OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS

[Omnirizon]

I could never bring myself to appreciate GalCiv; too many little things about it bothered me.

For that matter, I've never found a Stardock game I've liked. What do they lack? I can't put my finger on it. A certain wit, a certain satire, a certain soul. Too much cliche, not enough craftsmanship.

[licker]

Heh...

Even for my rant on GalCiv I still got my moneys worth from it, even it wound up in my uninstall and don't care if I lose the CD pile...

Oh, there's plenty of wit and satire in GalCiv, though I would agree that it may or may not be ones cup of tea.

Honestly, I don't care too much for any of that 'craftmanship' if the game mechanics are great, and if the game mechanics suck then no amount of craftmanship is going to make it interesting (basically ALL RTSs in my opinion...)

[Omnirizon]

AlphaCentauri = wit/satire/soul

GalCiv = flat/stiff/stupid

it had the game mechanics, but it didn't have much of anything else. If all I want is game mechanics I would just play Tetris.

[licker]

Different strokes for different folks...

Some people (though I'm not one of them) like the flavor of GC, but ultimately it comes down to is the game worth playing or not based on the underlying mechanics.

Tetris sucks horribly though, the mechanics are fatally flawed due to the fact that there is no 5 piece block!!!

[Omnirizon]

don't be bad-talkin Tetris!!!

[WraithLord]

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

AlphaCentauri = wit/satire/soul

GalCiv = flat/stiff/stupid

it had the game mechanics, but it didn't have much of anything else. If all I want is game mechanics I would just play Tetris.

Well I like GalCiv. However I also had this kind of "boring, been there done that" nagging feeling when playing it. And I was like thinking while playing, hey you're supposed to have fun with this game what's wrong with you???

Anyway, that's why I never really got into it. Its nice and interesting and has the elements in place but something was missing that I can't put my finger on. Dunno, the "magic" maybe, the one that MOM had and dominions has.

Still there's a chance that elemental will not be a fantasy GalCiv spiritual clone, and even if it would be it will still be worthwhile just to run the campaign and more importantly to get an understanding of where FTBS stands as of 2k9.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by licker

The AI was terrible at defending them, and terrible at hunting down your ships. So who cares if they have 100 ships and you have 10, they cannot take your planets and you will eventually out tech them (since you aren't wasting credits on ships) and be able to plow their fleets with a couple battleships or whatever you need to make to counter them.

I'm curious when you played GalCiv2? I didn't even try it until the release of the Twilight of the Arnor expansion, and my roommate bought it and told me I should check it out. It seems to me like now the problems that you describe are not as present as you portray them - the first being that the AI puts emphasis on military might in diplomacy, so not only are they more likely to view you as food if you put off building any ships, but it will cost more to convince them otherwise if you choose to stick with that method. Plus the dynamic between ship capacity, component cost, and engine speed, seems to make it an enormous money sink to go for the fast transport killer concept. At least, in all my tinkering, I never saw it as viable to even get your tech to the point you could have a 20+ speed ship with -any- weapons or anything else at all, without having produced some sort of mobile defenses (read: ships that can actually kill other warships) in the meantime.


I agree with you Omni - AlphaCentauri stands in my ranks of "favorites of all time", and I every time a new Civ version is announced (they made one for consoles? come on.....), I cry over it not being AC2.


For those of you who may not have tried Twilight of the Arnor, my roommate liked GalCiv2 from the beginning, and he says Twilight is an entirely new ballgame (and I believe him). There's tons of new content, and no 2 species play the same, etc. I found it to be a much better game than I am seeing described, where it sounds like dissatisfaction with the base game. Anyway, my point being that if they apply the things that transformed GalCiv via Twilight, into the first build of Elemental, and then add to it in fun and interesting ways as it looks like they intend to, I think it should be a pretty cool game.

(Oh and I agree that $10 is a bit exhorbitant for a movie, I usually wait til movies hit the local theater-pub, where I can get movie + 2 pints of hard cider for $10. )

[licker]

My comments are based on GC2 and the 2 expansions. The core issue is that of the open movement system making it far too easy to exploit AI tendencies with small and faster fleets.

TotA plays like a different game because of some new rules for colonization and racial specials, but while it provided a nice little bump, once you get through the new mechanics the core is still the same.

Some people love it, I'm not one of those people. It's not a bad game, it's just not a GREAT game, and IMHO a badly flawed game from the movement system standpoint.

MoO3 got movement and map strategy so completely right it's a shame that the rest of the game was such a puddle of **** (well to most people) which killed anyone wanting to 'borrow' mechanics from it.

Sword of the Stars is another good one though. However, they really stripped down the empire management to bare bones so you don't really get the planet building fix most 4x games tend to provide. It's also horrendous at micro on large maps in long games.

[DonCorazon]

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

For that matter, I've never found a Stardock game I've liked. What do they lack? I can't put my finger on it. A certain wit, a certain satire, a certain soul. Too much cliche, not enough craftsmanship.

I totally agree with this sentiment.
I admit I have bought the GalCiv games and never played them much - they just have a kind of flavorlessness to them. I am probably a fool b/c I preordered Elemental but it seems like it could end up the same way.

Take a look at their video clip. Phrases like "the solders saw their extermination was at hand" to me sum up how Stardock games feel. They masquerade as classics like MOO2 but miss the sense of humanity. I mean, who talks like that?

[Zeldor]

If they aimed for the most boring trailer ever award they surely succeeded.