How about adding costs to colonizing planets? Further away your ship is the more creds you'll need to claim a planet. Maybe factor in size and such.

Or maybe have some fraction of your population die in transit.

That would work. Considering that freeze-drying colonists couldn't be 100% full-proof.

The risk of losing PQ 1-2 would probably impair the human since only human players colonize PQ 13+, either we wouldn't colonize or we wouldn't investigate anomalies.
Speaking of anomalies, the planetoid anomaly, the green chunk of rock, does it always spawn a monster? I've had a monster come out of it three times now, never anything else.

That could work. It would force one to have to make some hard choices in the early-game. But it wouldn't provide that pleasure in discovering a strategically choice bit of terrain and then sending a colonist out to claim it.



Same here in my game.

Hmm I would mind if you could do more to terraform rather then find ideal planets.
This is a vague concept to get the creative juices flowing, imagine for a moment that the 3 PQ
improving techs were removed.

Instead you could spend money or industry increasing the planets quality,
and that this would be separate to any life support costs for bad planets.
Population and production and current PQ affect a base amount required to
advance a PQ. PQ advancement is slow going but can be helped with techniques
through research (use the ones we have creatively).
These research techs could be activated much much like the invasion selection,
each has side effects high costs etc.

Hope I managed to get my idea across.... :notsure:

As for making space more interesting, how about adding in some anomalies that do things described in this thread. Infact 2 spring to mind, both of which cost the lives of our poor survey ship....
One could be a black hole and the other a star going nova.

The black hole is created on the anomaly spot and reduces speed in that sector by one as the ships compensate for its gravity. To make it more interesting, any ship who's last turn is next to the black hole is destroyed (no ship can go on the black hole).
The star going nova anomaly could create a nebula or some sort at various sizes, these affect the ships passing through differently.

By the way sorry if this post is a bit long

~SDC~

it's a space monster egg, not a rock

Moo3 actually has a system like that. And unlike most of the rest of the game, it works pretty well

Someone mentioned Star Wars Rebellion. Horrid graphics, buggy and weird tactical combat, addictive as hell. I loved that game too. Hard to explain why. I know I loved all the different kinds of ships and their differences. The tactical battles while pretty minimalistic in how they played out, could be frickn huge. The vast travel times were you couldnt change their course also added some great strategy. Long repair times were a pain. Made you just scrap the ship sometimes which is more realistic anyway. Mostly Rebellion just seemed to have a lot of great ideas that just never got finished. Ive always held out hope that they would someday flesh it out, use a good graphics engine, and expand the scale for a Rebellion 2. Pipe dream Im bettn.

One thing it had that could be cool in Galciv is that if you put military ships in orbit over an enemy planet (blockade), it would lower their morale over time and eventually they would revolt. This would mean that you couldnt just target transports anymore. Ships in orbit could also bombard a planet and destroy improvments, troops, and quality. Basically it meant that having enemy ships in orbit over one of your planets a very very bad thing. Invasions were also tougher than in Galciv, unless you pounded the planet into nothing from orbit. But that could make it useless. There was no attacker advantage and battles were fought between troop units, not large populations. Another cool thing is that if you took over a planet its population would be very mad at you. You had to garrison troop units over it and run diplomatic missions against it to keep it from revolting. Man I miss that game.

Wiley,

If you still love SW Rebellion, you should check out http://www.swrebellion.net

There actually is someone working on a game that is being called Rebellion 2. Actually, since it's not being made by LucasArts, it's not officially a sequel, but it will be modded to be a Reb 2.

Also, by using a editor called RebEd, the long repair times can be reduced. You can also change almost everything else in the game.

I was pretty involved in that website for a while, but just don't have the time to devote to two sites!

Hmmm didnt realise this, played moo3 once didn't really get into it I'm afraid.
Anyhow I must admit I would enjoy it more if the colonisation part was an on going and slower
process....

I guess my wish list is a little long, I'd also want 4 new choices at game setup....
Ship cost (one option being colony ships at increased cost), Tech cost, Culture resistance.

I dont care what you call them, this would add a lot of different styles of play, and I wouldn't care the affect on the points. I'd love a high cost tech game occasionally just so I can see defenders and corvettes used! Anyhow I getting off topic.

~SDC~

Thanks for the tip Theoden! I'll have to check it out more later!

This is a *great* idea.

Then it's agreed.......Stardock needs to make another game

IMO, the major difference between GC and Civ exploration is the ability to build anywhere. In civ, every movement point of the settler means a decision... Move or settle. choose move, then next turn you have to choose move or settle. In space games, you don't have that option. The benefit of that however, is not seeing all the ICS (infinate city sleeze)

Yep, Galciv sucks. We'll just have to wait until Galciv2...

At the end of the day, I think that it would be more fun if more ships were needed to be built in the early game. So more defenders and star fighters had to be built to defend colonies. Maybe limit the holding capacity of colony ships, so that various techs provided improved colony ships that went faster or could hold more people. At the moment, colony ships are the same for the whole game.

Another thing (not related to the early-game), would be a resource that provided a speed bonus. Say, it went up to +4 max. It would need to be rare in case one civ grabbed several. Perhaps only 1 in small maps and up to 3 for gigantic maps. But how valuable would that be! The AI would need to be progammed that diplomacy always slowly deteriorated between the holder of the resource and every other civ, because it would be such a strategic resource to have. And early exploration to find the speed resource would be very important.

This is a good point. You also had to balance production of military units and workers with your settlers, and figure out what the most efficient thing to do with your workers was. Games are about choices, and there aren't that many choices to make in the colonization phase of Galciv. Send your colony ships off and wait until they arive. Wooo.

and that balance of production is also tainted in GC because of not being able to have production specific planets, but that is another debate. lol

I don't care much for not being able to have some planets producing ships, and others producing social (exclusively). That is about the only game "design flaw" I see, imo.

So, none of you guys like GalCiv, and want it to be MoO4? That is what it sounds like.

By the way, it's MoO1 where you have to get the tech to colonize the different types of worlds. In MoO2, you could live on any world, some just cost more to maintain anything on.

And it's Reach For The Stars! where you can pick being a Jovian life form. You work from gigantic to little.

quite like the possibility of introducing the minor/pirates from the start and getting the AI to evolve them from say space stations to planets invaders - the idea being that the galaxy is a dangerous place (outside of your influence), but the galaxy becomes more ordered as influence spreads and empires become established. The minors could mirror this development, moving from roving 'barbarity' through organised 'guilds' etc through to planetary empires. of course, what this means is there is a 'threat' early on - a threat that could develop if not contained? the problem with galciv at the moment is the interesting minors (the terrorists and the pirates etc) appear and, in my games anyway, get taken out almost immediately...it might be good to allow the minors the 'technology' to exploit low PQ planets, thus making them difficult to exploit at lower levels.

It seems to me there is a conflict of interest between the general GalCiv playing masses (who seem to want more variety in the game to make it interesting) and the 'elite' few who can beat maso (who think improving the AI should be a priority). Stardock must have a difficult time balancing these two needs, alienate the former and they lose the majority of their players, and hense future income, alienate the latter and they lose the support of those most active in keeping the community alive...

Not necessarily. That's why we have the difficulty levels.

AIs below Normal are deliberately dumbed down to make it accessible even to the newbies. Some nerfs or AI improvements have been made just to the harder levels eg. the trade good/tech sell nerf , AI escort of transports, etc.

~SDC~

No doubt there is a bit of this, but this will no doubt happen no matter what changes are made.

However I think its still a good idea to post ideas on all aspects of the game, its fun just to talk about the game , keeps me interested. Anyway I personally hope the exploits are plugged and bugs fixed first. So this would be bonus stuff, hence trying to think of smaller things as ideas to add variety to an already addictive game

~SDC~

I LOVE GalCiv!!
I'd rather GalCiv be what it is right now than try to be some dang clone. Well....then again....maybe if it was a clone of ALL the other games discussed.... LOL

I like hearing ideas from other players about possible ways to enhance a game. I especially get all warm and fuzzy inside when someone agrees with me

*ahem* ALL HAIL FROGBOY *cough*