I got Sim City 4 when it first came out, and gave up on it. Too much flaky behavior where things didn't work as they should, and not much in the way of patch support from Maxis. I might look into Sim City 5, but not until it's been out a while and I'd first scoped out the forums to see how things stood.
I belatedly just discovered this post. I'm disappointed to hear this news, but not that surprised. In recent times, the Computer Games Magazine had gotten unhealthily thin and started adding console coverage. CGM used to be my favorite games magazine all the way back to the Strategy Plus days. I really respect Steve Bauman, and thought that his magazine usually provided the most mature games coverage (ie: written towards mature adults rather than teens), but after the changes there,
Some comments: Super Isolationist: Balance-wise, I'm not sure if it's necessary, but it seems natural for me that a Super Isolationist race should get a influence penalty. Super Spy: Is it possible to gather any intelligence at all (ie: techs, ships, etc) on the Super Spy race? If not, sounds a bit overpowered. Perhaps this ability should give a diplomacy penalty since the race becomes known for its sneakiness. Super Dominator: This might be overpowered or weak,
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It's not a bug. If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft. That being the case, then, perhaps there could be some sort of indicator to the player that this is happening? Maybe income being shown in red on the tax screen, or a "Graft!" message next to the treasury figure when it goes above the lim
I remember the micronauts toys. Never saw any comics or anything, though. I used to have a bunch of them, but mostly when we played with them it degenerated into us shooting each other with their little spring-loaded rubber bullet guns.
If I make game Wizbang 1, I can't realistically release Wizbang 2 for at least 36 months. I'm curious why this is... Are you saying the market (buyers or retail vendors) wouldn't support Wizbang 2? Or do you mean that it would take 36 months to create a release-worthy Wizbang 2? If it's the former case, I know that I'd be willing to buy the W
I'm curious what revision control software you use as well... Clearcase is the best I've used, and it has excellent file comparison and merge capabilities. CVS is OK if you use a decent graphical front end for it. My advice as a veteran of several painful "mega-merges": I've found that if you have two code bases you know will eventually need to be merged, it is much better to put in the ongoing effort to keep them as in-sync as possible, rather than wait until the end. Ie: if
I'd love to see mega-events added. Ideally it'd be an option you could enable even from within an existing game, and could adjust their likelihood (ie: if I'm running away with a game, toggle mega events on, at high probability, to throw a monkey wrench in things and see if I could handle it). Other thoughts: - An option to make the bad mega-events more likely to happen to the top dogs and good ones to the underdogs (ie: space pirates most heavily infest the leader race's territory
I was a very big Dominions 2 fan, going so far as to work extensively on programming enhancements on Dom2's fan-made random map generator. But given GalCiv2's focus on creating a top quality AI, GC2 fans should especially know that the Dom3 developers primarily consider the Dominions games to be multiplayer games. IE: In Dom2, you can only save by exiting the game unless you alt-tab out to use a fan-created utility. The AI in the past has been rather weak and exploitable, and the typic
Yay - it sounds like a lot of my UI requests for the civ manager have been addressed! Thanks, guys!
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Millions of people pay $15 per month to play World of Warcraft. Do they add new content every month? Not only do people pay the $15 per month but they then $40 for add-ons like the Burning Crusade (on top of the $50 for WoW and the $15 per month). As I see it, that $15/mo is paying largely for things like the online hosting of the game and in-g
A trainer is an external hack program for the game, so unlike the developer-created cheat codes which the game recognizes as cheats, trainer cheating can potentially go undetected by the game so metaverse cheating might be possible with one. (IIRC, If you use the built-in cheat codes in a game, it is no longer eligible for metaverse submission.) I'm all for having cheat codes in games, for the single-player to use to experiement and have fun with. But when game developers don't prov
Disabling the auto-focus without the auto-select part doesn't really fix my problem with "auto-focus" and might make it worse. I suspect it's the same that most people who wanted the "auto-focus" disable want auto-select disable, and we just loosely used the term auto-focus as a catch-all description for the auto-focus/select behavior. Anyway, my typical scenario: - I click on a certain square, moving my currently selected ship to its new position. - Expecting that I stil
I imagine this may not be fixed, because if you have a lot of scouts and other ships, it may take too long every turn to not only calculate the optimal path, but do it for EVERY ship, taking into account the movements of EVERY OTHER ship as well for each calculation. I have no understanding of how the coding works, but I could imagine this would take up more time to calcul
Ugrok: I'll bring that up to the team, but note that you're taken to the shipyard for the purpose of selecting a new design if you wish. I do like the idea of centering on the planet though. Vandenburg: Cari's your new diety, not me My office-wise cursing at the feature was just the straw that broke the camels back. She's the one that knew how to fix it. I also like
Hooray! Thank your for addressing these things. If you're still taking suggestions, I'll copy my post from here: Link . It sounds like you've already fixed some of these issues, but there's others in here I'd love to see as well: ------------------ Yes, the planet and colony management UI definitely could use some improvement. It's not bad if you have only a few planets to manage, but in
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I've seen the same thing in the main game. I played Terrans, but chose the Altarian hull set, and in the next game as Terrans, I picked the Terran hull set, and all the designed were screwey. That was back in one of the earlier patches, and since then I've stuck with the Terran hull to avoid the problem, so I can't say for sure it's still there. But I've read all the change logs and haven't seen any mention of it. In any case, it'd be nice if it only showed you your ship designs th
FYI: you can see that things like morale building or market building bonuses stack by looking on the Summary screen. If you had, say, two VRC's (+60% morale each) and a stock market (+10% morale), at the bottom of that screen, you'd see Morale: +130%. For morale, that bonus gets applied to the base morale of the planet (which varies by population), and then (I think) the taxaxtion modifier is applied. The kicker is that the base morale drops rapidly once you hit 20B pop. (It's base
The best way to see the effect of bonus squares is to press the Summary button and look at all the improvements there. Any improvements getting a bonus effect will show there, so a lab producing 8rp on a +300% res bonus will show 8rp + 24rp for that lab on the summary screen. The Approval tile gives +100% morale for the planet. At least as of Beta 4B (what I'm using right now), it seem to give this +100% morale not only for the morale buildins (Virt reality center, etc), but also fo
if i get you right, too many sensor modules wouldnt be anything to worry about. If you have 1.1 theres a sensorrange cap so it doesent matter if you had a hundred surveymodules, your sensorrange still wouldnt exceed the cap. What I meant was that if you put a survey module on a scout (if it even fits), there would be little room for any sens
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In a way, this is actually helpful for inexperienced players, because it means that even if the DL's attack first on non-fleeted ships, the players will have a chance of doing some return damage that can add up.
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On the planet/ship window just click once on a ship or planet. As above, I don't mean that small planet/ship list; I know you can find a planet/ship from there. I'm talking about locating the planet on the main map from the planet (tile) screen and from the spreadsheet value screen, whatever you wish to call them.
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Lintman.Um... the Colony Management Screen is the "Planet Screen". You must be referring to that other screen that lists the values for all your planets. I'm not sure what the offical names are, but what I'm calling the "planet screen" is the one that shows planet surface with all the tiles and improvements. What I called the "colony managemen
Definitely, the size of the module at least as improtant than the cost. Even if you just wanted to outfit all your scouts with survey modules, the size would prevent them from carrying many (if any) sensors.
I'd love to see anomalies spawning throughout the game on a semi-regular basis. Barring that, perhaps a random even could repopulate the galaxy with anomalies as a one-time event.