First thoughts ?

[bonscott]

Influence. Not really sure. But I do know that I built up serveral influence starbases along my border in one game and it took a while but I started to quickly swallow up world after world with my culture. Kinda Civ 4ish with the Great Artist culture bomb. You really start the see the cascade effect if you invade a few of the border worlds you'll see your borders really go deep into enemy territory.

[EternalSpark]

Some things I don't get about the Influence bases (and perhaps bases in general)

- If I have a mining starbase out in the boonies, away from any colonies, am I getting any benefit out of the colony?

- If I have a starbase that eventually winds up in an enemy territory, is it still considered 'mine'?

- Influence bases: Do they need to be on the borders, close to the enemy colonies, or closer to the planets to improve their culture potential?

[Lemmy]

Mining starbases affect your entire civilization, regardless of their position. Their effects won't show up on your planets, but it should show up in your statistics. But to see the difference you need to remember you original statistics

Starbases will always be considered yours unless you trade them away (or maybe if their is a UP resolution to change it). You can place starbases in enemy territory as well, and once in a while the UP will come with a proposal to tax these starbase.

Influence starbase can be in enemy territory as well, but i don't know how far from your own territory you can go for them to still be effective, or if there's a limit to it at all. But i did place one in enemy territory once, about 10 sectors in, and after a couple of upgrades and turns, the sectors around it became mine.

[drank]

I think it's a fun war game. If you're into designing ships, researching some upgrades, designing more ships, etc., then there's some fun gameplay to be had.

To be blunt, it's not such a great game to play as a builder right at the moment. A number of significant bugs to bonuses (social production, research) make the actual effects of improvements pretty hard to figure out. And some of the formulas - especially morale - are complex to the point of being completely inscrutable. It makes no sense that you buy a Trade Good that's supposed to give "+15% morale" across your whole civ, and the actual effect is 1-2% on your lowest approval worlds.

And sadly, they retained the completely unintuitive economic controls from GC1 - three sliders for military, social and research production that total to 100%. But since these areas are not commensurate - 50% of your military production capacity might cost vastly more than 50% of your research capacity - it's quite unintuitive how various settings will affect your overall prodution and profitability.

And, yes, the game is pretty buggy. You can argue (as the devs do on the Stardock forums) that these are a lot of minor bugs in gameplay rather than crashers. But still, virtually no area of the game is absent problems: uninformative tech tree interface, missing projects/improvements, tooltips that are flat out wrong, navigation errors where your ships go to the wrong place. They're very responsive developers, but they'd have done better to have a more comprehensive QA program rather than having to respond heroically after the game is released.

Bottom line, if the idea of designing custom ships and fighting with them appeals to you, you'll probably enjoy the game as it exists right now. Otherwise, you might want to wait for another month of patches before giving it a try.

[Kassiopeia]

I haven't really had an opportunity to get into the game that much, because I've spent most of my time playing around with the starship designer.

[Sirian]

(Reposted from Realms Beyond):


One of the areas where GalCiv excels is the culture/influence system. The system is based on "present time influence" more than it is on "all culture accumulated ever in history" and this works very nicely. The ability to exert strong peaceful influence even over areas where your rivals have always dominated, if you concentrate on it (at the expense of other things) is really pleasing. It's the one core system that is flat out better than its Civ counterpart in every measurable way.

At the expert level, the system does have a few issues, but I won't discuss those at this point.

I'm actually not looking forward to regrounding in to the Civ4 culture system with the new patch.


The space battle eye candy is really top notch. The battles are not all that complicated or fancy, but they are pretty to watch. More so, your custom ship designs are shown in all their glory, so if you invest any effort in to the look of your ships, you are naturally going to want to see them flying, shooting, killing (you hope) and dying (you hope not).

GalCiv is also rather strong in the "strategy vs tactics" area. Really, if it just closed a few loopholes, upgraded the interface (less need for micro, plus streamlined functioning on highly repetitive tasks, etc), and invested significantly more in to the AI (not making it "play better" but making it so that the AIs don't all end up playing so similarly to one another) it could be really great.

My complaints are mostly at the upper end of gameplay skill. There are levers to pull that will render parts of the game so incredibly easy that you have to pump up the AI to max just to get a fight. (I am playing my first Max AI game already and off to a grand start, although I drew a VERY lucky bonus on my home planet that sped my progress considerably.) However, these issues are only quickly evident if you read the spoilers of top players. (It took me several months to figure them out in GC1). So really, it's a great game to buy and play in isolation, rather than talking too much about it. You will get more out of it if you avoid "learning too much" about those levers that I mentioned above.

There are also some great features for setting up different strategic leans. You can customize an enormous number of things for your game launch. There is now even a TECH SPEED lever, which was not in GC1 that I recall, and goodness only knows what effects that might have. (It could be very interesting to play on slow or slowest tech pace.)

There's also an interesting new vector in the planetary economies that has to do with building types that upgrade. The old, Civ-style way from GC1 was "one of each building type on each planet". Now there are about five or six basic building types with later generations REPLACING the same buildings from earlier, but after spending more on them. It does create a lot of flavor on the planets in terms of specializing them in various ways.


- Sirian