Hfx, this is basically the new model of game production. I'd get used to it. Personally I like it. I'd go further and say that if stardock committed to having a full development team continuously improve the game, I'd be willing to pay a monthly fee for it. Or I'd be happy to make some donations if they were to start selling ship parts aka dota2 style model.
It's more about whether the AI plays within the rules of the game. There's a big difference in terms of playability between an artifical production boost and turn 1 map wide visibility. "Cheating" is just a word to describe that. And yeah- the devs are generally good at Reading posts and the AI has come a long long way over the past year. A year ago the AI just randomly built improvements, now it properly specialises planets and seems to attempt to make use of a
The problem with 1 attack per turn is that it can lead to some extreme abuse with regards to 1 ship tiny fleets. I think the "closeness" or "size" of the battle should determine how many movement points it uses. Ie a giant fleet vs a single scout should use just 1 point. Whereby a massive fleet vs massive fleet battle should probably end the attackers turn outright if they win.
Agree 100%. Good AI is the key to a good game!
And yes, I know the AI in civilisation cheats heavily. That's beside the point. Galciv series has a (well deserved) reputation for the best AI in the genre. The bad news for the devs is that means players set the bar higher :)
I actually meant genius. I believe this is the last difficulty before the AI moves from getting standard +production bonuses (handicaps), to outright cheats in the form of fog of war removal and extra starting techs. Might be wrong about this though! And yeah zuploed - the method I stated was a bit of a simplification. Trying to write a repeatable method to perfectly micro a planet in under 10 steps is impossible! So I took a few shortcuts and si
Well, at "higher" levels the ai cheats heavily. Apparently genius is the highest level of actual AI - on incredible and godlike the AI just gets artificial boosts
So how does this work in practice? If I colonise a class 14 world and decide to make it a manufacturing world, I would 1) build a few factories. 2) build a hospital. 3) build more factories until the world approaches pop cap. 4) build first farm next to hospital 5) build more factories until all hexes used. Add solar collector then start upgrading. 6) every time the world gets near pop cap,
But the major issue is that the AI builds a few farms and that's it! It spends majority of the game pop capped which causes it to fall behind economically in a big way. Teach the AI to build farms properly. Make the AI great again!
Yeah. I did a calculation a while ago - it turns out for a class 16 factory world, the ultimate manufacturing output comes with roughly 8 farms and 8 factories -> as a rule of thumb. Actually, you want to maximise and equalise your percentage gain in manufacturing and raw production - but that's a pain to calculate! So I use the rule of thumb above. But again, a farm with no population being supported by it is useless. Hence why hospi
You can think of it like being pylon blocked in Starcraft. You don't want to build too many pylons at the start because it's a waste of resources. At the same time, you don't want your unit production to stop because you don't have enough pylons! In galciv, you don't want to build farms at the start. You should only build them when your population of a planet nears the cap. Then build 1 farm. Then wait for it to get close again, then build another &n
Generally you want to keep putting farms on 1 by 1 (with a hospktal), until you hit the pop limit, then add another farm, or research a food tech, or similar. You want to.spend as minimum time pop capped as possible. You generally want to stop when your farm count reaches (roughly) the same number of labs/factories/wealth buildings that you have.
I think I've found a huge flaw in the AI that heavily limits their economic output. A quick fix here would make the AI much more nasty! The AI never seem to build enough farms! I'm currently playing a game on gifted at turn 150, and invading class 14 planets with just 14 population - it was pop cap limited! Compare to my home world which has 80, or my primary production world's each of which have at least 40. The lack of population sev
I gotta say the galciv3 AI has come leaps and bounds since release. And I know there's still loads of room for improvement! i think what galciv needs now is something to make the map more exciting. the space just feels so... Empty! Which is great for realism, but awful for engagement. specialised and upgradable shipyards, anomalies, constructable planets or megastructures, more resources, gas collection, etc etc. Add some stuff to jazz up all those empty tiles
The idea of returning to shipyards is awesome.
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I somewhat agree, although almost all 4x games have this issue. Id argue it's the one major unsolved problem of the genre. would be interesting to see stardock solve it. Maybe in an upcoming expansion about a crusade or something... :)
Never played Ashes, but sounds like you got hard done by. That said, who are gamespot? Sounds like some outdated ezine on the precipice of joining the dustbin of history. Ignore them - and laugh as their failing business model is upended and demolished by a little disruption. i still think you guys need to swap to a subscription model for your games, or at least offer updates via sub (And expansions free for subscribers). I'd happily pay! rec
110% agree - this idea is awesome! another related one I had a while back was to give shipyards upgrades and specialisations like starbases have. For example: 1) Repair docks. ships docked at this shipyard repair 2x faster 2) Skunkworks - builds s hip designs with prototype modules 30% faster 3) Supply docks - increases trade income for all ships trading with a linked planet 4) Fleet maintenance - allows shipyard to upgrade stationed ships for free - ex
1.7 is definitely an awesome patch. one question - its great that you can now choose which planet sponsors a starbase. but I can't see a way to do this globally - that is for every starbase. For example, I want to dedicate one of my shipyards to building constructors and nothing else, and default all my new starbases to sourcing their constructors from that shipyard. Is there another way to do this that doesn't involve manually setting this up for each and
My latest creation - the Shiva Class Supercarrier. More pics on steam workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=667714307 <img src="http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/276218793512
Agree. Starbases patch is great. I would be happy to pay for updates of 1.7 quality!
Im also noticing this. I think they tweaked a setting
I agree gauntlet - while I love the spirit of the changes, they are not very transparent to the player. Would love to see some tweaks that keep the objecrive but improve transparency. It would be good to see the introduction of a sensor starbase, or at the very least a beefing up of military starbase sensor modules
I love that if you want to increase your sensor range, you need to actually research techs in the sensor tree now, rather than just stacking 10 low tech sensors on a cargo ship at turn 1. Awesome change.
This change is great for the game balance. ignore the haters. If they want the old system back they can mod it in.