OK. But I don't think the ctrl-N issue is a "problem." Some of us like starting randomly and dealing with what we get. However, I can understand wanting a feature that would do something like space opponents as evenly as possible, or atleast somewhat evenly. I wouldn't use it, but I could see the desire for it.

Did you see me say well below anywhere? The OP gave it a 7.8. Some people agreed. This thread doesn't even have a big # of posters, so how do you get to what the "norm" is? Oh, I know, reviewrs and "polls".   




I already said what I'd call a perfect expansion. Before posting this, don't you think you should have read the whole thing? Because that's how misunderstandings happen...
As for being top of the heap, that's not really the issue. But top of the heap *currently* doesn't mean 10, and that's the point. But that's been thoroughly explained here too. Scales cannot be "moldable" to what currently exists. It could have been made better, *even* with what it features. Am I wrong on this? Well documented bugs and cheese are still present - if that was the result of a rush release for marketing purposes, that's not really an excuse. I'm not attacking the game, I'm defending my view on this.

Well well, here's my two cents worth of comment concerning DA and some people's comments.

Most of the new features and improvements in DA make it worth the investment, especially for future (B5) modding.
BUT I also have to agree heavily on the lack of depth in the UP and espionage.
As big a fiasko as MoO3 was, it implemented these features MUCH better than DL/DA.
However, I will give the dev team the benefit of the doubt concerning whether or not they considered it to be as important to gameplay as WE do, when they developed DL in the first place. So it would probably prove next to impossible to improve it as much as we'd like them to, coz the original game engine doesn't provide the means.

ONE thing many of you complain about however I can not quite understand. And that's ground combat. I mean: What do you expect? That the game turns into some sort of first person shooter once ground combat is initiated?
If so, why not also turn it into a space combat simulation ala Wing Commmander once SPACE combat takes place?
Sorry, but cut the guys some slack, will you?
Or at least do care to elaborate as to HOW you would improve it. So far I just read stuff like "Oh it's SOOO crappy..."

This one is easy, most of the people simply want more complex land combat. Dont you find the current system atleast bit hilarious? Throwing billions of citizens into transports with laser guns and off you go!

During DA development devs talked about "legions" or some sort of land combat troops that would be added. Clearly they did not make it into the game, but imagine if they did. This rather simple addition would bring a new fresh twist on the whole game. No longer conquering worlds was just about sending transports with people on them, you would have to recruit and send military troops. This is something even MoO games had, it cant be that hard to implement?

I think Improvement is good for any game . I started on freelancer when I got interested in pc games then upgraded my ole presario with new graphics and memory to play galciv2 and dark avatar. As time goes on more ideas can be shared about the game and following expansions will get better. I played on the ps2 which I hardly touch now cause i play mostly pc now.

This game's design has a LOT on the table. As it was, my first tough huge galaxy resulted in a five day long game (about 20 hours). Throwing in more detailed ground attacking would stretch that to 40-50 hours without breaking a sweat.

I'm not gonna touch the rest of this debate, but I'll note that the box version of (ironically) Space Empires V lets you play without the CD. ("Excellent customer service that's unmatched" would be a different story, though.)

Oh wow, other posts again.

Yes, planetary invasion leaves much to be desired. The idea of plucking out a % of your current population and then having the survivers of the ground combat become the new populace of the new planet is really really really weird.

Now I can understand why the 'culture and races' of other people are completely ignored. You essentially wipe them all out during the invasion. The new population of the planet are the survivors of the invasion...that is just...wrong.

If they have the mind to horribly create a tedious micromanagement of spying, I think we can have a decent management of our space marines.

It can open windows to subjugating planets...which in turn can lead to senate votes to liberate said subjugated planets. Recently subjugated planets will now take time to reach 100%, since you know...they are subjugated. Takes time to integrate. This also can open up new and more events!

Hell I think by just adding a feature to train a certain percent of civilians for each planet to become the military would be a great improvement. Say add a scroll bar similar to the espionage bar that allocates a certain amount of funds to “soldiering”. But then you’ll need to do something about the graphics, the method they fight an invasion, and what to do about defenses. I think it was Alpha Centauri that had a defensive system you could build to enhance the defense of the town, that might be nice. As it is right now, soldiering really doesn’t do much, considering you can send endless amount of transports to take over a single planet. And as long as you've got a good fleet around your planet its invulnerable to attack

It’s nice to see that Titan of Steel took some time off of his busy weekend social schedule to reply. Kind of sad, though... one would think he could have found something better to do on the weekend. We’ll just leave that alone for now.



Why don’t you break down the poll into names to prove your point? Oh, yeah. If you did that, you’d prove yourself wrong. Don’t want that, now do we?



Hey, moron, 4% is the AVERAGE. It got multiple reviews of ZERO. Since I provided such evidence, and you still don’t understand it, that makes you a pinhead.

Okay, as to the “perfection” of DA...









Here are 4 quotes from you, all indicating that you are arguing against my opinion that DA is perfect.

Each time you made this FALSE claim, I responded with my assertion that DA is not perfect, but simply the best.

Since that perfection was never claimed (and repeatedly denied), you are a liar.

This is what makes you a liar... these 4 claims from you, each claim made after explicit denial of said perfection.

The best part?



Why should I have to come up with even more lies, when this example is such a perfect illustration of your use of deception to get out of a lost argument?

Admit that you lied, and that you were wrong.

Oh, I should stop busting your chops... after all, you're the one with enough spare time on the weekend to argue with me.

If I couldn't come up with anything better to do on a Saturday than post a page of arguments in a game forum I'd hang myself.

DA is definitely a great expansion, no doubt, probably the best expansion for a TBS game I've seen. I think there are some RTS and RP expansions out there that blow it out of the water. My favourite expansion of all time would still be Neverwinter nights: HOTU, the campaign was almost as large as the original game and there was so much added content for both modders and players.

Nevertheless I would say that the addition of the super abilities and the other features in DA, combined with the other improvements that have been made in patches since release of DL have transformed Galactic Civ from a great game into the best space TBS of all time. I mention super abilities specifically because they give GC what MOO2 had, completely unique races that all require a different strategy to win with.

hiddenranbir:

In terms of mass, the galaxy is much more empty than the game portrays it to be. Of course, the game also portrays starships the size of planets, so I suppose we aren't talking about the same thing. More galactic terrain would be nice, as we'd already agreed upon.

Asteroids are, IMO, essential to the new balance of the game. On the one hand, you might want to make colony ships, but maxxing out your asteroids first also is a viable option. Reassigning Asteroid production is also key during various wartime activities. In this sense, it's much more than just a simple building.

As for wormholes, giving access to them, even with technology, unfairly favors the ones who are near said wormholes. One way unpredictable destination wormholes already exist as part of the exploration scheme. I suppose that random wormholes could occur throughout the game, but I know that I, for one, would simply get annoyed with such a "feature."

ToS Iceman:



It doesn't matter when it was released. MOO2 has not had any game approach its dominance until the appearance of GalCiv2 and that means that it bears relevance, regardless of when it was released. For my part, I rather think that most of the new games today put too much emphasis on graphic content and not enough on the actual gameplay.

Making simple games more complex is not necessarily a good way to make the game better. MOO3 went exactly this route and it was an utter disaster. Civ2 was, in some ways, a more complex game than Civ3, although I like Civ3 better.

Simple games are often the best. There were many more complex strategy games than GalCiv2 and MOO2 right from the start, and there have always been games of world conquest so complex it went right down to realistic portrayals of real units. The success of the Civ series is not in complexity, but in playability and accessibility. Chess is not a great game because it's complex. It's a great game because it's both simple AND complex.

All great games aspire to this standard.

I think that your disastisfaction with the game has less to do with its simplicity and more to do with personal taste, which cannot be argued, of course.



It's not easier. It's harder. Civ3, for instance, has a very tied-together tech tree, which means that there's only a very few ways you can manage it. Eventually, you have to go through tech bottlenecks to advance, and that means that tech acquisition proceeds more or less the same few ways, every time.

MOO2 also has this problem. You can't research the trees independently because researching just one tree and neglecting even one other means that you have important key weaknesses. Eventually, by trading or by stealing, or by researching, you MUST acquire the same few key techs each game or you will lose. Weapon or defense, it doesn't matter. Variation is less.

Linear tech trees with mutually successful management schemes despite completely ignoring entire lines means a different game with each combination. You can run with the diplomacy line or you could run with the weapon lines. The game plays differently depending on that choice. You can choose diplo/influence, diplo/terraforming, diplo/weapons, or whatever dual tech strategy you prefer.

Spin Control Center, for instance, is a great building if you're Diplo intensive, because it allows you to fake off wars, but still allows you to trade for important weapons tech when you need it. You typically have a few ships you upgrade and no more. If you're more army intensive, it isn't worth as much, and all the diplomacy in the world won't help you acquire weapons tech. You'll have to research those yourself. It's a fundamentally different situation.



Everyone does it that way because it works. Blizzard, by blowing away its competition, has definitetively shown this to be the winning paradigm.

Games are always released unfinished because we now expect all games to have excellent and continuing tech support. Experience has shown that an evolving game with great support is better than an OK relatively bug-free game with minimal to no support.

What's "correct" or not is irrelevant. This mode of software development is superior to the "complete game/no support" paradigm, and this can easily be shown to be true through several examples.

What "everyone does" is also irrelevant. I bought the game on the supposition of continuing patch updates because that's what I want. If I thought that the game had fundamental problems, I would simply wait for the right patch to be released and play it then. Patch performance is the most important determinant. Post-patch games must play, play better and better, and be time-sensitive.



My brother is a software developer. I have it on good authority that games as graphically complex as GalCiv2 and WoW and Warcraft are extremely difficult to test for bugs, especially the CTD type ones which are absolutely not tolerated.

WoW had a worldwide beta test for months and months. So did Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Regardless of how efficient the testing is, the sheer brute numbers of this kind of testing has not been beaten, and the Frozen Throne STILL shipped with several CTD bugs.

DA IS mostly bug-free. I've played it quite extensively, and apart from a few CTDs (which I've also experienced on the Civ games), it's okay.



"Almost bug-free" is itself an opinion. Even just one bug will kill your fun dead if it happens to YOU. You beta-tested for the game, so you're naturally biased for it. The final release will, of a certainty, feel significantly better than your beta-test exerience, but even you concede that it is absolutely not bug-free. You would probably feel the same if you beta-tested for DA.

"None that would spoil the game for you," is a valued, opinion-based, arrogant statement. How can you possibly know what would or would not spoil the game for me? Conversely, if you think that some bugs are reasonable, and your claim is reasonable, wouldn't the generally good reviews of DA also point to "mostly okay" bugs? Like other objections of yours, it boils down simply to a statement of taste and nothing more (or nothing less).



It's a fictional game with fictional support. Installations which cannot be built on-planet are largely unknown because almost all real installations ARE planet-based. The game allows for the conceit that planet tiles are used for both orbital and planetside construction. Orbital Terraformer and Orbital Fleet Manager are examples of orbital installations which occupy planetary tiles.

As I said, if the installation is orbital, then it wouldn't be a Starbase, would it? It would be an orbital platform of some sort.

I don't know of logistics and support for deep space installations because I don't know of anyone who does anything related to that. Neither do you, because such things do not exist. In some sci-fi universes, deep space installations are harder to supply, in some universes, they're easier. It's just a matter of which model you prefer.



I have never seen fighters and carriers done to my satisfaction, ever. It's just as well for me that DA and GalCiv2 don't even attempt it. Fighters are essentially guided multiple ordinance - little more than manned missile platforms, if you will. I don't see the point in complicating the game for a marginal complexity that isn't strategically significant.

Carriers are essentially battleships with bigger and longer-range "guns." What's the big deal?



It's a game concerned with starships and plasma weapons, dear. "Realistic" gets checked at the door.

Dan Greene:



I disagree with your opinion. Particularly in the case of Psilon and Klackon, your tech opportunities were severely limited - no choice whatsoever. No matter how your play Psilon, you always ended with the same techs - everything.

MOO2 tech management tended to several very circumscribed lines. I know because I've beaten that game at Impossible with every race and with a custom race at -10 ability just to milk the score.

You could dither around with unoptimized tech management, but if you really wanted to win, there were only a very few select tech strategy lines you went for.

With DA, I feel that each game is technologically different, because the map and situations in each game makes each tech matter less or more. Of course, we all beeline Ion Drive and Universal Translator ASAP, but there have been some games in which I delayed that because I needed ship production a bit more early game (and my race was pathetic at ship construction).

I've had games in which I entered a war with winning tech because everyone else's been locked into an arms race with only two weapons technology. That almost never happens in MOO2. You have superior weapons, or superior defense, but utterly strange new weapons no one's ever heard of? It just doesn't happen. Neither with the Civs.



Depth isn't always good. It doesn't make sense to make each planetary invasion take more than a couple seconds to code in when you could have 50 planets to conquer, and maybe fight over, conquering them twice over. You could play every combat in Civ3 like it was Shogun: Total War or even as an RTS minigame, but it would hopelessly bog down the real game and it would be a royal pain. As you know, the Civ series doesn't allow you to manage your combat, either.

Even in MOO2 you only took over ship controls if the game's AI was too stupid to use your ships effectively. Many people didn't bother even creating many hyper-effective ship designs because it entailed having them control each combat tactically.

Having 3 or 4 factors to control that essentially gives you 5 or 6 effective options to code for is no different than the 3++ options the game already gives you for invasion options, except that entering your choice precoded is easier and less time consuming.

Tweaking your 8-10 variables to the same 2-5 optimized options each time is not different from just offering you those 2-5 options as buttons, right from the get-go.