[Other games] Galactic civilizations released March 26th.

raynor · #1 March 15th, 2003, 08:13 PM

If (Big If) Gal Civ has challenging AI, then this might be an accurate comparison of Gal Civ and SEIV to Chess. In a Gal Civ game, you start out with a King, a Queen, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights, 2 Rooks and 8 pawns. You carefully deploy each piece in the beginning game trying to control as much territory as possible. You carefully play out the middle game. Then, you try your best to deploy each piece to produce a result matching your goal of winning. The AI is equivalent to any of the chess programs with which Gary Kasparov is competing.

In SEIV, you start out with a King, seven queens and eight pawns. But they are really cool looking queens and pawns because you can customize how they look. When you pick them up, they talk to you in the language of your choosing. You can move the pawns, 1, 2, 3 or 4 spaces and sometimes attack forward instead of diagonally. That is what is happening on your side. On the other side, they just have the standard pieces--which although they can be any color you want, are just the standard chess pieces that move in just the standard chess way. But the AI has no opening book and does a 0-ply search looking for moves.

[ March 15, 2003, 18:14: Message edited by: raynor ]

Fyron · #2 March 15th, 2003, 11:33 PM

See... with SE4, the pieces are often different. In GalCiv, it looks like they will be about the same (just very minor variations of 2 or 3 traits with new tech levels). So, comparing SE4 to Chess is not a very good basis of comparison (at least, less so than comparing GalCiv to Chess, which isn't that great to begin with

).

raynor · #3 March 16th, 2003, 03:57 AM

Not that I want to switch this thread off the Gal Civ topic or anything... Okay, let me phrase the question so that Gal Civ is in the question:

Instead of spending $50 on Gal Civ, should I download and try out Proportions Mod, Full Quadrant Mod, P&N or Adamant Mod? (And, why?)

Suicide Junkie · #4 March 16th, 2003, 04:04 AM

Well, you certainly should get Proportions Mod, P&N and Adamant Mod. Don't bother with the Full Quadrant Mod. Get Fyron's Quadrant Mod Deluxe instead, plus the standard Version for maps to use in the other three mods.

Its 4 games for the price of zero!

raynor · #5 March 16th, 2003, 04:11 AM

No. You don't understand. I wanted you to give me a rough number of hours of playability of each of the mods. Unless stated otherwise, all figures will assumed to be in hundreds of hours.

I think I've downloaded all of them. But I'm scared. I didn't sleep for three months straight when I bought SEIV in January of 2001.

Suicide Junkie · #6 March 16th, 2003, 04:16 AM

That is much harder... it all depends on how much you like them, but on average, I expect that they will be similar to getting SE4 all over again (entirely new games), with the advantage of knowing the interface.

Fyron · #7 March 16th, 2003, 04:38 AM

Adamant mod will give you no playability in SP right now, because the AIs are not modded yet.

If you can find humans to play it with, then go for it. Just keep in mind that I have not gotten to Weapons yet, so everyone uses the same weapons.

FQM can be used with nearly any other mod, so it can easily extend the playing time of any other mod. Just play some games with FQM Deluxe: it makes the maps much richer and more varied, and overall gives (IMHO) a better experience than using the standard quadrant/system schema.

Proportions games take many many turns, so that mod has a lot of numbers of hours.

P&N as a Pirate or Nomad takes a while too, so that can easily be many many hours too.