nameless clusters make for a terrible map

from GalCiv4 Forums

Navigating a galaxy that is segmented into circles is fun, but it needs a way to address the circles because once something is off the screen in a busy galaxy that's it good luck ever finding it again. Please generate names for the circles and tag objects/items as currently being in those circles.  I play with the maximum possible size and after 200 turns it becomes a very tedious game where you're having to apply all manner of workaround to manage the fleets and jot down all sorts of notes in a pad, and come up with your own conventions of referencing those circles. Madness :P

Overall though i do enjoy the game. Is there any hope for the AI as well?  yr auto search ships just tend to suicide themselves constantly so i make new ones with big guns on them and they suicide considerably less. is that meant to be the solution?

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2,510 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

You know, it would be cool if the clusters had names.  A very large one could be called Globular Cluster M13 for example.  I'm sure there is a list of Globular Clusters in the Milky Way by diameter somewhere.

Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I think if developers spent more time in the business sector developing for actual customers who directly interface with the s/ware AND the programmers they'd learn a thing or two about how to implement something more effectively on the first pass and still managing to keep it at the mvp level. It's just about modularizing your approach to programming, knowing from the beginning what you'll need at the end helps a lot and is informed mostly by iteration on concepts that aren't unique to gamedev itself, particularly in 4x most concepts are borrowed from business sector dev, gamedev is notoriously slow to implement so iteration gets bogged down and a lot of workarounds/concessions get made, so it's a bad medium to learn effective design principals through.  For example i couldn't imagine implementing a list module without factoring filtering and sorting, it would just be a no go for me, brain wouldn't manage it because those aren't extraneous extensions those are core features.  Likewise implementing scopes (clusters) without referential hierarchy is also just insane because its just = "common sense", like i can hear the client asking "how are we supposed to locate X" before it's even conceived.  I know everyone comes at programming differently so i don't begrudge anyone, just sharing what i've learned since i started a million years ago. I mean i'll never be as cool as Stardock for numerous reasons but their UX dev could certainly learn a trick or two.

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Maybe i'll get a printer, then i can screencap the clusters, print them off and just have a map with marked clusters with pet names :P

Reply #4 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Nearly everything that appears in the game can be renamed, so I decided to see if the clusters could be renamed.  They can't.

I zoomed out all the way, then clicked on a cluster to select it.  The name of cluster appeared in the information box at the bottom-left of the screen.  When I put the cursor on the name, I got a tool tip that indicated I could click to rename the cluster.  This is identical to how other things are renamed.

However, when I clicked, nothing happened.  The game completely ignored the click.

If something can be done to have the game recognize the click, I think clusters could be renamed.

Reply #5 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Yeah it'll be something Derek has to implement in the source code. :)