Ideas and Irritations

Ok, so I'm a big strategy player...both TB and RTS and especially love Homeworld and GalCiv so have been waiting for this game for quite a while. I've played through a few games offline and will get round to playing online at some point. Before I do however I need to get off my chest the areas that I think this game shines in as well as those where its pretty awful!

1. Precisely why are there no starbases in this game?! I mean this is meant to be an all encompassing space epic and apparently no civ had the bright idea that perhaps fortifying the nearby wormhole might be a good idea to stop the enemy invading. Bring back Constructors please!

2. Planetary defenses suck and ships take too long to die. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting the inclusion of The Giant Space Turtle Of Doom which swats capitals in one hit or that the game goes down the SupCom path where you just have to flick a unit to kill it but when it takes a level 1 battleship an age to kill a light frigate methinks some balancing needs to occur.

- Ships should be more powerful but they should have less hit points, this would improve the pace of the game.

- Planet bombers are too fast. I HATE the AIs tactic of sending in 8 or so siege frigates. Don't get me wrong, I am perfectly capable of building planetary defenses and do so. I find this Extremely annoying, to the point of quitting the game.

- Static defenses should provide an area of effect around the planet, not around themselves. As it is they are largely pointless as a strike force can simply move around them. Hangars are the only choice.

- As already stated, it should be possible to fortify gravity wells that you control, not being able to detracts from the game and goes against common sense.

3. Research pace is too slow. I only ever play on fast research speed and even then spend large amounts of time making cups of tea. Obviously against a human opponent, this situation is going to be better (as you need to be more careful what you research) but there should definately be a way of influencing the speed at which things take place. I suggest a Civ style meter system where you can put a proportion of your income by the minute into research/ship building etc to speed it up. Also, more research bases above those that are required should speed research - common sense!!

4. Diplomacy and Espionage. Is shocking. Full Stop. There should be a way to find out the content of a rivals empire by spying, again this is common sense. As for the diplomacy, I like the concept but mission based needs to be supplemented with more traditional methods to influence galactic opinion of you.

As it stands, the diplomacy system in this game goes totally against common sense. There is no way that an empire can surrender to you if you are the most powerful in the region. You cannot influence a civs opinion of you by giving them things. You cannot trade techs. You cannot create missions for them. The list goes on.

5. I love the pirates, brilliant execution of this concept, beats the hell out of Civ's random appearences etc. Only suggestion is that you should be able to set an upper limit on bounty so you don't have to babysit it when a raid is imminent.

6. Fleet Supply is just plain silly. So I have a vast empire encompassing hundreds of worlds with an economy that makes the $ look more like the Z$. So I can afford a massive fleet right? No apparently not, again for no good reason. This really is a big hole in the game, once you have an empire of a certain size there is no point in expanding it more because you can't defend it properly. Fleet and Cap Ship supply should scale with the size of the map you are playing, max supply on a large map should be in the region of 10k, possibly more.

Overall, speaking as a software dev myself, I feel this game lacks content. There are numerous really obvious things that a strategy fan (4x and RTS) expects in this day and age and are missing for no good reason. This game strikes me as being half finished. Great shame as far as I'm concerned, being a big fan of GalCiv with all of its depth. Bring on version 1.5 please Stardock!

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post

Successfully updated karma reason!

I agree that the ability to build starbases would be a good addition. Think of DS9 Guarding the wormhole in "Deep Space Nine." It could ideally have researchable abilities such as defense & offense, repair, and fielding fighters/bombers, and would give the builder "ownership" of the gravity well until destroyed by enemy attack.

Successfully updated karma reason!

WOW ... thats a lengthy & detailed OP ! (from a « software dev » no less) ... its odd that it did not attract a lot of reactions : reply #1 was posted 2½ days after the OP !?

... as a defensive noobette, i agree that the defence of the gravity well is too difficult, especially against skilled human killers, who will simply bypass the cannons and approach the planet from a weaker spot, beyond the limited range of those cannons ...

Successfully updated karma reason!

I'd love to see beefed up defense my self.

I feel that too much has been done in recent years to destroy turtling in RTS's, which often creates a situation where you've got a main defensive force constantly running back and forth from undefended point to undefended point to defend.

Defensive structures in their current state, are mostly useless. The only point I've found to them, is damage sponges during pirate attacks =p A player can fairly safely ignore them in favor of killing ships/juicy targets.

Perhaps defense would work better if instead of making a "turret", you simply upgrade "planetary defense" similar to fortifications, thus getting a ring of defenses, and even ground based weapons(i.e. nukes)?

As far as research speed goes, I like the slower pace of it. With slow research speeds you can't research everything in most games, forcing you to pick one or two paths to follow. This puts a lot of emphasis on intel, which is good, and leads to the next section...

Scouting.
Scout AI is a step in the right direction, but more options is always better. A scout/espionage based line of tech could be neat, with things like the ability to sneak false trade frigates in to watch enemy income and such.

On pirates.. I'd really like to see pirates follow more logic. They're an awesome concept, and are a huge leap in making an economic victory possible, but have some strange behavior.

When pirates attack you, they fight to the death, not very smart if they want their plundered booty. A pirate attack would flow better (and be so much more annoying) if they preyed on your trade and refinery ships by waiting in neutral grav wells. Or they could fly in, blast defenses (if they're LIGHT.. don't attack 3 cap ships with a dingy), board the trade station, and make off with a portion of your money (running away, not stealing then fighting your defenses to the death)

On the subject of fleet supply, I'm not sure how I feel about that. While a large empire needs a large number of ships to defend, they could also mass them all and make an unstoppable wrecking ball of death.

A solution to this could be combined with the defense issue by making "garrison" fleets. These fleets would be unable to leave the system they're assigned to, but would take no (or very little) supply as they're based at a world. This would make logical sense as well, as it takes less effort to supply someone in deep space moving from point to point than someone who lives in orbit.

Successfully updated karma reason!

@Sorceresss: And there was me expecting a mass of flames from all the fanboys!

@Quinburger: Definately agree with you regarding garrison fleets and planetary defenses, would make defense viable without allowing someone to build an uber fleet of carnage. I would however like to see the inclusion of some mechanism by which the player can affect research/ship/structure build speeds beyond researching the certain techs. In any strategy game, I tend to econ/tech my way to victory and not being able to influence the speeds detracts from the game.

On a separate note, although I think the interface is generally pretty good, there are a couple of things that I think could use improvement:

1. Zooming into the middle of nowhere - how about implementing a 'zoom by wire' system where zooming in will zoom into the nearest object to the cursor, be it planet or phase lane? Zooming into empty space is entirely pointless and should be avoided (I tend to do it in the middle of a firefight which is doubly frustrating).

2. I lose track of where wormholes connect to, maybe I'm missing something but as far as I know there's no way to see on the map where a particular worm hole leads, lines on the map would be good.

Successfully updated karma reason!

One thing I really don't like about the economy / fleet supply part is that it is percentage based.

I got a tine single planet with an output of 12 credits and spend 75% of that (about 8 credits) to supply my 2000 units strong fleet.
The other guy has 20 planets and a combined income of 1000 (with trade and stuff) and has to spend 750 of that to supply the same troops I have.
It simply makes no sense.

Fleet upkeep should use absolute values. Or maybe a percentage based basis (but a small one) and on top of that absolute values per ship to avoid the problem of players buying the next fleet upgrade and then not making any more money (since with absolute values one could go into the negative income region).

Example: Getting that big fleet will cut your income up to 30% (so the ridiculous percentage based part is less significant) and an additional 0.2 per heacy cruiser or something like that.

And the diplomatic part has been mentioned quite a few times now. There is a wide agreement that it needs some serious tweaking. But since this is a very multiplayer focused game I guess its not that much of a priority. Multiplayer diplomacy in FFA works just fine

Successfully updated karma reason!

Speaking as a primarily MP player, I have to disagree with some of the OP's points. First, defenses.

Defenses are ok in my opinion. Repair stations combined with a few turrets can easily defeat pirate raids, and they are good support vs a larger fleet as well. Yes, you will need ships to defend your worlds against serious attacks, but that is not a bad thing at all. It makes you actually think about task forces instead of just making a huge fleet or two. Pushing around a single huge pile of units (ships) from super-defended base (world) to another is horribly boring and lazy gameplay, and should be discouraged at all costs in any even remotely viable MP game.

Espionage and scouting. Currently, you can gather a lot of information about your opponents by scouting. IMO this is far superior gameplay than pushing around some slider to gather intel. While I do agree that getting intel about an empire's inner workings (economy, tech levels etc.) would be nice, it should be done by some kind of active means such as scouting. Perhaps an early special ability for scouts.

More means for sabotage and other behind-the-lines ops would be nice, I agree. But again, this should be an active role by a specialised sabotage unit, not just allocating credits to a value box.

Fleet supply is ok IMO. It's a little "gamey", but it does force you to think hard about expanding your fleet.

Right now what the game needs most is scaling options. Research cost option (cheap, normal, expensive), victory conditions, accelerated start, resources at start and so on. Rise of Nations is a good example of how to do it right.

Successfully updated karma reason!