I was pretty excited to see todays announcement!
Despite playing Galciv3 for about 700 hours, it got me thinking about why I wouldn't rank it my favourite 4x
Probably my favourite 4x game ever was alpha centauri. While there were a huge number of things that made that game great, especially given how dated it is, I think the real key to its success was the attention to detail on the lore. Every tech had a cutscene and detailed description. The races and personalities were so well crafted. The attention to detail was unbelievable, and still better than any game I've seen since. The entire sandbox game followed an overall narrative in a way space 4x games never really have since.
Galciv3 had basically none of it. I would love to see that change in Galciv4 - i know there is an interesting backstory to the game, but its not really featured at all in the general gameplay. Its not that expensive, and its the last 10% of polish that makes all the difference.
Other key things
1) Please keep the ship builder, and allow us to import! I think I would have played only 100 or 200 hours without it. Even if the ship builder evolves dramatically, surely an import tool can be made...
2) Space is an empty place, but it doesn't *need* to be that way in game. Galciv3 did a decent job of this compared to other space 4x games, but I think you should double down.
3) The new sector / planetary management system sounds great
4) Please rip off stellaris etc and allow for multi-race empires. It adds a total extra dimension to the gameplay. For example, having an Iridium economic advisor makes a lot more sense than Altarian
I think attention to the series background lore is going to be one of the biggest changes in the game. Rather than having a campaign, it's all integrated into the sandbox.
There will be a lot LOT more "mini" cut-scenes in this game.
Instead of making a new thread, I figured I might as well hijack this one to add in my own wish list items. That cool with everyone? Alright then.
For starters, I hope you've got a couple of features in the works to improve quality of life (QoL):
1. Switching between "windows"/"screens"
Could you make it such that if I encounter an event that demands my immediate attention e.g. Trade Offers, United Planets Resolutions etc., I can switch away from them so I can view other information I might need at the moment?
For example, I might want to look at my Tech Tree to see how my own Research is going before accept a Trade Offer, or look at the map to see how my war is going before casting my vote in a UP Resolution related to war etc.
That's not possible currently with GCIII, so I'm hoping you guys have accounted for it from the start with GCIV.
2. Blueprint Designer
The Ship Designer has been great all this time and all, but what I've been really wanting for a while is a Blueprint Designer that generates ships based on my specifications.
A Blueprint Designer should allow me to designate which ship components I want for a design, in what order of priority, how many of each it should have (including filling up all remaining capacity with them) and so on. It should also allow me to use any ship design I want for the blueprint, including any downloaded from the Steam Workshop.
In GCIII, making my own blueprints is currently only possible if I were to mess with the XML files. So unless this is some kind of stealth attempt by Stardock to train future XML programmers or something, a Blueprint Designer UI feature would be greatly appreciated for GCIV.
First I would like to say, YES!!!
I haven't read much into the announcement but will check out more afterwards.
Regarding wishlist my out-there items would be t to see a manpower mechanic, where you have grow a pool of troops and ship crew, and more to do with resources. For example, Distant Worlds, Stars!, and hell even War of Magic had this. Some of these games required having miners extract resources and trade ships shuttle them back and forth. It might be me wanting Anno in space in my GalCiv but I'm a nerd lol.
More down to earth would be to do away with the "all or nothing" combat approach. I'd like setup my ships to attempt a retreat at say 50% health.
I think in GalCiv 2 I played 2 campaign missions and GC3 I played half of one so Sandbox all the way.
Item #1 for my wish list: Please make the ship designer easier to use. These kind of games come to a dead stop if you can't build upgraded ships - it's a critical game function.
And I always find the ship designer's in 4x games to be very 'non intuitive'.
With a game with no tactical combat I dont really understand the point of putting so many resources into a lego designer.It also means the ships never look that good compared to say ES2.
i'm just going to drop this here https://forums.galciv3.com/496796/page/5/#3797155
And now to see if I can copy paste from the other forum for GCIII the ship designer can have more effect even without tactical combat.
Greetings. I think the main list from GCIII has multiple pages of us discussing this subject.
Ok I love designing ships.
I love seeing my ships in battle even more.
Some of my best games are from Gal Civ II and the responses some of the Ai would reply or tell me.
Please keep the snarkiness.
Please go to dinner and have several margaritas (or whatever you need for snarkiness inspiration) and keep it in game.
Ive shot dr pepper out my nose I have laughed so hard!
Looking forward to Alpha.
For me make sure it works on (Steam) Linux
YES! you absolute legends! GalCiv3 is still a great game and it was a reason why i got a bigger and better hardware
take my energy
I have to agree with Jodet3359.
I found using the ship designer about as much fun as having a tooth pulled.
I have been a GalCiv devotee from the very first version on OS/2.
Steam tells me I have spent well over four and a half thousand hours playing the latest iteration of that game (so clearly there are other aspects of the game I enjoy ).
In all that time I have created exactly 2 ships designs, or should I say managed to make a couple of minor mods to existing designs so that I could build capital class ships when there was effectively none of the required raw materials to make the standard version to be found anywhere in the known universe. It took me hours to struggle through even these minor alterations as I recall. It is admittedly a distant memory, it would be years now since I even attempted to use the designer.
Lets see.... jumping in here...1) Make everything designable... Starbases/Asteroid Mining Facilities/Special Ships related to Government/Ideology/Whatever, Drones, Etc. Thoroughness if you can.2) Mod Support via Steam. By that I mean, I can download mods through steam and install them. Actual mods. Not just half-completed shipsets.
3) We need more ways to see/enjoy fleets of ships. Some player's demand combat control, some want better combat viewers, etc... how about just if I click on a fleet, I get a little popup video that loops a sweeping review of this ships in that fleet. So... click on fleet... extension window appears with a little voice chatter acknowledging me (their emperor) a little video showing all my fancy ships, and stats next to it. Click off, it all disappears. And yes, have a menu option to disable it.
4) I'd like to see GCIV lean away from trying to be a chess game, and lean towards being a RPG. I firmly believe you can do both.5) Real end-game content. GCIII has virtually none. Stellaris has some, but it's not all it's cracked up to be (though I have not fully tested out Nemesis). 6) Meaningful ship roles within a fleet. Fleets of all Tiny or all Huge should be at disadvantages against more balanced loadouts. I want battleships, destroyers, and some carriers working together to do a thing. That does not preclude or insist upon combat control... I believe it can be done with stats alone. It's irrelevant whether this is realistic or not... it's fun and it's what I think most people want and feel good seeing on a screen.PS: I get your idea with having all ships contribute ground-military assault power, but I would recommend limiting that (or giving enhancements for it) to Carriers. In effect, even if Carriers don't provide long range on a strategy map like ocean-going carriers, they give the fleet the ability to **precisely** pound colonies into submission and provide the air-support ground forces need.Glad to see you embracing the sectors concept for GCIV... it's something I've wanted to see tried for a while... hopefully it works!
This +1
For a lot of us I think it boils down to that we have no satisfying conclusive agency to the entire ship design experience in either GalCiv II or GalCiv III. If you think about most 4x's games the ship loop is some form of research, some form of design (usually but not always) and then construction and, in the case of a warship, combat.
Now I'm a huge fan of tactical combat and, to echo what Ash said, I've never understood the point of the detailed cosmetic ship designer when the end of the loop (combat) for ships in GalCiv II/III was such a huge letdown. I know some people enjoy it as is, and can spend many MANY hours in the ship designer and that's great, to each his own.
To that end, I'm not advocating for tactical combat in GalCiv IV. I'd love it if there was some form of it but Brad has said it wont' be in there due to various reasons and one being the scope of the game. And honestly, that makes total sense.
What I do hope we see is something vastly superior to the combat system of GalCiv III. The concept of the ship roles was a step in the right direction but the final result ended up being a lukewarm halfway house that was poorly implemented, shallow, difficult to understand, inflexible and ultimately unsatisfying. I'm going to throw the battle viewer in with that as well because the visualization and ship placement was often poorly aligned with the actual battle results.
During the development of GalCiv III VERY early on in its development there was talk by the devs of having a simple pre-battle planning phase that would let the player set some battle options prior to the combat. I believe that later that took the form of requiring that you had certain ships in the fleet with a certain module that would let the player set certain options. Regardless, all of that was dropped.
I would really like to see something like that implemented for GalCiv IV, something that allows the player to alter combat behavior on an engagement-by-engagement basis that goes beyond the conventional methods of altering fleet composition or assigning leaders. I'm not talking about Dominons 5 level of setup but something that allows some general behaviors to be set. Perhaps allow more detailed behaviors to be unlocked with the presence of a fleet commander, just throwing out ideas here.
And let me also say I'm very excited about combat no longer being and all or nothing affair in many cases. This is a VERY welcome change and I hope it sets the stage for further combat enhancements that give the player more options besides smashing two fleets together. I really hope to see combat improved a great deal in GalCiv IV and if not full blown tactical, then something far superior to what we had in GalCiv III.
Ditto to a lot of what was said.I love the ship designer. I want it to stay.However I want there to be more to the combat system then just rock/paper/scissors. I want every part to actually have a use and effect. Why did thrusters exist in GCIII? In theory they made ships faster so you could close with a missile ship and even the fight sooner... but in practice it made way more sense to just put an additional rail gun or two on your ship. make it so the ships actually behave differently depending on how they are built and what weapons they have... Heck steal some "tactical programing" settings from games like Gratuitous Space Battles... when you design the ship you set how it behaves and then it just does its own thing in combat.
Yea, the thrusters in GC3 is a perfect example of its combat system's halfway implementation IMO. In an actual tactical setting having faster speed would let you do a lot of things like close faster with the enemy ships or hold the range open. The problem in GC3 was that the combat options present only let you do one thing: charge at the enemy. There was no way to design a ship with thrusters and then give a ship role that keeps it at maximum range from the enemy to take advantage of its speed. Or to use that speed to make fast passes at an enemy ship then circle out of range, come back again etc.
It was like they threw some tactical elements into the combat engine but didn't give the player sufficient means and tools to actually take advantage of those elements to any great degree. Even without full tactical control a more fleshed out ship role system or fleet engagement stances would have let the player take advantage of different strategies without having to directly control the combat itself.
I once tried putting a lot of thrusters on a ship in GalCiv 3 just to see what would happen. The thruster ship charged the enemy and zipped right past them. At least, thats what I assumed what happened given the lack of weapons fire after that (the combat viewer doesn't show things right). It took a few turns for the thruster ship to turn around and charge the enemy again. This again, lead to the thruster ship zipping right past the enemy with only a single exchange of weapons fire. This repeated until the enemy was dead.Suffice to say, I don't think it is helpful to zip past your target. I think you should stop once you are in weapons range.
some agency over battles will be way too cool!
designer is cosmetics, i don't care too much but i need to be able to change the ships using whatever parts..
End game creep - it's ... boring to finish a game sometimes, anomalies might be used for some kind of mini-game or sm.th. - when you build a stronk char/empire - you should be able to apply it to some challenging content for rewards (:
i really have no idea what to expect but i am hyped!!
I should be able to "mine" my decommissioned ships for a percentage of the resources that went into their construction.
Being able to mine space battlefields for a (smaller) percentage of the destroyed ship resources also makes sense.
Privateers to raid enemy ships and planets would be good, though there should be a risk of being caught out, if I do a raid and lose. Spies in my territory can uncover my nefarious actions etc. I should be able to say capture a fleet of Drengin ships and use them to attack Yor bases and ships to provoke Yor to attack the Drengin.
I should have a choice as to what to do with captured populations.
Do I want to integrate them into my society, slow and hard.
Use them as slave labour.
Eat them for dinner.
With regard to piracy raids, an attack on Yor with Drengin ships by an integrated Drengin crew should be far more convincing than using my own race to crew the ships.
There should be "rumours". If I am integrating Drengin on one planet and eating them on another, the integrated Drengin should be able to figure it out over time and wonder if they are next.
This is just my 2 cents on the project and Derek has the last word on it.
I love the ship design features. But I *personally* feel like the time that was spent on that feature in GC3 would have been better spent on features in the game.
One of the complaints I frequently see about GalCiv III is that it took multiple expansions to flesh out the game. So I have to wonder how much of that would have been prevented if nearly half the budget hadn't been spent on the ship designer?
With GalCiv IV, we have that ship designer already and I agree it could be cleaned up. I just think that the top priority for the game has to be the gameplay itself. The game should be great even if it had no ship design at all. The ship design should simply make the game even better IMO.
For the first alpha, there won't even be ship design. Different techs will unlock different ships. That won't stay that way but it helps us make sure that the gameplay itself is solid.
The ship designer itself (the cosmetic part) will exist outside the game or at the very least, be buried in an advanced, advanced feature type thing so that we are forced to make sure that the basic choosing and configuring of ships is very straight forward and focuses on strategic depth and not cosmetic elements.
Just my 2 cents.
I guess all players will have different priorities (eg ship designer, combat). Personally, I find the ship designer neat, but I never used it. I do appreciate the cool designs some people come up with though. If we had tactical combat, I'd just auto it (just like I did in Master of Orion 2). I'd auto colonies after the 10th or so, if I actually trusted the AI to do a good job (I don't think I've seen an AI in a 4x handle cities/planets/improvements well, I have to do it myself lol).
I'd much rather see resources put towards the galaxy map/generation (my biggest GC3 pet peeve), diplomacy, planet/empire management, etc.
Agree
From my own viewpoint I would have been happy with a "ship designer" that simply took a list of attributes, weapons, shields etc and jumbled them altogether however it wants.
While others obviously enjoy designing beautiful ships, all I ever cared about was functionality and building the best option with the resources and technologies available.
Other than placement of components I never designed a ship for anything other than functionality. I enjoy thinking of what kind of ship I need against different opponents. I’m glad to see what type of ship you build will continue to be something you can design if you want to. I am also very glad that their will be a retreat option.
I enjoyed the government aspect of intrigue. I wish desperately that the colony limits where calculated by number of habitable planets when the map was made so they functioned better on large maps but it added variance to the game. I hope that governments in the next game would be slightly different based on how the map was.
My second request is one you are probably tired of reading about. Markets was a good idea it made getting required resources a lot easier but not too easy. I do not think much is needed to change with this but I would very much like for a second black market to be added that all governments that can use that has limitless resources but come with such a high price you wouldn’t use it unless you were extremely desperate or so far ahead the game is basically over.
My third request. Please make trade financially matter because in 3 it just never seemed to make much of a difference in Civ 5 sometimes I make decisions of who I’m going to attack based on their trade profitability that is a thought complex I NEVER experienced in the hundreds of hours I played in Gal Civ 3. Diplomatically I would embargo certain players to improve relations but the financial aspect of this just never crossed my mind.
In general (trade, treaties, tourism) in general should have an impact on the ability/availability of citizens, and especially for citizens that are gifted in areas where your own civ lacks (for example, if you're trading with the drengin you have a higher % of being able to recruit a kick-ass war citizen). Thus, if you need a lot of, say, farming expertise it would incentivize you to attempt to develop relations with alien factions who have a lot of farming experience/knowledge/etc.
That is an excellent idea IMO.
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