GalCiv2: First Impressions

[Sirian]

My third day with the game has gone better. The expansion phase has ended, the galaxy is fairly stable, and I'm moving along. Exploiting the minors plus researching some more advanced techs has moved me well in to the lead. I got declared on. Got to do some fighting. My forces killed about sixteen ships, lost two. I guess my designs were superior?

The combat is definitely better, though how much better, the jury is still out. It may simply be that I stepped down TOO far on the difficulty.

You have to go pretty far up the tech tree to get to Planetary Invasion (well, enough that there's a cushion of safety in the early game).

There are a lot of gameplay things that are better than GC1: combat and ship designing, starbases are better balanced, and (gasp!) the AIs actually do now build cultural starbases. The starbases themselves I'm not sure about yet. They LOOK like they can survive better, but I need evidence. (If you can wipe them out too easily -- that's bad.)

The micromanagement and waste issue is still there but was not annoying me greatly. I'm feeling more optimistic. For one thing, once the costs on techs and production goes up significantly, the number of turns to complete an item grows, and waste shrinks proportionately. That is easing the burden on the middle game by quite a bit.

The worst thing though is that I am the only one to build any unique Wonders or Trade Goods. Of course if you clean up on all of those, it's like cleaning up all the wonders in Civ and then some.


The AIs did get away from researching the Laser weapon branch too much. I have seen them picking up missiles, too. NO defenses on the enemy ships I fought, though. Only weapons. And my own ships had mostly weapons, since those seemed to offer more bang for buck in the limited space available. I need to see more of this to see if there's a balanced system there or one in which the defenses are a red herring and the more guns the better. Heh. (If defenses are like MOO, though, then they might still rule the day with larger ships. So far just smaller ones have been available.)


- Sirian

[Sirian]

I managed to do well in this game in part thanks to designing an improved Scout vessel right out of the gate. (Reminiscent of MOO "Scout 2" ships, only even more improved over the default.)



The ship design system is really good once you get the hang of it. I did not RTFM on it, but did manage to figure it out with a reasonable amount of trial and error. Some parts of the interface seem clunky, though. (Trying to edit or upgrade any existing designs, I am either missing some interface options or the existing one "have issues".)

My first warship:



You can see I put some defenses on there.


Then the ship that did in the Drengin when they decided to get some:




Now my current design. "Go ahead. Make my day." 8)



You know you don't want a piece of this action, right? (I'm talkin to YOU, Drengi baby.)


- Sirian

[Jester]

I think I want a piece of this action... well, GalCiv2, that is.

I'm sold. I enjoyed the first game enough that I owe them a crack at the second. Hopefully it won't be quite as... odd... as the first one. All my games either were horrible losses or the grossest runaway wins imaginable. And all that without ever building a military of any substance.

Come to think of it, that's probably *why* all my games were so polar...

-Jester

[Liquidated]

A few things I've learned so far sirian... some of it may be new.

Early combat ships SUCK. without researching miniturization (oh my spelling) you really cannot fit much of anything on them. The problem when new is WHAT techs to research to get your first warship.

Like the number of techs needed to invade planets, there's many techs you need to make your first viable warship and they are not in 3 easy fields of research.

As you mentioned, wow the tech choices you need to make. Clearly you cannot do it all but instead need to focus on areas you wish to compete in and tech there.

For weapons there's three fields

missiles
massdrivers
beams

Each has it's own strengths like beams are smaller but more costly than massdrivers. As nice as one ship is, if it costs 3 times as much to make as that cheese box with a gun, the cheese may win.

After picking one area of weapons (say beams) the next is more costly(say mass) to research and the third (say missiles) even more costly. Decide if you want to focus in one weapon area to high levels or spread research over for more balance but less punch. Speccing in 3 areas is prolly not a good idea.

I see you are a big fan of mixing weapon types on ships, maybe try a more focused approach and see how that fits.

To counter the three weapons, there's three defences,
point def
armor
shields

each is base value strong against their counterpart.. if you have an off brand of defence, take the root of it's value and apply it instead.

eg. if you have a ship that's 4 shields, it's 4 def against beams but only 1 against missiles and mass.

If The drengins are next to you and you see them researching beams, a wise choice just might be shields! lets hope the korx with missile boats don;t help them out.

The ability to see the starting star locations (it's an early tech) is given to all the races except the humans. If you wonder how aliens kept stealing that prime world, they CAN see more than you can if you pick terrans.

Logistics REALLY makes a difference in combat. if you neglect logistics your fleet size is severly limited. By working that field you can group larger numbers of ship strengths into one lethal force that can overcome ship vs ship deficits against a low logistics foe that specced in bigger guns.

I really need to take about 3 weeks off from life to bump my solo civ game up, learn galciv2, conquer masks in photoshop, and finally finish my tweaked windowblinds ui that's 6 months old.

Oh and actually read @#%@#%@#%@#% pynchons gravity's rainbow from start to finish. I cannot get past page 600 (a 15 year stuggle so far) by which point it completely devolves into the mess my lit friends taunt me with to this day. hmm in that case may need 2 months off from real life.

Cheers!
-Liq

[BeefontheBone]

I may not know much about anything, but I do know that the square root of 4 is 2 :P

Still awaiting more opinions - if it's still as MM-filled as the first one I may well not bother.

[Sirian]

I enjoyed the first game enough that I owe them a crack at the second. Hopefully it won't be quite as... odd... as the first one.

It's still just as odd. The economic engine and its mathematical abstractions are essentially unchanged, though they are better balanced and polished now.

I have found that the AI are disadvantaged by the shipbuilding thing. The player can get faster scouts and colony ships going and gain significant advantage from doing so. ... Maybe that will change later, although it might not be good if it does. (Players have to have some levers to get ahead; it's a matter of choosing them wisely, rather than ending up with sucky, unfun ones by accident. The fact that you CAN get a jump on scouting and on colonizing distant worlds may actually be a game saver for me -- if I don't have to send colony ships out blind in to the fog, and have whole games turn on the luck of the opening guesswork, that's a big step up on the game's ultimate value for me).

On a map with some breathing room between you and the AIs, there's enough time to scout around, find the good planets, and build the faster colony ships to get there. (You need to research the first engine upgrade tech, but it's a cheap one.) In this situation, the game's opening stops being a Big Huge Dice Roll™ and starts being a lot of fun. ... It's a cockroach race to grab as many planets as you can as fast as you can, because Bigger Is Always Better™, but that's typical for the genre. (Civ4 is the first game ever to solve BIAB, and that's only for the first two thirds of the game. Too big is not good in the early going of Civ4.)

Once you have a fair share of the territory (or an unfair share, actually) then you have a game on your hands. I found out from Brad that some of the economic waste is avoided. Planets without starports will not actually spend any money on Military. That's a solid step in the right direction. You can read more about that over at Poly:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.ph...did=149080

I also put in a complain/analysis/request about waste in general. Who knows. Maybe he will tighten that up and reduce the need for micromanagement.


I'm currently playing Large/Scattered/CommonHabitables and finding that well worth doing. Even larger map types are available. GC certainly has less micro than Civ3 does, although at the moment, GC2 has more than GC1 did. The core game FEELS better balanced, though. I've been feeling better about it as the hours pass. Still only in my second real game as yet, though.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

Actually there seems to research overflow.. whenever you finish a tech some there is some research into the next tech you pick.. and when I went back and researched some early techs I had skipped I was able to research up to 3(!) techs in 1 turn (techs that followed eachothers)

The research overflow is kept. It sticks to whatever the tech selector picks for you. This is not as bad as being lost, but not as good as Civ4's method, which puts the overflow to whatever the player chooses next. The longer it takes you to get around to picking that tech, the longer those beakers that you have already spent are sitting around bringing you no return. (There's a virtual deflation to them, in lost opportunity costs.)

Depending on the code involved, it might be something they can improve the rest of the way.


- Sirian

[Liquidated]

HAHA man liq's math is hahahaha

too funny to edit out hahaha.

Cheers!
-Liq

[Yosh]

I agree with Sirian on the n-trading issue; one game I ended up buying most of my techs from the Altarians; only teching my specific weapons techs that they weren't. It bothers me that this is possible since, as Sirian mentioned a couple times, CIV has raised the bar so high.

The roach race is also EXTREMELY annoying! I can't stand it how you are FORCED into rushbuying colony's and scouts and such and grabbing the first available planets. The beauty of CIV is that there is no one "right" way to do things. The downside of GalCiv II is that often there only is one way to do things.

I do like the tech tree in regards to the weapons tech and such - to me, that is the most enjoyable part of the game! I've been playing on Normal, and found that although the AI's all tend to trade techs so much among themselves, which means that all the AI's have one specific weapon system, if you start creaming a particular AI with a weapon, or begin nullifying their weapons with its' defense, the AI will (slowly) switch over to something else.

In my recent game, the Arceans began in a great position near the center of the map, and they must've done some crazy rushbuying and constructing, because they colonized literally 15 different planets in just about 10 turns! Many of their worlds colonized were "Behind" my borders, which annoyed me to no end. Eventually of course, the Arceans dec'ed on me (I had no military to speak of), and I fought back with missiles and shields against their lasers. Adroitly, the AI switched over to Mass Drivers, rendering my shield research invalid. I suspect that it did this only because it was still early in the laser tech tree. Of course, I then scrambled to beeline up the armor research tree, and the AI did not since adapt, although the strength of its ships has increased greatly.

Something I didn't understand at first, and am greatly hoping they change is that you can trade for techs that you do not yet have the pre-requisites for. For example, I can trade for Lasers III without first researching Laser I or even Beam Theory. That's a perplexing and ultimately IMO broken game mechanic that they might fix.

I did notice also that the AI doesn't really concern itself with defense; my ships are almost always able to win 1:1 battles because of this. The diplomacy AI also is very kooky... it will trade all the techs in the world to me, but it will demand almost everything I own for a stinkin' Xinathum hull plating! Since the AI loses nothing from making such a trade, it doesn't make much sense why one of my Allies (I made an alliance with some in past games) would demand such a high price on this.

My biggest beef so far on the game that is non-game mechanic related is the interface -- once again, CIV has raised the bar so high on this aspect that the GCivII interface seems clunky and thrown together.

Still, the game has a lot of potential. On the Stardock forums, developers are actively soliciting suggestions for improvement, and better yet - they're listening to what people have to say! I know that there is a lot of demand from players on the forums for a "No tech trading" option -this would slap a bandaid on that particular issue by working around it, but it would still improve the game IMO.

[Yosh]

Forgot to add -

Sirian - your Missile Frigate design looks and has almost the exact same specs (and Name) of mine! I named mine the Missile Frigate Mk I - it had the same body, and pretty much the same specs - Convergent engineering FTW!

In my designs and research, I tend to emphasize speed over everything else; with greater speed and range, you need fewer of the same ships to accomplish the same goal - a fighter defending a planet can destroy an incoming fighter, then race off to the front and become a strike fighter in just a few turns. I try to take advantage of my interior lines as much as possible, which having a higher speed ship can accomplish very effectively.