GC2 rocks. It really really rocks. I still play that game often and enjoy the crap out of it. But it has a few issues that really shouldn't return in the sequel. These aren't bugs per say, just poor implementation. Annoyances that can't be modded out well. I don't know if they will be relevant to GC3 but if they are or could be I hope to draw some attention to them. All of these annoyed me enough that I had serious thoughts about asking stardock for the source code. Ignoring the fact that they would probably say no, I don't have any way to compile them if they used studio 2005. I still considered it though.
1) Range scaling. I understand why larger maps might need large ship ranges. But this was way over scaled in GC2. It didn't matter how large a galaxy you start with it still feels small. It should also scale with the number of habitable planets or better yet be able to be disabled by user setting.
2) Planetary Governors. You should be able to save them so you don't have to make the same ones over and over from game to game. Also they should specify by improvement type and not specific buildings. So instead of xeno bank, it should just have financial improvement. It shouldn't fill out the planet right away after being selected. It should be selectable from the main colony screen. (I disabled the pop up because it blocks a large portion of the planet, you know the part I use to decide what governors I should use!)
3) Auto explore. Should bring up a dialogue where I can select random patrol, random unexplored patrol, traditional explore. Random would pick a random spot in range and the ship would go. Random unexplored would (try) to pick a random unexplored spot in range and go. Should there not be a random unexplored spot it would just go to random spot. Traditional would be the default explore the 'w' key already does. (Though perhaps you would be improving or deprecating this already?)
3b) Automate anomaly exploration should have the option to fallback to random patrol if there are no anomalies in range.
4) Ship design management. During the game I should be able to save individual ship designs rather than have the game set to same them all or none. I don't need to save every little change I make during a game. Turing this off on the other hand means that I can't keep any of them!
5) Mining governors. I understand you are doing something different then the mining asteroids that were in the previous games. Until I understand more about the replacement I am going to point out that mining asteroids could have used a governor. So that I could have them go to nearest planet still building something, or nearest planet with a star port. Or to a planet of my choice like the home world.
6) Colony list and build queues. They should not snap to the top of the list with every change I make. If I want to purchase a few improvements from the colony list and they are not at the top of the screen, tedium ensues.
6b) Colony list purchase governor. If I have some extra cash and want to buy a bunch of planetary improvements to hurry them along, I would have to go one by one and click and buy until I have them all or I run out of cash. A governor should be able to do the same thing. Auto buy xeno factory until you get them all or run out of cash. (or until a specified budget is reached.) Buy run out of cash I don't mean go into the negatives.
If you enable it, the AI will 'harvest' the more optimal designs from Human players and use them as their own or as templates.
Have you listened to the podcast linked to by the tread https://forums.galciv3.com/450609. It looks like most of the things mentioned here are already in the works for GC3. I am also quite amased at how well Paul Boyer covered just about every item in every post of every thread of this forum and what is being done in GC3 about each item.
Aw, come on, those ships bristling with randomly-placed giant guns are hilarious!
AI Exploit...
Turn off surrenders making AI duke it out to the end, but the AI will still trade all planets for several ships, at that time they no longer exist, and the ships to them are useless and end up becoming pirates or split between races...
For that matter that exploit is there even if surrenders are on.
I understanding trading planets for things but never should trade the last planet for anything...
At that point you have the AI by the balls anyway, so it's no big deal
I haven't seen anyone mention the problem with the balance between weapons and defenses?
Now i may be mistaken but i always thought the three types of weapons and the three types of defenses were supposed to make for interesting strategies for people to enjoy? Why then turn around and make defenses completely moot by failing to keep up with high end weaponry and therefore completely destroy the whole point of the three weapon and defense types????
Anyway, if i could choose only 1 thing to fix from Galciv 2 to Calciv 3, that would be it!
And speaking of pirates .... lets beef them up a bit. In most games they just kind of sit around doing nothing or simply attack starbases and constructors - but that is all they do - attack stuff with no rhyme or reason. In most games I play none of the races bother to take them out either unless their ships happen to run into them on the way to invading another player's territory. The Terran Tyranny ... uh ... Alliance, is usually the one who has to mop them up.
Pirates should be treated as a minor race with respect to relations. They should be able to talk to you on screen and make a demand for some amount of credits to NOT attack your satellites or ships. Come on! they are pirates, they should have contact with you to try and extort money from you. Even better, one of the "diplomatic" options you should have when talking with pirates is to offer them money to "harass" other races ships and territory. You should even be able to offer them some of your more powerful ships to beef up their firepower against your enemies. Give pirates something to do in the game rather than sit around with their paisley orange color ships....
I agree do something with the pirates like on Distant worlds.
I don't have a problem with surrenders cause I just shut them off anyways.
Can I have an option to shut off planet trading please?
I don't really have a problem with AI surrender behavior, but I don't think it's ever a good thing to have "turn it off" as the only solution to a problem.
Since I like the AI surrender behavior and some others don't, I think a "turn it off" option lets each of us enjoy the game more fully.
If you have a better solution to what you don't think is a problem then I would like to hear it. The reason I think it is the best solution is because someone likes planet trading and surrenders, or it would not be on the game. I would like to be able to shut these things off or remove them from the game. A reasonable solution to surrenders is vasal states instead of surrendering in war, or to make then a protectorate instead if they surrender to a different civilization instead of who you are fighting. This doesn't fix the planet trading problem though. Still give me an option to shut this off.
The simple solution is "don't trade planets." Every planet traded via diplomacy was traded to or from the player. The GC2 AIs never traded planets between themselves; only flips and invasions. On occasion they might contact the player and try to extort a planet, but you always had the option to refuse. In all the games I've played I don't think I ever saw an AI extort a planet from another AI; I'm almost certain they were programmed not to.
In FE you can set this between several values including off. I would expect the same from GC3. Regardless of what it is set to, I just don't like the idea of an AI surrendering when the enemy has no way to actually inflict damage. I have seen an AI from across the map that probably only has contact because of wormhole anomalies surrender to another AI because the other AI already had military ships. The fact that they couldn't actually reach each other or that the neither had invasion techs was apparently never considered. To make matters more derpish, the surrendering AI was the one that declared ware the turn before because the first attacked someone else.
After that I just set surrenders to off.
So a smarter surrender heuristic is definitely a must.
The point I was trying to make was primarily in response to this
which I took to be response to people asking for improvements to surrenders.
While I personally have never been bothered by AI surrender behavior, if there is a problem with it then Stardock should address that for GCIII, not just give us the option to shut it off altogether and leave it at that.
Correct, but I would like to see Stardock work on the problem of planet trading though.
Something that annoyed me around the time I started playing GalCiv 2 was that I couldn't trade planets in such a way to minimize conflict. When your influence is pushing strongly against another civilization's influence, that adds - to your relations with that civilization. Trading planets to minimize that could solve that problem. Likewise, early versions of the game had AIs declare war on you if you had ships in their area of influence for short periods of time. They assumed you were going to invade when you might have been passing through or protecting your planets in their area of influence. Also it made it easier to optimize economic starbases as well, since more planets in the Area of Influence is better. Buying planets belonging to other civilizations to capitalize on this was another strategy.Unfortunately, there was no way to fairly trade planets in GalCiv 2. The AIs couldn't see what I was trying to do.
now that the AI will use player designs form the steam 'cloud' we should see better AI ships.
Some things that GCII didn't do, but could have:
Not sure if this is the right thread, but while playing the campaign for dread lords, I found myself constantly counting the range squares with the grid on to ensure that my ships/fleets were outside of the range of the DL's until I was ready to fight them. I know that the new version moves to hexes which will help with eyeballin' it, but it would be nice to have a way to more easily see the exact range of the enemy ships displayed on the map, based on their max speed.
This could be done as a simple "Mouseover the enemy unit, and display a large hex border==they range". If this was enabled as a mouseover, I'd expect that an option to turn it off would be available as well. For hard core circumstances, having it always on and shown for each enemy ship (only those at war?, evil only?) could also be a useful option. Again, I'd expect that to be easily turned on/off.
If you have multiple ships in the same hex, displaying the range of the fastest would be acceptable. Perhaps you could use red for armed vessels and yellow for ones with no offensive weapons but construction/troop/colonization modules.
One other thing that would go hand in hand would be a toggle to warn the player that some vessels were in attack range of enemy vessels with offensive capabilities. Hit the proximity alert button, and highlight those ships in danger, with a vector towards them from the threatening enemies.
As these are things that the AI already calculates during movement and prep, it shouldn't add much overhead to CPU time.
I have often wanted to know how far it is from a selected ship to some other location whether in terms of tiles or moves. Brad, can this be worked in with your devs busy schedule?
Using the specs that you just gave me I could say about one milimeter give or take a micron, or I could say half a billion light years take your pick on the answer. I don't understand the question.
Oh I'm not going to change the top because it is funny, but on another forum we either came up with 930 million miles for a game parsec pr 18 and a half light years for a real parsec. If your wondering 930 million miles is about 10 astronomical units.
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