Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

I know one of the major beefs I have with Gal Civ 2 is the severe lack of variety when it comes to ship building. Do I use weapon type A, B, or C. Oh I forgot it doesn't really matter because the opponent can just use shield A, B, or C to counter it. Call them missiles, bolts or whatever you like, it's still an actual carbon copy of paper scissors stone. And the early version was pathetic in that little ships over big ships was a no brainer, since even if a ship had all the firepower in the universe, it could only kill one small ship each round. It's better now, but still pretty awful IMO.

MoO was great in that department because you had to decide weapon arc, close range defence, enveloping weapons, heavy or light mounting. Good missiles choices, as you could decided whether it best to fire lots of missiles but for only a few rounds, or fewer missiles for many rounds. Troops boarding tactics, energy absorbing shields. Proper space combat where you had to decide if you wanted more powerful ships that turned slowly, or lighter fast turning ship, or just not bother with turning and have all weapons 360. Basically, a whole host of options to design any type of ship you like. Obviously there were optimum designs, but it was always a joy to re-design my ships in MoO. In Gal Civ 2 it's always just a case of "Extra miniaturization. Great. Now I can have 5 type A weapons instead of 4 type A weapons. How exciting."

One game I did find quite enjoyable recently was Starships Unlimited. It has a pretty unique combat system which I liked a lot, plus ship design that took me back someways to MoO days :)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Yeah, my biggest beef with Galactic Civ was "ok I've now got +4 lasers instead of +3 lasers. Guess it's time to start researching +5 lasers so I can keep ahead of my opponents +4 shields..." Contrasted with Calahan's description of MOO (which is a pretty accurate depiction of how the game felt to me), it just felt very flat to me. Deciding to go with rapid fire shield piercing death rays or MIRV'ing ECM'ed missiles or tractor beams and boarding crews makes a pretty big difference in how your ships fight as opposed to generic weapon A, B, or C. Energy dampeners or shield capacitors? Point defense lasers, a lightning shield or good old ECM? Long range torpedoes or a bigger engine and point blank maulers? Punch through a section of the shield or go for enveloping weapons.

Damn, I think I might have just talked myself into digging up a copy of MOO2...

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

And in MOO2 you could even enjoy playing against Impossible AI (or whatever it was called) opponents with 400% resource bonus. I loved plasma cannons (they got really small as tech increased).

SEV(IV) is supposed to be similar, but the micromanagement... ugh...

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Some good news about the multiplayer... looks like they've had some change of heart. I'm thinking the individuals who did send their concern made a difference. Looks like Hotseat and PBEM are not guaranteed yet... so anyone who enjoys those multiplayer aspects may wish to contact Stardock.

EDIT: June 2nd:

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

GalCiv 2 was a great game. Bob hit the nail on the head. I have never played another game in SP where I had 3 or 4 people go to war against me and actually be able to break up the coalition or be threatened with extermination. It was much different than Civ where eventually all the AIs team up against you "just because".

Regarding the weapons, I think there are several reasons for this:

1) It is much easier to make an effective AI when you are dealing with aggregate defensive and offensive values.
2) As a ruler, you really don't get involved with determining what arcs the weapons on your ships have.
3) It makes the game much easier as far as micromanagement in the late game.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

My understanding is that from Frogboy's (i.e. Brad, the designer's) perspective, #1 is the reason. GalCiv was designed around the AI, and making tactical combat simple and symmetrical was the only way to make strategic choices computable for the AI. Imagine trying to create an AI that can predict combat outcomes for ships in MOO2 or armies in MOM or Dom3!

Unfortunately, it also makes the games flat and uninteresting for those who are more interested in playing with neat toys than in abstract strategy. I happen to be one of those who would rather have rich tactical options and an AI opponent which "cheats" around strategic choices by getting 8x my resources[1] than a world-class AI who can beat me every time at tic-tac-toe. Obviously I'd really like rich tactical options and an AI which doesn't NEED to cheat, but for me, the interestingness of my own armies is paramount.

-Max

[1] Being strategically clever is only necessary when you're dealing with scarcity. If you've GOT a bigger hammer you can just use it.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

The trouble with most of the "gets 8x resources" approaches to AI is that they usually wind up with an AI who's by far toughest if encountered early. 8x advantage is very hard to overcome when you haven't had time to use your strategic and tactical advantages to build production faster to offset the AI's mechanical advantage. Later, the AI will still get 8x the resources from each planet/city/province/whatever, but you'll have more of them to counter with. Starting out you've each got 1.

I haven't played GalCiv, but this seems to apply to most 4X type games. On the hard levels, if I get attacked by an AI early I get swamped, if not I win easily. I wonder if a progressively increasing multiplier for the AI would work better.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

I don't think the 8x approach is a substitute for a good AI in a 4X game, it's just a substitute for the ability to do tactical analysis. Instead of being able to exhaustively analyze the outcome of a particular battle to decide whether you can engage his 34 missile frigates with your 4 dreadnoughts, just make some unrealistically-optimistic assumptions about the capabilities of 4 dreadnoughts vs. 34 missile frigates, but what you actually send into battle are 32 dreadnoughts.

That doesn't mean you don't have to know how to expand efficiently, but an AI which can't expand isn't going to do well even if you do dumb down combat to rock-paper-scissors.

Edit: to address your point about 8x being too much when encountered early, all I can say is "good point." Progressive does sound like a better idea in that light, unless the game starts at a point where the human already has a lot of tactical options (Advanced start in MOO2).

-Max

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

I have played the second Galciv2 expansion as a beta tester (preordered it as soon as they started advertising), and was disappointed to find they had broken too many words like the version schedule. IMO they were delaying the game just because they focused on another title(Sin of a Solar Empire) while relying on the fans to improve the game for free. Almost every week people were complaining about the unplayable AI and the infamous bug that made their ships disappear, but its only near the end of the beta phase we saw they were finally fixing them.

I know that was reasonable for business, but when the game was finally released I had lost my interests, specially when I saw the minor bug I had noticed them months ago were still there after so many updates.(the in-game picture of an unique building is missing because they have misspelled the file name). Maybe they have blocked my gmail like spams, who knows.

Though I loved Galciv2, I have never checked their games since then. Prefer saving time for another MP.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

A focus on singleplayer gaming requires AI to be a top priority. I love Dom3 but playing SP bores me to tears. I just can't make muyself play past the early game

The devs here have clearly developed a game for mp only, which is fine, but if stardock want to sell a lot of copies they need to have a great AI, which isn't possible with Dom3 type complexity

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Ive known some complicated games that did decent with AI by making the AI moddable by the players. I think Dom3 (ok maybe Dom4) should have gone that route.

I think that any game developer should recognize the areas they are leaving light, and make those areas moddable.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

dom3....the best TBS fantasy game.
what do you think about mod fantasy Fall from heaven 2 ? there's some likeness with elemental?

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

I played a lot FFH2, and it suffers from the civ4 combat system : you make a ubber stack of doom with most of your units in it, and try to attack first, as fights are solved during your turn, the ennemy can't retaliate before his turn. It's the level 0 of tactics/strategy, but all the rest is quite nice if you enjoy civ4.
I don't know elemental, but the fights can't be that bad...

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Loved GalCiv2.

Frankly I don't get all the "MOO2 was so much better!" posts. It was a great game back in the day but I sense a lot of serial historical game romanticizing going on... (what?! on a Dom3 message board?!? OMG!)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Hhhmmm not sure if that's a fair comment to be honest. I happily admit to having enjoyed older games much more than any new ones myself, but think I made some valid points about one of the major shortcoming of Gal Civ II (and there are several IMO) which others seem to agree with. So just saying we only prefer MoO over Gal Civ II because we are all old romantics isn't really a solid base to argue a point from. Even if we are actually all old romantics :)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Hey V, good to see you around. Hope you hop in a a game or two! :) FWIW I dug up MOO2 this week and killed a day and half on it. Assault shuttle and nuetron blasters! Engine boosters and inertial stabalizers with shield capacitors! Tractor beams, emission guidance systems, plasma webs...still fun. :)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Baalz: Unlikely I'll be joining any games... I really just check back every few months just to see if there is ever plans for Dominions 4. :rolleyes:

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

There's no question that Stardock is hard at work on Elemental, he talks about it all the time in the Demigod forums.

Brad has had his hands FULL with problems on Demigod. It's a great action-oriented team mp game but it has had nothing but problems with online play and that's fatal for a team-oriented online mp game, so the game's had a rough launch. In a recent post he stated that most of the online problems are behind him now (I and many others would dispute this, but don't get me started) and as a result he is moving over to focus on Elemental, so it appears that the new game is going to get more attention now.

The reason, of course, for the emphasis on hosted servers is all these problems he's having with Demigod where players are wholly unable to figure out how to handle port forwarding, NAT, proxying, and all ther other complexities that are essentially required to understard in order to play online. It took me over a month before I could get my configuration to work online ...

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

PBEM doesn't require any such networking knowledge and is classical for TBS games. Granted, they should be designed with PBEM in mind. I posted early in elemental development a suggestion to allow PBEM. I think the players liked it (it got positive responses) but it was totally ignored by the devs. A shame if you ask me.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

This is a shame, I heard nothing but good things about you from other players. Perhaps you'll come back to dom3 and try something fresh at some point (new gametype, nations etc)

OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

I hope Elemental will allow LAN and Hotseat for those who enjoy multiplayer within a single household. Also PBEM should be easy to setup within Elemental as long as it uses auto_resolve for the battles.
I know there's talk about allowing the game to be pushed back to August of 2010 allowing more testing and more game content... which most of the community(myself included) seems to approve.


Yes, I believe it's being presented at PAX... new screenshots on the game websites.

Also I recently created a poll where Stardock is uncertain how to handle the children from vassal marriages. I'm hoping some of the community can share their opinions on how Stardock should handle this feature.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/362345