I reckon it's a bit early but heck: the earlier the better. Get the developers to think about these issues BEFORE they develop it.
Was playing a bit of Gal Civ II again. Drath Tech is HORRIBLY overpowered on larger maps. War Profiteering. (Shudder). Once you bribe the AI to war, the tech generates at minimum 20,000 credits per turn.
Gal Civ has several issues in all three iterations:
1. AI doesn't put enough engines on its ships.
2. OP combinations. For example, in Gal Civ II War Profiteering + ability to insta-buy starports, colony ships, and factories on your planets = Insta Win.
3. The percentage system doesn't scale well. Universal +% modifiers are too powerful.
4. AI doesn't know how to do the early game colony spam thing.
In other words, balance is a major issue in all three iterations. Game doesn't scale well to larger maps.
So here are my ideas for future iterations of the game:
1. No universal % modifiers. None. Building synergy leads to FIXED production, research or money bonuses. This gets around the problem of exponential growth.
2. The number and type of buildings you can build on a planet is limited by its population. Not enough people? Then there's not enough population to work the buildings.
3. Each star system can only have 1 economic starbase. Every time you build an economic starbase you have to assign it to a specific system. Military starbases, however, can be built anywhere.
4. Economic starbases provide large FIXED boosts to all planets in the system. None of that percentage silliness.
5. Combine shipyards with economic starbases. In other words, starbases are shipyards and vice versa. Makes sense if you think about it.
6. Starbases are the bottleneck for space production. More population = more planetside production. BUT: without an economic star-base, the production can only be used for building stuff on the planet.
7. Make everything that travels in space super expensive relative to buildings on the ground. Make constructor and colony modules ESPECIALLY expensive.
8. Space is dangerous. Traveling into dark, unexplored areas far from your cultural boundaries can cause your ships to die for no reason.
9. Forget about pirates. Instead, there are space monsters that roam the areas outside civilized boundaries. The further from the boundaries, the tougher and the more numerous they become. Use the same template for every monster, but adjust its hit points and damage based on min distance from nearest cultural boundary.
10. Consequently, colony ships are going to need to carry weapons if they intend to travel far from your cultural boundaries.
In other words, turn space travel in Gal Civ into a Dark Souls-like experience. Make space travel more expensive and nerve wracking. The more nerve wracking it becomes, the more rewarding it is if you do it well. It also punishes aggressive early expansion.
Cut corners with your colony ships so you could expand faster? Fine. There be monsters out there that might eat your colony ship.
Also, new colonies don't automatically listen to you. Every time you expand to a new planet, you have to upgrade a "bureaucracy" building in your capital. Otherwise you have no control over what the new colony does. The upgrade and upkeep costs of your "bureaucracy building" scales exponentially so if you want to micromanage you're going to have to pay with in-game currency.
Colonies with large population can become capitals, too, meaning that the player is encouraged to build up the population of new colonies so they can avoid the problem of exponentially more expensive bureaucracy upgrades.
This is hillarious.
The AI in its current state is basicly stumbling over its own feet. SD chose a very weird way to implement in the beginning, or - what I think is less likely - put a lot of effort into obfuscating the .xml interface by which you mod it.
I have seen the AI upgrade three basic factories instead of building a solar pp in the freshly terraformed slot adjacend to all three.
I frequently see the AI build a shipyard on freshly colonized worlds, blocking population growth and building of factories.
The AI frequently maneuvers itself into high coercion regions of the sliders. There appears to be an interface in the AIStrategyDefs.xml, but - to put it bluntly - I have seen it do nothing that would imply to me it actually works.
Funfact: the AI can build multiple uniques. Triple hyperion matrix, double research clositers, double tech capitals...
...
I can only speculate why that is. By first theory would be, that this is par of the plan to provide a solid modding interface, which is understandable to many, even without having ever seen a condition or a loop. Also the system seems to be designed to enable an AI that acts more organic, if that makes sense... An AI which occasinally doesn't follow a recognizable pattern. This can be good, but it falls apart when balance isn't good enough to enable multiple good choices (e.g. tech strategy).
My second guess would simply be that - whatever they planned - it had to be published unfinished (or was not anticipated to produce huge revenue). Game design is a business. Cutting corners happens. I don't blame them in either case. (Though I would love to get my hands on a better interface)
There are a few imbalances in the game, which are that bad, that what you describe takes place and you can't balance it because either the AI stomps the humans into the ground or vice versa. But exponential growth is not one of them. Maybe it is not possible to make an AI that plays as good as a human with no bonusses, but I think it would be possible to make it good enough to be pretty hard (occasionally taking wins, especially with good rng in galaxy creation) with gifted bonusses.
Yes it does. SD just limited it in Vanilla via the AIStrategies. I can and have made the AI colonize 100+ Planets, before I have even hit 40. Although I scaled this back for my mods. It can be OP. You can also get the AI to continue its colonizing efforts while at war.
[...]What we need is an AI or a system that allows the AI to beat you when it's behind. That would make the game fun. ROFL stomping the AI gets boring after a while.
War Profiteering is well balanced to my eyes, there are SuperAbilities ingame which are even stronger, and because there are several power-restraints in place which may keep War Profiteering low:
- Presence of Altarians or too close proximity to evil-factions. Profiteering only works when Drath aren't at war with the target faction themselves. If Altarians are present their SA usually throws Drath into their own-instigated wars, nullifying War Profiteering. Of course there's a huge difference in between AI game & player game: As a player you can choose to not getting involved in any wars incl. if Altarians ask you to come to their aid - which is something the Drath AI will never do.
- Mapsize, you mentioned it already. If something is just situationally strong, or weak, that can be considered well-balanced on average. And it's so much better than to just average it out for all different setups because that would be boring - think about replayability.
- Profiteering is a late-game bonus, thus it must be strong once it kicks in otherwise it would be irrelevant. There are SA such as Breeder, Diplomat or Dominator where you can effectively win the game right during the first Colony Rush - they're much stronger. Therefore I don't understand how you can write this:
The Drath & Terran tree is similar in most regard (generic) with the Terran tree (apart from War Profiteering, which is an addition to their SA) being better because they have more extras (best HP-mod, Warpfleetmods, best sensor-mod, et pp). Drath are even handicapped morally. The gamebreaker however is SuperDiplomat which enables a player to buy freshly colonized planets from all AI (except Torian) for a really small amount of tech + bcs thrown in. I once tested out how far this could be driven in a large galaxy versus suicidal AIs - result at the end of the colonial rush I did have ALL habitable planets under my control (+200) with all AI being left with only 3 (the AI is hardcoded to refuse to trade away more planets except for peace-deals).
So from a player-standpoint the Terrans are the very best race to expand if you know how to do it. Ofc the AI won't utilize this but the Terran AI does well in early game with their +1 bonus to speed.
The only thing I find unbalanced on the Drath is their inherent high diplomacy rating: It's too strong esp. versus races that have an inherent diplomatic penalty, like Thalans or evil-factions: a difference of ~+60% right at gamestart is huge, and seeing that Drath can get the most diplo-bonuses from techs this is only worsening as the game progresses: sometimes causes the Drath to buy all warships away from other factions, and when these are at war with someone they'll get conquered. I've observed a Thalan AI giving away his last remaining defence fleets for his last remaining planet while hostile forces where adjacent to it - defeat.
But the problem here lies more into the evaluation system for ships: outdated designs get degraded in value too fast, plus the AI shouldn't even consider to sell ships when it is currently involved in own wars (ie. actually only when at peace and his development is stiffled by high military maintenance)
Diplomacy is actually the source of a large number of problems, because the AI makes choices just dependant on values of worth for specific items when a player can intelligently & strategically agree on deals. And that's actually the problem in a nutshell:
You're asking for something impossible. A computer is only a counter. They cannot even really subtract, they use negative addition to come to it and all the other mathematical methods are deriven from addition as well. That thing is braindead stupid, the term Artifical Intelligence is grossly misleading. You're asking for something which the best scientists currently wouldn't be able to pull off (if you combine all available variables in a GC3 map at any given turns Go pales in comparison) so just tune down your expectations. Especially under a commercial environment.
if you're having just a tiny little non-developed planet somewhere its power should be boosted into large numbers from SB support? Then the question would arise what you actually need planets for, just live in space directly.
A system depending on % modifiers promotes the utilization of big developed planets, a fixed boost simply calls for as many planets as possible no matter how they look like. I'd say an interesting approach would be to combine both approaches - if some modules would give a fixed amount that would help to close the gap between tiny & large planets in terms of direct raw output numbers.
In a future uber-industrialized civilization that shouldn't be a problem. Limiting factors are more likely to be space & energy-requirement.
Apart from the cosmic radiation (and a future civ would've to solve that problem otherwise space travel wouldn't be possible in the first place) space is nothing but vastly empty. Though I agree that exploration can be fun if there would be more to it than just unveiling the FOW. Though I think this should be more related to uncover stuff in asteroid belts or planets themselves.
I think I understand why you're asking for this: If something holds a great deal of potential future power one shouldn't get it so cheap as now. Otherwise you just master to get as much out of it as fast as possible and most likely win by this [The Grand-Marigoldran-Strategy ]. The problem is that the GC flow actually foresees it to make a colonial rush at very beginning of the game. If you throttle that down too much players may find themselves into a situation of too empty turns. One possible solution could be to dynamically change the cost of Colony Ships - let it be increased by a % factor for any planet that has been colonized in the past (FreeOrion uses this IMO to great success)
IMO constuctors should see a large overhaul. Something along the line that a constructor is only needed to initiate a facility, all its upgrades/improvements should be built according to rules specified by a player, its costs simply taken off from existing planetary production, in a way like the Freighter system in GC2 worked.
Nevertheless, now that you're already thinkinbg about a GCIV I might thrown in some ideas as well:
- Planetary exploration: It's somewhat naive to think that just because you've encountered a planet from orbit everything on its surface is already known to you; colonization should happen only on a small spot and the rest of the planet should be subject to extensive exploration - which would greatly influence the ultimate outcome or form of that colony.
- Dynamic techtree: I find it highly illogical that all future technologies are already "known" or "visisble" even when the prereqs themselves haven't even researched yet. It would be so much more interesting if technology could only be researched if specific "triggers" were found in the civilization, resources, sites on planets, in dealing with aliens, from things you observe in space or learn in battles etc pp, and, whenever a practical application calls for an invention of any sorts. In fact, technologies could be generated based on your past experinces so your attitude of how you play a game would reflect significantly on your abilities to master technology.
- Complete dynamic 4D map - I'd like to colonize a galaxy just like a galaxy is real space. Which also implies that every turn, all objects move a bit - the galaxy rotates around its center, planets around suns, moons around planets etc pp. Suns go nova, planets get hit by comets, suns change in luminosity or emit more radiation, new stars form from gas clouds, close-proximity stars gravitationally disturb whole systems - ejecting planets then turning rogue -or falling into their sun- you don't actually have to invent something anew because all these things already happen out there....
Yes. Sort of. My argument is there's too many % modifiers in the game.
@ Maiden666
Depends on map size. I said Drath tech. Key is to get a couple of techs the AI ISN'T able to get early. Combine that with the galactic bazaar (which you can build early if you start with the trade superpower) and its very easy to bribe everyone to war.
You rushbuy that wonder with Mitosoft after the initial expansion phase is over. (the one where you only pay a fraction of the usual rush-buy cost, while paying a loan for a very long time).
With War Profiteering, the only challenge is to see if you have the stamina to rushbuy so you can stay under 1000,000 credits by the time you win the game. Tax rate was set at 0% for most of the game so I could burn through more money. I won by being evil and influence starbase/mind controlling everyone. AI couldn't do a thing because they were too busy getting bribed to fight one another.
I understand the AI is braindead. Thus: make the game easier for the braindead AI to take advantage of.
Exponential growth KILLS braindead computers.
Oh I don't doubt that - no need really for extra gimmicks to instigate wars, just take a look at the MMR & always bribe strong AIs to attack weak AIs of different alignment or close territorial proximity. It's even more easy with SuperDiplomat because that SA acts likewise as the Bazaar (a +50% increase in value of your offering [which beforeahead gets multiplied by the discrepancy in the diplomacy ratings - which is the reason why both Bazaar & SD is OP] and SD is even additive to the Bazaar bonus.
Nevertheless, what you did is simply creating a setup which did maximize the power of your strategy:
- Multiple AIs to increase Profiteering & have the AI being preoccupied with each other
- Influence War to not handicap your Profiteering
- Taxes 0% to have best population growth = more influence
- Evil MMC = insta flips
Of course this works very well, even against suicidal AI. But just change a single increment - eg. play against a single AI w/o Minors - it won't work anymore at all...
Yes, but that's the only case it won't work on.
If it's 1v1, I guess Super Annihilator and rush them down.
I think you're going to like this:
Annihilator works very well also on maximum enemies (incl. Minors). Just keep distances low in terms of galaxy size... and your own speed + weapons-rating as high as possible.
The number of ships you get from a war-declaration is based on your current military rating - although only 1 proc every turn. Imagine to declare war EVERY turn on someone, just to get free ships, and an increasingly skyrocketing military rating. Which will make the AI gladly accept your peace-offering, just followed by another war-declaration. You can repeat this 3 times for any available opponents, until they don't trust you anymore. Which is irrelevant at that point because you already have HUNDREDS of ships in space when everybody is still just in the midst of the colony rush - which you can easily prevent - amongst other things.
Just try it out. You'll see that at that point where your War Profiteering game began to start rolling you already finished everybody off with Dominator - IF the setup is right
Maiden wasn't the Korath your favorite for awhile before the Yor was.
Yor + Thalan - most unique techtrees and Hard to play as you're handicapped in several regions (Diplo, Influence, Growth/Farms etc)
Too bad we can't test this on multiplayer. See which strat is the best.
Why cant we test this on multiplayer
There is no Gal Civ II multiplayer
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