OT: Galactic Civilizations (the game)

[Suicide Junkie]

Some comments:

And they always win big with fighting actually making them stronger rather than weaker like it has at least a good shot of doing in real life.

In real life, battles cause heavy collateral damage all over the place... fighting in the cities leaves them in ruin. Fighting in the country leaves the farmland devastated and UXO makes it dangerous to work on. The front lines typically cover both your territory and the other guys at the same time.

In space, you are fighting in open, valueless territory most of the time. Destruction and damage is limited to the warships involved. When you do fight over territory, it is the defending player's land being destroyed exclusively.

---
One way to go about fixing that is to make homeworlds generate most of an empire's value, as in Proportions mod. That way the empires will remain of similar strength until the very end, and the possibility of recovering is greater.

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.

---
To fix that, you need to let the little guys cause more damage before they get wiped out. Leaky shields and armor are the way to go here.
Use strong leaky armor to encourage strategies that divide up a fleet's firepower. Spreading the damage out and having leaky shields/armor means that the attacking fleet will have some destroyed ships but LOTS of wounded ships, even if they had overwhelming numbers.
The attackers now have to slow down for repairs, or leave a large fraction of their forces behind.

Either way, the defender will have a better chance. Fewer warships to fight, or more time to gather a fleet big enough to drive out the invaders.

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.

Or just sort by atmosphere and look at the pic. Its pretty easy to tell the diff between the large and small ones, and the difference between large and huge dosen't matter much; you're gonna colonize them all soon enough anyways.

I usually pick my planets to colonize based on resource value instead. I need the resources now, and I won't hit population limits for a while.

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.
I like to provide torpedoes with an accuracy bonus, WMGs extended range (to 11 or 12), phased (weapons and shields) reduced power, and so on.

If you're behind in sensor tech, and just can't hit the enemy, use the torpedoes. Try the WMGs on support ships that stay behind the main line of warships and carry little to no shielding. Pull out the occasional PPB ship to force the enemy to use the phased shields instead of the higher-hitpoints normal shields.

All kinds of good stuff you can do.

[Roanon]

Oh yea - Civ III was worse than Civ II, a waste of money. Reminds me slightly of another xxx 3, the name escapes me at the moment...

GalCiv is not worse or better or as good as Space Empires - it is different. Apart from the multiplayer aspect, Space Empires is for planners, calculators and (micro)managers. GalCiv is for those who love unpredictability, random events, and sudden twists in gameplay. I would not consider them of being in the same Category or genre. It is like comparing chess to poker.

[gregebowman]

Imperator Fyron said:
Civ III had even less replay value than GalCiv, due to horrible bugs and design decisions... not to mention the insidious marketing ploys... ugh.

I disagree. I love CivIII, and even though I haven't played it in awhile, I will always have it on my computer. I've d/l the patches, and bought the expansion disks. I could have waited to get the combined package that just came out Last week and saved a few bucks, but I didn't. I agree that Atari, or whoever is in charge of the Civ franchise, could have done a better job of it. But that doesn't take away my pleasure of playing this game.

[Fyron]

So I can get the all in one package to get a game that is not up to par with its predecessor? No thanks. The "Civ 3 Gold" Version is what the original release of Civ 3 should have been. Nothing new has been added, other than ridiculous play modes akin to RTS games... Plenty of the better aspects of Civ 2, especially from the expansions, were cut and never returned...

[Atrocities]

Civ3 was a waste of money and I ranted about it for months. I guess when you get spoiled on excellence, it is hard to go back to game play that is more about turning a buck at the expense of the player than it is about game play.

[gregebowman]

Ok, Atrocities and Fyron, it's obvious you don't like CivIII. Of all the incarnations I've played, though, I like this one the best. Marketing ploys and bugs aside, I like the game and the gameplay. Maybe if they ever make a Civ4, it will have the options you like. Maybe not. There was one of the games out there I liked one option, and that was the one where you could build your space station and see the earth from orbit. I want to say that was Call to Power, but I could be confusing it with another Civ game. There have been so many.

[teal]

Suicide Junkie said:

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!

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.

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.

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

[douglas]

teal said:
The only way you can filter it usefully (once you get additional breathers) is by the "No systems to avoid" button, which I can't use because I keep forgetting to clear all of those systems when I'm done and have my invasion fleets sitting idle when war comes because they aren't supposed to be entering those systems.

There's an empire option for whether or not your ships stay out of systems to avoid. Deselect that, and you can safely use "No systems to avoid" to filter the planets available screen without affecting anything else.

[Suicide Junkie]

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).

Are you taking the "Ancient Race" trait by any chance?

I don't usually have very many planets seen but not colonized by someone or other.

[Fyron]

gregebowman said:
Ok, Atrocities and Fyron, it's obvious you don't like CivIII. Of all the incarnations I've played, though, I like this one the best. Marketing ploys and bugs aside, I like the game and the gameplay. Maybe if they ever make a Civ4, it will have the options you like. Maybe not. There was one of the games out there I liked one option, and that was the one where you could build your space station and see the earth from orbit. I want to say that was Call to Power, but I could be confusing it with another Civ game. There have been so many.

Yes you could do that in Call to Power. You could do something similar in Civ 2 Test of Time expansion. It allowed up to 4 maps, layered on top of each other, to exist in one game. It had a fantasy mode where the maps were the surface world, a subterranean world, the cloud layer (for hawkmen races and such), and the sea floor layer. There was also a sci fi mode where one map was the starting planet. The next was the orbit, where there were ancient platforms built by a long gone race. There was then a mars-like planet and a gas giant to travel to. It was extremely fun. Too bad it, and everything else, added in the Test of Time expansion was canned for Civ 3, other than animated units... Stupid egotistical Sid Meier...