Review-in-Progress (Open Thread)

[Solver]

Thanks Bonscott .

[Solver]

*neanderthal grunt*

[bonscott]

Originally posted by yin26
Man, great answer. Makes me think more carefully about my starbases...

No problem! Glad I can contribute.

What I typically do is every resource mining starbase will get at least the basic battlestations module, one attack module and one defense module (what I choose depends on nearby AI's). That way the AI needs to bring it to take down the starbase. I'll do the same for any influencer or economic starbase on my borders.

Note that the AI will do the same thing. I'll try my best to take out nearby AI starbases before they upgrade the offensive capabilities.

I'll typically put up a military starbase to protect my home systems and toward my border. I'll also place 1 or 2 along the border (and try to cover some AI systems if I can). I'll do the same upgrades as above along with multiple assist modules. What this does is really help in your first war or two by help defending your systems from counterattack or invasion as well as help you in taking your first few systems yourself. Once I've expanded out and my inner systems are no longer at risk I'll destroy those starbases as they are no longer needed and just increase costs of new starbases you build (depends on logistics of course). I'll then put up new military starbases out on my new borders, rinse and repeat.

[Solver]

OK, a few very short sentences.

The initial impression is quite favorable. It was neutral at first, no love at first sight, but a couple of hours later, I started getting into it.

I already have a thing I hate about the game, and I already have identified areas that I love. I've only just scratched the surface, though, and there will definitely be more things to come that I like.

I'm playing a first game on the default settings, including the Normal AI level, but I've already noticed some retarded AI action on the offensive. This being my first game, it should have wiped the floor with me.

I actually thought that the ability to customize the looks of your ships is an extra "garbage" feature - before I entered the shipyard. It's pretty damn fun!

The minor civilizations are good stuff. Overall, I like some aspects of the diplomacy, although I prefer Civ4 by far for the actual trade deals.

United Planets . It's at least as good as the SMAC council. Maybe better, that remains to be seen. Certainly better than the Civ4 UN, which is better than nothing, but not much for sure.

GalCiv2 surprised me pleasantly on a few things that I didn't think would be fun. One is customizing ships, as I said above, another is watching battles. It's surprisingly fun.

Starting the game with a fair sum of money really changes how you play it - you can buy some stuff in the beggining here, unlike Civ. That's interesting.

I appreciate the overall humorous style, like those texts that you get on researching a tech... they add some nice flavour .

The graphical feel reminds me of SMAC sometimes - that is a compliment, as SMAC is the most atmospheric strategy game I've played. GalCiv2 has those nice pictures/short videos sometimes that really help set the mood.

I actually have more in-depth comments now, but I want to go to bed now. See, Sirian, you may have managed to send me to bed at 2:30, but now it's past just 3 and I'm typing this - so GalCiv2 gets some stuff right .

[yin26]

It's really a pleasure for me to have both Sirian and Solver in this thread. Sirian performs laser surgery, and Solver makes a sculpture. When I want to know at the molecular level why things function (or don't) the way they do, I ask the doctor. When I want to see from some distance why the particular shape is worthy of admiration (or not), I call the artist.

Can't wait for more!

[yin26]

By the way, would anybody out there please test the following:

-- Enter diplomacy with somebody.
-- Offer several techs at once.
-- Write down the total the civ was willing to pay but do NOT sell.
-- Take all techs off the table and sell them one by one, keeping a running total of what you earn.
-- Compare the numbers.

[drank]

Yin, I have definitely found that I get more money by selling techs one at a time. I think there's some kind of limit on how much cash they'll offer on any one deal.

Also, if you want to sell them several techs in a branch (Sensors, Sensors II, Sensors III), you'll get more money if you sell them in order.

The second one makes some sense from a logical standpoint, but both of them increase the micromanagement of diplomacy by a huge amount. It's like - there's some number the AI will eventually pay me for these techs. Why is the game you making me spend so much tedious time dragging sliders, finding prices, and then repeat for each tech. Just give me the money and let me get to the next turn already!

[bonscott]

Originally posted by Solver
I'm playing a first game on the default settings, including the Normal AI level, but I've already noticed some retarded AI action on the offensive. This being my first game, it should have wiped the floor with me.

"Normal" level AI is actually pretty dumb. You'll need to be on Tough level which has Intellegent AI's before they are on even footing and using all the AI code against you.

[Solver]

Screw Apolyton for having those annoying message length limits that still aren't removed for Plus users

"Normal" level AI is actually pretty dumb. You'll need to be on Tough level which has Intellegent AI's before they are on even footing and using all the AI code against you.

That's counterintuitive. I would expect "Normal" to be where we are on even footing, and "Tough" where the AI starts to get advantages.

OK, probably time for my first meaningful post on the game, with various areas of comment.

Graphics and Interface

It's funny how Yin is a critic of the Civ4 interface. I, on the contrary, think the Civ4 interface is very intuitive and easy to use - and all the information that is accessible at all, is easy to figure out how to access - to me. The GalCiv interface so far left me with very mixed feelings.

I can not move the map with the arrow buttons on my keyboard, and that's very annoying. I'm used to moving the map a bit with keyboard while doing something else with the mouse. I can't seem to customize this and make the arrows move the map instead of the selected ship.

The hotspot of the end turn button is bad. If you're clicking the lower right area of the minimap, you'll activate the end turn button instead. Besides, you can press Enter to end your turn at any time, even if you have unmoved units. I don't like this. In Civ4, Enter only ends turn if you've moved everything, if not, you need Shift+Enter to force end turn.

The sliders for speding/taxation/credits in diplomacy aren't nice to use. They do sometimes stop being dragged or something - they're not very easy to drag, anyhow.

The interface for changing how a ship is built is bad and counterintuitive. Let me quote Yin from the first post here.

For example, something simple like changing what ship your are building on a planet is too clumsy. Unless I'm missing something, you go to the shipyard, click on the new ship type, click "Done" -- but then the game dumps you out of the planet view, so you can't confirm the change. If you click "back to planet view" then you don't seem to select the new ship type.

I ran into exactly the same problem, and had the same issue. I don't like it. It's possible to change it from the Planets screen, yes, but if I am in the Planet Control screen, I have no way of changing production and returning to the screen, as Yin described there.

On a related notice, if I click a planet, the info area shows what ship it's building and how soon it's done, but doesn't show how soon the next planetary improvement is complete. I have to doubleclick the planet to change that, and there seems to be no context-menu, either.

Likewise, planets should really show, under their name, at least the currently produced ship and turns to go - Civ3 started showing production under city names, and that was good. Yes, it seems that you control less planets in GalCiv2 than you would control cities in Civ3, but still.

The advisor/info screens are leaps and bounds ahead of the Civ4 screens. All the statistic screens are interesting, but the Foreign screen is particularly good, showing you not only the relations between everyone, but also espionage info and everything else you might now. But even this screen suffers from the same problem that the general GalCiv2 interface - too many clicks required. I open the Foreign Manger, I see the civs and their power rankings. For whatever reason, double-clicking a civ doesn't bring up the negotiation window, it's only double through the Speak To button on the left. OK. Now, to check treaties between the other civs I have to check another tab, to see a detailed breakdown of someone's relations with me, yet another tab.

That's not optimal. The Civ4 Foreign Advisor manages to show the information about treaties and relations between any civs (that is, including AI-vs-AI) on one tab, including the information about relations factor breakdown. The GalCiv2 screens don't have the excellent novelty from Civ4 - showing there at a glance which civs can trade which techs. I need to check every civ separately by speaking to them if I want to see what they have available for trade.

There either is no hotkey or I have missed one that would cycle me to the next unit with moves left. I'm probably just missing it, though.

Overall, my first general impression of the interface is that it contains a load of information, which is good, but makes you click way too much to get the info, in addition to sometimes having just poor design.

The graphics, well, I like. Performance's top notch (then again, so is my Civ4 performance, I don't know what some people whine about), I love the windowed mode, the ship designs are various and interesting, the planet textures are good, overall, the game looks elegant. The zoom levels are also good, from eye-candy very close zooms to boardgame zoom-outs.

The first explorers

So I started my game by buying a Scout and sending it to look for other star systems. That is, the systems seem to show up on the minimap, but I need to check which systems have habitable planets.

As I found a star, I had a WTF moment. The star was visible, I clicked on it, and saw there are 4 planets, 1 of which is habitable. The problem is, my Scout had only seen the star itself and one unhabitable planet, why is that info available to me before the scout discovers the actual planets?

I am indeed leaning to believing that the AI knows where the habitable planets are, judging by the speed and direction of their colonization, they never get delayed by sending ships to systems with no habitable planets.

Colonization

OK... with my colonized planets, I appreciated the interesting gameplay concept. How you build up those planets is interesting, mutliple improvements of the same type possible, plus there are thoe bonus squares... you can really create an uber-pop planet or an uber-economy planet. That's nice.

What is less nice is the sheer randomness of what you get when you colonize. So you go and see a, say, Class 8 planet. That still means nothing. Before you colonize, you don't know the terrain, and you don't know the possible bonus squares. It might be an awesome planet with 4 bonus squares that will allow it to be a great manufcaturing and research hub, or it might be a mediorce planet that even requires some Soil Enrichers to boot.

It's funny how the expansion phase is over very quickly. At first, everyone is frantically sending their Colony Ships to every habitable planet, and before you know it, the galaxy's down to a couple of uninhabited planets, which also get colonized soon.

My first impression of the expansion phase/colonization is that it isn't strategic enough. You have to expand and grab those planets because you need the population, which is a crucial asset in GalCiv2 - taxes, soldiers, etc. So, obviously, you want to grab the planets close to you, and then something else if you can get your hands on it. Having more planets also lets you gain more revenue through trade routes later, and it seems there are no severe economic counter-effects to colonizing new planets.

So it would seem that rushing to grab the planets is the right choice, and if so, that isn't very strategic. Additionally, GalCiv2 doesn't have a part of the expansion phase that I really enjoy in all Civ games - deciding where to settle. GalCiv2 has fixed planet locations, and which ones you can grab depends mostly on your starting position. Sure, in Civ (especially Civ3 and Civ4) there are some obvious must-have-a-city-here spots, but there's also a large factor of deciding where to put your cities nonetheless - for example, you can choose to settle aggressively, focus on culture there and hope to deny the opponent some land in Civ4, etc.

Speaking of land, why the heck do all the other civs fly their ships freely through my influence zone? This leads to the first impression of influence not being a strong enough tool. In Civ4, you can stop others moving through your land and even deny them land to a degree with culture - here, influence seems worthless in this regard, although it definitely can flip over planets.

Domestic stuff

The domestic and economic model of GalCiv2 is definitely interesting. Building both a planetary improvement and a ship at the same time, the taxing and allocation sliders, I'm looking forward to playing with those more. The sliders seem to be somewhat intensive micromanagement to get the most out of them, but it's interesting to be able to dump most of your production into ships at wartime or into improvements during the building phases.

The core economic model, like what's going on on a planet, is pretty easy to understand. The planet screen shows you the numbers, the various advisor/stat screens can show you more numbers, that is definitely good stuff. I even sort of understand what I'm building.

The research reminds me of SMAC, which is, I guess, appropriate - military techs give better ship components, many economic techs give new abilities, etc. Oh, another annoying interface quirk - after I research a tech, and the window pops up to select the next tech, the tech that is selected is the one that follows from the one I just got. Like, if I just discovered Laser, then Laser II will be selected in the tech tree. I'd rather have it stay at the top of the list, I probably want to research some other 4 turn tech instead of going for a 25-turn tech that I just became able to research.

Surely, tech names are somewhat bland, but I don't see it as a problem, besides, the blurbs you get after research has been completed more than make up for it. I miss the Datalinks, but then again, the information on what a tech actually does is readily available... but not in detail. I can right click tech X to see that it gives me +10 Economy. But from there, I have no quick way of seeing what would +10 Economy actually mean - I can't click on "Economy" as a hyperlink or anything. I need to refer to another abilities screen for that.

Starbases and those special resources are, again, interesting things. Haven't played enough with those yet, but at least the AI is quick at establishing Mining Starbases where there are resources. I really like these concepts.

Diplomacy

The concept behind the diplomatic model seems good, the implementation has some nice similarities with Civ4. You get to see what exactly impacts your relationship with a civ, you get to see why they wouldn't accept a deal if there's a special reason, that's good stuff.

It would appear to me that tech whoring is back but that needs more playtesting. Nonetheless, I was able to trade techs very easily with a couple of civs - they seem to be very happy to trade.

Haggling is back, and that sucks. I'm offering tech X for tech Y, that won't do. So I offer some credits - now I slide the slider until they accept. Aha, it stops at 360 bc. Now, I slowly slide it back to see where they'd stop accepting... until I find the minimum amount I can pay to make the deal work. It's boring and it's bad strategy game design. It's boring because, well, having to slide a slider and then be even more careful to find the right number gets tedious really, really quick. And it's bad strategy game design because it is the Only Right Choice (TM) - the bane of a strategy game. The more of these Only Right Choices (TM) a strategy game has, the weaker the design, bceause it's not strategy anymore. And whereever there is the Only Right Choice issue, or when it's almost there, it should at least be made easy for the user. Civ4 gives you a "What would make this deal work" button which makes the AI tell you how much money they want. That's good - you see the amount, and you can pay it or forget it. At least there's no wasting time to find that amount.

On that Normal difficulty, I was able to get two civs quite friendly with me easily - the Terrans and the green guys, Torians, IIRC. Why the heck would their leader have a Hungarian name is beyond me - although the Dark Yor minor civ leader being just a network jack is funny.

But, at the same time, the AIs seem quite aggressive. No, not really aggressive - I guess I should just say willing to join wars. In Civ4, AIs need a good reason to go to war, in GalCiv2 they seem to do pretty much on a whim, more on that a bit later.

Back to the issue of negotiation, it’s hard to find which techs would be tradeable for which. In Civ4, you mouseover a tech on the trade table to see its cost. In GalCiv2, you have no such luxury, so you just have to somewhat randomly guess which techs to put on the table to get the deal you want. At least until you get very familiar with the tech tree, but that takes quite a bit of time.

The diplomatic Surrender option is not explained anywhere. I can try and guess what it means, but the manual doesn’t elaborate, nor does the interface. Can anyone help me out with this?

The concept of having a diplomatic ability is yet another interesting thing – I don’t know if it pays off to invest in diplomatic improvements or not, but at least it sounds cool. And it makes sense that a warlike race would have less success at diplomacy than a merchant race.

Finally, I loved the espionage. Espionage is, for me, definitely a weak point in Civ4. Many agree that the Civ4 espionage isn’t powerful enough, and even more people agree that it’s not particularly fun. I know Sirian considers the current espionage model to provide enough opportunities, but hey, it’s still not fun. I have to admit, though, that at least the Civ4 espionage model doesn’t break the game in any way. So, the GalCiv2 espionage model is fun and makes sense. Investing money over a period of time into espionage is something I really like, and I particularly like the effects of espionage – you get random info about the target Civ. That’s what I would want to see in Civ4. Here, you get some info on planets or their research or economy… random tidbits. It’s very interesting. I’m somewhat concerned about the balance of possible tech stealing, but hopefully that’s expensive enough.

Screw ethics

I only had three ethical choices come up so far, but in all three cases, I chose the Evil one. Why? Because they were, in all three cases, the much dreaded One Right Choice. For example, I colonized a planet and the Evil choice gave me a +45% improvement in planet quality, while the Good choice gave nothing. The Evil choice is the right one. Strategically, I can see no reason not to choose the Evil option. In the other two cases when I had the choice come up, the Evil choice was also clearly superior.

I do like, though, the ethics concept. And I believe this issue can be easily fixed by giving the Good choices their bonuses. If you kill the locals on a planet, you get a quality/research/whatever bonus. If you let them be, they share some of their culture with you, resulting in an increased influence. Or, they share nothing, but the people are happy about your choice resulting in improved approval on the colony.

The ethics system has the potential to be one of the most interesting parts of GalCiv2, it just needs some balance. Once it’s balanced, it would perhaps even be possible to increase the number of times that ethical choices come up, making it all the more fun.

[Solver]

Ships and combat

I really liked the Shipyard, designing your own ships is fun. The sheer possibilities are fun, considering that you can really design a LOAD of ships. The inability to delete “core” designs is bad.

Warship design is really a game within a game, how you can go with several smaller weapons, or two medium weapons of different types, or this, or that, or yet another that… cool. Very much so, in fact. And it seems that once you’re sufficiently advanced you can create some ships that are very customized, possibly even more customized stuff than you could create in SMAC (again, need to play more).

It seems that ships that have some defensive capabilities but no weapons aren’t really too useful because they can’t fire back. Hmm.

The concept of Transports and planetary invasions is interesting, but it also has become my biggest complaint with GalCiv2 so far, more on that in just a little bit. OK, now I’ll focus on something that actually happened in my game.

A minor civ (one of them has a teddy bear for a leader, too!) set up a starbase on an influence resource in my territory. It was quite a distance from them and actually still fell under my influence, but I wanted the place. The starbase had no weapons or defenses, so I sent my Raider MK1, the weakest possible fighter, to take the starbase out. OK, starbase’s gone, and replaced with my own in a moment.

Just a bit later, the Arceans (?) say that they don’t like me being at war with their friend and are declaring war on me. OK, I sign peace with the minor civ, didn’t plan to go after them anyway. Arceans also have one planet in my influence range – their colony ship beat me to it by one turn earlier. The planet’s protected by one awesome scoutship in orbit. Uhmm, ok. I dispatch a couple of fighters there, take the ship out, buy a Transport from the nearby homeworld and set the course. Just then, the Drengin announce they’re declaring war on me just because – they seem to be the Montezuma of GalCiv2. The Terrans attacked both the Arceans and Drengin, because of our alliance. The Torians soon said they want to help me and join the war vs. Drengin. This is what I meant by the AIs willing to go to war – they’re certainly happy to do so! It looks like, if you start one war, it can soon involve more civs in it.

Now comes the retarded AI part. Mind you, I thought that at “Normal” the AI is at least made not to make stupid choices. The Arcean AI came with three Transports to my homeworld. Two in a fleet, one separate. Good, only I put a scoutship in orbit when I saw the transports and they were left able to do nothing. And then I took them out with one fighter. It seems that, if transports arrive to a planet to find it protected in orbit, they will do nothing and just stay there, waiting to be destroyed.

The Drengin were little better. They also sent a fleet of two Transports, but included an Escort unit. That’s still nothing really serious, though, as one fighter is adequate vs. that, and two fighters are a certain victory.

By the way, another thing that doesn’t make sense. The United Planets pass a law that gives Transports weapons. So now I have a Transport with weapons of power-2. But, the Transport still can’t attack a planet that has ships in orbit! Instead, it should attack the ship – not the planet itself of course, but if a Transport has weapons, it damn well needs to be able to attack defending ships!

And we’ve finally come to my huge complaint. When making an invasion through Transports, there’s that whole advantage factor deal. And the attack starts when you press the button. The problem is, the numbers jump like crazy, and the outcome of the battle depends on what they are when you press the button – in other words, the outcome of the battle is practically random! Consider this example.

I was invading with 2000 troops vs. about 6000 troops. That means that the attacker ratio is 1:3. Now, I watched the advantage numbers jumping, and saw two extremes. One was 9 vs. 4, the other was 24 vs .2. 9 vs. 4 is a definite victory for the defender, 24 vs. 2 is the defender being slaughtered. So what determines if I get the planet? Not the number of troops I have, unless I bring an overwhelming fleet, not any other factor, but just sheer random chance. This is an absolutely huge complaint for me.

Closing (for now) thoughts

All of the above is pretty much just a first impression of the game. That’s what I had in mind when writing my last post but I certainly didn’t want to write this up in the middle of the night – it took me about an hour and a half to write this now. My impression so far is overall favourable, but I see a lot of room for improvement and in a different way than Civ4.

The way I see it in Civ4, there’s also room for improvement, but it all falls into the “could be better” category – I don’t think anything in Civ4 is broken as it is. In GalCiv2, I’m getting the feeling that some things are broken or unbalanced, particularly such as the ethics complaint I mentioned or that invasion quirk. I do have many complaints about the interface, some of which I described, but I can actually live with that, I guess I’m not the most demanding person in that area.

I do enjoy the humorous feel of the game, a bit of a feeling that the game isn’t taking itself too seriously. And with that, I guess I am now off to play some more.

[Solver]

A negative observation just now:

I kicked some Arcean butt, and they gave me 6 techs for peace. A few turns later they decide to declare war again because I'm at war with their friend.

[yin26]

Solver! Awesome posts! This is great stuff:

1] The ethics models get toned down when you go up in difficulty. On Tough, any way, the choices make a lot more sense, and the bonuses are more even.

2] On invasions, things like "Soldiering" is huge. You are right, of course, that an evenly match army (taking away the bonus you get as attacker for having air superiority) will be random...but it should be! If you have a higher soldiering bonus, though, you'll win that battle more of than not (all the way up to "always" if you have a high enough soldiering bonus). You get these same effects in Civ4 as far as I can tell, it's just that in Civ4 the computer is rolling the dice for you where you can't see it.

[yin26]

I suspect that AI thing you just mentioned is also tied to difficulty.

[Sirian]

OK, rebuttal time.

1. I'm not sure what Yin's talking about with ethics and difficulty levels. I don't think that's correct. ... The Ethics system is one of the most well balanced systems in the game. You just aren't seeing the big picture yet, Solver. Leaning Evil nets you local bonuses but a global disadvantage. Leaning Good nets you local penalties but a global advantage. (Good Allies are far more reliable, stable and helpful.) Neutral makes fewer enemies than either, but has less dramatic ethos bonuses. ... I do wonder if the system is still well balanced with all ten races, though. It WAS extremely well balanced with the original six, but the extras seem to dillute the pool (in my limited GC2 experience). ... Also, the amount of bonus you get is tied to the amount of ethical swing. A HUGE planet bonus like you got will swing you ten points on a scale from 0 to 100. A minor bonus may only swing you one point. You can "play neutral" by leaning Evil on a few really powerful bonuses but leaning Good on everything else to balance it out. There was also (in GC1) a frequent need to match your alignment to the biggest baddest local alien race, whichever one it was, because they'd squash you in the cradle if you didn't. Then you have to forget everything else but sucking up, and doing what it takes to align yourself for survival. That was VERY well balanced in GC1. I'm not sure if that dynamic exists in GC2, though. I have so far seen no sign of it.

2. The Advantage Factor is a dice roll, but it's no less manageable of a dice roll than the dice rolls in Civ3 or Civ4. If you bring "barely enough" force, an unlucky roll may stop your advance. If you bring "not enough" force, a lucky roll may win you a prize. Gauging how much force to bring to ensure victory is part of the strategy. Some limited forms of dice rolls are useful even in strategy games to represent abstracted concepts, rather than adding in a bunch more complications. As long as the dice rolls are limited in scope, and a whole game doesn't turn on one or two rolls, you're in a good place. And I must tell you, whole games never turn on these rolls. The "Advantage Factor" roll is actually quite clever, as it uses the timing of when you press the Attack button, instead of some PRNG sequence, to seed the dice. I think this is fine. You can also use various WMD options to improve your odds, at the cost of temporary and/or permanent damage to the planet. If your need to hurt a rival is far more urgent than your need to obtain more territory intact, then the WMD options become both attractive and powerful. Mass Drivers are the ultimate beatdown, giving you on average 2.5x more effective force than conventional warfare.

3. Diplomacy is hands-down the most powerful of the various branches/abilities. Focusing on it nets you better relations, better deals, better everything involving the AI. You get paid more, you pay less, you get targetted less, etc. Literally, it is so strong that avoiding beefing up your Diplomatics is tantamount to playing a variant.


I don't have a lot to say about the rest of your review. I agree with most points, and the rest are matters of taste.


- Sirian

[yin26]

Maybe I'm seeing things wrong, but I just mean to say that on higher levels it looks like the Evil/Good choices weren't giving me 45% planet boosts. I've been getting shades of boost or bust on either end. Maybe it's just random?

I have been testing the diplomacy techs as well and am seeing the huge power there.