I like a nice, low-key experience for basically all of my gaming endeavors, so I limited my opponents to two and made friends quickly. Problem is, hardly a turn goes by without them trying to trade with me. This wouldn't be egregious, but the initial trade offers are horrifically bad despite me being maxed out on approval with both civs.
Fine, so I laboriously adjust the trade to something better for me and click send. But the thing is, doing this *every turn* is sucking the fun right out of things.
Overall, I am *wildly* impressed with this 'alpha'. A few spelling mistakes here and there, a few times when the UI is difficult to read -- most notable when I'm in planet view and trying (and failing) to read all the stats on the left. Additionally, I am not best pleased to *have* to start in the same sector with all my opponents. That's just stressful, and I sincerely hope we'll get options to punt those aliens across the galaxy during the set-up process while we slowly and comfortably build our empires.
Still, though, despite all the changes, it was incredibly easy to jump right in and play. It helps that I've been playing these games for over a decade, but you guys have created a deeply *intuitive* monster of a 4X game. That's no small feat.
I love this game. I love the depth of the worldbuilding, and how it flows organically from that which came before. I love the beauty of the map, and the ships, and the UI, and every-flipping-thing else. I love the music -- of COURSE -- and I love the customizability. Well done, y'all.
But I sent you a trade offer...
Thank you for your kind words Teland. The trading is something that is going to be an ongoing thing to tweak with the AI. I'll pass this post along.
Hmpf, I even increased the cooldown between time they will talk to you in 0.45. I'll take another look at it.
Thanks so much for your attention to this! I went back and started playing the more stable build, just in case, and the trade offers are -- so far -- less oppressive, but I haven't played as many turns in the stable build, and the rate of those offers is increasing noticeably.
Here's my take on trade offers.
In my experience from GC3, the offer tends to be for a bunch of stuff including a hefty sum of credits on my side of the table, and a few things on the AI's side of the table, which I may or may not need. There wasn't any way to look up what a resource could be used for e.g. Epimetheus Pollen is used to promote administrators to ministers, so having a stockpile of it is very useful if you're an expansionist or you like building a lot of hypergates.*
* I've only just started using hypergates in GC3 and one of my annoyances with them is that when a hyperlane goes through an obstacle, ships will path around the obstacle but in doing so, come off the hyperlane for a bit before going back on. So, I build extra hypergates to adjust the hyperlane onto a clear path.
In addition the AI didn't seem to stockpile or do missions to get a variety of resources like the human player. That's even though they were pretty good at making an impressive collection of colonies. So, there wasn't a lot of reason for me to trade. If I really wanted to buy a particular resource, then Intrigue expansion offered a way of doing that without negotiating with other empires.
Rather than having a cooldown of a certain number of turns on trade offers, the AI should think about whether their trading needs are unsatisfied when deciding to contact a player. Instead of opening up a trade offer every time, maybe they can just say what they are particularly looking for, and then let the player decide whether to open the offer window right at that moment. Maybe the player can hook up a resource to a starbase and/or ramp up production of that resource and thirty turns later have a decent amount to trade.
And also, having a nice sum of credits to trade for that is a plus point in the AI's favour.*
* The AI in GC3 seemed to have difficulty with their finances. The surveillance panel in the espionage screen showed that some of the factions would get down to just a handful of credits, at which point they would ask me for a handout.
The AI would also look to buy strategic resources like antimatter, which I was be reluctant to part with, because antimatter was used to add some missile weapons to ships.
Hope this is a useful perspective.
How about I give you one tech in trade but you give me 5. And you throw in 5000 credits.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
