Hello Galciv community,
The most impactful piece of feedback I can give:
Just like all previous Galcivs before this, the maps are extremely empty, and the "features" such as nebula and blackholes do too little to give any meaningful shape to the map, and indeed make any impact to decisions of the players. I see this being due to two reasons:
1) The features are too small. Nebulae should be significantly larger - both for gameplay reasons, and to be more grounded in reality. Keep in mind that nebulae are where starts are born- they should be massive. Look at the most famous one - the Pillars of Creation. These are just a tiny feature in the larger nebula, and alone are 5 light years across. The actual nebula is some 70 light years across. Ignoring how big the features should be for realities sake, the current tiny size of them means they never come into relevance in a game anyway, as they are too easy to ignore entirely.
2) The features don't do enough. I suggested this for the Galciv 3 beta, and will suggest it again. Nebulae and Blackholes should block sensors. Sensors should be shadowed by nebulae and black holes. Sensors outside a nebula should not be able to see into (or at least not very far into) it, and should certainly have no line of sight to anything behind it. Just like my first point above, this would both better match reality, and impact the map in a very real gameplay way. Suddenly you have real terrain, where if you aren't careful, you can be subject to surprise attacks from fleets that made their approach in the shadow of a nebula or a blackhole. It becomes important to build listening stations in the correct places to cover your blind spots. It would be awesome!
So there's my two suggestions - a way of giving terrain to an otherwise incredibly empty map.
Kind regards.
Hey Surge,
I am curious, do you not think the sectors help break up the terrain and present new challenges with chokepoints?
Hi,
Excellent feedback, hard to give because like you wrote most of time we just mind blackholes and nebulae like road signs to say: "hey, here you can find antimatter or elerium", for the rest, bonus/malus don't matter so small they are.
I guess you like the new sectors system but regret to not see strategic subways and sectors be accentuated by a local sector gameplay like having to travel through a full sector set in a nebula where you're almost blind with pirates/monsters/ennemies attacking from nowhere (a real cut-throat area), or a nebula between two subways extremities so you have the choice between cross the nebula damaging your ships (for example) or take a detour. What most of player choose setting indirectly a strategic road through this sector.
Just a point, Surge. I never saw computer players use nebulae or blackholes in anyway. I don't think to just make them bigger or fully fill a sector would be enough to give you what you seek. They already don't know which usefull ships build, so know how to use them, it's a lot much harder. Certainly for something like an ambush behind or inside a nebula (teach to observe, understand an opportunity, plan an ambush and wait to strike, that's a tough job).
Nice post
I think the separate sectors help a little, but when considering the size of each, and the fact that 99% of the game involves playing wholly within a sector at a time (with very little fighting across the boundaries), is really is only a little.
Even counting the new sectors idea, I still believe it is vital that something be done to make the maps within the sectors not so homogeneous. Look at any 4X that isn't space based, and the number of features that can be found in their maps which bring shape and obstacles to the game. Then look at all the space based 4X games - they are all empty, or use the same 'starlane' idea to give the map shape (Galciv4 just combines them). Wouldn't it be great if a space based 4X finally provided as much character to its map that something like Civilization or Age of Wonders did? One can dream.
I don't know how much character can be added to something that is literally vast swatches of nothing punctuated by the occasional star system.
At least the devs of Distant Worlds 2 understand the importance of not having for all intents and purposes an empty map. This is certainly worth a read.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1531540/announcements/detail/2980809117799377487
Some key points:
As always, I implore the devs to address the irrelevant features of the map. The subspace lanes to different sectors is ultimately a gimmick that will not really impact how the game is played turn to turn.
I would like to see something like ion storms that basically create impassable areas.
Technology hurdles...At game start the Nebula are impassibledo research.. they greatly slow your ships and perhaps damage them each turn you are in themDo more research. They slow your ships and rarely damage themDo MORE research They slow your shipsDo More research They no longer slow your ships treat them as normal spaceDo all the research The stellar gasses in Nebula allow for faster repair and refueling of ships transiting said space.
What about ion storms - and maybe other galactic features - that negatively effect the PQ of a nearby planet? Have it as a an event: "Turn 16: An Ion Storm has severely negatively impacted the planet GenusII, scientists believe this has been reduced from a PQ 14 to a PQ 6 Planet", or something like that on GNN.
If the planet is uncolonized, than you just have less resources coming from it or now only 6 Tiles on it (if any of the 8 lost tiles also had an artefact/resource on it, than that's gone). If it's a colony of yours, than you take a hit in the resources you get from it, if it's a Core World, you lose 6 tiles (which ones are randomized) and, of course, if any of those tiles had something on them (building or resource or artefact), than that goes too.
Too harsh/annoying?
If you think so, maybe to balance things out, have some galactic features that every so often will improve PQs on nearby planets...
Have the devs considered actually making the drastic changes to the map and terrain that are needed to make the map interesting?
Yes. In fact one of the reason for sectors was to introduce terrain. You can think of them as connected games of GalCiv, or you can think of them as continents dseperated by vast oceans. So from the perspective of blocked terrain, we have it. Lots of it on the large scale.
And not only does it blind you to whats on the other side, but you are unaware that a path exists until you get the correct tech. Is that stream into the heart of your empire, or are you going to need to plow through the Drengin territory to get to it? As well as exposing you to the surprise ships you mentioned when they come in from a stream you either hadn't discovered or knew was there, but didn't know what was on the other side.
Of course it also introduces choke points, and areas that are very valueable to control for diplomacy and trade.
But it is pretty macro scale. Within a sector you are right. We do have blocking terran now, though its pretty minimal (black holes). As Draginol mentioned, it could be cool to have mbulas that applied this on a larger scale. Or at least applied it for most factions.
I would love to see a better integration of some of the hostile entities and nebula. So Pirates or space monsters always have their star bases in them. Something to make players nervous when they see nebula and give them a little more personality.
Messing with visibility is an interesting idea. But in a game with the scale of GC4 whenever we tinker with "surprise" on the mico level it doesn't end up being fun because it forces the players to hyper focus on everything. There is just to much going on. Having your fleet destroyed by an enemy you didn't know was there is not a good gaming moment. It works okay if oyu are managing 3-5 units. But when you have 30-50, it falls apart and feels unfairly punishing. We want the player to see the board, want him to recognize the htreat and want to give him time to deal with it.
Thats my 2 cents. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
I think this terrain comment comes back version after version. It's legitimate. Visibility is something that could be done. Simply making a small nebula have an effect is pointless. People will just go around them and avoid the effect. You could allow visibility into and through storms with the appropriate sensor techs perhaps. You've got a lot of those. It's a hard problem though. Keeping people from being utterly blocked off from the whole map by large nebulae.I think it would help to think of nebulae more like a "biome" rather than a small blot on the map. A whole area of the map with a mild effect that is simply unavoidable because planets and stars are in the middle of it. Maybe even different buildings, stations might be built there. Spy stations. Black markets (I know that's already a thing). There could even be ion storm type nebulae that prevent easy access to whole areas of the map, giving you one more way to expand to new planets beyond the planetary tree. Maybe black holes create gravitational fields around them that are similarly unenterable. Maybe there are large debris fields from broken planets, huge ship battles, etc. Maybe you can only enter ion storms with sufficient shield tech. Only enter debris fields with sufficient point defense tech. Only enter gravitational fields with sufficient armor tech. Lots of possibilities. Just a matter of finding the fun and the implementation.
If you wanted to make things really interesting, and something I think that would help is to create non-starting sectors. Sector exploration at the moment is a little pointless because by the time you get the tech, the other sectors are often pretty fully occupied. Do I want to go cross-sector to start a war with some races I barely know? Not until I've cleaned my entire sector up... So no, not for a long while. But if there were completely empty sectors... Well now you're cooking with gas. Or maybe plasma. Might as well send some colony ships over there, right? Before someone else does. And if that sector is filled with hazardous terrain, that would explain why no level 1 squirrel races live there. And it wouldn't block anyone from starting off.
I agree.
This is actually a cost of having so many starting civilizations in the base game. GC3 on release had less than half this. But when you have so many civs, players want to put them all int he map so you end up will full sectors everywhere (on the default map size). Playing on a larger map with less civs may give you what you are looking (being the first civ to break into an untouched sector).
We are also continue to play with map generation. It make be good to put some tiny, non-populated sectors on medium maps just to give players the experience you are describing.
My understanding is that sectors were introduced specifically to eliminate expensive routing calculations. Anything else is a side-effect.
I agree in principle that the terrain could have a greater impact than it currently does. Maybe something that would help is to make sectors more amorphous in shape, not just elliptical. Another would be to have more ways to interact with barbarians and minor races so that they give the map more shape. Maybe I haven't gotten far enough, but I mostly ignore them.
Part of this is that we haven't really learned which maps are best. Most Civ VI players determined that small pangea maps were the most fun unless they were trying a specific civ. I don't know what the sweet spot is for this game.
That is not the reason. It's actually very expensive to calculate inter-sector travel because you could have a sector that is "near" your sector but has several connections one has to get to.
The reason sectors were put in was to create more interesting choices about what techs to research and when to build. Sectors add an extra layer of strategic decision making.
Sector scanning is a root level tech so players can choose to make that a strategy from 1 turn or they can choose military or economic or other paths.
More importantly, it also eliminates the problem we had in GalCiv I/II/III where, in order to create phsyical clusters of interesting empires we had to have vast areas of "empty" which just aren't very fun. This lets us have our proverbial cake and eat it too.
Maybe I need to mess around with the settings more.
I agree some bigger nebulae would be better. Really they are not much more than another "go around" obstruction that ships nearly always avoid. It would be more interesting if ships opted to travel through them a little bit more often and had the odd encounter in them. Battles where interfering with shields or maybe missile targeting to mix things up the odd time.
along with lots of other people it seems, i agree that bigger nebula would add another fun level to the game. i also agree that you shouldn't be able to scan past them much, maybe just see inside the first visible tile or something. i think that there are a few things you could do to help negate the side effects of having them be too powerful for sneak attacks though...
1. prevent ships in nebula from scanning anything around them past 1 tile. a ship hidden in a nebula should need coordination from something outside the nebula to be able to see when a target for sneak attack is available. it might also help let you know that there is a possible threat if you see a starbase or ship with high sensors right next to a nebula
2. greatly reduce the logistics ability of any fleet in the nebula down to just 1 ship at a time, and disable the ability to have multiple ships stacked on the same tile. this will prevent giant fleets from sitting in one spot and jumping out at once, instead you will have to spread them all out, which makes sense considering it's a lot harder to see the ships around you in a nebula. this would also make smaller ships less dangerous than bigger ships in nebula, and ships would have to possibly waste more movement if they tried to group up into a fleet after jumping out of the nebula.
3. keep the movement speed reduced for the entire turn that ship has touched a nebula, or maybe a set number of tiles after it leaves the nebula. think of it's as the nebula's slightly lasting effect on engines that travel through them and suck up that nebula material. this will prevent ships that jump out of nebulas from quickly reaching a distant target. also, combined with the "1 ship per tile in a nebula" thing, this will make it take even more time and movement to group up a fleet that jumps out to attack a closer target as well.
4. this might make abilities that let u disregard nebula abilities too good, maybe just make them have reduced effects instead if you're making the nebulas a bigger thing.
5. if you could see into the first tile of a nebula, but ships in the first tile of a nebula still couldn't see past 1 tile, it would help prevent against sneak attacks a little more.
i think the larger nebula idea is also a great way for players to get their ships like colony, constructor, and probes, to areas that would otherwise be difficult to get to without detection, but at a price. maybe even have some research tech to make it so u can hide bigger fleets in nebula and navigate them better for races that are a little more "sneaky"
and maybe have techs that can allow you to see further into nebulas, helping against sneak attacks even more if you want to be able to focus on that.
I don’t know if this is in the game, but it would be nice to hide troops in nebulae, as well as systems, hidden systems in nebulae)))
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