Questions from a concerned would-be buyer

[Asmodean]

Some time ago, I was involved in a debate on the official MoO3 forums on whether Galvic and MoO3 would release at the same time: A spin-off of that debate was this other guy (he was a Drengin.Net subscriber, and thus was playing the Galciv Beta), who basically said that Galciv wasn't any good, and certainly no threat to MoO3.

First, here's the (unabridged) version of what he said:

First let me state this...

GalCiv still has two solid months of coding to be done on it before it goes gold by their current ship date. This means there is a lot that will still change and needs to be done from the version i'm currenlty playing and what the final product will finally be like. So my current opinion of GalCiv is biased because it is an unfinished product.

Now on to why I think GalCivs gameplay is outdated.

As I stated in my last post, the element of conflict is what drives the rest of the game, wether it be doin a Genghis on the known universe or imitating neutral Belgium as panzers role through your front yard, if that element isn't something thats gonna knock my socks off then i'm gonna take my toys and go home.

Tech research is standard, you pick a technology, press 'Next Turn' till you get it. They seem to have a fair amount in the game, I haven't finished out the tech tree yet due to some late game bug problems.

Planet Developement - there are 5 governers i believe, the governers are actually your ques'. You load up your governer with different build priorities for then assign your planets under one of the governers. You can micro your planets, but I just hate that.

Population control - each planet has a moral, moral is mainly driven by your taxation level, the more crowded a planet the less moral they have, there are improvements you can build to boost moral... but the affects don't last long. Your planet gets too unhappy they can simply defect to another empire.

Economics - planets make money, improvements can help out, you set your taxation level, then you set your actual spending level seperately from that. you can also alter spending % on the 3 main areas; military(how fast you build spaceships), social(how fast you build improvements on your planet), technological(how fast you research). Those 3 areas' percantage has to total 100.

Ship building - certain techs you research give you access to a new ship. no customizing, no hairy eye ball death beam lasers, just a ship with hit points, attack/defens ratings and a move rating.

trade is simple, build a freighter send it to a planet, farther that is away from the building planet the more that trade route is worth.

so far this game isn't a micro management fest until you reach one area. Space Ships. There is no build que for spaceships that i've seen. there is no stack or group move command that i'm aware of. if you want to move 20 ships from 1 square to all the way across the galaxy you have to click the destination point for every ship.

I could get much more in depth than what i've written so far, but I feel that in all the areas that have been done before by these games, GalCiv has really not made any serious advances from the game play elements as they appear in Civ1 or MOO1. In the current state of the game I would rate it somewhere between Civ2 and MOO2 and their original games. Just with a lot of the micro management taken out.

Now where GalCiv really starts to gripe my bawlz is on combat. The play screen is one big 2-D grid. Each 'solar system' takes up one grid cell. each space ship takes up on grid cell (friendly ships can be stacked all in a single cell) You can move anywhere provided your ship has enough range to reach that grid cell. There is no interdiction, no this is my land and keep off of it or i'll treat you like an indian. ships go anywhere they please. combat is simply running your ship into his a quick calculation is done and you've either won or not.

Don't even get me started on what ground combat for control of a planet is like. They go so far as to have some random #'s to help "spice up" the action i guess. Before combat starts you have to hit the space bar, when you do so both sides have a range of random numbers it has been skipping through very rapidly. The range is based on your overall combat level. if you are way advanced it might be 15-20 while his is only 1-5. Once you hit the space bar it stops on a number on both sides and that gets figured into the overall equation i guess. It can help even things out a bit or make a tough match a cakewalk. I just can't stand the idea of having the player act to get the random number as the only innovative idea for ground combat they have so far. Otherwise ground combat resembles MOO1.

I feel that so far they have almost taken a step backwards in the evelution of this gaming genre. Or it could be they have the next latest greatest craze, it's even better than sliced bread and i'm a total yutz cuz i'm the only one who didn't like it.

BUT - they are still in developement, many features could still be missing that could improve this game. I have not been following this game so there could be features i'm unaware of.

To sum this post up.... (dontcha just wish i started with the summary so you could say screw the rest of the verbage)

Qualifier: GalCiv is in beta still, anything I have said could be totally altered, fixed or fubared even more by release.

No realy micro management unless you want to use space ships.
All tech, econ, pop, build, spy, etc. areas have their own little twist on them to make them a bit different from other games but I do not feel they have advanced in any way. Just simply made different.
Combat blows wet meaty chunks that definitely do not taste better the second time.

I paid to play their beta because I remember the original GalCiv was a pretty decent game when compared with the current crop on games like it that were out at the time. After playing this new version a while now i'm left feeling that somebody used their wayback machine to bring the old design team to the present and they haven't learned a damn thing because of it.

Okay...so clearly this user is rather disgruntled. Can anyone (preferably Brad , but I would certainly respect it if he didn't have the time to answer here) counter his arguments. I have always thought that Stardock were making a killer space 4X game, but he raises some valid points, and I would like to see them countered.

Asmodean

[Draginol]

He has very legitimate gripes and many of those issues have already been addressed. That's the advantage of an open beta program. Players can tell us what they do and don't like.

Example:
Ship moving. Players demanded fleets. We now have fleets. Put your ships together, press a button, and they become a fleet that you can move/attack/whatever as a single unit. Makes creating convoys much easier.

Now, with regards to the most common gripes:

Yes, GalCiv has a Civ-style of tactical combat. You don't design ships (i.e. choose their weapons and such). And when they battle you don't tactically control the ships. You're leader of a civilization, your job is to run a civilization, not choose whether to fire the photon torpedoes instead of the phasers. So when two ships meet, one is destroyed.

Each ship has its own attack, defense, and hitpoints along with a level (ala Warcraft III heroes) which gives them additional benefits.

Regarding invasions:
It is much along the lines of other games in this genre (like MOO 2) where your soldiers aboard a transport land on a planet that you have space superiority and they battle it out. You don't control individual units of invading troops. Again, you're leader of a civilization, not a division commander. In GalCiv 1.x though we will be providing more general tactics (i.e. use mass drivers? carpet bomb? each choice has its own strengths and weaknesses).

But basically combat comes down to the ability of your soldiers, your technological sophistication, what defenses they've built, and what offensive enhancements you've built along with a "luck" factor which only makes the difference in close battles.

Probably the big thing that user didn't like, which we addressed, was that in the early betas you could load up an unlimited # of troops onto a transport. Now there are various kinds of transports with limits on the # of troops and range of the transports.

That said, SOME people won't like the game. there will be people who want tactical combat, for instance. I personally feel that those users have gotten plenty of games. Gamers like me, who enjoy strategic games versus tactical games haven't had much development aimed at us in recent years.

I do think there are some significant advances in GalCiv for the genre:

+ The starbases. No strategy game has a unit that acts like this. Imagine Civilization or even Warcraft III if players could build a building that had a radius affect on near by units and other structures. A building that gives, for instance, a +1 to attack to nearby units. Or increases trade on freighters traveling near by 25%.

+ Upgradedable resources. As you gain more technologies, you can build star bases on galactic resources and keep upgrading them throughout the game to make them more and more powerful.

+ 20 plus Civilization Abilities that you can upgrade during the game by taking a research path.

+ A REAL technology tree. I.e. one where you can really take multiple paths down and play out a strategy. I'm playing a game today (using an updated tech tree) where I have gone down the path of being a master diplomat. I have improved my diplomacy technology so much that I've managed to get the computer players to do my bidding by talking them into whatever I'd like. My military and economy aren't that strong.

+ An intelligent yearly status report. While some strategy games have a generic status dialog, GalCiv has a yearly status report with dozens (many dozens) of intelligent progress reports presented as a news broadcast. The information in it tells you what's going on in an intelligent, interesting way.

+ Random sub-plots. Events that make the game have a different feel each time. Not just random events but mini story arcs in the game that are rare enough that it'll take you months of playing to run into even most of them.

Now in fairness, most of this stuff wasn't in at the time of that player's post (they only showed up in beta 4 for the most part). But there will be people who don't think that these things are a big deal. that instead we should have had a 3D rotatable map or ship design screens or tactical fleet combat (in other words, we should have made MOO). But I personally think there are a LOT of strategy gamers who are looking for strategy games that are less action oriented and more strategic in their nature.

In other words, we want players to be able to build their own civilization.

Hope that answers your query!

[Asmodean]

Thanks for your speedy reply, Brad. Appreciate it.

Yes you did answer my query. Specifically regarding combat. I, too, like the strategic games more than those that operate on the tactical level (which is probably why i never spent more than a few hours playing Imperium Galactica II).

Actually, another question comes to mind: Have any decisions been made with regards to European release of this game. Same time as in the U.S., or will we (once again) have to wait a month or so to play?

Asmodean

Edit: I know I could have bought the Beta, but I didn't want to spoil the fun of having the brand new finished game in my hand, shaking with anticipation, as I installed and played my first game. What can I say: I'm just not a beta guy

[LDiCesare]

Yes, GalCiv has a Civ-style of tactical combat. You don't design ships (i.e. choose their weapons and such). And when they battle you don't tactically control the ships. You're leader of a civilization, your job is to run a civilization, not choose whether to fire the photon torpedoes instead of the phasers. So when two ships meet, one is destroyed.

Hey Brad, yes, some players want it so. I hated the AI in MOO and MoM because I had to play tactical because the ai couldn't do it decently.
In fact, the biggest question I have with MOO3 is whether tactical combat will be a click fest or not? If it looks like it is, I won't buy the game, whereas I am pretty sure I will buy GalCiv.

I think there is one thing which would have been worth having (maybe is), it is the combined arms tactics. Yes, I said tactics, but I don't mean archers + flankers + meleers as in CtP2, but more something like Moo where ships had special abilities that complement one another and call for special techs to counter (like automated repair means you will want to build big ships, warp dissipator to freeze your opponent help defend planets and ships with missiles, etc.). I don't mean you have to use them in combat, but when you know your opponent uses ships with heavy shields, you decide to use ships with shield-piercing. That is strategy too. So to me the combat model looks a bit simplistic, but I don't think that will bother me a lot.

And yes what about European release?

[Urban Ranger]

Combined arms tactics can be handled by giving bonuses to groups of ships having the right complements of weapons and equipment. In the board game Federation and Empire, a carrier battle group has bonuses and is very hard to kill - you have to detroy one ship at a time with really concentrated firepower.

Maybe they can do something similar in Gal Civ.

[Asmodean]

Also, I would like to see how this game plays if you decide to go with a peaceful empirebuilding strategy. How well does it play if you choose to fight only defensively. I like to employ this strategy, as I find it more funny to build planetimprovements and colony ships, than fighting units.

Asmodean

[Draginol]

Ships have ranges on them (how far from friendly star systems they can travel).

Some of the units are very powerful but short range. So one good strategy is to fight defensively, protecting commerce.

One strategy I employ goes like this:

I bulid up star bases in my sectors that give my ships attack bonuses. I slowly expand these star bses to magnifiy my cultural influence so that nearby sectors come into my thrall. Eventually those foreign planets will fall to my cultural domination and I repeat.

It's not an easy strategy to achieve since the AI is aware of this tactic and can work hard to make sure that your trade income is minimized (which you'll need to pay for all this stuff). But turtling can and does work pretty well depending on the circumstances.

[Asmodean]

So you use your starbases to project your might to nearby starsystems. I like this.

*Insert picture of Asmodean drooling here*

Asmodean

[Draginol]

Precisely.

You can build star bases anywhere you'd like. They in turn can be upgraded by buiding constructors (a unit) that when they intersect with a starbase will add a module to them.

These modules can be things that locally magnify the strength of your ships, your cultural influence, your economic power, production, and more.

Here's another example that's kind of fun:

Trade is a LOT more than simply building a freighter and sending it somewhere. While someone at first glance might think that's all there is to it, it's a lot more sophisticated than that.

When you build a freighter and create a trade route, a little trade ship is created that travels back and forth on the route. The money you collect from the route increases as the trade ship travels. The further along on its route, the more money you make.

This has significant importance because if you're at war, protecting those trade routes becomes vital (And why you may not necesssarily want to simply send a freighter to the other side of teh galaxy to maximize your route -- if the trade ships get whacked a third of the way there, you won't make hardly any money on the trade route).

Here's where star bases come in: You can build a line of star bases along your trade route that magnify the income you make from these trade routes. As you upgrade the star base, the amount can go from 5% increase in the income to 50% (over several upgrades).

Hence, if you can firmly control the route and fortify it, you can have a huge advantage over your opponents.

After 1.x, we hope to add another victory path -- the way of the marauder. Someone who gets rich not by building a real economic base but instead researches technologies that allows them to build marauders that prey on trade ships along with technologies that help cover up the fact that you're the one doing the privateering.

[moomin]

Marauder victory? A risky proposition, but I sure like it. Pirates of the High Space Lanes, or somesuch.

[LDiCesare]

Wow. The star bases looks like an interesting feature. I guess it would allow you to play OPC (One Planet Challenge) as a trader?

[Asmodean]

I'm definately happy with trade being an important part of the game. I really liked the civ2 model of trade, whereas the way civ3 handles it does not really go down well with me.

No word on European release, Brad?

Asmodean

[Urban Ranger]

Quick question: how is logistics handled? Is it possible to defeat an invader by cutting off its supply route?

[GeeTabs]

I'm really looking forward to this game. Still, the combat aspect is still a little unclear. Can anyone out there compare it to, say, the type of combat used in Stars!

Thanks in advance.

[WarpStorm]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the combat seems Civ-like (not that that's a bad thing).