Firstly... using "ALL CAPS" does not enhance your argument. It emphasizes, but does not clarify. Or rather, it clarifies your emotional state, not, your ideas. Since your emotional state is irrelevant as to whether your ideas have merit... it doesn't really assist you. I resort to all caps on occasion, many of us do, but I also recognize it for what it is... a vice, not a virtue. I highly recommend that people use said vice sparingly... at this point (JJ) your usage is so frequent, it is actually detracting from your points.

 

Secondly. Space mines are no different than say... orbital defense platforms, or any of a myriad possible ways of passively defending a planet or location. Space mines as a specific idea though... are generally not favored by people as a "Sensible" concept because space is truly vast and it is presumed that most mine fields would not be mobile. 

But JJ, your concept has some merit... it would be nice if we had a passive and powerful method for defending our colonies other than ships..... which in my opinion is what Starbases ought to be able to do. However, its largely irrelevant... a minefield... starbase... or a ship... they all get built by production... it just a matter of how much of that production got spent on an engine.

So you could easily build a spaceship with no engines, fill it with weapons, shove it in orbit... and there you go... you have your minefield.

 

Thirdly, I think Hypergates will be cool, and instantaneous travel for them would probably just be too good... maybe VERY late game? Also perhaps we will get lucky and the Hypergate speed will be scaled by map size. Personally I'd love to see Hypergates be a type of Starbase, complete with upgrades for them, including speed boosts, defenses, etc. If anything perhaps they should replace military Starbases because such an important piece of infrastructure is well worth building into a fortress... it is afterall the most likely place where friendly reinforcements can come from and therefore would be held at all costs.

 

Fourthly, I think the whole debate about "What players want" is hilarious because none of us has any data about that. I can remember players unloading a lot of hate about the tech tree and its different mutually exclusive technologies... there was a pretty successful and popular mod that got rid of those for quite some time. It doesn't make any sense for technology to be mutually exclusive ... learning how to make ships have more HP does not stop me from learning how to build those ships more efficiently. What could be mutually exclusive is execution... perhaps I cannot apply what I learned about making ships with more HP and keep them efficient to build... but once I've learned both I would have the choice to apply one or the other, as needed. This does not happen... for the most part "learning" and "applying" have been integrated making this choice difficult to realize in-game. Ship components can be an exception to this notably, as can structures.

Ideas that don't make much sense automatically get a down-vote for me, and they need to be very fun, exciting, or thematic to make up for it. This feature is not particularly fun or thematic and so I look forward to it disappearing.

 

Fifthly, I find it funny how GalCiv treats population and production, and people have made some very good points about population and housing... but production... why does everyone assume more people = more production? It's not going to in real life for much longer (historically speaking) in my opinion. For example... the direct production of food could once be easily linked to the exact number of people farming... this isn't really the case any more, because tools, animal labor, automation, genetic engineering (better crops) continue to mess with this equation. Right now, you could consolidate every mass-farming institution in the mid-west United States into a single corporation, fund its automation, and drastically reduce the number of human beings involved in the process of making that food and I'd wager it'd be enough to feed the entire planet.

Military force too, has for most of human history been strongly linked to population scales... but again, technology weakens this link. Today we are the cusp of automating war to a degree not seen before, the United States is relying more and more on drones and less and less on pilots in a plane. One drone-pilot can manage multiple drones potentially, and very little stops us from fully automating such weapons. Perhaps unwisely to both our material and moral peril, but that hasn't ever really stopped us has it?

Population does not automatically = production anymore, or it won't in the future when far greater degrees of automation are available. Population can also be seen as a great liability... population's correlation with production is weakening, but its correlation with consumption is only increasing. Consumption leads to less reserves of important resources, greater strain on limited facilities, more people to police... China, both today and in its long history, has long had to spend an enormous amount of effort controlling and safeguarding its populace... historically speaking, it has been quite a rebellious place. The United States is eating/consuming far more than a fair allotment of the earth's resources and constantly fears upsets in global status quo as a result, making it vulnerable to relatively small events across the entire planet.

If people are not producers, but they are consumers... what purpose do they serve? Well don't worry, they still have some purpose and they still produce something, but I'd argue that they have limits to those things. A colony is likely weak if it only has a 1000 people, but it likely isn't gaining very much once it has a million or ten million people... or say a billion... at some point though, it's going to capsize from a boon to a burden. They don't perform much manual labor, intellectual labor is only so useful (how many "Einsteins per capita" do you realistically get, need, or can't simulate with AI?) and they eventually can start causing a significant drain on resources that could otherwise be spent on infrastructure, military strength, or important projects. Or they get so numerous they cause serious climate problems, political problems, or police problems.

The point is... not that I am perfectly "Right" or such, but that there is plenty of room to consider changing the formulas of population vs production based on these reasons. I'd make a case that colonies should have very low population, a certain flat rate of industrial development based on tech and what you send those people with. The population would still be the primary mover for generating wealth and research, so you still need them to grow.

This would then mean that we could have a very slow growing population (which arguably should be more vulnerable to bombardment, disease, random events, etc.)... still be able to create the level of industry we are used to as players, but suffer a research and economic penalty for going very wide very quickly. Super heavily populated planets should start suffering industrial decline as more and more resources go into keeping the consumers happy, and over-taxing the local resources should have climate/pollution impact. Mitigate these with racial traits and technologies as needed... but the real challenge isn't going to be "how do I get enough people" it is going to be "how do I control this many people... this far away, and how do I stop the locusts (people) from eating all the stuff I need to build to protect their sorry assess".

 I think taking a deeper look at population in this way, could lead to a much more sensible set of game features for building Wide and building Tall. Tall empires would focus on that automation, limiting population and consumption, giving them more resources per planet to work with for building orbital constructs, ships, drone armies, Dyson spheres, etc. Wide empires would focus on technologies that allow them to claim more planets, further away, and faster.

The wide empire can win, if it successfully claims more territory and then survives long enough to develop that territory "tall" similar to how the game plays currently. The Tall empire wins, by staying small until it has achieved an advantage in tech and resources and decides to strike out and attack the wide empires when they are still vulnerable.

Talls still become Wides in the long run. That is unavoidable unless you allow for win conditions like "I achieved ascendancy and don't care about material life! Wooo" or "I researched winning!" or "I magically made everyone love me to death, they committed suicide to honor my glory and I win".

Ok... and you can have those in your game they can be thematic, but lets be clear... there is always "I won because I had the military strength and industrial production, technology, and happiness to avoid rebellions and exterminate my opponents directly or indirectly." AKA ... not a super-narrow arbitrary win condition. Domination.

I support introducing Tall strategies, not because they stay tall, but because they give a great variety in play style for the early to mid game... and they can represent a fun challenge (if done right) to those of us who play wide empires early on. Colony rushing is still going to be a thing, its just going to leave your empire more vulnerable to tall empires for a period of time while you catch up. That sounds like a fun challenge that can and should be explored.

 

Finally... none of that matters if they don't fix Ship Roles or Carriers, or Commanders, and other stuff, because I can always defeat the enemy ships... always. Galactic Civilization means very little if we do not have a working/kinda-fair model of its antithesis:

 

WAR

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I informed you, and did so as kindly as I know how to. 

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PM Sent.

Galactic Civilizations first came out in 1993.

Babylon 5, which allowed access to hyperspace through gates, came out in 1994.

Stardock has always had an active fan base for GC, and we've always been willing to share ideas of what we'd like to see in the game. Stargates, mines, starbase varieties ad infinitum, an ideology system based on actual philosophy, ditto for the economic models, breaking combat in space and on planets into mini-games, accessing planets based on whether your species was a methane or oxygen breather, etc. (At one point, the game actually had tech that let you teleport ships.)

I'm sure there are new ideas for GalCiv out there, especially when they are specific to a particular version of the game, but there are a cubic parsec of ideas (like stargates) that are approaching 30 years old.

I wasn't throwing shade on you, you were standing in it.

ok I have deleted my comments...

With regards to the colony rush:

You can still colony rush to your heart's content.  The difference, however, is that those new colonies won't grow in population at 0.1 but instead at 0.01 by default so they don't contribute much to your empire at first.

To offset this there is a new immigration technology path:

By going up this path, you get your population growth back but you are choosing this instead of say, going up weapons or improving your engineering or what have you.  It's a new choice.

The suggestion of simply nerfing colonies for 25 turns or what have you is similar to what we are discussing here.  Except I think people will intuitive understand that new colonies are going to be rougher than the homeworld and thus being able to overcome this helps.

In addition, there are several new improvements for colonies such as Supply Depots.  You can also choose to build up your world with Supply ships which might actually be my favorite new feature.

Okay, let's talk pacing. In a zero-sum game the only thing we can really adjust is the speed with which there's a winner. So I'm cool with talking about this in terms of pacing. 

In a zero-sum game such as this, it makes logical sense to try and accumulate the limit resources (planets) as quickly as possible. The developers have already presented us with hurdles that slow it down; extreme planets (require tech) and planets that require Atmospheric Cleansing (require more research tech). 

So now we're being introduced with more hurdles that are designed to slow us down further (more distance between worlds, way slower growth rate). 

Well, okay. 

But let's get back to something you just posted: "every civ will be on the same footing fighting the same constraints"

I think most of us have played this game long enough to know... that's not even remotely true. Especially once you start increasing the AI difficulty level. 

So forgive me, the smallest bit, if I don't buy that argument. 

But let's set that aside. Let's imagine, for a moment, that everyone really is on some kind of equal footing. 

Then I would return to something I mentioned in Discord the other day: I don't think the "colony rush" is broken to begin with. 

This is part of my basic argument: it wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing. And when people try and "fix" things that aren't broken, that's when bad designs emerge. 

The colony rush was, to put it as plainly and simply as I can put it: fun. It was somewhat fast-paced (compared to the end-game, when you're managing tons of colonies and every turn takes 20+ minutes), and it was this unique mixture of exploration, colonization, and resource-acquisition. It is arguably the one phase of the game when the largest number of interesting things are happening simultaneously. 

And it was just fun. 

I don't know about anyone else, but I play games because they're fun. 

And the minute they stop being fun, I am going to move on to something else that is fun. So if a game developer is actively moving away from a design that is fun, to something that is less fun, I have to wonder why they are making that move, because it makes no logical sense. 

And basically, I'm going to move on.

There are way too many great games out there, and far too many games in my own backlog, for me to devote time to a game that wants to make itself less fun. 

But I digress; let's talk pacing. 

I don't think it needs to be fixed. But if I were going to fix it, I'd simply use a bigger map. Put more distance between habitable worlds. And by bigger, I mean a LOT bigger than  what we're seeing in the Retribution Beta... 

Distance adds time. Time adjusts the pacing. 

The devs have decided they'd rather adjust it with population growth. 

Here's the end result though: when you slow down the population growth the way they have, and shrink the map sizes, you end up with a much, much smaller and slower galaxy to play in. Okay, so you "fixed" the not-broken pacing issue. You now have a slower game. And a simpler game. Fewer habitable planets. A less interesting galaxy. 

Instead of needing to conquer 20 or 30 or even 50 planets to defeat an enemy, you need to conquer... 2. Wow. That was better? 

Do you see where I'm going with this? 

GC3 is a turn-based 4X. You know what's awesome about a turn-based 4X compared to, say, a real-time-with-pause 4x? It's far easier to NOT get overwhelmed by the sheer size of an empire with a turn-based 4X. Because it stops for you. It alerts you to everything that needs your action and input every turn. 

It's the stage upon which to play a grand, huge, glorious space 4X game without it being daunting and overwhelming. 

And Stardock has basically said, "Nah, we're good with a galaxy that has a handful of planets and a super-slow growth rate. We want this to be simple and slow." 

And I just find that really disappointing. 

 

Yet, the whole point in a good-enough-4x-challenge basicly stands on very personal perceptions of gameplay rules within a relatively deterministic model.

We are encouraged to discover complex (or simplistic) tricks to master various Winning ways or, to manipulate certain conditions towards our own satisfactory formula which also relies on special/optimal parameters. Choosing between immediate success or some "grinder" processing of whatever suits our mindset while a static set of events requires our attention or volunteered neglect.

Thus.. the entire magic stands on conscious principles that we opt to set as priorities or not. 4X has a knack for open-minded paths far beyond the Win/Lose goals under which we bring a tangent of opinions & as a result, reactions.. wise & flawed.

FUN == what we decide to accomplish given a sealed stack of preferable aims. But there really isn't any obstacles to variable access at which intellect should gain proper focus -- freedom to play as god & demon is a trajectory rather than one solution that solves all hopes or wishes.

WE play inside the proverbial SandBox -- remember? To me.. the fun is into the HOW i can (somewhat!) control what & when elements or events happen. Fast or slow, thick or dry.. gimme everything (and anything) to observe and react according to my own free will ... or mood swings.

I didn't say equal footing. I said "same footing fighting the same constraints." In the immediate context of my argument, I wasn't talking about everything being equal, I was talking about how these constraints are applied across the board--not just to the human player. So in terms of game play, I don't see a change like this as nerfing the colony rush, just extending it on into the mid game. That's what I mean by pacing.

I understand your position and respect your opinion, but I disagree. I don't know if "broken" is right, but I find the colonization process as it is somewhat mindless. Get everything as quick as possible as close as possible and if you play things right, you'll come out with the most colonies--or enough to win.

Right now, I like to play with extreme planets set to abundant and habitable set to occasional. I do this because I want colonization to be more drawn out. That's often (but not always) how I play. So, I'm predisposed to like a feature/change that draws the colony rush out and provides new, more meaningful choices in regard to colonization.

I guess I see this as not "fixing" something that is "broken" so much as deepening a part of the game that is currently somewhat shallow.

I 100% agree. I'll reserve judgment on whether these changes are fun for when I get my hands on the expansion.

Bigger map requires more performance... so "a LOT bigger" means a lot more performance... this is not necessarily a broadly applicable solution. That said, I play with stars set to rare for this reason. Again, I think so much of this discussion falls into the category of preference that it is hard to say my argument is better or worse than yours. What fun we get out of the game is largely subjective. I hope the result of any changes is broadly fun and moddable for those who don't find it to be so.

As Frogboy has mentioned, this isn't a fixed scenario where growth is massively capped. It is a starting point that can be adjusted via tech. Also, I can't comment on whether the game is slower since I haven't played it. From what has been described, additional options (like supply ships) will change the dynamic--change how we invest our resources--and thus instead of seeing it as slow, I envision something that offers more paths/choices that will have an impact on my ultimate success or failure. Again, without having played the expansion, I can't know whether this is what will happen--maybe it will be a step backward. I hope not.

I didn't see that in any of Frogboy's posts...

I don't know how it will play out, but I suspect it isn't going to be quite as gloomy (or quite as spectacular) as anyone expects. I'm guessing it will be like many of the former changes to any number of features--at the end of the day, the changes just require me to change how I play.

It seems like with every update there are some that think the proverbial world is coming to an end. I appreciate that your statements lack that kind of hyperbole. And I hope Stardock doesn't disappoint, as you seem to think they will.

That said, I do suspect the game will remain fun and big and interesting and all the things that have drawn so many to spend so many hours on this game. And if they manage to royally screw the game up... well, I suspect they'll recognize that and make it right.

Only time will tell--and I hope not too much more time!

Did I miss something? I haven't been on Discord too much recently--getting ready for baby #3 to show up and have had to build a room instead of spaceships and galactic empires...

I agree. I think so much of the concern surrounding these changes boils down to how one prefers to play. I don't know if there is an objective "correct" change other than what increases enjoyment for the largest number of people. This is a game, after all, and when I finish playing, real life hasn't changed much except I'm a few hours older with nothing more to show for myself--except maybe a sunnier disposition.

 

Retribution is in Beta testing. 

Oh, okay. When you said "we're seeing" in the beta, it made me wonder whether you had actually seen/played a beta version of the game.