The "Review in Progress" Thread...

[Draginol]

Yin,

if you can put your AAR into a single file, I'll put it up on GalCiv.com.

[Eric S]

Originally posted by ChaotikVisions
Oh and btw on the AI expanding thing, they do get a "cheat". They start with all of the map explored or at least a good portion around them explored. This cheat is written off as part of the story, but its probably one of the main things boosting AI quick expansion to good systems.

Actually, they don't start with the map explored, they only know the type of each star. They still have to go to each star and look to see if it has any planets, it's just able to prioritize checking out the stars better than we can.

I find it odd that something that Humanity can do NOW we can't do at the start of the game, 175 years in the future.

[yin26]

Hey, the man himself!

Do you mean a file as in a .txt file or just all this stuff posted here put, say, in an e-mail? I do hope to keep adding to it over the next few days as well, but I'll send ya whatever you want (or post it an a given thread at GalCiv) if it helps people who are looking for the gamer's perspective on what seems to a top-notch game.

P.S.

Can I mention that the way you dealt with a particular poster demanding a refund because of downloading issues was masterful? You side-stepped his (understandable but overdone) anger by admitting he has a right to a refund given his feelings. You even contacted support to take care of the refund yourself. Next reply from him?

"Sorry. I was a jerk. Please don't give me a refund. I really want to play this game."

LOL! Superb...

[yin26]

I find it odd that something that Humanity can do NOW we can't do at the start of the game, 175 years in the future.

True, but where's the sense of adventure in that!? At least you can see the planet positions on the mini-map, which is a bone thrown in this direction.

By the way, Brad: Is there any option to turn off seeing the planet positions in the mini-map? I'd like to start my games completely blind (well, blinder than I typically am, that is).

[Eric S]

Originally posted by Tuberski
I see that one of the things that people complained about in Civ 3, "Settler Diarhea" makes another appearance. It doesn't bother me, just seems kind of funny.

As others have pointed out here, "Settler Diarhea" was a derogatory term in which the AI wasn't being more effective, but rather less effective and more annoying.

The only time I've seen the GalCiv AIs drop a colony in a bad position was when there were no good positions, and the AI had so few colonies that even a bad one was better than nothing. The poor Alterian AI in my current game is in such a bad position that he doesn't even culturally own the sector his home system is in.

You don't see very many colony ships moving through your area to snatch that one nice planet on the opposite side of the empire, either, because ships , including the colony ship, is limited in how far it can go from an existing colony, similar to MoO 2. This is one reason to expand towards the other races first, then fill in behind you, assuming you have a "behind you."

[Lemmy]

I find it odd that something that Humanity can do NOW we can't do at the start of the game, 175 years in the future.

That's not completely true, we can only 'see' the big gas giants now, and who would llike to live on a gas planet
And even if we could detect earthlike planets, we'd still have to know about the living conditions on the planet, which is even harder then just seeing them.

[Malleus]

I assume he meant the Stellar Cartography advance. I have never researched it. It's a bit silly...by the time it is available, the whole map has been explored.

And he is right. We know the star color and content of thousands of stars, including all of the nearby ones.

M

[velkoris]

I have quite enjoyed my first two games, but I do have one bad comment though.

I think the whim of the random event is way way way way too harsh.

In the first game, I had the clear military leadership, and was happily slapping a neighboring civ down into the dust, when a random event gave them a precursor ranger, which then casually demolished my entire fleet, all my starbases and my tradeships in about 4 turns.

The second game, my early fleet was crushed by the random appearance of 4 prison battlecruisers on about turn 20, it not being a total wipeout only because my hero ship was on the other side of the galaxy exploring. When they eventually got bored and went to torment someone else, I managed to do quite well until yet another random event made one of my planets be taken over by a precursor dictator with a fleet of overlord ships which, again, ran around and smashed my civ back into the stoneage ( including my 400 turn to build starbase aaaaargh ).

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by yin26
Ah, I didn't know about that 'cheat' -- which does explain some of what I saw. Brad has, however, given a nice hotkey: ctrl+N

This will regenerate the galaxy without having to restart a game. So if you get totally hosed at the start, you can re-seed. I actually don't mind the AI seeing more at the start since, as you say, it's part of the story, and as a person gets better, the extra challenge this presents is a good one.

Did the reset ctrl+N come with the bonus pack as I do not see it in the manual?

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by velkoris
I have quite enjoyed my first two games, but I do have one bad comment though.

I think the whim of the random event is way way way way too harsh.

I would like to be able to turn of random events, I hate them in games.

[Gelvan]

Concerning Random events: they were made to support the feeling that every time you play it, it's a new game.

Somewhere on the homepage I've read something, that such "uber" random events will be announced, so you should get a message like "on planet x there might be some old relics" way before the opponent becomes his ranger. Therefore you should focus on getting this planet BEFORE the actual event takes place.

BUT - I haven't got the game yet, therefore I don't know if it truely gives you hints about 'WHAT WILL BE HAPPEN', or if this was a feature not impemented in the end.

Still they said it would be in:

Q: How do “random events” help the game? Sometimes games have random events that completely mess up the game. How are you going to avoid that?

A: Like our AI, the events that occur in GalCiv have intelligence behind them. While the event itself is chosen randomly, how it is actually played out in the game is not. It calculates out the event such that the event won’t have an over powering effect on the game while at the same time not being trivial.

For instance, we DO NOT have events like “Your power plant has exploded taking out planet Y” in GalCiv. That’s the sort of stuff that’s just frustrating because there’s nothing you could do about that.

Instead, something like that would be handled as a growing terrorist threat that you could deal with and the longer it goes without being dealt with (by someone, not just you because these events don’t make a distinction between you and other players) the worse it gets. For example, one event might come up and talk about how some minor thing got destroyed by a group called the “Calorians”. Well if you look on the map hard enough, you’ll find that there’s a planet called Calor that is a minor race that wasn’t there before. If you or someone else takes it over, then the problems caused by these guys goes away. If they’re allowed to linger, things get tougher. But you always have the ability to avoid or prevent anything that could be really game changing.

The choices you make in GalCiv combined with the status of the galaxy help determine how these events get played out so that they fit into the unique story of each game.

[velkoris]

Somewhere on the homepage I've read something, that such "uber" random events will be announced, so you should get a message like "on planet x there might be some old relics" way before the opponent becomes his ranger. Therefore you should focus on getting this planet BEFORE the actual event takes place.

Weeel, yes and no.

For the events :
Enemy finds Ranger - No warning on this one at all.

Prison Ship Attack - Not a specific warning, but for future I would be aware of the possibility as the senate voted me into having ownership of a galactic penal colony some time earlier. ( How the escaped prisoners managed to steal some battlecruisers to escape in is somewhat of a mystery given I hadn't even researched corvettes at that point and I was galactic research leader ;p )

Overlord takes over planet - This one gave a warning several turns before happening ( Evil presence sensed, oncoming doom blah blah suggest you abandon colony ) but still, a destroy one of your most prosperous planets or be wiped out is, imo, a ridiculous special event.

[Jamski]

Trade it for something good?

-Jam

[Urban Ranger]

Hey Yin, good to have you back. It was great the way you heckled them other guys during World Cup

So you are at Yale now? How goes?

[yin26]

UR: Good to see ya! LOL, yes, the World Cup thread. That was hilarious! Thanks for the reminder. Yale is awesome. I'm completely engrossed in my job ... except for the past few days with this GalCiv thing, of course. I hope you are well.

Well, I played some more last night and put my lessons to good use:

This time I decided to rush-buy anything that took more than a handful of turns to make. As you might imagine, this has put me in a lease hole that I might never pay off. As it stands, I've got like 100b.c. in lease payments each *month*! On the flip side, I'd got a huge advantage over most civs in most areas. Yes, this time I not only made a military, but it's the strongest in the galaxy...so I attacked my neighbor just for fun, taking one of his systems and am working on the next.

Some thoughts:

It seems to me that it is entirely too easy to use the lease thing to huge advantage because of the way diplomacy works in the game. Again, I'm only on normal difficulty, so perhaps this issue is not so pronounced at higher levels.

Basically I sent a scout out ASAP to find other civs so I could start tech trading from the get-go. Unlike previous games, I did *not* trade away the Universal Translator, so unless they researched it themselves (some seem not to!), they couldn't engage in trade with other civs (I'm assuming this is the case at least).

Long story short, between the major civs and the one minor civ, I not only covered all my leases but am again swimming in cash! Now, I completely understand that at some point the Love Fest will end and I'll be strapped with huge lease payments that could wreck me.

But in the meantime, I've such an advantage over my neighbor that I'm easily gobbling up his planets. I wonder why it's so easy to make money off tech trades...? Well, since I haven't played a game to completion (other than losing, of course), I'll need to sit on these worries a moment, but is awfully curious to me that the other civs don't seem to be aggressive in their own trading of tech. I hope, again, this might be tied to difficulty level.

And now that I'm actually launching an attack on somebody, I'm finding the pacing of space travel a bit taxing. Perhaps I just missed a key tech., but my troop transport will only move 1 square per turn at this stage...so to take over that system 15 squares away took 15 turns just to get there.

I understand, of course, that since troop transports represent the incoming occupying force you want to give the defender a decent chance at intercepting it, otherwise the game would be a sneak attack fest with much less strategy involved. Having said that, at least semi-early on, the pacing of warfare is a little too deliberate as a function of ships not being able to move much in a single turn. And this is against my neighbor!

Here again, though, I'm happy to be told that later techs will greatly address this issue. It certainly will have to because those pesky Yor are WAY over on the other side of the map ... and its a small map at that.

One quick note back on the transports: My neighbor tried to retake his first lost planet by sending over troops ... but he did not protect the transports at all, resulting in easy kill. Might this also be a factor of the difficulty level? Needless to say, I had a few moments of panic as I thought: "Darn, this otherwise great AI seems to be doing the trickle attack thing...I hope that's not the problem."

It's not that the AI didn't have some ships nearby. He had a stack of 4 starfighters, but they got confused at to whether to attack *my* transports, my ships, or what. Or so it seemed.

Well, some cautionary flags have been raised in my mind, but it's too early to tell in this game how things will go. Will the leases eventually crush me? Will other civs gang up on me and then attack in force if I don't pay careful attention to alliances ... ?

The good news here is that even if these truly are _problems_ with the trade and AI, they seem infinitely fixable. So with Brad on standby for the next year, I'm happily not feeling so uptight that things are set in stone here. And, hey, it could be that once I install the bonus pack and subsequent updates, coupled with a notch up in difficulty, that I'll find myself happily getting my rear handed to me again.

Here's to my defeat!