Solver's 1.1 thoughts

[Grandpa Troll]

Thanks

I'll let you know when I get it and if I run into a snag Ill let you vets get me through

[EternalSpark]

My primary experience:

MONEY! Holy crap, after the patch I can actually make a profit. Oh sure, colonyspam is still the best path to take (granted, I've done random habitables and I've seem to have gotten the higher-end part of that in the games I've played), and for a while my bank account was nothing... but after that, money was flowing in.

[Barbazoul]

What did you guys think about the "no tech trading" option? Did you try it? I played my first 1.1 tough game with no tech trading, and i found it really easier than with regular rules... I was constantly in front of the tech race, and ended fighting "medium" AI ships with "massive" sized ones.

Maybe i was lucky, or maybe it was the setting of the game (medium galaxy, 4 opponents, all random)? Or maybe it is because i dont exploit tech trading enough in normal games?

What do you think about it?

[Silver14]

You're probably not tradeing techs enough. I realized in my latest game that I wasn't tradeing enough. I could see how no tech trading in GalCiv would make the game even easier then in Civ IV. There are so many techs and branches that the AI shares with each other that not being able to trade could cripple all but the larger AIs in the game.

[EternalSpark]

Some more thoughts -

1) As mentioned, I'm able to keep myself finanically afloat very easilly now. Very welcome; I was sick of having to micromanage every turn to have a posititive number.

2) The shift-social-to-military is great! The only problem with it is that social projects show up as 'Never' until you actually build it.

3) In almost every game I play, the Torians are crazy expanders. If they are in the game, and not completely isolated, the galaxy will be bright green.

4) Agreed that disabling tech trading does make you rather powerful, tech-wise. Honestly, though, I like that. Without disabling tech trading, I never feel like I'm ahead of the pack.

5) The best thing, still, is to scout the map and reload.

[Draginol]

Great stuff. I will be looking at this more when I get back from a biz trip and see what can be done in 1.2.

[Hansolo88]

Glad to see you still check out the Apolyton forums Brad! There has been some great discussion on the game here and I am glad you aren't missing it.

Hope you are enjoying your time off!

[Solver]

Thanks for reading this, Brad. I'm now playing another game of GalCiv2 (going slow, though, Civ4:Warlords business again), and I expect to be updating this thread again - I have some half-formed new thoughts already.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by EternalSpark
2) The shift-social-to-military is great! The only problem with it is that social projects show up as 'Never' until you actually build it.

If you click on any Focus button, or add something else to the build que, the never goes away.

ACK!

[Solver]

AI observations. I checked out an old AI weakness again, at which it got no better, and identified a new area where the AI is very poor.

So, I'm playing and the Drengin declare war on me. Big surprise. According to reports, they also have the most powerful military, which is somewhat disconcerning. However, the declaration of war is followed by exactly nothing - the Drengin AI declares war first and then starts to think about sending ships my way, a fatal weakness.

What do I do? I, of course, switch my economy to a war machine. Turn up Military Production, design a new light combat ship, start building ships, upgrade a mining strabase near the Drengin with an attack module. Soon, I had a reasonable number of combat ships flying around, I sent them into Drengin territory, and destroyed some combat ships that were then being prepared for fight by the Drengin. Gahh.

Next, I noticed that Kona is actually one poorly defended planet, and has low population, so I send two Transports by and take it. Soon, the Drengin fleet finally shows up. But, it's too late already. I had my first Perforator class warships out. One Perforator-class ship could destroy the standard Drengin transport fleet (1 Transport + 2 Escorts). So, while the Drengin declared war at a time when I had very little military, since they only started doing something then, that gave me plenty enough time to counter.

The solution would seem to be pretty clear, just make the AI prepare for war first, and declare then. That's something the Civ4 AI does well, it has a "prepare for war" phase. Builds more troops and sends them to where they're needed. In the case of a cross-continental invasion, the AI will declare war and on the same turn land troops on your shores.

The GalCiv2 AI needs to do the same. A declaration of war shoud occur when fleets are assembled and in position, at least enough ships to actually do some harm. And the declaration should immediately be followed by an attack on ships, starbases, trade routes or even a planet - anything. Currently, a declaration of war in GalCiv2 essentially means an advance warning for you: "Beware, we are now building fleets and are going to attack you soon". It should of course be: "We're attacking you, and if you don't have sufficient military, you're screwed".

This is, BTW, with Drengin at Bright intelligence, so that's probably not to blame. OK. Now the new weakness that I identified.

The AI is unbelievably poor at understanding how the war is going - is it losing it or not. Same game as the one above, before Drengin declare. I had done an early experiment that resulted in the Drath having a planet in my system. I declare war on the Drath, with minimal forces. I take the planet, and then send just a couple of weaker ships to the Drath territory. There, I destroy a Constructor and two starbases.

At that point, I go to negotiate peace. The Drath won't even sign a white peace agreement, they want me to give something up. Wow. Okay, I decline naturally, and destroy two more starbases, another Constructor and a Freighter. Now the Drath are willing to sign peace, but not give me anything for it. I'm still not satisfied and reject.

At this point, the Drengin declared. I stopped attacking the Drath altogether and switched my focus to the Drengin... as a result, soon the Drath were unwilling to go to peace unless I surrendered something. They must have mistakenly understood that, if I'm not attacking them anymore, then they're doing good in the war.

Hello, Drath folks, you lost a planet, four starbases and three civilian ships. I lost nothing. And you want me to pay you for peace??

In the war with the Drengin, it went even worse. Drengin declared, and after some time, the situation was such. I took Kona, destroyed several starbases (3 or 4), destroyed 3 Freighters and a constructor, destroyed 4 Transports (big loss of population for the Drengin) and also destroyed some number of combat ships. My losses through all of this consisted of one combat ship.

And the Drengin will not sign peace. Not unless I give them a tech or something. That was just mindblowing, they lose a planet, starbases and ships, they achieve nothing, and they won't even agree to sign peace.

The only thing the AI understands in this part is when it's completely beaten. Like, down to 1 planet and with no military - you know, the situations when it surrenders. Prior to that, it seems, however, that whatever system the AI uses for gauging its success in a war is very much flawed.

Keeping my non-AI thoughts to myself, for now.

[Barbazoul]

I completely agree with the first part of the post ; the AI should prepare for war before declaring. It should move its ships toward the player (or the other AI), then only declare war.

But what the Drath did seems perfectly logical to me (maybe because im crazy). You ask them a tribute for peace ; they disagree. As soon as the Drengin attack you, the Drath just think that you are in a very bad position (with 2 war fronts), and that you can't lead two wars at the same time ; i think that makes sense, and that's why they are asking for something in exchange of peace. They try to exploit this situation to their own advantage...
Or am i completely dreaming?


PS : i find the AI really good at detecting incoming attacks... Often, i stack a few ships near their borders, and they declare war before i even have the opportunity to do so myself ("we know what you are doing"). That's great. But id love to see the AI prepare its attacks, to see warships coming innocently near my starbases, and then a good declaration of war followed by a massive attack. As Solver said, this shouldn't be too hard to do, and it seems really important... Because now, they declare war and you have plenty of time before anything comes your way. This doesnt make sense.

[Solver]

The Drath would have been right if the distribution of forces was different. I asked them for tribute for peace for the first time before the Drengin invaded. Next, yes, I was at war on 2 fronts, but that shouldn't stop the Drath from being able to count casualties. They lost ships, starbases and a planet to me, I lost exactly nothing - they don't have any advantage to consolidate...

The 1.1 AI is much better at detecting incoming attacks, yes. Which is why I don't stack ships outside of their borders now. I assemble a fleet that is ready to attack, and send it right to their planets. Thanks to the fleets being somewhat fast, the AI will see the attack coming, but it will have 2-3 turns to prepare, and it won't help really then.

[Solver]

This will be a somewhat philosophical post. It's about GalCiv2 and Civ games for sure, but it's not specifically related to the 1.1 gameplay, and won't have much in the terms of specific suggestions for an update, because I will be talking about core design here. Feel free to skip if you're not interested in such ramblings. The last part of the post has some suggestions, though.

What I'll be posting now came to me as I was waiting for a tram earlier today - I am nuts that way, but some of the longer posts here and in private forums I've come up with while waiting for something in the city. If that isn't a sign of addiction and dedication, I don't know what is .

Okay, so the issue at hand is the game's replay value (longevity), the surprise factor and the amount of unknown variables that you encounter and have fun dealing with. I currently feel that GalCiv2 is quite replayable, and has a long lifespan, as most strategy games do. GalCiv2 has that thing that is so crucial to a TBS game, replayability.

I came up with the thought that GalCiv2, because of some elements inherent to its core design, has a somewhat smaller replayability factor than Civ games (when I say Civ games, I mean the family of Civ1-Civ4, CtPI & CtP2, plus SMAC, but I will be mostly referring to Civ with Civ4 in mind). Smaller replayability, not bad replayability. GalCiv2 has plenty enough of that replay value for any casual strategy gamers. My ideas/arguments kick in when you're talking about the big amounts of playtime, such as, can this game provide 200 hours of gameplay? Or 300?

To the matter at hand finally, I feel that what limits GalCiv2 somewhat in this regard is the small amount of unknown early-game factors, and the very big speed at which the existing factors are dealt with. This sounds similar to a complaint of "every game is the same". The difference, however, is that, if "every game is the same", then you're looking at a game that can maybe provide 20 hours of gameplay, a pathetic number for a grand strategy game. The "too little unknown variables" problem kicks in, as said, when you think about those replay hours on a much larger scale than that.

It's the easiest for me to explain what these unknown variables are by taking Civ as an example. In Civ, you have: geography (how many landmasses? how big is yours? are you alone? are you on a peninsula or in the middle?), terrain (got a huge jungle not far from your start, or a land-of-plenty with rivers and all?), resources (what, where and how many) and some others. I usually play Civ4 on the Fractal map script. It generates an unknown number of landmasses. I have great fun in the early exploration, when I need to determine the size of my landmass, the number of rivals on the same landmass, as well as the terrain aspects to decide for my expansion.

What does GalCiv2 have in this regard? First and foremost, planets. There are some habitable planets out there, and their classes matter a lot. You definitely want a class 15 planet more than a class 4 one. Some planets are essentially predetermined to fall into the hands of certain civs, which depends on their starting position, and that's how it should be. Then, you do a colony rush, or you don't, but you're colonizing actively, and so are the other civs. At this point, the unknown, exciting game-defining element is which planets fall into whose hands. And, here's the deal - GalCiv2's earliest phase of the game, colonization, is over very quickly. It's over quickly both with respect to the in-game time, and the real-life time. Playing a Medium sized galaxy, you won't have to wait for long until all the planets are colonized.

At that point, this early unknown variable is gone. Roughly speaking, "the rest" starts now. The planets are what and where they are, the question now is what will everyone do with them and how well. This is, of course, where the replayability of the game lies, you can go warmongering, you can build, you can overwhelm with influence... well, you all understand the number and scope of the options. Now, if there were just 2 viable strategies with very specific executions from there on, we'd have the "each game is the same" problem, which is most fortunately not the case.

In Civ, you do keep discovering new things about the world itself for quite some time. After you've done exploring your immediate surroundings, it will take you some time to find out what exactly is in the rival territory, and if there are other landmasses, it will take you yet more time to even meet the civs there, and then find out about those locations. GalCiv2 doesn't really have a concept of "what's in their territory", because the tiles are either stars/planets, or they're void space. Again, there's stuff like starbases or fleets, that creates the gameplay and the basic replayability, but there are no "grand" variables there, like the terrain or somesuch. I really hope you can understand the difference here, this one might be hard to explain... think about "grand" stuff being permanent. In Civ, the shape and amount of landmasses is permanent, so is the terrain. In GalCiv2, the locations and the classes of planets are (forget class-reducing attacks for now). Civ's cities and culture or GalCiv2's starbases and trade routes aren't such permanent things.

It's the presence of these "grand" elements in a game that adds grealty to the replayability. I can say that for me personally, it's exactly what takes Civ games into the category of games on which I can spend hundreds of hours. Other than all the building, trading, fighting and the other stuff I do, these grand elements define each game, making some playstyles easier or harder, some strategies wiser or more feasible. To take an example from the Civ4 early game:

Strategic resources. There are three main resources at that point - Copper, Iron and Horses. At the start, you don't know where any are (there's this fun exploration aspect I'm talking about). When you finally know their locations, which ones you have means a lot for the game. If you have Iron, you can mount a fully-fledged invasion. If you have Copper (and no Iron), you can also mount a good invasion, but may need a bit more troops. If you have Horses (and no metals), you're in a very good position for a war of pillaging and small strikes here and there. Consider a situation where you have one neighbour. Now, if you have Iron and he has no resources, an invasion is awesomely convenient. If you have only Horses, and he has all three resources, you better hope he doesn't decide to pick a fight. If you both have the same resources, there'll be quite a brawl if you fight.

The important part here is surprise. You don't know when you start what you have, and what your rivals have. It creates all sorts of interesting choices (go for Iron Working and hope you have Iron, or forget it?), but that's even not the point. The point is that it's a grand unknown variable, and it's something that's important but you have to wait a while until you find out. It's exciting. And, it may well surprise you, as in a situation where you want to fight but find out that your intended enemy controls all the resources.

That would be what GalCiv2 lacks. There's really no such mechanic, and past the initial short phase of colonization, you don't find out much new about the world. The resources, for example, you also know all of them from whenever you first discover those map areas. All the information there is about the world is revealed to you soon. And you meet all the other civs in the galaxy early on.

Pretty obviously, this is inherent to GalCiv2's core design. The game's set in space, there can be no continents, no terrain types... no rivers or such stuff. Which is why I am not suggesting anything, changing this would require a nearly complete redesign of the game, which's only feasible in a (very) large-scale mod or a sequel. And then I'm not really sure the game would become better for it. Does it really matter if you can get 100 or 400 hours out of a game? I don't know. Well, to me it does. The game from which I can get 100 hours will be a very good or a great game for me, the game which provides me with 400 hours of fun may well be my overall favorite game. Redesigning the game from some of its core concepts is a dangerous thing. It can botch up the game, and it requires a lot of effort. Under the current system, however, GalCiv2 is sure enough going to provide its money's worth for most players. Heck, in the industry, games that provide 20-40 hours of gameplay are often considered a success, so if a game provides 100 hours, it's a success by any measure. It's just that me having now become rather closely involved with Civ4 development, I started thinking about not just improving a game, but how to make it a LOT better - on the theoretical level, even if it involves such amounts of redesigning that are not practically feasible. Hey, I warned you this was a philosophical post.

Still, even within the current GalCiv2 framework, it's not implausible to add some more grand elements! Some technologies could be made to reveal new things that would be some new gameplay elements. Off the top of my head, a *very* interesting addition would be a "Hyperspace jump" technology. Once you discover it, you can build ships equipped with the hyperspace module, which can jump to another location, which would be sort of like a different game map. Within the same game, but a different map. And this different map would have a bunch of interesting stuff. Planets. Anomalies. Shipwrecks.

Or you could make some resources appear with time. For example, once you research some tech X, there's the chance that new resources will become visible within your borders - "Our scientsts claim that their recent discovery reveals that the space garbage in sector Y can actually be harvested as a research resource!".

These two are really off the top of my head. I am sure that I could come up with more new systems and elements to add some degree of new "grand" stuff to GalCiv2, and these systems could be of various levels in terms of how radical they are and how hard they're to implement. I mean, the first idea about a different map is quite radical and hard to do, the second one about resources is simpler. I'm not a tester on Brad's team, however, so I should probably shut up here instead of listing half a dozen elaborate new game systems.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read this. Again, please do not take it as actual criticism of the game, because this is more of a philosophical look at design and replayability than criticism, though I'm sure I will return to less philosophical aspects of the game in future posts.

[Barbazoul]

Really nice and interesting analysis, as always.

I have to agree on the Civ 4 terrain and resources.

But what you didn't mention is that Galciv 2 galaxies can be heavily customized ; of course, once you explored it, you explored it and it stays the same for the rest of the game, but playing with rare habitable planets or abundant habitable planets really are two different things... You even have pre designed maps (i haven't tried them yet) where the galaxy is a spiral, for example... So there is some kind of geographic adding replayability in galciv 2 as well.
Since 1.1 i only play with random games ; i randomize everything(except the size of the galaxy), and i havent played two games looking like each other...
Sometimes it's disappointing because it's too easy, but sometimes the galactic geography makes thing really interesting... Okay, this isn't the civ 4 land masses with mountains, plains, jungles and special resources ; but still, these options add a lot to the replayability of galciv 2.

[Solver]

Agreed fully. Again, I did not complain about the lack of replayability in GalCiv2. It's a well-done TBS game, and thus has replayability. BTW, I also play with everything on random.

The options are great. Many star systems with abudnant habitable planets is one thing... rare stars with rare habitables is another thing. These indeed impact the game very seriously, and create for different early experiences.

According to me, though, the problem is really in the fact that all this variation is over early. Suppose I start a new game with random star/planet settings. Within minutes, I'll see if there are few or many stars/planets, and 15 minutes later, they'll be colonized by me and the other civs. Ad then for the rest of the game, there will be no grand elements to surprise me or new ones popping up to take into consideration. There's dipomacy, declarations of war, random events, a lot of stuff that changes how the game goes. But none of that stuff falls into the "grand variables" category as I tried to define it. The exploration's over quickly, and nothing of an exploratory or semi-exploratory nature pops up, and there are no permanent things going on, except gas attacks, which you initiate anyway so they're quite predictable.

It's philosophy that I'm doing here right now. In practice, I am quite satisfied now, and what I don't like I post as gameplay observations, such as my post about the AI from earlier today.