Well, I hope that Stardock has some sort of profit-sharing plan set up for its employees. I've seen too many start-ups and small companies where the only people that benefit from "above-and-beyond" employee enthusiasm are a small group of people at the top. Not pointing fingers, moreso a general comment about the state of this industry.
hi Frogboy, Though I have a PC, I tend to use my Macintosh more and more, and my next laptop will surely be a Mac. Does Stardock ever plan to release GalCiv II or future games on the Macintosh? I realize much of your revenue is tied up in Windows development, but I believe there is a large, untapped market of Mac users who are into strategy games.
Admiral Rom (#7) said: "However I found I just used the same ship designs in moo2 over and over, once I had found out the optimal ones to use." In MOO3, the tech you get is different every time, so there's no memorized perfect ship designs. It's very dynamic, especially when you add in tech trading. However, I will agree that the MOO3 ship design as it stands is incredibly tedious, though I think this was just poor implementation of the ship design upgrade UI. I don't think ship des
wampyre, i don't think that's true. if he was just a frothing fps monkey, he would have slammed the game for the lack of multiplayer. i thought his review was fair for the most part. there is truth in what he said; some of the graphics in GalCiv are outdated for a 4x game being made in 2003, but that has mostly to do with the game's development budget i suppose. not all the graphics are bad, though - i think the UI and the CG renders are better than MOO3, but the ship sprites look more like a sh
Trade sanctions/embargoes are an excellent option in MOO3 when you choose to voice your disgust of another nation but don't want to specifically declare war on them. I hope you guys kill the bugs and put that feature back in GalCiv.
Captain Bizarre (#64) - I was referring to the alteration of game visuals in Black & White being an influence, not the idea of tracking morality in general. Sorry if that was unclear. In Black & White the gameworld and the creature you control becomes more evil-looking or good-looking depending on the choices you make. Actually, I just thought of an additional way GalCiv could visually reflect your moral rating: change the player's ships to be more good- or evil-looking. Of course, that would be
Better integration of a player's alignment rating with their game decisions would make for a more immersive experience. Obviously GalCiv's inclusion of a morality barometer was influenced by the game "Black & White," including the visual feedback, but I don't think Stardock has taken it far enough. Right now the random events are the only actions which influence a player's alignment rating. But what if most in-game actions had a morality stamp? For instance, selling some of your people
*bump*ing this up since I posted it last night and it got lost in all the craziness. (stardock, don't you think you should put up a proper forum, like UBB, now that this place is going to get swamped with players?)
wampyre, I'm not sure I understood you correctly, but in MOO3 you can choose what to trade -- it's just that you have to do a "counter-offer." I'll probably pick up GalCiv today, even though I shouldn't be spending the money and my wife will probably get irritated. I really hope the diplomacy model in this game is deep, because I almost enjoy the diplomacy more than the war strategy. Diplomacy in MOO3 is somewhat workable, but most of the time there's no feedback to the user fo
Does selling a planet to another empire increase your "evilness?" And would it cause dissent within your empire? It would seem pretty ethnically questionable to barter away segments of your population, even under dire circumstances. The only instance I could see it being justifiable is if the planet was already near revolt against your empire.
How could you buy it from EB? I thought the retail release date was tomorrow?
wampyre, The choice between good graphics and good gameplay is not a binary one. I could just as easily say to you that flashy sprite graphics are not necessary and text representations are just fine. In other words, at some point a genre has to get up to current standards, and the standard now is 3D graphics. The space strategy genre has gotten small enough as it is; there's no reason to risk turning off a lot of potential gamers (except for the small number of hardcore fans) and subse
hmm, my apologies, the link didn't show up. I'm not sure how to do links with this forum software. Let's try it again: www.hegemonia.info
Mr.Lucky, Perhaps you haven't seen some of the more recent 3D games; I think you'll find that the realism level of polygonal objects has vastly increased over the past couple years. Case in point: Hegemonia, a recent space RTS, has spaceship units that look as good as the cutscenes in GalCiv, even though it does not slow down on a GeForce2. Check out their screenshot gallery:
Just wondering why it costs more to buy the game from Stardock and download it directly than it does to buy the full game with the box and printed manual from retailers? I would rather support Stardock directly without the middleman taking a cut, but not if the game will cost $10 more.
I think graphics are one of the major downfalls of the strategy genre. The developers of these games tend to target the widest audience possible because they think their potential market relative to the total number of gamers is very small. And to some extent, that is true -- a lot of gamers want instant gratification these days. But I think strategy game developers unintentionally keep their potential market small. By lowering their technical specs to archaic standards, they run a large risk o
Stardock Forums
Space dust, Thanks for the info. Is there a place where AARs from beta testers are located? I've found the AARs give me a much better feel for the play of the game than reading the user manual or the light-on-details overviews.
Stardock Forums
Okay, well when is the demo coming out then? I can't really get my brain around how this game plays by reading about production queues..
Stardock Forums
I'm not looking for another MOO. I'm a general space strategy fan, back since my days in the early '90s playing Spaceward Ho! on the Mac. To say that MOO and GalCiv have no more in common than "a space theme" is just not true. They are both space strategy games, and as such have many similar features, though the implementation of them may differ greatly. It is in this implementation where I feel it is useful to compare MOO3 and GC, for the people who have played MOO3 and are trying to see how GC
Stardock Forums
Lucky, For the people that were disappointed about MOO3 and looking for something different, don't you think comparing the two on their own merits in an unbiased way might provide a good way to see if it's worth the investment? Since there is no demo for this game, comments from people who have played both games seems to be the best way to find out. And is there no search function on this forum? There has got to be a wealth of information posted by the beta testers in the past.
I've been looking forward to this game, although it has only been on my radar for a few weeks so forgive me if I lack a lot of knowledge that the old-timers take for granted. One of the big reasons I've been interested is because of the AAR reports posted by the game designer on this site, which really gave a feel of the gameplay more than any of the feature listings or interviews could. In one of them, he described a situation where an empire's system was destabilized and broke off fro
GalCiv2 Forums