OT, galactic civ II

[NTJedi]

Cainehill said:
Not sure I'd want it for MP - too many turns where one person wouldn't be doing anything, while the other player may be adjusting his economy, designing ships, and taking forever, so it wouldn't be all that good for LAN party style games.

Easy fix... you simply place a timer inside the game same as seen with AOW:SM. DOM_2 multiplayer games even have a timer. No reason GAL_CIV_2 can't use a timer as well.

Cainehill said:
And given the number of turns where you're just waiting for some research to complete (in, say, 14 turns) and a ship to be built (in, for instance, 27 turns), it'd be boring and disappointing as a PBEM or even server style game, ...

I haven't seen anything in the game which would not make a timer work for keeping a good pace.(a friend has the game) And same as AOW:SM... every time the game is loaded the host can adjust the timer.

Cainehill said:
But it's quite good - the interface has some very irritating quirks* - but the gameplay is pretty cool, with the best diplomacy I've seen in 4X style SP games. And what you can do with the ship designer is amazing - people have made ships that look like transformer style robots and more.

Yes this game has great potential, but SP only really limits replay value. SP is fine for a start, but it should definitely add MP. Nothing compares with human opponents/allies.

[OG_Gleep]

I agree with Cainehill, MP wouldn't fit this game very well. It can take a very long time to build something. Its not like dominions where you get a set amount of resources a turn to play with. In this game, the cost is turns. So, you can literally spend multiple turns just hitting next waiting for something to happen.

This leads to a very poor setting for PBEM, which is the common medium for TB games. The only viable way to play this MP would be via LAN and even then.....

The Timer addresses how long you have for each turn, it can never address how exciting each turn is.

As far as the replay value, theres a random galaxy generator for sandbox mode, and a campaign. Theres multiple races to choose from, and a whole slew of difficulty settings. But it comes down to how each person values a game. For me, I don't need to play a game for months or years to be satisfied. If a game lasts over 20 hours, I am ok with it. If it lasts 40 hours, I'd say that it was more then worth it. I can easily see 40 hours going into this game. At $40...that comes to $1 per hour.

[Cainehill]

Yeah - I mean, some of us easily got hundreds of hours out of Master of Orion / Master of Magic, neither of which had any MP - just different combinations of races, magic paths, special abilities, etc.

That said - I'm not sure GC2 will have the same longevity, because the races are essentially pretty similar, and the tech tree, while sizable, is ... bland. Essentially, drives get smaller and sometimes faster; weapons (only 3 varieties) similarly get smaller and sometimes stronger, ditto for defenses.

But definately 40+ hours, especially as the game apparently really changes as you bump up the AI levels ( the AI strategies actually change, as opposed to simply getting more power, as per Dom2 and most other games ).