I'm not sure if this has been brought up in other topics, but I looked around and only saw one other post that saidanythingabout combat (several about UI enhancements)
As the game stands in its current form, combat is very stale and feels like it is on rails. From a person who has played countless strategy games over 25 years I feel that the entire combat system needs an overhaul to be competitive with other grand strategy games. So the ideas I am suggesting are really nothing new, just elements taken from other games. Some of them are taken directly from Stardock's other games:
Now that this game has been programmed in 64-bit the possibilities should be limitless given hardware limitations for the user. This game right now just feels like a slightly polished up remake of GalCivII. I really hope that the developers are serious in implementing some major 2015 changes or this fan base will quickly jump ship for a better strategy game.
I agree with all the points you have raised here. Implementing heroes would be a great idea. They also need to overhaul planetary invasion, I was expecting big things, but its just not been delivered. I think I'm going to stop playing Gal Civ III for a while and maybe come back in a few months!!!
Tactical combat has been discussed thouroughly, passionately, and repeatedly. I am surprised a search did not find a reference. It is not in the development schedule and is basically ruled as not part of the intended GalCiv gameplay. It is, however, a great subject for starting bitter arguments.
There is some sort of commanders system coming. I have no clues as to what it will contain.
I don't think they will have a leveling system for both commanders and fleets. It sounds like they would consider that redundant.
I am glad to see you give some love to pirates. Most people seem to hate them. They spice up my early game. The AI does poorly with them, but I expect that will change someday.
I like the idea of quests. I would rather see it used to extend and flesh out the campaign. I would keep the sandbox strictly sandbox.
I have to disagree about "slightly polished up remake". I suppose it is subjective, but I don't think GalCiv needed a major re-write. I like what they have done to expand a successful title and set foundations for several years of growth.
What better 4x? This is the Mustang Shelby gt cobra convertible of game's.
Main quest, lol.
The biggest reason for calling it a "slightly polished-up remake" (although that would be an exaggeration) is simply that there aren't many substantive changes from GalCiv2 that have taken effect yet, and the game is already released. A lot of the major changes (other than graphical, which are great) are a little iffy to me, and a lot of content from GalCiv2 that I like hasn't been included yet.
Also I would like leveling for ships since I doubt most of the game will be run by commanders (that would be overwhelming as crap if you had as many ships wandering around as I usually do). Leveling ships means the Enterprise doesn't need an admiral in charge of her to learn from combat and surveying anomalies. It wouldn't be nearly as substantial, but it would have an effect (slow upgrade of health, accuracy, jamming, etc).
Otherwise, I don't really need tactical combat and getting programming for that is a lot more of a task than anyone asking for it seems to realize (if they haven't gotten around to including everything they wanted before release yet, how are they supposed to build a minigame into the game that needs completely new programming?). Something at least endless space style where you can give your ships priorities and set orders of combat (or even specific orders, such as which ships for your escorts and guardians to focus on protecting and what types of ships for your assaults and interceptors to prioritize if the default targeting isn't worthwhile in the current battle; say interceptors targeting assaults first or even other interceptors).
Also for the OP, giving commanders bonuses for specific weapon types simply doesn't work since in GalCiv, you usually focus all your attention down one line other than your resource-specific weapons; that would make ships with new weaponry simply less effective than your standard ones, and would take away choice rather than create it. The tech tree already has enough choices that take away variety that I don't want more (i.e. only getting 1/3 of invasion methods or diplomatic treaties available is more choices but less variety).
There's no point in even having levels if everything else just scales to them.
no point in have tech trees as you can just trade for all your techs anyway and make a profit doing it. Why research anything?
Right now pirates don't level up at all. "Scalable" doesn't mean ES4 Oblivion where everything was exactly at your level that you encountered, it means that as all civilizations level up so do the pirates on a generally comparable level. Over time they will become less effective as pirates lack the capacity to match interstellar empires, but that doesn't mean they should be at the same level constantly.
The current system makes pirates overpowered if they happen to spawn right next to your homeworld (as you can't really deal with them, so just run away until you can research warships yourself) and that makes no sense. Pirates shouldn't have weapons before EVERYONE else in the galaxy combined with higher production than anyone else with an unsupported shipyard. Yet in late game, pirates have the exact same ships pumping out with no different weaponry whatsoever and are easy to counter by just sticking a shield and weapon onto a scout ship (my cargo survey ships can usually beat them). Its sort of the same idea that shipyards are untouchable in early game and pushovers in mid game.
Personally, I hate Pirates. But since you can turn them off IDK. But the combat system is kinda weak. I, personally, wish it was more like Sins of a Solar Empires combat system. I thought that was very polished. GalCiv gameplay with Sins combat would be awesome.
Merging a RTS with a TBS. They say it can't be done. Except except every Total war game ever made, MOO, MOO2, MOO3, about a dozen Sid Meiers games have both and etc...
You can't do both and do them well. The AI in Total War is, in my experience, a total joke and Sid Meier's AIs tend to just be given cheat resources until they can compete.
The biggest problems with games that have both tactical and strategic modes are:
1.) Resources need to be allocated to fund two major projects rather than one. Right now, this game is having trouble keeping up with the projects that they're currently working on and they're talking about people switching projects (since apparently spending over a year working on one thing gets dull). Even worse, the AI is having trouble playing the game as it is right now; coding the AI to play a tactical minigame as well will take up a lot of time that should be spent fixing and improving its current state.
2.) A tactical game mode is not something that you can simply add to a strategy game because it significantly-changes the way combat works and therefore the strategy you have to use to fight battles (for instance in Empire at War I would never autoresolve a land defense battle because I can do a ton better than the AI, but I don't really like land battles in that game...). The tactical game mode has to be balanced sufficiently that players aren't feeling pushed to fight every tactical battle.
I'd rather see them flesh out the strategic stuff than add tactical elements since the game is about strategy more than tactics (whereas the whole total war series is about tactics then strategy; the strategic depth is all designed to make tactical battles unique rather than perfectly-balanced random battles like they end up online or in single-player skirmish).
Tactical combat will NEVER EVER be in Gal Civ III.
It was requested that Gal Civ II have 64 bit, DX 11, larger maps, more features...and thus GCIII was born.
They need to make the AI better in war.
Comparing GC3 with GC2 is moot atm as GC3 is at v1.03/1.1 whereas GC2 was ended at 2.04 with 3 DLC's and multiple patchs I wasn't playing GC2 at the 1.03 or 1.1 so I wouldn't know how they compare side by side but given time and the Devs previous track record and as I've stated before Brad/Frogboy wont want to see GC3 screwed up (hopefully) so I'm prepared to wait and see what happens and before anyone accuses me of being a fanboy I've had a couple of discussions on the forum with frogboy about things that have gone in GC3 that personally I disagree with Multiplayer/Carrier Module limits/LEP - I REALLY want this gone!.
As I've said on another game forum - You can please some of the people,all of the time and all of the people some of the time but not everybody all the time.Patience is a virtue that can be a lesson in life or a lifetime lesson?
Failing that the masochistic quote - Give a man enough rope!
Haven't even finished the first project to be honest. I wish Stardock would design a product on the far end of the production possibility curve instead of the other way around. But to hear Brad say it they are fanatically happy to tell the tale of great sales exceeding all expectations and costs recovered and live to fight another day. Yes good for business but not exactly an industry shattering experience or leap forward. What exists needs work and what is missing leaves plenty to be desired.
The whole idea that tactical combat wouldn't be do-able is another cop out, it would be both beneficial by on several levels do-able, and make up for some of the flaws that exist. Do-able because MOO did it in every iteration, fun because tactics go best hand in hand with strategy, deepening the game because while they made it bigger they did not make it better. Starfleet command did it way better than MOO as far as tactical but even MOOs simple combat would be better than nothing. Hell even being able to direct your ships to which targets and still be mostly watching would be less of a snore-fest the battles are. It just isn't satisfying building up a huge empire and only really being able to use the stats from combat for substance.
Yes it would cost more, to build but there are plenty of gamers on the fence about it and while Stardock has a good patching record their release record is not as solid.
I am in complete agreement though that they should flesh out the strategic stuff, and UI, and AI, and well just about everything, turn times, CPU utilization, features which were in previous incarnations that are not in GC3.
I feel that GC3 deserves none of the 9/10s or even 8/10s it got and all of the 5s 6s and 7s players have given it. It is worth the purchase in a year when it is discounted but full price for a game missing a bunch of features and with pretty poor AI and strategic depth where it is at is ludacris.
One thing that I was reading about the other day on another company is that they want every release to be "noteworthy" and that they don't want to sequel to death or DLC everybody to death but that they want large polished, refined, and filled out products that are noteworthy which compliment their brands. I just get the sense that the whole lets make GC3 noteworthy box wasn't checked and the lets develop it to exactly the line where everybody else is at and expand it +/- 1mm.
To be fair I do find the ability to put in 100+ races to be noteworthy, in the middle of a crap ton of bad AI, and other implementations which aren't fleshed out or filled in it feels like a hollow accomplishment.
I understand and agree with te point being made. However, some comparison seems valid if you are looking at GC3's growth. For lack of a more comparable standard, GC2 will have to do. From what I know of comparison techniques you could easily set up categories such as playability, replayability, engagement, challenge, adaptability, and so on. Then you get some survey method you can trust and you get data for the categories.
With any care, you could have a fairly good approximation. If the AI of GC2 ended up at overall value X. the present AI overall value can be assigned aX where a is some fraction either greater or less than 1. A later similar study would give us a new "a" and we could see growth or not or how much growth. It all depends on having a measurement system we could
In the meantime, we all have very subjective opinions based on very anecdotal evidence. Stardock has some interesting stats, but most of us don't seem to believe those. If there was such a thing as forum consensus, and if that has any validity in the real world, I would say it puts "a" as a value less than one. There seems to be some disagreement on whether we should be happy that it is growing or unhappy that it needs to grow. Underneath that, there is a consensus that it is actually growing. Given how demanding we are, that is encouraging evidence.
Other than that, you are right. It is all moot at this point.
I understand and agree with te point being made. However, some comparison seems valid if you are looking at GC3's growth. For lack of a more comparable standard, GC2 will have to do. From what I know of comparison techniques you could easily set up categories such as playability, replayability, engagement, challenge, adaptability, and so on. Then you get some survey method you can trust and you get data for the categories. With any care, you could have a fairly good approximation. If the AI of GC2 ended up at overall value X. the present AI overall value can be assigned aX where a is some fraction either greater or less than 1. A later similar study would give us a new "a" and we could see growth or not or how much growth. It all depends on having a measurement system we could In the meantime, we all have very subjective opinions based on very anecdotal evidence. Stardock has some interesting stats, but most of us don't seem to believe those. If there was such a thing as forum consensus, and if that has any validity in the real world, I would say it puts "a" as a value less than one. There seems to be some disagreement on whether we should be happy that it is growing or unhappy that it needs to grow. Underneath that, there is a consensus that it is actually growing. Given how demanding we are, that is encouraging evidence.Other than that, you are right. It is all moot at this point.
what are you trying to say Q ball?
I have to say that I disagree with what you are saying. In my opinion everything that was within the final product of GC2 should be in the released product for GC3. Anything less is a step backwards.
While i think GC3 is a good game I agree with your point and confess to being a bit dispirited at its current release state. Feels like a polished beta more than 1.0 release. To their credit patches are coming pretty fast. Believe it will get there, just a mater of more patches and time
Well, that's what this game does too, but it also lacks tactical play. I haven't seen any evidence that combining tactical and strategic hurts the AI. Both Galciv and Sins have some of the worst AI I've seen. No offense to these great games, but I've received more challenge from the AI in Master of Orion 1 and 2, which is a far older series that has both tactical and strategic play. Its weird because elements of this old game are still miles ahead of what newer games are capable of.
I don't think its too outlandish to expect a tactical element that can compete with its predecessor from 1993. I mean really. I still play the original master of orion and it still holds up just fine, even against all of its modern competition. I just wanna emphasize how substantial a good tactical combat system can be in a space game. I played galciv2 in all its glory, but the entire game was this massive build up to nowhere. After a couple games I uninstalled it in favor of MOO and MOO2. The real game changer was the superior tactical game.
Moving onto the other mentioned games it depends which series we are referring to. Total War has been hit and miss with each addition to the series, but Shogun 2 has a great strategic game along with a great tactical game and decent AI. Still I think its clear that AI has been a weak point across the entire genre no matter the game title and there has been little improvement that I've noticed since the 90's. The best AI has always come from the modders, which boggles my mind since they have less resources and more restrictions.
I would not like to see the developers spend their time on building a tactical combat game; better that they should expand and improve the strategic game.
I can't think of a single strategic game that does strategic 4x and tactical combat both well. Usually it is the strategic gameplay and AI ability that suffers (I'm looking at you, Total War).
Two changes that would add a lot of flavor to combat for me:
1) Let me change the function of ships (Escort, Capital, Assault, etc) during my turn if I want to.
2) Let ship systems be damaged in addition to the current hull taking damage. So a ship might lose its thruster(s) or warp drive, or lose weapons or defenses as the hits come in.
That second point would not just improve battles it would add to the strategic game: so my command cruiser lost its ion drives and can't move as fast as the rest of the fleet. Do I drop it out and send it in to be repaired or do I slow my fleet down and hope they get it working again soon?
But no - not tactical combat, please. We'd never see any more improvement in the strategic game, and it needs the love right now.
Million dollar question: Is the game still fun?
The game is a bunch of extremes. They completely nailed many elements and flopped on others. All in all I think its fun right now, but eventually the lack of AI challenge will get to me, if its not worked on. There are also a ton of balance issues, but I'm sure they will be worked on too.
The tactical has potential in its current state. The combat roles remind me of stars!, which is another old and fantastic space game. They shouldn't replace the current system, but more work is needed. We're talking about the most stupid and basic commands here. The combat roles are cool and all, but they are inferior to a much simpler system.
Now add on top of this some risk/reward in regards to weapons and engagement ranges so that close-quarters weapons have a significantly higher DPS. There is no need for these roles, most of which make no sense anyway.
Finally, a much simpler role system. Ships can prioritize combat ships or prioritize support ships. Support ships would be ships that have support modules or are unarmed.
Clearly it is fun for some people. For me it feels like cake, half baked, in a different flavor than I was hoping for, without the cherries I was hoping would be on it like GCII and without any frosting.
The strategic elements are A Ok except the AI can't compete. There is no tactical so all you get is the stats of how your ships fared, since you probably are loading out your ships until they are full with hull space there isn't much to be done to find the best fit/ max advantage so its just shallow, as is the AI. The planet management while deeper than GC II is also meaningless. Some buildings have much lower effects than others, and strategies don't really have a galactic effect they have a global or local effect but that is it.
Even the strategic game would be much better if the AI actually understood and respected a border and it acted like a land border on a 2D surface like on a planet as it is a 2D surface in space. However the influence barriers don't make borders. So there are no borders. Even though if influence barriers were borders the game would be better.
Is it a fun implementation? I don't think so. Fun coms from making choices that have consequences which are clear, and fun comes from being able to have multiple pathways to victory, having victories taste sweet requires the ability to lose something you could control the win or loss of. There is no tactical battle to be spoken of so you can't compete to best somthing here. You can watch but its just borin so you skip it and if you look at the stats you might modify a design or you might just build 2 ships which takes the same amount of time and is no real problem because you are ahead on resources anyway. You are ahead anyway because the only real way to win is Production Production Production. You don't need to research ever, as you can trade for those even with the lockouts in immense galaxies with dozens of races, somebody's turn to trae you something is up. You are able to do this because you have the resources because the other angle is getting colonies ASAP is the fastest way to win. More = Better. LEP sucks, but it doesn't matter because you don't suffer revolts or worlds or invasions you just pay a penalty, which you can overcome easily but simply just having more worlds. The AI simply isn't up to the task of putting you in jeopardy, and the non-existent tactical combat means you spend 50% of your time running constructors to starbases which don't maintain borders, and competing with AI that can't keep up and it becomes less about strategy and more about production which of course you can do better on because all production derives from expansion and multiplication of those efforts over time.
Were influence barriers, borders and effectively handled as such by the AI then you'd have actual strategic placement to consider. If the game was structures to handle constructors much more automatically or just remove the upgrading of starbases via constructors all together it would be so much less of a bitch to build.
Feel a lot more like cleaning my room when I was a teenager rather than hitting the next turn in Master of Orion. You tell me does that sound fun?
one question along with a suggestion, what woulde have happen if the al and the player coulde build a lot of small combat ships for a very small price like 15 hammers or 10 in production price in the early game.
By this i am refering to be able to build things at a very low cost and get a lot of small armys out, giving at least a feeling of that you are not helpless even if you are at the lowest lvl tech of warfare.
so if you wanted to build small ships or medium ships, their cost for hammers woulde have been increases including the weapon damage and shield strength due to what hull type it is.
tiny hull 1.0 small (standard amount of hammers used 10 hammers) small hulls 3.0 ( this means everything put upon the small ship costs 3 times more but are also 3 times stronger, including the amount of mass capacity.) Medium hulls 9.0 (also the same theory.) Large hull 27.0 Huge hull 81.0
this just an exsample of what i suggest but yeah is just an idea i have been pondering on. (also dont forget the tech uppgrades in the game, how to balance that once you get to mid-late game stage, but maybe limit the amount of tech/passivs can be applied to the type of hull (like a huge hull can only have 3 while large can have 6 and so on.
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