You know, as someone really into the immersion thing and who cares a lot generally about this kind of consistency, the GalCiv "week" long turn has never bugged me. Why don't you take a look at Civ4. A turn is anywhere from a hundred years to 1 year. And does it make ANY sense that a warrior can move like 1 "square" (however far that is, but we can assume it's less than 100 miles or so) in 100 years? No, it doesn't. That's because "turn" is a turn in these games and what arbitrary measure of real-time we choose to label it doesn't matter squat.

The game does move "fast" but I don't really notice the "real time." I guess Civ has just trained me not to care.

strangely enough I couldn't care less what the aliens think, I personally as a Human would like my time counted in a fashion that I can relate to.

All we are asking for is the option to do this, we don't need the dev's to mess up your game, nor does it seem likely to take up very much time to implement such a change.

I don't very much care if you want to argue a semantics with me or call the argument asinine, It's a game, I love it and I'd like it more in months or years.

I'm Sad, it's pointless but It would make me happy........

The "galactic week" approach is a complete cop-out. The calander is a Gregorian calander and the months are the one used on Earth. What nobody seems to have mentioned is that all tax-payers aren't human. When you conquer an alien world through culture, they don't become humans. There is galactic tourism (and immegration.emmigration it can be assumed) as well as radical advancements in healthcare that may (must) have eliminated childhood illness and death. Without starvation, the Earth would have quite a few more people than it currently does.

It is also reasonable to say that only 10 billion tax paying citizens on Earth would represent at least 50 billion humans (there are six billion people now extrapolated at a modest 1% for 225 years). A new galactic empire may not be supported by everyone at first, and a lot of the unknown people may move to new colonies on new worlds. As the empire grows, more people throw their weight behind it and bang! you have 500 billion tax paying citizens (not all humans of course).

Also, I believe population growth can be nerfed through xml if you don't agree with me.

A turn...is a Turn...is a TURN.

What he said.

A turn is anywhere from a hundred years to 1 year. And does it make ANY sense that a warrior can move like 1 "square" (however far that is, but we can assume it's less than 100 miles or so) in 100 years

And like he says, it's very unrealistic for a warrior to only be able to move one space every 100 years.
It's a game, games aren't completely realistic. Sometimes you should just not think so much about it. I mean, I know I don't stare at the date every turn to see what happens.

If it really bothers you that much, I hope you can find a way to just mod it in.

If the Devs officially change it, I bet there will be another group of people complaining about how stupid it is for a uber production planet to only be able to produce 1 scout a month when it can normally produce one battleship a month.

Then there's that whole can of worm about having more than one military project complete every turn.. that could be better for the game, I guess.

Just don't think it's that big of a deal.

There's no point in bringing up Civ on this topic. That game has to cram 4000 years into about 400 turns and has to at least attempt to make its tech levels match historical years.

GalCiv is set in a fictional galaxy hundreds of years into the future, and the measure of time can make internal sense without weird play balancing issues. You don't have to worry about ship travel making sense time-wise because there is no such thing as "hyperdrive" to say "no way it takes two months to travel 15 parsecs!"

The only thing GalCiv has to worry about is the passage of time making sense within the context of common sense and its own conventions. Having an "election year" every three months doesn't make sense internally (by its own conventions), and the epic span of the game would fit more comfortably into several decades or centuries than several years (by a common sense measure). Further, nothing within the game that feels okay in weeks (research, travel, fleet battles) suffers from the proposed change while many things that currently feel off (growth rates, invasions, UP and Senate election cycles, the aliens talking about centuries long history in sandbox games where you met four years ago) would be ameliorated.

-Foslex

PS. One exception I thought of... the lifespan of the Terran leader. Who's to say that any of the aliens wouldn't live for centuries? But a 5-10 year span of leadership of the human leader makes more sense than a 50-100 year one. I consider this point to be the inconsequential exception to the rule.

I said I wouldn’t post again but I have to post one last time.

I can’t believe weekly turns received even one post in support. I can’t believe people took the time to post and say “I can’t believe you people care about this?” (which is essentially the only argument the weekly turn supporters have mustered that is worth responding to).

The developers taking two minutes to change this or to provide players with a means to mod it is not going to reduce the quality of anyone’s future updates. The developers taking two minutes to post and say we think its reasonable for the population of an empire to grow 100x in the space of ten years also isn’t going to reduce the quality of an update (although it will greatly reduce my respect for them).

Internally, the game acts like the turns are at least one month. The election text is the best example of this, but not the only example. Galciv 1 used monthly turns. I thought they were too short considering the population growth. But at least you could make-believe a little.

One week turns might as well be one minute turns. It doesn’t make any sense. Building a battleship in weeks? Ascending to energy form in the space of 10-15 years? Building the infrastructure to not only colonize, but fully develop hundreds of planets in a decade?

People . . . its absurd! Its unbelievably absurd. Is this an issue that effects gameplay? No. But is it an issue that can effect people’s enjoyment? Yes.

There is absolutely no reason not to make this change. Will it get made? I doubt it. Having bought many Stardock games in the past, I certainly have my doubts. But it should be made and as soon as possible. Its odd to me that this survived Beta.

Depends on how easy the fix is.. I would say Months as well.

By the time of testing, production and upgrades to a weapons system take, even in full blown war.. it's months that make more sense then weeks.

I'd rather have other things tweaked first though.

I guess I never realized how important time was until now. Probably not realistic that I can play for a few days and destroy a dozen or so races. i probably should get a slower computer.

Brad posted on a different thread that you can change the unit of time pretty easily as a mod. I know nothing of modding and don't feel like starting today, but it's out there.

Which means... it'd be a cinch for Stardock to change it! Bard also said that he prefered weeks as a time unit when compared to years (I agree). He didn't explicitly talk about months one way or the other.

I hope that that's the kind of mod change we can make that will still be in place for Metaverse games.

I honestly don't think that a week is unresonable. The pace at which technology advances is pretty mind boggling already, so I think it makes snse that it will only get faster. For a planeraty battle, it is possible that everyone on the planet would be mustered to fight in a big battle because if they lose or don't fight, they all are killed by the invasion force (which is what happens in gameplay).

With new building materials and processes, building a state of the art battleship in two weeks makes sense. During WWII, American ports were building supply ships in a single day. Imagine what could be done with nanobots building the infrastructure of a planet. In under a year, all the nessecary infrastructure of an entire planet could be built with self replicating machines.

With faster than light travel, a coordinated strike could devestate an entire empire in the space of a day. If anything should be changed time wise, it should be to fit in with the week long turns (elections mostly).

Again with growth: many worlds have native populations. It makes sense that they would eventually start paying taxes to get benefits from their host empire. The way that the game seems to consider tax-payers is people who will fight for the empire anyways, and as I said before not everyone will support the empire. Since the empire doesn't really care about what is happening on a specific planet, they don't look for all the new taxpayers.

All that said, this would be easier if there were more (hidden most likely) statistics. There should be an actual population and a tax-paying population. I'm also not sure if the game engine keeps track of what races the population is comprised of.

Now if you want to continue to argue in favor of monthly turns, there are a lot of things to think about before you discount what is already in place.

Actually, one of my custom races is the Space Rabbits (I'm not joking), so the population growth fits really well with them.

Maybe one GALACTIC Week= A few months on Earth?