OT: Galactic Civilizations (the game)

teal · #19 September 28th, 2004, 05:31 PM

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Suicide Junkie said:

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Precisely because everything is laid out before you in black and white, Space Empires IV tends to be a very one sided game (one side tends to win big with little or no losses).

I have to disagree with that. It dosen't matter how much you know about how the world works. Its how the world actually works...
In stock, shields are so strong that ships end up being completely undamaged, or completely destroyed.
After combat, your fleet has lost a couple ships, but keeps rolling with shields recharged.

Good point. But if you do know how the world works precisely it is much easier to *tell* that you don't have a shot at winning and therefore is a little more boring. Some unpredictibility is a good thing!

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For example, I have a list that I make in excel of all the planets I want to colonize and most importantly how many facilities each can hold *based on the breathers I have available* so I can sort it on that field.

Sort the list by "Pic" and then by "atmosphere".
Jump to the atmosphere you want, and the planets will be sorted increasing in size.

Thanks, I didn't know that you could sort by "pic". Still, I have a very hard time with the screen mostly because it shows you the entire galaxy at once. When I am only interested in one or two systems (except at the beginning of the game when its not a problem). And I don't like the "no systems to avoid" button for the reason stated earlier. The whole screen could be managed better. And there are other areas where SEIV doesn't do such a good job of displaying useful information.

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Multiple possible strategies - Gal. Civ. has different legitimate ways to win the game. In the sense that all of them will work if played at sufficient skill against the highest level of AI. SEIV really only has one viable strategy if you want to win. Get the biggest economy and build the largest ships with the latest weapons and pound the bejeebers out of your enemies. You can't use missles or fighters really (although they sometimes work because of suprise) and ramming fleets are also fatally flawed in a way that I don't want to say in case my opponent in NGC4 is reading this and removes my one chance of actually doing some damage to him

This is also where mods come in. The weapon balance from SE3 didn't quite come through cleanly to SE4.

Agreed completely. Modding can help this issue a lot. Problem is, if you mod, then the AI, generally speaking, gets even worse than it already is, and this makes single player even worse. Single player Gal. Civ. is quite good out of the box by comparison.

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All kinds of good stuff you can do.

Of course. I didn't mean to sound as harsh about SEIV as I ended up sounding. Of course I like SEIV a *lot*. I was trying to give a little bit of what makes it different from Gal. Civ.

Teal