repeat. Adjust course if needed to avoid baddies. Repeat until ship arrives at destination.
If automated ships would stop and alert me when they "see" baddies, allowing me to adjust course with their remaining move points, maybe automation would work. Otherwise, I'm going to continue manual escorts.
Actually, in Stellaris, you have 3 fields, physics, social and engineering, your research generation is divided by these categories (different things generate different kinds of research) and you are researching one tech from EACH field.
We have yet to see the tech tree for GC4, but GC3 had 4 fields, colonial, engineering, warfare and culture. So far as I can tell it looks similar, if not the same for GC4.
However, we can research only one tech at a time and only from 3 or 4 choices, which can ALL be from the same tree. Thus is the problem we are seeing.
To make bad worse, if someone unscrupulous, like me, for example, gets the ability to travel between sectors and refuses to trade said ability with his poor AI neighbors, then the game may be basically over. Give me a hundred turns or more jumpstart on colonizing planets, putting stations on jump lanes, sweeping whole sectors of anomalies and other such rude behavior, they will never catch up.
Of course the reverse could also happen, making the game a race to the phase lanes. While their is a tech to jump from sector to sector, the odds of getting it early enough to make a difference is slim to none.
After I invaded one of the Arceans's core planets, they surrendered to me. I now have all of their core planets and colonies. However, they still have at least one colony ship, they still show up in the diplomacy window, and on my last turn they popped up a message asking for peace. Here's a saved game.
General impressions at Turn 104 in a "slowest" paced game, which is my favorite way to play any 4x game.
The game feels like GC. Maybe a strange observation, but having put in 1000+ hours in each of GC2 and GC3, I was quickly comfortable with the game. It also has that "just one more turn" feel (as I left the lawn sprinklers on for over an hour before I remembered them.)
I really like the citizen and leader cards.
I'm assuming we will get more ministries in later builds. I researched minister techs but those did not lead to new ministries.
The circular control zones are confusing on a hex map. Does the zone include the hex if its half way in? No idea.
Pirates and space monsters are seriously overpowered early game, having 6-9x more firepower than I can generate in an armed shuttle (excluding T.A.S. Discovery). I do like that pirates can have any weapons. Can't depend on just defending against beam weapons anymore.
I really like the ship upgrade system, but agree with another comment that when we have dozens to hundreds of ships, need a "upgrade all" option.
Having the Ship Designer at this stage of the game is cool. During Founders for GC3, we didn't have it for a long time. Please let us know when we can save designs between builds and upload (like Steam Workshop) ship designs. This is one of my favorite things about the game.
I both like and dislike Core Worlds. I like not having to micromanage every planet and I dislike the loss of control. Most colonies are marginally helpful, but all of them require a colony ship and citizen and defending ship(s) if we want to keep them. Having multiple star systems feeding a single Core World reduces the number of shipyards available while at the same time we have more stuff we need to build in shipyards. It's good that this slows the "colonization rush" but . . . I don't know. Jury is still out for me. At the very least, colony worlds should be harder to capture.
I've talked about ship pathing in other posts. I remember a conversation we had with Paul during GC3 development and, if I remember correctly, he said "straight" paths were really hard. Regardless, this needs to be solved. I'm spending a lot of time in game micromanaging ship movement.
"Standard" starbase upgrades like "Starbase Factory" should only require "standard" resources (plus modules) like Durantium instead of "exotic" resources like Tetrapod Hives.
I'm leaning toward liking needing a citizen to build a starbase. It definitely slows starbase expansion, especially early game when that competes with citizens for colonization.
Enough for now. Thanks again for the opportunity to participate.
I mentioned this earlier, but want to chime in on the current conversation around randomized techs.
Having been seriously frustrated by not having access to any of the green biology/colonization techs for something like 160 turns (with rerolls every time), the randomization definitely needs some fine tuning or some slight redesign.
I have never played Stellaris, so before reading the posts above that reference it, I had no idea how its research system works. That said, I was already thinking something like a tech tree plus randomized techs within a category would be a nice balance.
I've thought about the research system's design a bit more after a number of additional hours of play. Perhaps the design could be a hybrid of the tech tree in GCIII and the cards in GCIV.
Specifically, perhaps most core technologies (i.e., the equivalent of non-specialization techs from GCIII) are available on a tech tree similar to GCIII, but randomized techs (i.e., specializations) and special mission techs could get unlocked as you traverse the tech tree and/or start missions. The core technologies on the tree provide you some measure of control over the direction your civilization is going, while the random techs would appear as tech cards as they currently do, but the selection of cards would be determined by what techs you have researched on the tree.
Taking this a step further... using a card system that mimics the leader cards could open up some interesting possibilities.
Okay, that is a bit of a long post... and I'm going to make it a little longer by throwing out a few alternative solutions.
Random alternative #1: On the planet screen, we have several governance options to deal with crime, have a festival, etc. Also, we have executive orders that seem to have a similar effect but are global. Perhaps we could have something like the planetary orders on the research screen or an executive order that allows us to spend control and/or other resources to reroll the random tech but focus our research into a specific category.
Random alternative #2: On the research screen, give us some UI control that allows us to focus our research efforts. This would not control the research--it would still be random--but it would influence the RNG to provide more techs based on how we prioritize research.
Random alternative #3: Create slots under the Minister of Technology that allow us to assign leaders to focus our research efforts. These leaders would have particular focuses based on their stats and traits. Certain factions would have certain focuses. High resolve leaders would push our research toward military tech. High social leaders would raise our focus on colonization and diplomacy. The paranoid trait would encourage military and espionage research. Having a handful of slots under the Ministry of Science would allow us alter the weights used in the RNG for tech cards and change our focus as necessary.
Okay. I've got that out of my system. For now.
I should say I do like the idea of keeping some random elements at play. But too much randomness and the game becomes more a game of luck rather than one of strategy and planning.
For some reason the tech tree button is working now. I can choose the techs directly from the tree.
It says this ship is idle, but I cannot give it orders. The best I can do is double-click on it and decommission, but I can't move it anywhere or tell it to do anything, so blowing it up is the only way to proceed.
Just wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who has been posting in this thread. You're helping us make GalCiv IV the best game it can be!
As a GC3 founder, this is already way more exciting than the early days of GC3. I just looked at my "joined on" date. Man, I've been here a long time.
I take it Hypergates haven't been implemented yet? I have researched hypergate construction and no hypergate components has shown up when i design new ships.
It may be difficult to see in this screen capture, but at certain levels of zoom, in the area not obscured by FOW, there is a cross-hatch pattern of hexes that are slightly darker than the others. It's a minor thing, really, but I mention it because when I first saw it I thought that my probes had not fully explored the area and sent one back to see. In the screenshot I've placed arrows to point out two of the intersections of the dark lines. If I zoom farther in or zoom farther out I don't notice them.
Could we get a button that moves all of your ships? It could be placed beside the end turn button.
I don't like having to refill my transports after invading a planet. What is happening is that the transports, after conquering a core world, lands on the planet and lets the populations mingle. I'd prefered it if they just stayed in space.While I'm thinking about, I don't like my military ships, after conquering a colony, go and orbit the colony it just conquered. I much rather they stay in normal space and bug me for orders next turn.I was recently thinking that if colony ships can be captured, then shouldn't constructors be capture able too? I don't know how many people a constructor is supposed to carry, but surely it is a waste to simply destroy them. By that logic, then shouldn't starbases be something that could be captured as well?An idea I have is to have the ability to build and launch colony ships and constructors without population inside them. There after, you send them to go to other planets to get population there.I've encountered situations where a planet artifact could produce ships, but the AI uses it every few turns to interrupt my attempts at planet invasion.Has anyone else seen communication with other civs that sometimes say you will get x for clicking one option, or maybe 10 xp for another?
" shouldn't constructors be capture able too?"
I can't see any reason why not and, yes starbases as well. If IV is going to go down this road then it's not logical to restrict capture to colony ships. By the way, you can build colony ships and not launch them immediately. Later on when you are ready or the population has maxed out you can launch them to move your colonists.
I am becoming frustrated with the randomised research system. Can anyone explain the rationale behind it? In the real world if, say, you wanted to research vaccines, you go ahead and do it, you don't sit about rolling dice. OK I understand you might need "DNA sequencing" before moving on to "Advanced vaccine research" but that is a matter of choice, not luck. Like others, I feel this system needs some serious adjustment. I have basically won my first game but cannot finish it until I am able to invade core worlds.
And that's another thing. Why the heck is a core world so much more difficult to capture than a colony? The only difference is that it has a governor. You can take a colony with an assault shuttle but apparently the appearance of a governor means you have to wait for months of research - doesn't make sense to me. Maybe governors come equipped with missile batteries or anti-ship-bots or something?
I've been thinking a lot about the tech tree issue too @tb801. I think I'm going to make a separate forum post proposing an idea: a two-pronged research system with a tech "tree" and a tech "pool".
The quick version is: the tech "tree" would function like a normal tech tree and contain the ~20 critical techs that we need for basic capabilities, like farming. Then the tech pool would include a large set (hundreds?) of techs that would use the current randomized system.
[Edit: Here is the link to that post]
I also second your point about the weird discrepancy between conquering colonies and core worlds. Especially because once you conquer a core world, it becomes a colony!
A simple request that I hope would be easy to implement: The numeric keys 1 to 4 along the top row of the keyboard provide 4 predefined views of the galaxy slanting away from the player at different angles. Could we please have another one (5?) to provide a true top down view of the galaxy? I always end up having to use the middle mouse button to tilt to as close to a top down view as I can get.
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