Review-in-Progress (Open Thread)

[crampon]

I totally agree with u.

[blacksunshining]

Good breakdown. I like both games. A blending of the two would be nice.

[Island Dog]

I agree bonscott. Super abilities are a great addition I was always looking forward to.

Still my favorite is the ship building. I have so much fun just doing that!

[bonscott]

Hey guys, been a while since I've been around. Not as much free time as I'd like.

LOVE Dark Avatar. Here are my quick impressions and my strats of some of the new features.

Planet Types
By far the best new feature of the game. Love it. It really stops the huge colony rush and I don't feel so frantic to try to rush buy colony ships like crazy. I explore even more to get those few planets that I can colonize right away and indentify what planet types I have available. I then inventory each special planet type and their PQ along with a star next to the ones that are key strategically. I'll then either trade or research one or two key planet type techs. I keep huge tabs on my border civs to see what they have and if they already have say Toxic worlds and I'd be 15 turns away I don't even bother knowing they will get to those before I do. But the ones I do go after I'll park colony ships right next to the ones I plan to get.

Spy's
I didn't like spy's at first, seemed mine kept getting kicked off and I'd never get any information on the other civs. Then I figured out it's best to "spam" your spy's. I'll wait until I have 3 of them. Then I'll take 2 and hit one civ with both. You'll get "low" intelligence in only a few short turns. As soon as I get low I remove them and choose another civ. If one gets kicked off I have a spare. If two kick the bucket then I'll hold off until I have 2 or 3 banked up again. I can get low for all civs this way with a lot less loss of spy's.
Low is all I really care about. After that I'll just bank up 5 or 6 and use them to kill enemy spy's or to hit a particular planet of interest.

Super Abilities
Awesome addition and give flavor to each civ. I have made my own custom civ and play as Super Trader. I like this for 3 reasons:
1) Econ is king
2) Getting trade routes real early can really improve relations later on
3) I can trade the "Trade" tech right away which gets me a leg up on catching up with other techs as well as allowing the other civs minimal trading which a lot of times goes to me

Ship Templates
Often overlooked feature. Love being able to create custom ship templates on which I can build my ships.

Just off the top of my head...

[yin26]

I started something similar on Dark Avatar here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=162758 Hope to see you there!

[The Rusty Gamer]

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[The Rusty Gamer]

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[Frogman]

Well, I've tried the game for a few weeks and I'm just not impressed. Its just not as good as Master of Orion (MOO) which is 10 years ago.

Why is it not as good? First, the computer just sucks at exploration and can't grab stuff as fast so you dominate from the get go. MOO had limits on movement and what planets could be colonized that started the computer out on a more even footing. Mass buying colony ships at the start of this game and sending them out all over the universe puts the AI at a real disadvantage.

Second, the computer opponents all look alike to me. There is no differentiation when dealing with any of them. With MOO you had a feel for the different racial advantages.

Third, I don't like the spending bar. If I build a factory and a research facility, why can't they both run at full production. Its just absurd. Then you don't even need labs at all, just emphasize research on your production facility, also absurd. You can play the whole game without making a single lab and still be way ahead of the AI on research.

Fourth, MOO had tactical combat. I can't tell for crap what the weapons are doing in this game and get a lot less enjoyment about employing the latest designs in my ships. Laser II to Laser V, big whoop, I can put more lasers on the ship. There just isn't the satisfaction. This is the biggest let down of the game. There aren't any cool weapons that you can see in action and you don't have any control over them anyway.

In 10 years I expected a lot more out of a space game than this. Now I have the urge to find some dosbox program I heard about that would let me run MOO again. Is the TBS brain trust dead? You mean we peaked with X-Com, MOO, Civ 2, and Masters of Magic in the 90's and haven't come up with anything better since?

[Urban Ranger]

I think the game is still too complicated. Too many special resources, too many variables to content with.

I also feel the game plays like I am controlling a collection of colonies, not a whole empire. I feel that things such as pooling resouces and relocating people should be allowed.

[Draginol]

BTW, there is a lot of fantastic feedback in this thread.

Thank you very much!

[Draginol]

There really hasn't been that much re-balancing in the game.

Rather, what we've done is streamline the game and make the game more transparent in how it's played.

But when it comes to adding new features, we want to see how people are playing the game and then cater to their needs.

[Solver]

I would say that there's a big difference about making an incomplete game and then updating that, or updating a complete game. Updates are a good thing. Let's take Civ4 as an example. You know better than anyone else how many things were rebalanced again and again before the release. And yet, post-release there was the need for a couple of (admittedly relatively small) balance tweaks.

What I think Stardock wants is to adapt GalCiv2 to the way it's being played. In this very thread, we criticized the early game extensively, basically stating that the important part is to grab as many planets as you can. That got changed. So did many other things.

Yes, you can sau that the players are like testers, and that's a valid point, too. But I think it just comes down to how much broken the game is initially. The initial version of Civ3 was broken beyond all belief, the Knight retreat issue and forest chops alone are enough, so in that case, I would agree that the players were nothing more than testers. GalCiv2, I believe, shipped in a condition that was pretty far from perfect strategic gameplay, but yet quite a complete game. With significant weaknesses. Your mileage may vary.

But I do love the level of responsiveness. I posted extensively on the 1.1 update, and I also made a somewhat philosophical post about general design and the lack of "grand strategy" elements in GalCiv2, that post is here. And from what it looks, the GalCiv2 expansion will be addressing some of those concerns as well.

I'm also not sure I'll play the game again, but I might even pick the expansion up at some point. After playing GalCiv2 for some time, it became evident to me that yes, I indeed do prefer Civ4, but even if I am a somewhat hard critic, I think GalCiv2 has quite enough positive qualities. as for the expansion, I think that I will, at least, be curious as to how those new features turn out.

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Solver
OK, it seems that now the Critic Strike Team (TM), composed of Sirian and yours truly is completely immersed in Oblivion and away from GalCiv2 .

I'm still playing Oblivion. I peeked in here to see what's new with GC2. Sounds like Brad is changing quite a bit. Much of that is probably in the right direction, but a game like this is too big for me to enjoy relearning how to play with every build and patch.

I hate to say it, but I no longer view it as a positive for the game to get "frequent updates" after release. I find that, for me personally, I want to play complete games, not games that are continually being rebalanced. There is one point of view that says the company is being responsive to fan requests and feedback, and that's a valid point of view, but another valid point of view is that players are serving themselves up as free beta testers and subjecting themselves to numerous temporary versions. That's much more like work than play to me.

I think that's part of the attraction for console games: the simplicity of getting to play finished games. One set of hardware for everybody, and games are either good or they aren't, but they don't reinvent themselves several times. Companies whose console titles are not well finished simply get labeled for making bad games and lose business.

The thing I've appreciated most about Oblivion is that it is fairly well polished. Nothing major is broken or badly unbalanced -- at least not anything you can't choose to ignore if you wish -- and I don't have to wait through patches for the good fun to begin. Perhaps this title benefitted from being both for console and PC.


I'm not sure I'll try GalCiv2 again. A process of giant-slaying -- of identifying the most successful moves for humans and trying to nerf them or take them away -- is not a path to great gameplay. For those who are enjoying the existing game, though, the changes may extend their fun a bit more, so may be worthy for some players -- just not for me. Good luck to them.


- Sirian

[yin26]

Only once (the Altarians) have I seen a civ on the diplo screen that didn't show me as having an "incredible advantage," so it's hard to say what the other civs are doing. They are likely not "abusing" the diplo tech trade game as I am.

For fleets in 1.2, I'm just finding it easier to hammer people with an early attack. I think the only-build-fleet-when-declared-on thing still works to set traps and even save money not needing to support fleets for a long time (though taking over 8 planets early on vs. waiting earns more, so).

[Solver]

So you're saying that the change of making the AI like yellow techs more isn't working? Also, have you tried your only-build-fleet-when-declared-on thing in 1.2?