I am really, really hoping the Beta or final version of IV will have some kind of optional tactical combat mode. So far it has been missing in this series. Just look at Master Of Orion II to see how it should be done.
Naturally one should be able to press "Resolve Battle" as normal, but if you have the opportunity to use your superior tactics to defeat a more powerful AI fleet then that is an enticing way of drawing more players into this game.
It has always been a disappointment to me that space battles in the Galciv universe are just spectator events, and ships that should know better simply kamikaze away. There is such an opportunity here to actually use those long-range missiles intelligently, or design a ship specifically to take punishment then blow up in the center of the enemy formation; the list just goes on. It would be a crime not to implement something along these lines.
I am convinced it would add and not detract to something that, at this early stage, seems so promising. It's great, for instance, to see a re-balancing such that tiny and small ships play a much bigger part in the early game. With Galciv III I never even bothered to build them they were so useless (except as probes) so we are definitely going in the right direction here.
But please, let's include some tactical combat.
I listened to an interview on the Explorminate podcast with Brad Wardell, who I think is the chief designer of the game. He made it clear he's adamantly against including tactical combat. He had some principled reason why he doesn't think it would work, though I no longer recall what it was. I'd like to see tactical combat as well, but it sounds like it won't be happening.
I think players would feel forced to use tactical combat which would really really bog down the game. I think of AoW 3 tactical combat is an option and I’ve finished maybe like 5 games of it, also in multiplayer it’s just undoable. I just sit there and wait while my friend engages in combat I can’t see. I’ve never completed a multiplayer AoW game and while multiplayer isn’t a strong focus of this game. Some of my fondest gaming memories is me and my buddies casually conquering the world in Civ 5.
To me Galactic Civilizations is chess to Civilization 5 checkers you add tactical combat I don’t know what it is but I doubt it would be able to ever complete or even consider a multiplayer game.
I really do hope their is something better than all or nothing fight to the death and would not be even the slightest bit opposed to something like this. Also would be great if we could pick ships that would fight to the death covering the retreat of others. Let you see that up for the fleet how the fleet engages and how it deals with close battles.
I think issues like whether or not to have tactical combat are central to the question of "What kind of control does GalCiv (whatever version) want the player to have?"
I've always looked at like this: The name of the series is "Galactic Civilizations" not "Galactic Planet" or something similar. Which leads to the concept of "Yes, you can micromanage and min/max down to this level. But below that level you have little or no control over how things resolve."
ForgottenSlayer's point about "if the feature is there, everyone would use it" goes back to the Planetary Wheel that used to exist in GalCiv3. You could tailor the output of any of the planets you owned to a totally, ridiculous degree and a lot of players spent ages moving pointers, etc to get 500 Production Per Turn (or even bigger numbers!) from their Manufacturing World or whereever.
I think Stardock have given players enough "min-maxing"/scopt to make things to their liking to the nth of the nth of the nth degree with things like the Ship Designer. I get the impression from things Frogboy has said over the years that he's well aware that too much min-maxing takes away from the core of what 4X/GalCiv is.
That said, I think there's a lot more scope to GalCiv combat than just "In Turn 25, the Drengin and Terran fought in the Sol system. In Turn 26, all the Drengin were dead." I've advocated being able to set up fleets like the bots in Gladiabots: "If Ship Health > 25% Then Withdraw", "If Nearest Enemy Ship Health > 25% And Nearest Enemy Ship Health > 25% Withdraws Then Ship Pursue" type logic.
I don't see that any player would feel "forced" to use a tactical combat system - as I said before, there should always be a "resolve" button. But in III and at the moment in IV if you don't have the biggest, strongest fleet you are going to lose - so how else are you going to affect the outcome? The answer is you can't. Some people might settle for that, but I don't like the "in Turn 26 all the Drengin were dead" simplicity.
Quite how you implement a tactical combat sub-game is for the dev team; I liked MOOII, mrblondini liked Gladiabots; there are numerous models out there but it cannot be beyond the wit of man (and the intelligence of the designers) to come up with a better system than "the computer has rolled some virtual dice and there were no survivors, not even Darth himself"
I completely agree. galactic civilizations is just no fun with out ship to ship tactical combat. masters of Orion II made it work, you would think Gal Civ could make it work 30 years later. I am playing gal civ III now, and I find it boring without tactical ship to ship combat, and I will completely boycott future Stardock games until they learn what makes games fun to play.
Brad Wardell is not the chief designer of GC4 Derek Paxton is.
Brad Wardell is the owner and CEO of Stardock of which one of its products are computer games.
Forgotten Slayer: I would only feel forced to use tactical combat if there was no option for quick combat, also I might use it once just to watch a battle unfold and see all the 3d graphics in action after that would never use it again.
AzureHawk MOO2s combat system was ok but was tedious with fleets of more than half a dozen or so. Interstellar Space Genesis has a similar system to MOO2 might try it.
Oh man, Stardock might go bankrupt! I'm sure they appreciate the warning.
There has not been tactical battles in any GC game what on earth made you think this one would? GC is about gobal game play not single battles. I have turns with 5-20 battles and those would take longer to play than like 20 turns. Also those 20 turns would have 5-10 battles as well.
MOO 1&2 had a good working tactical combat system, but boy could you get bogged down if it was a large battle. But I admit, it was cool and fun.
I'm not sure you want that in GC4. The game is just too big. I definitely would not want to have to use it for each battle.
I do miss the Battle Viewer though. Currently you just make a big fleet and throw it in there. A great thing about GC3&4 was the ability to design your fleet with roles for different ships, and watch how it played out in the Battle viewer. Now there is no battle viewer, and you don't even have tool tips to tell you how each roll acts in combat. And if you had the tool tips and assigned roles, you still don't know how your selections worked out because no battle viewer. Except you won or lost or won with one ship remaining.
Honestly, I don't think GC4 needs tactical combat. I do think it needs the battle viewer, and tool tips on selection of the ship role. When ever you get ready to save the ship design, you select a role, but there is no explanation of what the role does.
TC is not an option for this game, I know, but some degree of control as "Focus on small ships", or "try to damage the flagship so the next engagement is more easy"... would be nice. Dunno. I don't feel comfortable clashing counters, and have been doing It since gc2. Some different would be good for the franchise, and refreshing for some old farts like me.
Tactical combat shouldn't be a thing in Galciv, but what is important that is missing is a way of learning how effective your ship designs are and how your fleets are performing against the enemy.
Yes, it's one of those things that are fun in theory but can bog the game down especially since you will do much better than any auto-resolve, especially if the rest of the game is not built around it. The game is designed around the fleets being the "units" that you customize with individual ships, so tacking on a tactical combat system can actually detract from the experience than add to it.
That said, I agree that the game is lacking a bit of info on how effective the ships are, and it might be interesting to have a few "behaviors" you can tweak for fleets.
I just want something more precise than the almost binary prediction we have now. I know there is RNG involved, but right now it isn't worth engaging in a battle unless it predicts no casualties / total loss because every battle is fight-to-the-death and quality ships are such a scarce resource.
We definitely need a battle viewer for galactic civilizations 4. The battle, particularly the loss, is a complete let down without one. I'd rather have the galactic civ 3 one than nothing.
I can see now that there is no room for TC. It's a shame, but the game is obviously aimed at big-scale space-Civ management.
What troubles me is that, so far, GalCIV just a bit... (whispers) boring? I only joined this forum in 2021 but I am an old gaming fart too. A lot of you obviously go back some years as well.
That gives us perspective. I don't know how many of you have read Sid Meier's autobiography but his big thing was that a game must be interesting and trigger that "just one more turn" impulse.
To date I am not getting that. Which is a problem.
Quite a few people here have suggested some kind of hybrid TC system, battleview, or "TC LITE" - frankly I would welcome almost anything over and above the present offering which is simply lazy.
I am not for a moment suggesting this would suddenly transform the game - but it would help, because at the moment I rarely click on the GalCIV icon
I am not getting that "Just one more turn" feeling either. But then I didn't with GC3 either. Just GC 1 & 2.
I mean it seems hilariously simple to me the solution of making battles interesting without completely destroying how long it takes to play a turn, and making it extremely punishing for not fighting battles yourself.
Have them be automatically resolved, but allowed the player to fly one of the spaceships in the battle. So a player might tip a close battle to a win. You don't get the problem of battles taking too long, since the simulated battles never really last more than 60s, and you get a really charming arcade style moment of combat, commanding your survey ship you've have since turn 1 in a battle vs space aliens.
or maybe introduce a Galaxian style subgame!
Really what SD needs to do is make two games..Galactic Civ 4 and leave the tactics out.... It is a civ builder game not a combat driven game...and then Galactic Tactics where the majority of the game is tactical combat, getting research from tactical combat, that lets you build better ships... to do better tactical combat. Then people who really really really want the tactical combat can be pointed to a game of tactical combat.
I do think they should do more with the player control for the combat.. especially now that the combat can last turns..there should be units that try to capture enemy ships, there should be units that only target fighters. There should be units that stay at range and snipe.. those sort of combat behaviors should be able to be set by the player before combat even begins.
Give us fleet tactics so that the combat feels like more than just rock paper scissors.
Some kind of combat tactics is all I have been asking for from the get go, so I quite agree. Of course it's a sprawling 4X civ-building game but (as with any game in that genre) combat plays an important role (how else do you deal with the Drengin?)
Rock paper scissors is not good enough.
I think I would buy "Galactic Tactics" if it were ever produced
I agree. This game is much too large to have MOO style tactical combat. I remember spending an hour or more on one battle in MOO1/ if I had a clash of large fleets.
But don't you guys agree that without some kind of tactical combat/fleet tactics this is a wasted opportunity? Why worry about perfecting ship designs (except for aesthetic reasons) if it has minimal impact on battle resolution? OK I quite see that many players would not be interested in an hour's-worth of subgame, but then you just turn it off, as in hit the "Resolve Battle" button.
TC is not gonna happen - I see that. Maybe as additional DLC in a couple of years? Who knows?
Two things guaranteed on Gal Civ forums at least all the way back to Gacl Civ II days:
1) People asking/begging/rationalizing the need for tactical combat, at least once every couple months.
2) Gal Civ creators saying no there will not be tactical combat, and delivering on exactly that.
Happy Thursday!
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