Why are you putting GalCiv aside?

[Sombra]

Adding to the replay value of the game:

- A little more eye candy perhaps?

-Terrain in space: Asteroid fields damage for bigger ships for example if they pass through. Gas nebula: limiting sensor range. Black holes sector can´t be passed if not certain techs are avaible etc.

- Perhaps limiting the range of bigger ships : Forcing you to plan a military campaign accordingly up to now alwys nearly the whole galacy is in range of my attack ships.

Further improving the (already very good) AI. Playing again CIV3 a lot in the last days its incredible annoying having a computer enemy cheatring for example who always knows exactly where your cites and units are.

[Cookie Monster]

I love GalCiv and RoN but both have taken a backseat to HoI. I haven't played that in a while and with the new 1.05 patch HoI is once again a great game.

There just isn't enough time to play everything so each of my games don't get played at some point. It's only a matter of time before my mood swings back to wanting to play GalCiv.

[Harry Seldon]

What's HoI?

[Egbert]

HoI?
Almost certainly: Hearts of Iron, a World War 2 strategy game made by Paradox, the Swedish company that made Europa Universalis. If interested try the forum at: europa-universalis.com

[Cookie Monster]

Correct!

HoI = Hearts of Iron (great game about WW2 grand strategy from Paradox)

[Pyrkaige]

To briefly answer the original topic question (apart from a simple lack of time, it being the summer and all): the main reason I stopped playing GalCiv for the time being is the AI. Not because it wasn't good; it's astoundingly strong for a game of this type. But beating the AI was the main reason I played the game a lot right off the bat, and once I got to being able to beat it regularly at all but the "built in cheat" levels, it felt a bit dry. In the Civ series, you don't play the game to beat the AI, because the AI in those games is horrid. But since there are other factors contributing to the "one more turn" feel, it doesn't matter that much. I'm probably in a distinct minority when it comes to this, but I would love to see a huge percentage of whatever coding time is available spent on improving the AI itself, especially tactically. OTOH, if there were gameplay changes that helped make other sections of the game more interesting, playing with "just" a good AI wouldn't matter.

And, for the long answer: As for the comparison between GalCiv and the Civ games (Civ3 was my favorite, despite its simplicities - culture is too beautiful a concept to not play with!), I think three things that all the Civ games have had that are not as strong a part of the GalCiv design are personalization, trade-offs, and fast end-game battles. All three of these could probably help out either an expansion version of GalCiv, or more likely a GalCiv 2.

Personalization In the Civ games (especially Civ3), you pick exactly where to put your cities in a wide setting, and there are major strategic choices involved in those decisions. There are also strategic and tactical choices involved in getting the best spots before the computer can grab them; the whole question of culture was used very well when it comes to covering land with your own culture, so you could fill in cities later. These are choices that are simply not there in GalCiv, for understandable setting reasons, but the Exploration section of the game feels weaker because of it.

So the cities in Civ feel more personal right off the bat, because you choose where to place them within a customizable map. They also feel more personal because of the tile management, as mentioned above. The (non-resource) starbases help in this regard, but it doesn't feel the same. I think that this is because the tile management in Civ is always about improving the city; again, personalizing it to exactly what you want. Apart from production increases, all the starbase improvements do nothing directly for the planets that they are by. (Bonuses such as culture and trade bonuses can certainly be helpful, but again, they aren't specific to the planet itself.) There is also the enjoyable micromanagement (for those of us who enjoy such things, at least!) of moving around the worker units in Civ and having them improve a land that is already there, and make decisions about how such improvements should be made. Cranking out constructors doesn't really have the same feel. This probably isn't something that could be added to GalCiv, but perhaps for the sequel...

Trade-offs I can't put it better than Sid Meier himself, "A game is a series of interesting choices." The Civ series have drilled down into this concept exceedingly well, and made it so that choosing poorly was something that you could get immediate feedback on, especially in tactical choices. GalCiv has been compared to chess and it feels that way, in that your choices are often about large issues of strategy that can make or break you in large ways, instead of small incremental ones.

The perfect example, and one place where Civ3 really nailed the "one more turn" impulse, involves Wonders/Galactic Achievements. In Civ3 there was often a frantic race to build a specific wonder, that you could see played out because (if you had the basic level of diplomacy) you knew whenever everybody else was building it, and if you spied on the other guys you could look at the exact city and see how many more turns they had to finish it. But the kicker was that you could not rush a Wonder, only build it, unless you got lucky with a Leader. So there was often this mad rush, especially early on in the game, where you're working frantically to pump out enough workers to build the mines around the city that was spending 150 turns building this one massive wonder... just so you could get it done 10 turns before the other guy. There usually isn't that sort of rush felt in most of GalCiv, except in the initial exploration phase, because if you want something you just lease it before the other guy does. With the changes to the lease structure this is far better than it initially was, in that you can't lease everything under the sun, but it still reduces the feel of working frantically to get something built. If the espionage side of the game were increased to the point that you could easily find out this sort of information, something similar might work in GalCiv as well.

Fast end-game battles It's horribly cheesy, but the fact that you can zoom all your troops across a continent once you have railroads in the Civ games has done wonders in speeding up the end game. I love playing on big maps in GalCiv, because I like the heft of a large empire, but I deplore the time it takes to move all the units around just to wrap up a game. This is probably one of the easier ways that the game could be dramatically improved with very little coding time spent: putting in a set of 10 mid-late game techs in the tech tree that did not take you towards the tech victory, which would help speed up your ships and eventually culminate in being able to build warp points (star-gates?) to move ships around faster. And unlike the Civ series, it would actually make sense within the game!

So there are three conceptual areas where GalCiv might be improved in order to help keep up the interest within players. The expansion pack itself will no doubt cause a lot of us to spend many more hours playing, once it's released... here's hoping!

[Chronus]

Nice post, Pyrkaige.

Apart from production increases, all the starbase improvements do nothing directly for the planets that they are by.

Well . . . technically speaking . . . aren't the tile imrovements in Civ 3 nothing more than production increases for particular cities (Food, shields, commerce)? I only bring this up because I'm wondering if you are aware of all the different bonuses a starbase can bring to planets (morale, production, increased trade). If you are aware of this then I suspect we are on the same wave length. That is . . . it's the how bonuses are created in Civ 3 (i.e. settlers) that create an additional fun for us.

It's horribly cheesy, but the fact that you can zoom all your troops across a continent once you have railroads in the Civ games has done wonders in speeding up the end game.

I can understand the wanting to end a long game but . . . uugghh! . . . a limit on railroad movement is one of the few things I wish they did change for Civ 3. The current railroad system eliminates the need for scouting, strategic placement, etc. and literally places an invading army at the mercy of your ENTIRE army (assuming all your land and cities are joined with railroads). I'm sure you've read all the arguments . . . jus getting in my little dig. (hmmm, I can't find the little "winky" smiley face).

Again, I enjoyed your post!

[Egbert]

Pyrkaige

That was one superb post.

[Pyrkaige]

Thanks for the comments... I'm glad to see the ideas enjoyed.

Originally posted by Chronus
Well . . . technically speaking . . . aren't the tile imrovements in Civ 3 nothing more than production increases for particular cities (Food, shields, commerce)?

Technically speaking, yes; practically speaking, no. Those tile improvements also confer a huge amount of player control over the city, both with workers outside the city and the citizens working inside the city. The choices that a player makes with the workers and citizens directly impact a host of game mechanics: the growth of the city; how much it gives to the overall economy in multiple sections (science, taxes, entertainment); the trade-off between local improvement (entertainers) vs. global, and so on. That is a massive amount of optional micromanagement control cunningly designed into a simple interface. If you focus both the tile enhancement and where your citizens work on, say, food production, it will increase the speed at which your city grows. There is nothing comparable to this with the starbases in GalCiv; for that matter, there is nothing comparable to the fine-tuning of population growth within Civ 3 in general, to be found anywhere within GalCiv. That's another area where players could/should be given more control, other than the crude method of jetting settlers or soldiers out into space when a planet gets too full. When players are given optional control (there should always be useful AI backups) over useful game mechanics within these sort of games, they tend to take advantage of them and can enjoy that sub-set of the game. As long as it doesn't turn into, well MOO3.

I can understand the wanting to end a long game but . . . uugghh! . . . a limit on railroad movement is one of the few things I wish they did change for Civ 3. The current railroad system eliminates the need for scouting, strategic placement, etc. and literally places an invading army at the mercy of your ENTIRE army (assuming all your land and cities are joined with railroads). I'm sure you've read all the arguments . . .

Actually, I agree entirely about railroads in Civ3. I've no doubt that if infinite movement weren't such a "classic" part of the Civ genre, that would have been tweaked out by Civ3, because it does eliminate so many choices that players would otherwise have to make. But, one of the huge benefits to Civ3 railroads from a game speed standpoint is that they eliminate the tediousness of slowly moving around massive amounts of units towards the end of a game. (Especially combined with, ahem, way-points, which thankfully were added to both Civ3 and GalCiv with their respective expansion packs. The fact that neither game had them originally is itself a bit of commentary on how easy it is to forget about wheels already invented, when making new games within the same genre. But I digress...)

I would certainly not expect any other TBS Civ-type game to implement a railroad or railroad-type level of movement within their own games; I certainly hope that other game developers wouldn't do that. But the idea of having some type of game mechanic within the latter half of a unit-heavy game that makes it easy to quickly move limited amounts of units is worth persuing. GalCiv could certainly use it -- and no, the rubber-band starbase quasi-cheat doesn't count.

OT: These party hat smilies are quite... big.

[Chronus]

both with workers outside the city and the citizens working inside the city.

DOH! I can't believe I forgot about the worker placement inside the city screen. Excellent point!

[Vince278]

It really isn't a good game. I've gone back to MOO3 and SE4.

[Asmodean]

I've been playing it since late January. I've taken up SMAC/X again. But rest assured that GalCiv will be my first choice of game, as soon as the expansion is finished.

Asmodean

[Hywel Dda]

It's interesting to see how many posters have retreated back to other games - no particular criticism of GalCiv - but they'd rather play MooN/CivN/SmaX/HoI/etc...
Myself I played a few times - then fell back on Civ II
Perhaps the problem is that GalCiv offers a lot - but then somehow fails to deliver.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Hywel Dda
Perhaps the problem is that GalCiv offers a lot - but then somehow fails to deliver.

That would be a great way to describe MOO3 but I would say the opposite about GalCiv: It offers very little and delivers it.

[LDiCesare]

I actually keep playing galciv. The challenge on maso is the best challenge you can find in 4X games as far as I know.