OT? SEIV vs GalCiv

[Abdiel]

Who's played Galactic Civilizations here and can make a comparison between the two? I noticed GalCiv pics in ImageMod so I thought to ask for comments, since I play both myself.

But now I only play SEIV Even though GalCiv has all the nice fine controls on government spending and income, and has a (far) better diplomatic model, these are the only two things I like more.

How many people here think ship design is tedium only and should be replaced by automatically upgraded ships/fleets, etc? Other than a few cases, like PPBs, that are so overpowered as to knock out all competition, ship design imho really brings out the potential of the 4X genre.

Any opinions? Flames? If nobody replies I'll just assume then everyone's too busy playing SEIV to bother with GC

Abdiel

[sachmo]

I very much enjoy designing ships. I have a lot of fun tweaking the components and trying to find the right mix for my fleets. Upgrading is like Christmas! I take my newest toys down to the gents at the shipyard and they wrap them up in a hull for me!

[Ragnarok-X]

honestly, galciv is not even half as good as SE 4 is. I dont like the research, i dont like the graphics, i dont like the colonizing, i dont like how your ships MUST pick up stuff in space. THere is just one thing that is better than in SE 4, and thats diplomacy. Everything else -> SE 4 !

[Gandalf Parker]

The A+ Number 1 incomparable thing that GalCiv is supposed to win at is the AI. For more years than I can remember (and thats alot of years) if you joined any serious discussion group on artificial intelligence at any professional level, mentioning games got you Galactic Civilizations as a response. Of course for a long time you couldnt see it unless you ran OS2 as an operating system.

When I heard that Brad considered Windows (XP/2000 to be specific) to have advanced enough to make it worth trying to port to then I started paying close attention and bought one of the first copies he released. *sigh* to be truthful... Im still waiting to be impressed. Brad might have waited too long to bring it to the public. It seems like he is still in "catchup" mode to other games on the windows platform. At the moment Id say he is about average (of course SEIV is well above average).

BUT since GalCiv is so completely built around an upgradeable AI engine I do still have hopes that it might be able to achieve its previous high position in that Category.

[ June 28, 2004, 15:26: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Roanon]

I have started a few games, played a few turns GalCiv and was very disappointed. Am about to resell it via ebay. Maybe I have done something wrong, maybe by using a different setup (galaxy size, percentage of good planets) the game improves dramatically. Please advise or prove me wrong, I would like to have another good stragegy game - up to now, I don't think GalCiv is one.

My impressions: While SEIV has a low complexity in rules, it has a high complexity in strategy/gameplay. GalCiv has a much simpler strategy/gameplay, but the rules and mechanics are much more complex, mainly due to the fact that they are artificially complicated by hiding even the most basic informations about the game mechanics.

What sense does a complex tech tree make if there is no visual picture of the tech tree available? If, when researching, you can't even click on the buildings/improvements/ships/follow-up techs you can choose for research and get any info about them? A technical/research encyclopedia has been standard since the earliest ages of Civilisation, there is absolutely no excuse for not integrating one into this game. I am sick and tired of games which have to be played 5 times just for learning the rules instead of reading the rules and learning the strategy by playing.

This lack of information continues for the economy. While in SEIV, you can calculate exactly how much a planet with XXX population, Y happiness and your chosen shipyard rate can produce, in GalCiv everything appears to be totally random at first. Later, you see some relations, but still you are unable to plan or calculate anything. There are global sliders for production/tech/social, you get an overview about the number of produced points, but WHERE will they be available? Why has this planet 10 production points, and the other, very similar one 20? Will a certain non-ideal planet, when colonized, have enough points to offset the added costs for non-terran planets? What are the costs for bad planets, anyway? These seem to be rather erratic, too - don't even try to calculate even a single turn in advance when colonizing them.

So you start playing, colonize a few worlds, find out that colonizing worlds of quality 15 or higher is not only "recommended" as stated in the rules, but a planet with 14 is an economical disaster (can there something be done to improve it? There are facilities which improve something ("soil") on the planet by 10%, but what do they REALLY?).

Then you find out that due to the low number of planets, all the colonizeble worlds are gone after a few turns. As the distribution is very random, and also very unequal, you can usually give up after the first turns, when you find out that you cannot reach more than 2 planets from your edge of the galaxy, while the largest empire in the middle has about 10. Rinse, repeat - play a few turns, check the number of planets you are able to colonize, trash the game if again started on a galactic island with hostile planets only.

The rules are really, really bad. No numbers, facts, rules, informations about basic economy, nothing. 90% of the "rules" are informations that can be found out by reading the tooltips for the buttons on the screen. I finally gave up playing when after a fight I had a damaged ship and could not even find out how to repair it.

A pity. It looks nice, it may have potential, but it seems to be more a quick game of luck for the very casual player who does not care to know beforehand what happens when he clicks a certain button or sends a certain fleet against another. The start, where you send an exploration ship across the galaxy collecting things like shipwrecks, asteroids, and warp anomalies, giving you a number of random improvements (just don't try to find out what these actually do !), which are available in huge numbers, reinforces the impression: a nice game of chance, some kind of intergalactic bingo, but not a real strategy game.

[Abdiel]

Well, I've so far managed to figure out that Soil and Habitat improvements raise the Planet Quality, so a 14 goes up to 15 and then 16. It's percentage, so a 20 would go up to a 22, then a 24. If you luck on a 26 at the beginning (i did ) it can go straight up to 31.

But hell that's like playing in paradise and you might as well not play

The strategy comes in an idiotic form. AI consistently ignores planets of PQ 14 and below, so if you find an untouched galaxy of PQ 14, you can colonize it, improve it, and use it as a base against the enemy. Or they might just take it over. That sucks.

And the research sucks, too. I was told that GC was better than SEIV, but yeah so far only the diplomatic model. Then again, would I want to see that in SEIV? In any hard mode, all you do is standard, you bribe them to fight each other, leave you alone while you grow and harvest the spoils of war. If you play easy, you simply blackmail for money right at the start and that keeps them impoverished for quite some time. I see no way of getting out of this, in any game...

Would I want such a diplomatic model in SEIV? So far, no. But hopefully someone can come up with a better idea...

Abd.

PS. Ships repair automatically. darn slow rate too. You can research Repair and Advanced Repair. Something might exist beyond that but that's as far along the tech as i got.

[Roanon]

Originally posted by Abdiel:
Well, I've so far managed to figure out that Soil and Habitat improvements raise the Planet Quality, so a 14 goes up to 15 and then 16.

I suspected something like this. Why can't they just enter it in their description that clear?
And what effects does it have exactly?. Ok, 14 going up to 15 turns a moneysink into a cashcow, but what effects does improving a 15 to a 16 have? I am a strategy gamer, I like to calculate beforehand if a certain investment pays and if, in how many turns. But I guess this game just was not designed for my kind of play style. Not that I preplan every ship construction and movement 10 turns ahead in SEIV, but sometimes it's fun ...

[Prophet-PBW]

I actually like Galactic Civilizations. I think it's a good beer-and-pretzels style game.

To be honest, I like the research. The uncertainty about the benefits and how the tree is setup made it feel like.. research. Sorry, I'm a roleplayer.. sue me.

I also like how there are many ways to win. I hardly ever won through military conquest. For me, it was always about the Influence.

And I was a big fan of the starbases. I got a kick out of lining my borders with McBurgerWorld stations. But you could build stations that can speed up repairs, increase production, affect speed and combat, etc.

The diplomacy was good. I like the idea of a UN-style body, though I wish you could propose your own petitions. And the democratic government is really neat. I like there are multiple parties and you can actually lose control of the government. Unfortunately, they never made the penalty for such a loss make sense to me.

But I like designing ships too, and we all know which wins there. I love thinking up new styles, new specialties. And I always preferred SE4's way of mapping the galaxy. Rather than having one giant map, you have lots of mini-maps connected by points. And I like SE4 combat more than Gal Civ's.

And SE4 is so easily moddable. It is the only game I have ever dabbled in modding.

Now, as to which is better..
Gal Civ has been installed/uninstalled many times.
I've been playing SE4 PBW for 3 years straight.
'Nuff said.

-edit-
Double post deletion hijinks

[ June 28, 2004, 16:52: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[EvilGenius4ABetterTomorro]

I played it for about 2 weeks (1 more than MOO3)and just got bored. They said it is supposed to be like CIV in the stars. CIV has far more replay and dept than this game does. I think if I never heard SE4, it would have been a great game. No matter what game I start playing, I always end up going back to SE4. I also got tired of flying my ship around in space picking things up.

[solops]

Originally posted by Ragnarok-X:
honestly, galciv is not even half as good as SE 4 is. I dont like the research, i dont like the graphics, i dont like the colonizing, i dont like how your ships MUST pick up stuff in space. THere is just one thing that is better than in SE 4, and thats diplomacy. Everything else -> SE 4 !

I agree almost completey. I do like the research tree if not the mechanics of researching it. And the GalCiv AI is more challenging. I believe that is a function of the number of choices available. SEIV has sooo many things to do and so many items available to do them with (or to) that its AI seems to be incapable of juggling the legion of variables to reach an intelligent decision. GalCiv has fewer decision points, with more of the complexity "under the hood", making it easier to program the AI.

....at least, I think so.