Solver's 1.1 thoughts

[Hansolo88]

Great discussion guys!

Two points that I fully agree with:

First, rush-buying is too easy. It should absolutely be exponentially more expensive to rush-buy a ship from scratch than to accelerate the production of one that is half-way done already. This would slow down the start of the game, make early-game economy more important, and help make colony-rushing tougher to successfully pull off. Best of all, its easy for the AI to deal with.

Second, I fully agree with Spaced Cowboy. Range is not as important as it should be. I've thought this from the very first time I played the game. It is more important on the larger galaxies, but it should be important on smaller ones as well. I say substantially cut down the starting range of starships and the effects of the early life support technologies, and if necessary add more life support technologies to spread out the bonuses more. This would slow down the colonization period some, and add another interesting and important research choice early-on. Again, it would be easy to adapt the AI to this.

So, these two minor changes would be both easy to implement and would add more interest to the early phase of the game, which is indeed too short (though I have had the same complaint about Civ in the past).

As for large-scale terrain features, I agree with Solver's thoughts completely. The difficulty here is balancing additions to the game with the ability of the AI. There are numerous great possibilities, and everyone has their own idea of what would be cool. One thing I liked from Space Empires was the "storms" in space that had various effects like hiding your ships, damaging ships that flew through them, etc. Something like that could add a lot of fun, adding barriers between areas, or whatever. Space Empires also had Black Holes that sucked nearby ships toward them and then destroyed them if the ships got too close; those were kind of cool. Or stars could go supernova and destroy all the planets around them, and damage ships that got too close. There are tons of ideas, the question is what is Brad really willing to add. From reading all the development journals, I don't think he is thinking much in this direction right now; he is more concerned with tweaking the AI and adding modding ability. All features listed so far for the expansion pack have to do with moddability, story generation, and more diplomatic depth. These are great, but I'm hoping for more hard features like new space terrain.

All this said, I am no-where near exhausting the replayability of this game, and probably still won't be when the expansion comes out.

[Solver]

Here's an easy fix for the range issue, instead of making ship ranges be constant numbers, make those numbers scale depending on map size. Thus, if the current situation is that life support modules are only important on larger galaxies, you'd have a situation where they are equally important on all sizes.

I'm playing Medium galaxies myself, and hardly ever bother with life support. My ships have quite enough range initially, and later in the game, I control more planets anyway, so range isn't really an issue.

[dac]

As far as influence goes, I think the AI does "play the influence game." But it does it by building embassies on it's planets. I've seen this as a defensive tactic in response to a planet that's threatening to flip, I've also seen the AI build a lot of embassies on it's planets in an attempt to "push" it's influence boundaries. The problem with doing it this way is that those embassies are taking up valuable tiles on a planet that could be researching, growing food, or manufacturing things. So, if my planets start disappearing under AI influence, and there are no influence starbases nearby, I'm usually assured that the local planets are going to be push overs because they aren't going to be able to build much military, and they aren't going to have a lot of people.

The AI should use influence starbases more, and embassies less.

[EternalSpark]

One of the problems with the AI since the latest patch (although it happened before, just less often) is what I call the "Moron Spreading".

Basically, it's when the AI has run out of colonizable planets in its own area. Then, from every corner of the galaxy, the colony ships come in. Enemies, friends, it doesn't matter. The screen will soon light up with that little "Hay, I'm A Colony Ship Lolz" graphic.

Now, I realize some of you will say "so? just take 'em over culturally". That's easy to say, but the AI is good enough that these bases won't just shift over easilly. They'll swiss-cheese your influence, reducing it.

Really, the AI needs to be taught that, after X amount of turns, don't send colony ships to meager planets. Hell, I've not played a game where a Civ is transfering colony pods without anywhere to go.

[Hansolo88]

Originally posted by Solver
Here's an easy fix for the range issue, instead of making ship ranges be constant numbers, make those numbers scale depending on map size. Thus, if the current situation is that life support modules are only important on larger galaxies, you'd have a situation where they are equally important on all sizes.

That's a fairly brilliant solution to the problem, and could definitely be one way to go. However, I still like the idea of simply reducing the range of all ships initially and forcing the player to research a bit to get a large inherent range and the more advanced life support modules. I just think it could do a lot for the early game, allowing empires to come into contact more slowly, lowering the tempo of the colony rush, and preventing early warmongering from being too successful.

This is something that could be modded and tested, a "Range Mod" or something, so maybe I'll have to do that sometime. I'd be curious myself to see what the effects would be on the different sized maps, I could be wrong about it enhancing the game; I'm sure it was designed the way it is for a reason, probably because the current method allows the game to get going fairly quickly.

Can rush-buying calculations be modded as well I wonder?

[Barbazoul]

There definitely is a problem with influence victories. I tried it again, and i won far too easily (at the "tough" difficulty, with every galaxy setting randomized).

I ally with the biggest civ, only trade with it, and i spam constructors like a mad man, building influence starbases everywhere. The AIs just watch me. Oh, sure, i get some threatening ; but my relations are all above "neutral", i don't know why. Maybe because i focus on the yellow techs at first. So they never declare war. They place their ships around my influence starbases and just look at their planets flipping one by one.

A human player would declare war, destroy the starbases, then maybe beg for peace, or continue the war.
As of now, there is a problem with this type of victory.
Everyone loves me, even while im conquering all the galaxy civ after civ, they just watch me doing it... That's strange. Maybe it's because im always allied with the biggest civ, and they don't dare to declare war?

[yin26]

O.K. Finally getting around to 1.11: Large galaxy, no tech trading, blind exploration, disable minor races (great, new options by the way!). Level is Tough with 6 randomly chosen races/intelligence.

First, so much of the game just seems smoother. Little touches like ships showing their destinations and time to destinations is key. All kinds of added tweaks all over the place. Two words to Stardock: Thank You! THIS is the reason I buy your products on sight, even when it's the Political Machine.

This time around, I tended toward the Evil choices so far (kind of using Solver's logic of 'get the best bonus you can') but only when the bonus is substantial. Otherwise I tried to go neutral or good. Nothing doing. The Drengin and I are buddies, so it wasn't long until my Altarian neighbors attacked. This is good, because I usually run this following test:

Do everything right BUT build military. Even here, "right" doesn't even mean focusing on techs that would be good for a military win. In other words, I try to leave myself as vulnerable as possible -- the biggest, easiest land grabee on the map -- to watch what happens. So it's good that the Altarians (who are alinged good) attacked me (a militarily weak, bad neighbor) pretty early in the game.

The problem, as we've read many times, is they had no military on hand themselves when they declared! Worse than that, they attacked me with ... transports. Yep. So, I switched my substantial manufacturing power on a dime to produce whatever ships I could as fast as I could. Within a few turns, I had cleared the skies of his many, many transports. To his credit, he has just produced a medium hull, very capable-looking attack ship that could give me trouble. But we see the point here. As a general rule, the AI should assemble an attack fleet first THEN attack. Of course, I randomized the AI intelligence level, which wasn't a good idea for testing, so maybe I'm seeing a dumb version of the Altarians, but the general problem seems reported widely.

A few buggy things to note: 1] When I launch a ship, usually the ship then is selected by default, which is great. You mostly want to actually move the ship after launching it, so having it selected is a real time saver, especially with the map zoom pulled way out. Every so often though (10% of the time?), the ship launches but isn't selected. Not a deal breaker by any means, but something to note. 2] I had a weird thing where an enemy freighter somehow ended up sharing the same square with one of my attack ships? The only way I could then attack it was to move the ship off the square and back on to it. Strange.

Anyway, Solver was starting to hunt me down for being MIA in the GalCiv2 discussions, so I'm back and reporting for duty.

[yin26]

O.K., I got double teamed as the Iconians jumped in. I decided to buy peace (which seemed too cheap!) and regear after losing two planets. No panic. Then I made a mistake: I made an alliance with the Dregin, but this just dragged me into a war when I wanted to build my own counter fleet, get my planets back, etc.

Taking the Evil path really messed me up this game. It's great! I should have done my usual (get to know the neighbors) before going nuts on the alignment choices. Let's see where things go from here, but you can see some of the real strength in GalCiv when things conspire against you like this. Now, if the AI would just get serious when it goes on the offensive, this thing could be a real pain (pain=joy) to win.

[yin26]

This was a good session: I lost, which makes me happy. If you make no attempt to chose alignment based on your neighbors --or, let's put this another way: If you allow yourself to to be one of only two Evil Empires against 5 good/neutral (maybe there was another evil in there?), you'd better do so from a position of strength. I think the random opponents made this a nice change, along with blind exploration. It made it much harder to figure out how to game the alignment system! I'll need more patience next game.

But I'll have the time to be patient because --THANK THE LORD-- I no longer am wasting who knows how long in tech trades. The No Tech Trade option, even if it favors the human player (as some have argued), most certainly favors my sanity. I feel I can focus much better on elements of the game that offer more strategy (such as mapping out alignments).

Still, the AI continues to send out completely undefended transports. Why? Even when the AI had me down to 3 planets, I must have killed 10,000 of its troops or more just by picking off unguarded transports. The brute force tactic eventually wore me down as some of these transports snuck past my defenses, so it's not entirely useless to approach the game this way as the AI, but if those transports would just team with some escorts, I probably would have finished these posts an hour ago.

[Barbazoul]

The AI that sends unescorted transports isn't set at "intellignet". At the intelligent level, most of its transports are escorted. Yeah, "most of", sometimes you will see a completely unescorted transport but it's rare. Since you randomized intelligence, maybe the AI that sent unescorted transport wasn't at the "intelligent" level.

But it still declares war without having any military forces, whatever the level you choose. I hope this will get looked at... Because usually when they declare war i have enough time to build the strongest military force ; so their declaration of war only serves one purpose : i conquer them. Which is the contrary of what they're trying to achieve .


Try an influence victory and let us know what you think about it ; i played 4 games of pure influence tactics and i won without firing a shot. The AIs just watch you conquer them all.

[Solver]

Yin, don't randomize intelligence for a better evaluation of the AIs. It's fun, but it creates a situation where, literally, some civs are dumber than the others. Set them all to Intelligent or Bright, and play with that. I can say I've seen very few unescorted transports from AIs at those intelligence levels, though it happens. I got the impression that the AI is trying a bit of a "risk" there, only it does so somewhat stupidly.

[yin26]

Yeah, in hindsight, I realize the randomized intelligence would undermine my ability to get a baseline evaluation. I'll turn that off for now. Perhaps the way to play that, though, is to go MAX on difficulty (or much higher anyway) so that even the "dumbest" AI is still going to play well.

[Solver]

But then again, on too high difficulties, the AI stops getting smarter, and just strts getting powerful economy bonuses, which can compensate for the dumbness, but aren't as good for a baseline evaluation.

Set all AIs to Bright/Intelligent and leave it at that. I've found that, for now, to be the best option.

[bonscott]

On Intellegent or higher I typically see the AI escort their transports and usually in fleets. But sometimes you'll see some undefended. But you know what? I don't think I ever escort my transports. Sometimes I do in a heavy fire zone but mostly I don't. And maybe it's bad AI that they don't take advantage. However my tactics are typically clear out all planetary defenses while my transports hang just out of range. Once cleared then the transports move in. But if I'm just charging in I'll try to defend them with an older fleet. So I'm not going to trash the AI much for having transports undefended because I do it myself and I'd bet many others do as well. Perhaps I'm a bad player then? But it works.

Yin, my last 1.11 game I just finished I ended up Evil. I just kept getting lots of cool PQ bonus events I couldn't turn down.

Altarians and Torians hated me from the start because of it. I got an Alliance with the Krox, Terrans and Yor (Medium galaxy). It really suprised me how much the Terrans liked me but we had a *ton* of trade between ourselves from nearly the start of the game*. Anyway, I took out the Altarians myself. My allies were fighting the Torians later on but I wasn't dragged in. I eventually joined in on my own to just deliver the kill. After that I won by Alliance victory.

*I beeline to Trade as quickly as I can now. Lets me get trade routes up early and I can trade the "Trade" tech around to catch up some in other areas.

But man were the Evil only techs AWESOME. Holy cow some of those buildings just totally rock. The +100% economy shot me to making 1400bc a month despite my very large military.

My new game I had the economy crash happen to me again by expanding too quickly. But you really have no choice or else the AI will colonize the planets anyway. The only way I was able to get out of debt was trading away some techs for cash (even some I didn't want to). So now I'm slowly clawing my economy back into shape by trying to get a population boom. So I keep the tech trade option on. I may try my next game with it off just to see how it is but I don't know how to play without trading.

[Barbazoul]

I don't escort my transports either, because the AI doesn't seem to realize it can "one shot" them. When an undefended transport approaches one of my planets, i just launch a basic defender from it, kill the transport, then put it back in my planet.
But the AI doesn't do this (at least they have never done it in any of my games) ; even if it has defenders at a planet and if one of your transport sits next to it undefended, the AI won't launch one defender to kill the transport, then get back to defense.