I thought I would love to share.

Immortal
Continents
Standard Size
Standard Speed
All expansions and all DLC.

I have ridiculous fun with this savegame. This looks like a strange start for Norway, but there is enough coast to work with but I found the game challenging and fun.


   

Attached Files

  HARALD HARDRADA 1 4000 BC.Civ6Save (Size: 647.18 KB / Downloads: 3)

So, here we are again. New game, new map, quite a few new people around. Let's see what the game brings. I am not comfortable, nor familiar with all the changes in the mod, but since there ate no normal BTS games around anymore, I will have to learn on the run.

I guess I moved back to more realistic proportions. I like MoO1's playful comic style (X-COM did it too). I was thinking I could maybe adapt some MoO2 designs. For the silicoids... there could be a sort of bearded variant. I'm thinking... their bodies/shells vary a bit (Caddisfly larvae houses?). The Alkari, Bulrathi and Psylon are a bit harder to explain. Maybe I can use some MoO2 design elements for their armour.  The MoO2 Alkari could maybe be a parallel species on the same planet... more lizard-like. Haven't touched the Antarans. I suppose the MoO4 ones are kinda neat. Read something about them being morphologically similar to the Trilarians. Haven't seen a good full body shot of the Antarans though.
The MoO1 Mrrshans look a little bit like... kangaroo-cats, but I'm not sure if I want to go there.




Hey, you guys are from the wrong universe! Maybe a distant relative.




Some more polish on this piece, though the GUI elements are pretty random. Just searching for an overall feel. In 1920x1200 you have a lot of screen estate with today's big crisp screens. MoO1 interface is pretty good, I'm just missing a turn log listing (of the Master's popups etc), and a field for showing the current overflow feature of the sliders (SHIELD, T-FORM, SOIL, UPGR, etc.). Sometimes it's hard to know if there's something available. Saw there has been a few open source versions which could be good reference if I ever decide to do something myself (harder now with the active IP I guess). I've been playing the GOG version (it still has that High Master ending bug... something to do with sound card?).


Lastly, another ship experiment. So many ways to approach ship presentation. A slight angle like this maybe. I kind of like the MoO1 ship designs. It might be possible to get some variation out of them using a colour layer for faction flag colour. Makes for 864 ships though, but most of the work is the line art (144) and not the flat colour layer which could possibly be indexed and baked on boot.



Edit: GOG MoO possibly has more bugs than "abandonware" version... AI pops suddenly going down to 21. Sliders getting stuck on MAX instead of RESERV. Silicoid eco sliders shouldn't perhaps be settable via the new tech screen. Can't select planet after selecting enemy fleet, have to select my fleet first. Mouse sometimes/often doubleclick (unsure if my mouse or not).

Let's go! At least two players in this game with whom I have a score to settle, Rusten and Old Harry.

Maybe this is technically not the right forum, but since it's a spiritual successor, I think it's alright...

Anyway, I've been the world's worst beta tester during the last few years. The game has gotten a lot of additional content since I last played, so I want to make a Let's Play/Review/First Impressions thread about the game to make me stick with it for a full playthrough again. I'm also going to highlight the key differences with MOO. The game is still in closed beta, with a Kickstarter and public beta coming soon. If you want in on the closed beta, you can message Jeff Graw here on RB (hurleybird on Steam).

Remember that this is a beta so things will change in the final release.

Let's start with the game settings:



Most of it should be self-explanatory. In the difficulty options, you can select AI smarts and AI resource bonuses independently. I selected the Master difficulty which is the AI at its best and no bonuses. Ail worked on the game AI. In case you haven't heard of him, that means this is no ordinary 4X AI, and it will be a challenge. I'm confident that I can beat it, but we'll see.




Currently, the only races available are Humans and Spixnih, a spider-like species. The other races can still appear as opponents, though. The Humans have a discount on fleet maintenance and the Spixnih have faster pop growth. Leader/Honorific/Government are all cosmetic. They're just text strings that appear in the game.

Onwards!




Oh no, it's got starlanes, which people hate for some reason! There are lots of connections here, though, and you can move off-lane with a speed penalty. You can also turn them off under "Advanced Options" when starting a game. There are lots of customization options and some presets: "Default" (for the intended experience), "Classic" (more like MOO) and "Streamlined" (quick and simplified game). If that's not enough options, you can also customize the formulas used by the game, as they're all stored in human-readable text files. Well, as human-readable as math formulas get, I suppose.

Looking at the colony screen, you'll see that there's no ECO slider. You pay the cleanup costs automatically and you can't clone population. A terraforming slider appears when you have the required tech.

I don't want to start any science investments before knowing the surrounding planets, so I leave everything as is and send out some ships:




There's a glowing circle in my player color to show my range. A neat interface feature: if you send only one ship, the game will immediately select one ship of the same type so you can give your scouting orders quickly. KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant borrowed that feature for the improved interface in 1oom, and for good reason! Now it's a bit of waiting...




The better planets in Dominus Galaxia are guarded by independents. Here we have some space pirates. They are the weaker type of enemies and can also be payed to go away. The very best planets are guarded by Remnants which are stronger and won't negotiate. In DG, you start with a healthy sum of reserve money, and your population automatically generates more, so you don't even have to do reserve spending like in MOO. (You still can do that, though.) I'm still a bit short, so the pirates are going to fight. I set my ship's behavior to retreat and auto-resolve the combat... and it turns out that the ship got away! In my previous games, ships were hardly ever able to survive pirate encounters, so that's nice!

The pirates are guarding an ocean planet with 80 max pop. I also discovered some undefended planets, which means that they're rather crummy, like here:




Abydos is in the same ballpark and Qyx is an inferno planet that needs advanced planetology tech. Note that once a star system is explored, the star on the map is replaced by a picture of the main planet! Let's colonize those two planets minimal planets... but we don't start with a colony ship, so how do we do that? Easy, just click Colonize World:




We don't need colony ships, just send over the population directly! You first select the destination, and then you get a list with planets you can send them from. In this case, that's only the homeworld. Sending transports costs a bit of money: 10 per world you send from and an additional 2 for each point of population. DG has more money sinks than MOO, but also more sources, so that's fair.

If we don't need to build colony ships, can we just swarm the galaxy? That doesn't work because a new colony doesn't increase your logistics range by itself. First it needs to build a space port (which replaces the ship building slider). Once that is finished, it contributes logistic range and gains the abilities to produce ships and ship off population. It's a bit strange if you're used to MOO, but I think it's a good decision. Transporting population is rarely important in most modern 4X games, so it's better to draw the player's attention to it than to leave them wondering why their new colony won't grow.

This is another part of the game that can be customized: you can chose if you want to build colony ships or spaceports (or both, or even neither).

A few turns later, my new colonies are settled and start working on their factories. Time to plan the next move. I could open up technologies to get more logistics range or terraforming. I could research weapons or build ships to fight the pirates. With the independent enemies, weapons becomes an economic tech, in a way. But actually, I want that ocean planet right now, to get the most of the Spixnihs' increased pop growth. I don't like paying pirates (less for strategic reasons, more because it just feels bad), but in this case, I swallow my pride and just save up and keep building factories.

With more population sent off to Ekseller in 2220, Mordon now has some unmanned factories. Clicking on the Adv button next to the slider brings up this menu:




The part that's important for now is that we can tell Mordon to not build more factories than the population can operate. The other options are for stopping when factories become too expensive: Factories don't have a fixed price. Instead, it increases with the number of factories relative to the planet size. Once you get to a certain level of robotic controls, it can happen that factories become so expensive that it's not worth building them everywhere. However, your early factories always stay cheep!

Excess production is shunted into research, so it's time to visit the Research screen!




This should be familiar from MOO, except that you can adjust all sliders independently. They're not absolute, but relative to each other, so Biology, Construction and Propulsion all receive equal amounts, and the other fields receive nothing. A nice convenience feature! DG also has a system to reward slow and steady investment which is very different from MOO's interest mechanic. Spending cuts take effect immediately, but spending increases take some time to manifest. (Note that this only applies to moving the sliders here, not to reducing or increasing your overall research spending.)

The little triangles indicate that Biology, Construction and Propulsion receive only half of what they're eventually going to get, because the starting setting had all fields receive equal amounts. The speed at which they move depends on your overall research investment, so you can't game the system by not spending on research during the adjustment period. I don't know if there are ways to game the system like with MOO's seed-and-trickle spending. So far, the best way seems to just select the fields you want to emphasize at the moment. I'm going with fields that improve my economy and exploration abilities.

I hit end turn and now the Science Spider has to stop browsing the web.




Huh. I thought that DG moved Eco Restoration up! If I had known that I might get it immediately, I would have opened research much earlier! The techs here should be familiar, except for Theoretical Biology. Researching normal techs doesn't unlock new ones in DG, you need theoretical research for that. Anyway, I go with Eco Restoration of course!

In Construction, I pick Factory Construction II for reducing construction costs by 19% and in Propulsion, I pick a logistics range upgrade.

I also start building a space port at Gordys, using stimulus spending from my reserve to speed it up. It's finished in 2230 and opens up some new star systems for exploration. Except one is just barely out of reach:




The red star turns out to have a tundra planet, the next one south is arid and I immediately colonize it from Gordys.

Eco restoration research finishes in 2238 and I follow it up with Terraforming II. The logistics tech finishes and that one annoying star becomes accessible now. Turns out that it has a barren artifacts planet My next target has to be Theoretical Biology, I need a hostile environment tech ASAP!

As for new propulsion tech, I skip Nuclear Drives for Theoretical Propulsion and hope for better engines in the next rung.




Up north I encounter more pirates at an arid planet. I don't have the money at the moment...

In 2243, Abydos maxes out factories and starts building a space port. Also, Terraforming II completes. It works a little bit differently from MOO:




So you get a small flat amount plus some percentage of the planet's base size. The point of that is to make the base size more important. I'm not sure if I like that. I think it's cool that the size matters in the early game, but just kind of stops being important later on because planets are just blank canvasses for your terraforming engineers. Also, the more you terraform a planet, the more expensive it becomes. Terraforming costs can be reduced by a high level force field tech.




The colony at Orbis is founded in 2245 and I spot some fleet at the next planet. It's black, not grey so I suspect that it's another empire rather than independents. The UI just calls it an unknown fleet...

The last big event of this play session before I stop in 2250 is that I finish Theoretical Propulsion and get to research sub-light drives next. The wait has paid off!

So I'm trying out a famous/charismatic/omniscient build. It's interesting in it's own right as there is a lot more opportunism with mercenaries instead of pre-planning of your armies. The same with early spells, as what you get depends on who your opponents are. Seems to work ok at least on expert. The charismatic actually is very good since win or lose in a game more often is whether your opponents end up ganging up against you or fighting each other. So surprisingly something like this might actually work on master too.

I recall from previous games seeing mercenaries with magic weapons, whereas the wiki says the original never did. So far I got some awesome mercenaries (griffins, paladins), but no magic weapons. They start to be important soon. Do magic weapons start showing up at some point or do I recall wrong?

There's a stronger wandering monster presence in the game now, since I last played some maybe 6 months ago. I understood the purpose is to make player defend his cities with other than 8 spearmen "police" garrisons. A perhaps unforeseen consequence is that AI early settler spam now often meets with monsters that then make neutral cities. I think this all makes the game a lot more interesting so that's great! (At least on expert) There seems to be one but, though: Since the monster stacks pick a new "weakest city" target every turn, it's very easy to pinball a stack between two cities for as long as it takes to muster a force to crush it. This is done by emptying the garrisons on alternating turns. As long as there is at least some strategic strength in the garrisons. This makes garrisoning a lot more pointless: you can practically always buy time. (have not yet seen a stack too fast, nor 2 stacks)

So it would seem the "dumber" targeting AI would actually be superior: Pick the weakest city when spawning, and stay on target. ?

btw what is the effect of raging monsters option now?

1406 cracked a lair with 1 phantom beast and ~7 phantom warriors. Got a grand total of 8 gold? Hope something isn't bugging out...

Hi!
I haven't been able to complete the last two games I've played. I get very far into them then the games hang when processing the AI's turns. In both games, I've gone back to previous saves but replaying the turns slightly differently didn't prevent the hangs.

The previous game was on 5.63b. This game, which I'm attaching, is on 5.7. It looks like 5.71 is available, I will install it after posting the latest game save file. I just never finish a game before a new release is out.

Edit: Same behavior with this save file with 5.71. But I know old saves and new versions don't always play nicely.

Attached Files

  SAVE4.GAM (Size: 151.96 KB / Downloads: 1)

Well here we were recently talking about Rebel Galaxy Outlaw here and now looks like we’ve got another game very similar to Freelancer and Wing Commander Privateer on the way, woohoo lol! The previous Starpoint Gemini games were sort of Freelancer/WCP like but involved tactical capital ship combat whereas this new Starpoint Gemini 3 game is very Freelancer like with Fighter based play and landing on planets & space stations to trade and visit their seedy space bars for work!! It also has an interesting (unfinished) side game where you take control of a small probe infiltrating derelicts and space stations avoiding security systems that sort of reminds me of some of X2 – The Threat’s side missions.

The game is still in early access on steam so naturally it lacks polish but is already looking absolutely gorgeous!! The only fault I have with its otherwise stunning graphics are the very plastic mannequin like people but apparently the devs have said they'll be fixing that.

This guy has done a good video preview of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irhHBt28xxU



Here's some sexy screens I found around the place: