Review-in-Progress (Open Thread)

[yin26]

Originally posted by drank
That's a pretty funny post, Yin!

LOL. Thanks.

On a smaller map, I find some fun in these various games. The StarbaseShuffle and TradeTango become tedious quickly on a big map, because you just don't have adequate UI tools to coordinate the building of dozens of starbases with hundreds of constructors.

Excellent point. For one, I can't see to toggle a starbase option on the minimap. Is there one?

The DiploDance is potentially a fun way to play. I agree that Diplo is a very powerful bonus, and indeed, the player can do quite well tech trading early on. By the 100th time you're dragging the slider on the Diplo screen to find what the AI will pay, it's lost some of its charm. A better UI (and an AI that better understood its strategic interests in tech trading) would make this genuinely fun in my book.

Agreed. All the ingredients are there...they just need to be mixed a little better and left in the oven on high for about 2 hours.

[yin26]

Originally posted by Shadowlord
Hmm. I take it the GalCiv II AI doesn't refuse to trade techs for a while if they're important? That was an innovation that I think worked really well in Civ IV.

As far as I can tell, the AI puts its techs out for sell the minute it gets them.

Does it price techs higher if they allow wonders that haven't been built yet?

Hmmm, I can't tell. Interesting question.

[Solver]

Yin, I am myself a fan of ship design in GalCiv2. The trade/starbase thing can quickly become tedious micromanagement, though. Now for some more detailed comments. Specifically, a look at the problems.

At the basic level, a strategy game needs to have strategic depth. That is, few One Right Choice situations for one, and the other key element is having tradeoffs in many places. Decisions with a good result here but a bad result there. Now let me detail some GalCiv2's shortcomings in a more organized way (apologies if I'm going to repeat myself a bit with previous posts) and also post relevant examples from Civ4. Please don't think I'm saying make GalCiv2 like Civ4! I just think Civ4 does many things right, so I would like to mention the relevant points.

The population problem

So, one big problem we have is that population is uber-important. That's not bad in itself, something being extremely important. But... where do you get population? On planets, once you settle them and then the population grows.

This means that, the more planets you have, the more population you have. The population immediately starts paying taxes, which is the first reason why pop is important - the second reason is that they're the source of soldiers for Transports, which are ultimately the center of any conquest effort.

GalCiv2 has limited places to colonize - habitable planets. Because of this, every time you colonize a planet, you not only get yourself that precious population, you prevent the enemy from getting it. Rushing the galaxy with colony ships early seems to be the right choice!

In Civ4, sometimes aggressive expansion is good. It's particularly good when you have a neighbour whose expansion you can block if you expand yourself quickly enough. Such as an AI starts on a peninsula close by, you expand fast and aggressive to seal the peninsula off, and you're at an advantage. Normally, though, when you build cities other civs aren't prevented from doing so, though you may manage to grab better spots or resources.

In GalCiv2, you have a situation similar to the Civ4 peninsula situation all the time. Again, if there's a planet you colonized, you leave the AIs with one planet less. And thus less population. But is that all? Nope. Now look at how you colonize.

You colonize with those colony ships that you build on planets. Which means that you're able to get more colony ships out once you have more planets. You start with one colony ship and a habitable uncolonized star near your homeworld, so it can be said you start with two planets. Build a Starport on the second one - buy it, in fact, it's very cheap. Now you have two planets building Colony Ships. Once you settle a third, that planet can build a Colony Ship too... resulting in faster expansion. Uhmm.

The next problem in this area is the lack of a counter-balancing force for population. Approval rating is supposed to be that, but it just doesn't work that way. With the default government, it doesn't matter what my approval is. All that low approval does is slow down population growth. But, by setting my tax slider to higher taxation, I can actually get more money than I would get with the slider at lower and full population growth - my population is still growing at this lower approval, after all!

And of course, when you get a new planet, it has high approval. So pop growth isn't a problem. This is especially an issue in conquest, because you get a planet that immediately is usable and loves you, but more on the problems with conquest later.

A good thing is that Intelligent AIs understand the value of colonization. They do actively seek to colonize planets, but they still can't outcolonize a human player who uses both sliders and rushbuying to his advantage. On Normal difficulty, it's possible to end the expansion phase with a very significant portion of the galaxy's planets.

How to fix this? Uh. There are some ways. One would be to make approval rating matter. Approval falls as population grows, but doesn't really matter, at least not until you switch to more advanced governments, but you can conquer half the galaxy and emerge as the uber-superpower by then anyway. Approval could be factored into production rates. By the way, I do know that approval matters for culture flips, but the AI isn't nearly able to cause a flip. So, factor approval into production rates, or make it an important factor in influence rates. I would make low approval lower influence and military production - unhappy people are typically not supportive of military stuff.

Another way to tackle the problem is to tweak rushbuying. Specifically, make it wicked expensive if the item in question just started. That is, it has 0 shields towards it production. That way, it would be very expensive to start a production on a Colony Ship and immediately buy it. You'd have to first work on it for 1 turn to make it reasonably cheap. Now you can, in fact, buy several colony ships very early, using the lease options, and then using the new population, which you'll have a lot of, to overcome the lease expenses.

I also want to note city specialization from Civ4 here. In Civ4, if you choose to go with fewer cities, you can specialize them highly and get many Great People. These things will pretty much balance you out with someone who went for more cities. GalCiv2 has no advantage to having fewer planets.

In Civ4, there's the obvious city maintenance which is a radical change. Every new city increases your expenses and it only starts being profitable after a while. GalCiv2 planets start collecting taxes from the population immediately. What if that were tweaked? Add a building like Planetary Treasury. It would be built in the same square as the "Basic Colony" improvement, thus not wasting another square, it would be reasonably cheap, but the planet would provide no tax income without it. Thus, a new planet would have to do something to become profitable, although the results wouldn't become as drastic as they are in Civ4.

Sliders

This is my basic thought on sliders - they are a good concept for game depth, but they are hellish micromanagement. Especially the spending allocation ones. Checking them almost every turn is... nightmarish. Interestingly, you can adjust all five sliders with precision up to 1%. In all Civ incarnations, sliders have been adjustable only in 10% increments precisely to avoid getting too hard on micromanagement.

Why is that micromanagement necessary? Because overflow from completed production is wasted. This is where I think GalCiv2 should do exactly what Civ4 did, make overflow count towards the production of the next element. That simple change in Civ4, I remember, produced a lot of excitement when I announced it on the forums, and in my experience, it really made the game less tedious.

My second concern with GalCiv2 sliders is the immense strength of setting the sliders at game start to provide unit construction at maximum speed - to speed up the colonization about which I've already spoken at length. And the same can be done to spam Constructors for starbases at one point.

I see an issue here - you can do that (spam Colonies or Constructors) while still having production for military units if you're building them or want to quickly switch. It's not a major issue, though, and I'm not really too critical on this. But I think that it might be a nice idea to make "civilian" ships buildable by Social and not Military production.

The anatomy of war

I am somewhat of a loss about where exactly to start despite my best intention to keep this organized. Okay, let me try.

For now, let's forget about military research, ship design and any diplomacy leading up to war, just look at how the wars themselves are.

The key asset in a GalCiv2 war are the transport units, which require the much-talked-about population. Transports are the key because they're the only units capable of taking planets, so the fleets of other ships, you could say, are just used to eliminate any ships orbiting the planets and to ensure the transports arrive safely.

The interesting part is the geographic specific of GalCiv2 wars, which is very much the opposite of Civ4. In GalCiv2, suppose a civ controls a star system. If it has multiple habitable planets, we're probably looking at 2 or 3 of them. Now, these planets are very close by, obviously. Ships positioned at one planet can reach another planet in the system in 2 turns, if not 1.

What does this mean? That getting ships from one planet to another is easy. Which means that, if you have a sufficient force, you can wipe out and take two planets on the same turn. A quick look at the differences in Civ4 - there, after you declare war, it usually takes 2-4 turns to get to the nearest enemy city, after which it takes a few turns to get to any next city. OK. GalCiv2 wars are, in essence, fought in blitzkrieg-style. If you have the forces, strike and take 2 planets at once. If you don't, take a planet and you'll still be attacking the next one a turn later.

If you're the attacker, you have a tremendeous advantage. Since you can move in enemy influence area freely, you get to decide how to position your fleet. Don't forget that you see what ships are orbiting the planet. If you're any smart, you will attack a planet the turn you declare war. Again, depending on the size of your force, you can maybe take 2 or even 3 planets on the same turn. Basically, it seems like a very good idea to take over an entire star system in one turn, and, guess what, this seems doable.

Good fleets are very powerful on offense vs. orbiting defenders, and the AI has a nasty tendency to also keep some scoutships or such in orbit several of which can be eliminated by one fighter on one turn.

And now we have a problem on our hands. First, you've just risen very considerably in power. You took two planets, got a significant enough population increase and hence more money. More importantly, the planets themselves are in somewhat good shape, excellent shape if you didn't use core detonation or such assault strategies. This new planet can immediately churn out new ships! Wow, effective.

If you want to, you can stay on the defensive and just wait until the AI is ready to sign peace, giving you quite some concessions while at it. This is ridicilously easy even vs Intelligent AIs. Why? The AI takes the wrong approach about retaking its planets. There will be Transports coming in. The Transports are sometimes unprotected, which is easy for you. Usually they'll be protected, though, on Intelligent. Good? No, not exactly. Due to the logistics system, a fleet of 2 transports will be protected by 1, maybe 2 fighters. If you strike at that fleet with a fleet of 45 fighters that you have there remaining from your assault, you'll wipe the AI fleet out easily.

Of course, if you want to continue conquering, that isn't too much of a problem. Continue on to the next AI star system, encountering their counter-attack fleet on the way. In my experience, if you wipe that out, you'll find that the AIs have almost nothing remaining "at home". And you losses just became easier to replace thanks to those newly conquered planets.

I am saying that there not only is quite a big advantage for the attacker, but that there's also an immense snowball effect. When you conquer a planet, you get a functional production base, the AI loses that. And you gain population that the AI loses. Remember that there are only so many planets so the AI can't replace the loss, the only way to do so is conquest. At which, frankly, the AI doesn't seem to excel. In fact, even if it launches a big enough force at you, which can happen, you should probably be able to eliminate the bulk of it in space, and weakening the attacking force enough to make it unable to take your planets. (For the record, the city attacking AI isn't exactly the strongest part of Civ4, though it's improved slightly in the next patch)

The blitzkrieg-ish nature of wars is inherent to GalCiv2. And this is, in fact, not a problem by itself. Yes, it's always going to benefit the attackers somewhat, but it's not the wrong approach to take. But I believe that the snowball effect is the bane of Civ-genre games. I actually feel that Civ4 didn't manage to eliminate that either, though fortunately it isn't as large as in Civ3. The snowball effect, though, has to be countered in GalCiv2.

One simple way to do it is to introduce something like the Civ4 resistance, making just-conquered planets useless for a few turns. That would at least prevent me from immediately building ships at that location, which is good and close to action. Another way is to make the planet slightly useful immediately but rather have a "transition time" in which the planet gradually becomes more useful. Turn 1 - operates at 10% of capacity for building/research, no taxes. Then with each turn the capacity increases by 10%, becoming 100% after 10 turns. Taxes start to get collected, say, after 5 turns.

One more thing about GC2 wars is that you can practically choose any planet for your first target. I love choosing the target civ's manufacturing capital - it immediately gives me a very productive planet and strips the AI of one.

The AI is also still not too good at detecting buildups. It seems to me it almost ignores them if it has good relations with you. OK, if not, it sort of tries to defend. But that, in itself, is the gateway to a potentially overpowering AI exploit. When not planning a war, just position your fleets near AI planets. Thus provoking them into wasting their production on military (which won't be useful since you're not actually attacking). Feinting at its best.

To say something positive, which I've already mentioned, I love the fleet combat views and the shipyard. Eye candy in strategy games has never been so fun to watch, and the shipyard provides a ton of options to play around for custom designs while not really being unbalanced like in SMAC - because GalCiv2 ships don't have oversophisticated "special abilities". SMAC players will know what I'm talking about.

Finally, almost forgot this. You get techs from taking planets. This sounds powerful, but it's not. It's very powerful. Mainly so because of how the GalCiv2 tech tree is structured. If you steal Dianthium armor III, you can equip your ships with that, even if you have no prior armor research.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours

Or, rather, give, not show. I am getting very strong shades of deja vu in GalCiv2, thanks to the presence of what Civ3 players dubbed tech whoring. Diplomacy is the one area where I've watched the GalCiv2 AI most carefully. Not surprising, given that the Civ4 diplomatic AI was the focus of my attention for a whole month. And I really don't like what I'm seeing, and this is one area where I saw very little improvement on the Intelligent setting.

The AI's so unbelievably willing to trade techs. You can use the same strategies as in Civ3 to get half the tech tree for free. For example, go deeper along, say, the shields tech line. Then go and sell an advanced shield tech to every AI, getting different techs in return from each of them, thus having a tremendeous return on your trade. If you wish, make it even stronger by keeping a monopoly on Diplomacy skill boosting techs.

Regretably, the diplomatic unawareness of the AIs doesn't end with tech whoring. One problem that I've already mentioned is that you can extort significant enough tribute from a civ before you attack them. This is also a problem in Civ4, but there you will only get gold, not techs from such a situation. And after the fight, GalCiv2 AIs are willing enough to pay a lot for peace, I've managed to extort as many as five techs. Plus you get a tech from conquering each planet, which is the snowball effect.

Not to forget the fact that the AI will trade with even enemies. In fact, I haven't noticed a significant difference in the AI willingness to trade based on relations. So if a civ hates me but I can offer a fair deal to them they'll still take it.

And two more issues are the tedious haggling to get the exact max amount of credits they'll pay, and the relative ease of pitting civs against each other. These aren't very good things either, particularly the latter. Through maintaining good relations or good tech lead you can arrange for wars how you want them.

As far as solutions go... here I can only suggest taking a good look at the Civ4 diplomacy system. It can offer even more than it currently does, but I think what's currently implemented is great and probably the biggest achievement of Civ4. To recap very briefly: AIs won't trade techs with enemies, won't usually trade monopoly techs, are hard to bribe into going to war and (very important) are hard to brine into having better relations if your relations are sour.

The interface

A few more small points about it. I've already mentioned my dissatisfaction with parts of the interface, but I realise that it's largely a matter of taste and personal preference. But, there should be a way for me to tell how many turns are needed for my ships to arrive to their destination. Also, if a fleet is stacked with some other ship, I can't control the fleet (remove units from it, etc.)

There must be a launch all button for planets. Rally points should be much easier and not, in fact, require a special set-up. I want: click a planet, click a "Set rally point" button, right-click a square and have all my ships automatically go there.

Again, planets really should show under their name turns to completion of the current build project and what it is. When selected, a planet needs to show the current social project, not just the military one. Currently the social project's only accessible through the detailed planet control screen.

Double-clicking a civ on the Foreign screen really, really should bring up the negotiations window!

These are the main interface complaints here from me. The rest are either not so major or more a matter of my preference than objectively missing items.

The ethical problem

Again, something that I've mentioned in the past. OK, now suppose that being Good is better in the global sense, and Evil choices are much better for the planet when they come up. That's a fair assesment.

The big problem is that it doesn't matter where you're leaning! Make Evil choices, and when you research Xeno Ethics, pay a heftier price and become Good! Besides, you know when Xeno Ethics is coming so you can even save up the money if you need to.

That's far too small a tradeoff, and essentially you can have your cake and eat it too with the ethics implementation. I'd say just get rid of that Xeno Ethics choice - you get what you've chosen, if you've made Evil choices, you stay Evil, period, no way to buy yourself goodness.

Closure

That's all I can think of for the moment, and it's sometimes making me tired writing these big posts.

I am not putting GC2 aside yet, and will certainly post if I remember/identify another problem or think of a possible solution. Again, sorry for sounding so negative, but this was a problem description post. And while I feel that GalCiv2 isn't quite up to the level of Civ4, I do have a lot of faith in patching and I love many of the GC2 concepts. I just hope Brad finds something useful in these comments, but this is not really my place, either - I am not, after all, a consultant or a tester for Brad.

I also hope to give the 1.1 patch a good look, but I can't at the moment guarantee that I will do so immediately once it's released because of Warlords currently being under development. I will definitely look a 1.1, though, it just might take a little bit after its release for me to get to it.

Thanks for reading!

[DaviddesJ]

Originally posted by Solver

My second concern with GalCiv2 sliders is the immense strength of setting the sliders at game start to provide unit construction at maximum speed - to speed up the colonization about which I've already spoken at length.

Is this really true? If you're buying most of your colony ships, rather than building them, then do the sliders matter? I haven't played much, but I would have thought that you want to emphasize research at the start (e.g., to get faster colony ships out there, or early warships); production is less important since your real production in the early game comes from the cash you start with.

I might completely misunderstand the economics, so please feel free to educate me.

To say something positive, which I've already mentioned, I love the fleet combat views and the shipyard. Eye candy in strategy games has never been so fun to watch, and the shipyard provides a ton of options to play around for custom designs while not really being unbalanced like in SMAC - because GalCiv2 ships don't have oversophisticated "special abilities".

I wish the defaults were better. I'd like to pick out a bunch of modules and have the game arrange them in a reasonably attractive way, rather than piling them all on stupidly unless I adjust them. It would also be neat to have a "Reconfigure" button which would just take my ship and re-build it with a different arrangement of modules; I could click on this a few times until I get one that I like. Since I really have no interest in actually positioning the modules myself.

[Solver]

Is this really true? If you're buying most of your colony ships, rather than building them, then do the sliders matter? I haven't played much, but I would have thought that you want to emphasize research at the start (e.g., to get faster colony ships out there, or early warships); production is less important since your real production in the early game comes from the cash you start with.

You can buy your first two colony ships, for example, and send them to systems close to the AI, stealing the planets they would otherwise colonize first. Sliders do matter, you can't really buy everything.

[DaviddesJ]

Originally posted by Solver

You can buy your first two colony ships, for example, and send them to systems close to the AI, stealing the planets they would otherwise colonize first. Sliders do matter, you can't really buy everything.

As I said, I haven't played a lot, but I think you can buy a whole lot more than 2 colony ships. I remember being quoted something like 200 plus 17/turn. You pay the per-turn cost forever, but, the extra income you generate from the extra planets you get should more than pay for the cost of the colony ships you buy.

Is there an exposition somewhere of exactly what the algorithm is for determining the cost to buy ships (or projects)?

[Solver]

I haven't tried many games too extensively, either. Maybe it's possible to buy all the colony ships you need and ignore the military slider. If so, that's worse. Buying two first ships and using high sliders for the rest is just something I did.

[yin26]

You can indeed buy more than two, and this gets back to my thoughts on too much money thrown at you. For example, in my current game, not only did I start with the standard 5,000 b.c., but my survey ship found 6,000 b.c. more! I don't mind so much that this helps to jumpstart the game (that's nice), but it adds to the colony rush, and if you don't get lucky with the survey ship, you're in trouble. Rather, it contributes to the fact that the colony rush phase is already over too fast and favors the person who can rush buy.

[yin26]

By the way, Solver, please rise to the stage:

"In recognition of his thoughtful, balanced, and insightful posts about TBS games -- posts that elegantly combine an infectious enthusiasm for but highest expectations from the genre -- we, the Mulitiple Personalities of Yin, hereby present Solver the highest honor awarded a citizen: The Diamond Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Gaming. Finally, we just like that your name implies that you are willing to solve problems facing our favorite games!"



--Yin

[Gufnork]

On larger maps I don't recommend buying colony ships, you're generally better of buying a factory, going all out social until you have enough factories to pump out one colony ship each turn. Those who buy colony ships will run out of money pretty soon and be forced to lower production, which will cost you a lot more than the colony ships you bought earned you.

Solver: There's one issue with population that you failed to mention. The pop growth formula. Right now population growth is not tied to population size whatsover (except for very small populations). Two planets with 5 billion population each grows twice as fast as one planet with 20 billion population. This further increases the importance of planets.

[yin26]

Gufnork: Good tip on rush buying. Also the math you mention is ICS all over again...except in GalCiv2 you actually have to rush to get (or attack to get) pre-determined planets, but the core problem is similar.

[Solver]

Yin: you're making me blush here. My contributions with these thoughts here are still a long ways from what some other people provide.

Gufnork - I actually hadn't noticed that yet, thanks. It makes the population problem a notch worse then, I guess.

[bonscott]

Nice job Solver. Couple comments.

RE: Population. You mention there is no downside to expanding like bunny rabbits. Ah but there is. Both my last two games my economy has completely collapsed because the maintenance costs of too many colonies too fast (not enough pop paying taxes to make up for it). I did a bit better this game by going for trade and the xeno business line quicker but it still killed me. So what does it mean for your economy to collapse in GalCiv 2? No income means no research, no ships being built and no buildings being built. Ouch. I had to cut my spending down to 10% or less both times just to break even which doesn't help much when you are -400 already. Maybe I'm just doing something wrong but ever since moving up to Tough this has happened to me.

Why is that micromanagement necessary? Because overflow from completed production is wasted. This is where I think GalCiv2 should do exactly what Civ4 did, make overflow count towards the production of the next element. That simple change in Civ4, I remember, produced a lot of excitement when I announced it on the forums, and in my experience, it really made the game less tedious.

I guess I just don't worry about it nor care. Waste, eh, whatever. I got better things to worry about. I know it just bothers some people to death but I don't even think about it. I rarely adjust the sliders. Only time I do is if I'm gearing up for war I'll put more toward military or if there is a tech I have got to get I'll put it more toward research but I rarely mess with it. I just let it ride.

[Solver]

You know what's funny? Usually, if someone criticizes the game and points out weak spots, he sometimes gets flamed, but usually ignored or dismissed as someone "not getting" it. I am, for some reason, receiving compliments here despite a rather extensive criticism of the game in question.

[Solver]

See, Bonscott, maybe you're not getting enough of it all because you're not adjusting the sliders. It bothers me because I know that adjusting them is the right thing to do and I do indeed see, practically, that it gives very good results.

Maintenance costs just don't counter-balance your expansion. As you colonize the planets, they will provide more revenue in taxes than they consume money in maintenance. If you have an Economy or Population Growth race bonus, you'll see the planet becoming a good source of revenue *very* fast. And even if not, I think you'll only suffer very few turns, if any of expenses. I'm actually going to go now and get some numbers.