Suggestion: gameplay assists

from GalCiv3 Forums

I'm trying to think of ways to speed up game play by reducing manual busy-time clicking around and micromanaging ship and fleet movement.

1. Suggestion: Can we (even optionally) dock the little info/command display window that appears on the bottom left corner over to the right area nearer to the Turn button?  Having to constantly move the cursor from one side to the other of a 30" monitor kind of blows. If all the stuff I have to regularly click on each turn are grouped into one quadrant (or at least one side of the screen) that would be helpful. (I'd really like to right-click the object and pop that window nearby rather than having to drag the cursor a mile down to the left-bottom corner, but dreaming's easy.)

2. Suggestion: How about grouping fleets into a Task Force (or kampfgruppe or whatever you want to call it) that can be moved around together?

This could be implicit by allowing all ships/fleets stacked in a hex to be moved at one time (using slowest ship as the reference). We do that in board gaming all the time. An explicit option would be even cooler where I assign fleets to the Task Force and they all move as a group. Kind of like a rally point I guess, but different. :)

3. Suggestion: A command called "Patrol" would be useful.  Click an outlined area for the fleet (or ship) to patrol. The fleet would move to the area and begin moving back and forth within its borders. An enemy ship would be attacked if discovered, allies ignored and neutral ships tailed within the area.

 

--David

1,542 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Hmmm...

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I like the patrol idea.   Originally, I think there was going to be a patrol option, where the ship would move from it's current hex to the destination hex, and back.

But I like your idea of "Patrol" better, because it really does fit.  Since click-drag isn't well done for a game like this, maybe, instead, a "Patrol Area" is defined as a (say) 5-hex radius area, and the ship moves to that area and then begins to randomly move around it. It stops when it sights another (non-friendly) ship.

Task forces are an interesting idea, but they become sticky issues, because we want to use them for movement only, not any form of combat (either TF attacking opponents or vice versa).  There's a lot of "who are you attacking" logic that would have to be figured out when using a meta-grouping like a TF.

 

 

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The only thing I didn't like about guarding and patrolling in galactic civilizations is it didn't work and let enemies invade and attack without even raising a finger to try and stop them.