angledluffa

Join Date 03/2006

Some ideas / things that vex me

First off, great game, as everyone says. Sorry for the lame username, but everything good was taken so I finally banged on the keyboard and chose that.

The first thing I want to mention is something I think is a bug. I can't believe no one has mentioned it yet, but I can't find any mention of it in the posts. When I play, I usually play to the end of a turn and then save before hitting "End Turn". When I load up again and end the turn as the first thing, anything military, social, or research that should have been finished this turn is overlooked. It's quite annoying, actually. If something would have been built after hitting "End Turn" without saving, it doesn't get built after I save and load.

Another slight annoyance is that upgrading all ships from class X to class Y costs a lot more than individually upgrading ships. This is frustrating as it forces me to either waste money or spend quite a lot of time finding each ship to upgrade.

I like that the AI no longer allows you to leave thousands of troops in easy reach of its planets, but it goes a little too far sometimes. A warning with some way of highlighting which transports or military vessels are annoying them would make it easier to avoid problems. In the most recent (in fact, only) 1.1 game I played, I declared war on the hated Yor and sent a fleet of transports through Dregnin space to wipe them out. The Dregnin and I had "Friendly" relations before I sent my fleet, but as soon as it reached their territory, they declared war on me. Not to waste a good opportunity, I started pounding them, too. I was also careful to keep my transports away from other allies, though. I happened to leave *one* transport near a planet of the purple species; that planet happened to be surrounded by several of my best producing planets, and it was already rebelling, but that one transport was enough provocation to cause yet another friend to declare war on me. I smacked them around a bit and then offered them some tech to forgive me, and all was well. Then came the WTF moment... one of the minor races, who were one of our best friends, far from any of my production centers and on the other side of my territory from the war, sent the same "Do you think we're a computer game? Prepare to die!" message that my previous two friends had sent. There were no transports in any of the sectors around their home planet. I can send the save game for immediately after they declare war; unfortunately, I don't have one from the previous turn.

A modification that would make it a lot easier to use starbases would be to have a "virtual waypoint" of "improve nearest starbase" that I could give constructors or planets making constructors. The waypoints are already very helpful, but every time a new tech comes along, I have to cycle through my starbases again and upgrade them all. Very tedious.

Also, a convenient way to find a particular starbase would be very appreciated. I'm thinking about a button on the starbase view panel that would snap to where the starbase is. I build so many starbases that I can't keep track of which number goes where, so the starbase view panel where you can cycle left or right through the starbases is useless to me, as I don't know which starbase I am looking at.

Finally, for those of us who like tech whoring and like playing diplomatic races, a mechanism for quickly finding the optimal $$ or IP price of a tech would be very appreciated. It gets very tedious looking for the exact value a trading partner is willing to give for each of techs you have researched, traded or looted. Also, trading multiple techs at the same time has diminishing returns; I am much better off trading one tech at a time for money instead of trading multiple techs all at once.

Thanks, and again, great game. I'm looking forward to 1.2.

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The "reload and miss a turn of production" feature is known, and IIRC, intentional, though I am not sure of the rationale behind that design choice.

I fully agree about upgrade costs for multiple ships, brought up recently: Link

I have had the exact same experience with transports and minor races that you describe. In fact, I had no ships within several sectors of the minor race, and they still declared war with the same verbiage. It's too bad they had nothing but a weak defender around their planet. Too bad for them, that is....

With regard to starbases: I get around some of the confusion by renaming each base as I create it. Mining starbases I'll name "green XXX" for an economic resource base, for instance, where XXX is the name of a nearby star system. Others are "Influ YYY" or "Econ ZZZ." It makes finding each base much easier, especially on gigantic galaxies. I also immediately assign a rally point to the starbase - that action facilitates future upgrades. Now, if only there were a check box to automatically create a rally point on a newly-created, newly-renamed starbase, and name it the same thing.... In any case, that doesn't help me track which bases have been maxxed out and which ones need more constructor lovin', which as you mention is a major inconvenience.

Nice, constructive, well thought-out suggestions.

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P.S. to the OP: how does one pronounce your name, and is there any special significance to it? It must be a b*tch to log in.

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Hi!

AI no longer allows you to leave thousands of troops in easy reach of its planets, but it goes a little too far sometimes.

AFAIK there's a bug in code. If you leave a troop transport near their starbase, they react as it would be near their planet. However in my current masichistic game I have the lowest military stats of all active players, LOTS of transports hanging everywhere, and NO AI player has lowered their relations to my race with a "- we know what you're doing" (yet

).

BR, Iztok

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While it is still a bug, I reckon that the reason that Minors tend to mistake transports being near their planets is because they are near to one of their space stations.

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I also immediately assign a rally point to the starbase - that action facilitates future upgrades

I also assign rally points to starbases right a way. But that still leaves upgrading starbases a pain in the a** , because the really points are not sorted alphabetically in the list. Instead rally points are sorted chronologically, I don't find that very handy.

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Are we not sure the minor is being paid off to attack you? I believe I read that 1.11 folks were going to be attacked quite a bit more due to payoffs. Although, from my perspective I have yet to see it as I am generally the agressor nation after a certain point.

My old senior chief use to say this to me prior to him moving on and I stepping up. I keep this phrase handy in the back of my mind when I am doing work, play or simply rocking out to GC2.

"Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance"

By allying with everyone else I wasn't going to attack first in my last game (score posted on the MV) I could freely send transports and gunships willy nilly through their territories w/o so much as a hoot or holler, more like a go get-um gunpowder attitude. (Of course the races on the gettum were the Drengi, Korx, Arcean, Terran, Drath, Yor... well everyone eventually).

Good luck and good hunting,
W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

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The "reload and miss a turn of production" feature is known, and IIRC, intentional, though I am not sure of the rationale behind that design choice.

Is that to prevent save-reload scumming to avoid bad results? I don't do that with Galciv, if I did I would not want to be punished, and as it is, I can't exit Galciv when it's actually time to take a break or get some sleep.

P.S. to the OP: how does one pronounce your name, and is there any special significance to it? It must be a b*tch to log in.

I pronounce it "John". It's no problem to log in, since I can use my email address instead of my login name. All derivatives of John or the nicknames I usually use were taken, so I just pounded on the keyboard and used that.

It's possible, but ALL of their military tech was from me, so I thought I was their closest friend. I was hesitant to ally with them because I didn't want to get sucked into more wars if other races started beating on them. Also, if they were paid off, why would they specifically say they were launching a war because of something I had done when I hadn't even done it? They would probably say something like "It is time to use your evil ways against you" or whatever that quote is.

While it is still a bug, I reckon that the reason that Minors tend to mistake transports being near their planets is because they are near to one of their space stations.

That reminds me of something else. It would be great if you could trade space stations with the minor races, but that's not possible.

In any case, that doesn't help me track which bases have been maxxed out and which ones need more constructor lovin', which as you mention is a major inconvenience.

Yep. In my mind, there are three phases to the game:
1) Explore and expand
2) Build a lot of constructors and manually assign them to starbases as your tech improves
3) Exterminate
I don't know what the missing X is supposed to stand for, but I'm pretty sure it's not "exasperation".

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Morghenes wrote:

This frustrates me as well. I want the option of sorting rally points by name or by chronology, A to Z or Z to A, in the rally point dialog box. They are sorted by name in the governor screens, but that doesn't help at all when you are trying to direct ships that do not already have a rally point destination assigned.

Suralle wrote:

Are we not sure the minor is being paid off to attack you?

The one time that this event happened to me, the minor race gave me the "we see that you are ready to invade, and we are not some idiot computer game" message. In the past, when races have been paid to attack me, I've gotten the "we don't necessarily dislike you, but your enemy's money is too good to pass up" message. Especially from the Korx. If we can infer from the messages they send us why they attacked us (which would be the whole point of sending the messages to the human player anyway!), then I don't think that the minor race was paid to attack me.

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When I play, I usually play to the end of a turn and then save before hitting "End Turn".

Why not change the setting on the autosave to a lower number?

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Why not change the setting on the autosave to a lower number?

I guess I wasn't entirely clear... what I meant is when I want to go to bed, I traditionally save when I'm done with my last turn for the night and then leave the game. When I wake up the next morning, my factory workers must still be asleep, because they don't do anything for my first turn back.

Another couple things I've noticed:

1) When the UFP mandated that all constructors have a minimum speed of X, they also forced my constructors to have a maximum speed of X. Very annoying.

2) Neutrality Learning Centers should autoupgrade from Discovery Spheres or whatever other research center the neutral race's planets currently have.

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Comments on your comments:

1. Yes, I completely agree that it sucks that you loose a turn of production when you reload a game. I only get a few turns in a day (new baby), so this hurts my games. However, if the AI suffers from the same penaty (do they), then it is not as bad.

2. Agreed on the upgrading. I originally thought that upgrading was too expensive, but they have decreased the cost. I would like to see it even further decreased.

3. I occassionally have this problem as well. I would say that good relations should always = not annoyed by space traffic.

4. I believe that everyone gets sick of spending the majority of time in a game upgrading star bases. Many interesting suggestions have been made on how to improve this. I like the idea of a virtual waypoint, but I would almost just want a button that would autolaunch constructors, then round-robin them to all my starbases, or better yet, have the ability to "check" the starbases that you want in the round robin queue.

5. I gave up on tech whoring as soon as they put in 'disable tech trading' as trading makes for difficult to loose games IMO. However, when I do use it, I would say AMEN, give us that feature!!!!

6. Let me just add one of my big beefs with the AI. I am finding that the end-of-game AI, pretty much stinks. I am confident things will get much better on subsequent releases when the AI upgrades old ships, or destroys then, builds the best available ships, and keeps more "killer fleets" around instead of many smaller ones. I have to go to high difficulty levels, where the early game is very difficult to get through given the mass ejection of colony ships that the AI uses to get its "leg-up", then if you do survive to late game, you will always be able to crush even the strongest opponents (due to what I just said I expect to improve soon). As soon as I get to blackhole generators, hyperwarp III, the highest logistics (and associated buildings) and ultimate miniturization, I build 200 attack, 25 move ships, putting them in fleets as big as they get (43 logistics) and pretty much can take out any AI opponent. With some effort, even if the AI is REALLY powerful, I can focus on getting my stacks very experiences, virtually making them unbeatable. I focus on bringing the high experenced ships together, then use them to attack the most powerful fleets (which are usually not as powerful as mine). Basically, if I can survive to that point, I never loose even if the AI has 4x the military, and 4x the research, I am still better.

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