Well, now I think I have an inkling of why some of you lads take the Metaverse stuff so seriously. Nothing like data to help a wit cut all the more sharply p.s. Trying to be a good beta volunteer has made me think maybe I should bother with the Metaverse in future b/c it is good "citizenship" to give the devs data even if you could care less about something like a "score." Given the ludicrous n
Why not put a hard-cap on the amount of spies you can have. If the spy system stays on its current track, this might be a good notion, but I hope any hard-caps would be indexed to map settings. A cap of 10 might seem plenty to small-map players who only expect to manage a few colonies, but for those of us who end up with a hundred or more...
keep up with those in the reverse order It probably would help if you concentrated your questions on a smaller aspect of the game I'll second both these. "It's the economy, stupid" applies very mu
I am not sure I can even find a historical exmample that is even some similar to this situation Where would you put the Cold War in your schema? Wouldn't you describe that as a culture victory? Certainly today's Russian Federation is showing much the same vigor and malice as the US during our first Robber Baron period. Even Cuba is busily courtin
I'd rather watch TV like I play video games--when I want to. I so second that! But the rental subscription thing seems less hassle than buying and re-selling. The only visual texts I've owned are ones I taped myself back in the VHS dark ages. I'm all for the market moving to flex-time, but I'm never going to be into connecting directly t
playing "whack-a-mole" with spies just isnt all that fun. Choosing where your spies go and what they do however is. I basically agree with you here, but still think it might be worth considering an espionage module for ships. I'm advocating both the counter-espionage slider and a switch in how we micromanage our own saboteurs. A couple of hasty c
Kryo, gotta admire the sheer efficiency. In my workplace, we call that "leveraging old content," and you got a mighty big lift for one drag and two clicks!
Something a Civ-fan friend typed to me today has mixed with my random reading around here to make me wonder if we could both "save" the new spy units and mollify those folks who are frustrated by the micro stuff and just want a counter-espionage slider. The idea is to make DA spies more like spies in Civ, in that they are produced in one location and must use movement to get to another place and to their job. With units like that, we'd still get the interesting new gang-up-on-the-leader
Re culture-flipped mining bases, I scoff Wheel's scoff until such time as there is "flavor" text to evaluate. For example, if there are significant populations and no way to pull a Pinkerton on them, culture-flipping seems inevitable, not impossible. Big populations without some Pinkerton/Jesuit/Madison Ave option for maintaining central authority does seem odd, though. On the other hand, if the base is fully automated, the only "culture" variable is whether AIs are granted independence. <br
Feedback would be nice, but I'm confident we get read and I'm far more interested in seeing the results of dev time spent coding after reading here.
I've been learning the hard way that route-checking will always be necessary in some games, regarless of whether autopilot gets asteroid-awareness. If you have production worlds with the Yor between between them and your colony rally point(s), you'll need to manually go around if you want to use all your speed over 3.
Real spies are dedicated to gathering information Wheel's onto something here. Deep cover spies almost always focus on intel, but there are also saboteurs. Maybe the DA system needs to add that counter-espionage slider and then use something like the planetary build queues to create (optional) spy units that you can use for sabotage. I'm definite
Not all SF needs to make you think. Purge, I most certainly indulge in fiction for escapism, and if it is text it is pretty much always SF for me. But I said "strong" and "good" at top. I don't talk with friends about the fluff I suck down for various weird reasons. I *do* keep talking to this day about books, like Dune or Stranger in
So... Where do we disagree? Well, I admit I was mainly looking for a nice bout of word-wrasslin' on account of Wheel being both feisty and thoughtful . And we might not disagree at some level, given that you were <TABLE cellpadding=8 width="95%" a
In a beta report thread, Wheeloffire says: "Science fiction isn't about the future. It's about now." I most unhumbly disagree: it's about both , and more. While I very much enjoy the "realism" in most any sort of fiction, what sets SF apart is that the good stuff makes you think *beyond* the here and now. Sometimes that means hardware stuff that sets engineers to scheming, and other times it is "soft" stuff that sets folks to imagining themselves or their societies with fundamenta
To my non-coder's eyes, AsteroidFieldMiningBaseModules.xml suggests some inclination to making asteroids work like the candy-colored resource mines. If the plan was to have different asteroids valid for only one of the paths in that XML file, I hope there's still a chance for implementation. But I have a completely different asteroid-related question: will the autopilot code be taught how to drive around asteroids when a ship has enough movement points to make the detour clearly worthwi
GalCiv2 Forums
Looks like Mumble takes the "big stick" part of the old "speak softly and carry..." thing *very* seriously Wheel, did you do the beta this round? I'm really hoping to see some gigantic-map input from you old hands. Mumble definitely keeps me thinking, but you've poked the occasional thinking spot for me also, and I'm hoping smarter-than-me people might be able to help Stardock strengthen the GCI
This % for military bases thing stuck in my head. The scalablility aspect made me warm to it initially, but I can see how it could/should be fixed in "narrative" terms. If the starbases lay down covering fire and project defensive fields and drones, then the specs of the ship getting the assist are moot, other than needing the basic receiver unit, an attack or defense module in this case.
Mumble, you seem pretty obssessed with scalability for a hardware guy Seriously, though, you've pointed out yet another thing I'd only half-consciously considered even though I've built military bases in several of my past games. Even though I like the gigantic maps too, I've never had as many as 16. I tend to use them to reinforce a chokepoint in an early game or as a mother hen for the areas whe
Stardock should give you a job mumble. They gave him a title, and those are steadily greater parts of compensation packages here in the US--think of him as part-time with pay based purely in this New Economy stuff Seriously, though, I think Mumbl
Still holding out for the option to disable Spies I'm a big fan of options in general, but this seems tricky, at least if you still want some sort of intel on the AIs. Do really want a disable for all espionage, or something more like a switch between DL-mode and DA-mode?
so say an opponent has 4 agents not placed, well in about 10 turns, those 4 spies have knocked you intelligence level down one notch This seems a plausible way to add the "passive" layer discussed elsewhere w/o adding complication to the UI.
tell the offending opponent to prepare for war (strong military) or "please stop sending spies if you don`t mind" . I really like this notion, but have doubts about seeing it in DA b/c the diplo system still lacks similar functions. We cannot do any real saber-rattling, and sucking-up is limited to gifts with no nuances like "Here's something b/c
The spies seem to be getting a lot of attention from us layfolks and the relative quiet from Stardock dev makes me suspect we'll see some significant changes in the next beta build. From what I've noticed in Brad's remarks, I'm pretty sure that whatever else happens, the units will be more expensive & therefore rarer.
launch all ships without setting a rally point destination by pressing the green arrow This only launches ships built in the current turn, which is good if you keep some ships in orbit but can be tricky if you try to keep everything offworld and occasionally miss some ships.