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GalCiv II: v1.1 preview

Frogboy

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GalCiv II: v1.1 preview

Here's what's in store..

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords v1.1 is in development. We've got a lot of new features planned. The list below is by no means comprehensive. It's just some of the things we're focusing on:

The ability to set a given planet as a technology, research, ship building or balanced planet, . NOT like the overall focus. It would literally add a 9% boost to a given type (or 3%, 3%, 3%).
Color coded the hammers/etc. based on whether they are bonus or not. Then on mouse over, which by then should be very nice, we can display where these numbers come from.
On game setup, have an option to simply set up how many players you want to play against and have it randomly pick who you’re playing with.
On game setup, have a checkbox that says "Randomize intelligence". The result would be that the game difficulty would be used to distribute the intelligence points. Example: I could select "Tough" and then have this checkbox selected and it would look at the # of players and the total number of intelligent points it takes to have tough and then distribute it out so that some are smarter than others (up to a 30% difference between intelligences).
Lots of tweaks to the context window UIs which we’ll be discussing how best to do it.
Fleet Manager screen.
An option to show auto pilot ships destinations on map with a very very faint line (dotted preferably if possible) where they are going. Ala the trade routes.
When selecting a constructor, have a very very faint circle that shows the area of effect a starbase would have.
MAJORLY updated AI (not to make it tougher, to make it smarter at higher levels and dumber -- i.e. poor strategies -- at lower levels)
Additional ship extras for more ship options
Bug fixes of various kinds
Approval Rating > 75% gives you a 5% boost to production. Approval rating < 40% has a -5% affect on production. Players won't be charged for this bonus production.
Ability to rotate ship components in the Ship Designer
Dynamic logo components - brand your ships with your insignia
Enhanced context menus for managing stacked ships and fleets
Starbase modules pruned/tweaked
Unused Social Spending routed to military spending (or back to treasury if nothing is being used)
New ship components
UI for selecting MODS/Total Conversions
Updated Scoring System
No Tech Trading option
New maps and scenarios
Various tweaks to economics, costs, etc.

Update: Free-form ship component rotation and resizing after being placed added. Very cool in action!

We expect to have this out by the end of the month. It'll be free for all customers of Galactic Civilizations II -- now at a store near you.

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Ex Mudder

Join Date 11/2002

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Great ideas. A few requests:

Can we have the minor races back? I'm playing on a huge map with all 9 major races, and there isn't even one minor race. I prefer 4 - 6 is excessive, 1 or 2 is too little.

Fix tech whoring by implementing blueprints - you can only trade away blueprints to techs you know, and having a blueprint doubles research speed on that tech. Add icon and cut research time in half in research window to indicate you have one.

Is there any reason you can't make approval boni being a sliding scale, instead of fixed break points? Having pop growth tied to approval - 0% at 40%, neg below, 100% at 80% approval, 120% at 100% approval ((approval-40)x2)? Similar with produciton bonus / malus - -1% per 1% under 40%, + 1% per 2% above 80 (max +10% production at 100% approval).

And a big "yay!" for color coded hammers and associate tooltips.

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Please, Please, Please, Fix the Main Window Scroll work when you push the Mouse into the corners of the screen.

Also, please consider making the Arrow Keys so they can be remapped for window movement.

I agree. It would be nice if they'd fix this. The other changes sound wonderful. Thanks for working to make this an even better game!

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This is what my friend said about this update: "If StarDock ran SWG? I'd drop everything and go back there instantly." And he HATES what SWG has become.

Anyway, I think this is freaking awesome. I most excited about the AI and the Logo-on-ships parts. Especially the latter part. I thought for a while that might be in release, but it wasn't. Didn't care -- Ship Design is awesome regardless. But still, I'm very happy you have this planned.

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Speaking of "drag and scroll main window", I was playing Rise of Nations, and I got frustrated that "drag and scroll" wasn't working! It took me a few minutes to figure out why not.

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Thanks for your great efforts to make a great product even better. I do not regret a penny of what I spent on GalCiv.

For future revisions... for those of us who *do* chose to include tech trading, a mousover or something in the diplomacy window that gives the relative value of the techs being traded.

I second this suggestion.

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I hope one of the bug fixes is the custom race loading system. That's the biggest error in the game...

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It'll be free for all customers of Galactic Civilizations II

What! You mean if I do not have your game I cant have the update for it? You guys suck .

EDIT is it done yet?

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Woah, this is nice. Very nice. Takes care of nearly all the things people have been whining about! Good job, S. I especially like the updated AI, since it's not perfect, the randomized oponents, and the constructor radius. This is really great!

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I haven't seen a lot of people mention this but one change I would like to see is some sort of visual cue when a starbase is upgradable or becomes upgradable due to new tech. Something like the hammer on the planets would be fine.

It just seems like it would be soooo easy. If it would be hard tell me and I will not mention it again.

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Will the Good, Nuetral, Evil Ethnic techs be finished? Well mostly Nuetral and Good as it seems that those are missing quite alot compared to the Evil Ethnic Side.

This is a very fun typo. I wonder which ethnical groups are evil? I vote the northern torians. They're sketchy.

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And he HATES what SWG has become.

You mean an MMOFPS? Played it for a year since the day it came out (or rather the day after because of the problem that players couldn't create an account). Had to stop due to uncontrollable circustances. Downloaded the trial of the new junk. It ran horrible even though my PC has been majorly upgraded, and the gameplay was terrible. It's not the same game at all, like they took it back to concept and recoded from scratch.

Anyway, GalCiv2 is awesome! Keep up the great work Stardock

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Brad Said: That's coming. Just not in 1.1.

WOHOOOOOO! God Love Ya Stardock! The Races of MOO2 shall breathe and fight again!!!!!!

Now I just have to figure out what MOO2 races will be Good/Evil and Neutral!

Dano

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On the shipyard, I wanted to be able to upgrade a ship to a design that already exists, rather than having to make a new design whenever I want to upgrade a ship.

In GC1, you could select the AI alignment tendencies before the game. What happened to this feature in GC2? (In GC1, I always kind of found it amusing to play in an all-good galaxy. It made it kind of easier to play against the tougher AIs if everyone was good.)

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WOW. More evidence to the whiners that Stardock really listens. A lot of the improvements were suggested in this very forum:

# On game setup, have an option to simply set up how many players you want to play against and have it randomly pick who you’re playing with.
# On game setup, have a checkbox that says "Randomize intelligence". The result would be that the game difficulty would be used to distribute the intelligence points. Example: I could select "Tough" and then have this checkbox selected and it would look at the # of players and the total number of intelligent points it takes to have tough and then distribute it out so that some are smarter than others (up to a 30% difference between intelligences).
# When selecting a constructor, have a very very faint circle that shows the area of effect a starbase would have.
# Unused Social Spending routed to military spending (or back to treasury if nothing is being used)

Awesome. I'm also very excited about being able to brand insignias on ships. The custom ship design freaks will go nuts over it.

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I love this game, and have only found a few little grypes. I love the company because of how honest they come off. I just wanted to add something that would make the game really realistic, and that is to be able to select an attitude when speaking to another civ. I would like to have to option when asking for something, to use a sarcastic tone and make them mad or to ask polite to add just the right touch. I think that it would be great. I dont like it when you are stuck in a ally situation and it would be great to cop and attitude with the civ if they do something that you think is bad, or praise them for doing a nice thing and have minor changes to your standing from just speaking to another civ. many thanks guys for a great game

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WOW. More evidence to the whiners that Stardock really listens. A lot of the improvements were suggested in this very forum:

# On game setup, have an option to simply set up how many players you want to play against and have it randomly pick who you’re playing with.
# On game setup, have a checkbox that says "Randomize intelligence". The result would be that the game difficulty would be used to distribute the intelligence points. Example: I could select "Tough" and then have this checkbox selected and it would look at the # of players and the total number of intelligent points it takes to have tough and then distribute it out so that some are smarter than others (up to a 30% difference between intelligences).
# When selecting a constructor, have a very very faint circle that shows the area of effect a starbase would have.
# Unused Social Spending routed to military spending (or back to treasury if nothing is being used)

Awesome. I'm also very excited about being able to brand insignias on ships. The custom ship design freaks will go nuts over it.

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more feature suggestions... for whatever version they might come out

* configurable autosave - can elect to save every turn, every other turn, or whatnot. losing 4 hours (but only 6 turns, so no autosave) is not fun
* upgrade / destroy options for a fleet. as it is now i can either upgrade all ships of the same class, or i have to spread them out and upgrade individually (while upgrading they can not be in a fleet. same tedium if i want to destroy an unused fleet
* explain how the various bonuses are calculated. many of my planets have varying moral base bonuses (basic ability, it says, but it varies between 15-54%). in fact, explanation on how all the numbers are calculated are good: moral reduction as linked to population, how do you calculate the moral bonuses from buildings - sorry they never add up)
* make the tech tree and actual improvements match, or make more sense
- intensive farming has the same amount of food production as advanced farming
- advanced farming should give moral bonus as explained in tech tree (when you finish researchin it), but it does not show up in the actual building
- VR center has less moral bonus than zero G statium
* SOME kind of limit on number of ships stackable in a same square. sometimes I can see upwards of 30 ships stacked there.
* better rally point interface. (148,239) has no meaning because such coordinate system is hardly ever used anywhere else in the game - maybe display the coordinates on the minimap or main map?
* able to rally to another planet / starbase instead of a rally point: it's possible to put a rally point on a starbase, but then when you click the square you can not select if you want the starbase window or the rally point window.
* ability to disable backgrounds in the main window. it's pretty but when there is a big white patchy nebula right behind everything (sometimes) it's almost impossible to see anything (p.s. i love the 3D star background and how it shows parallax as you pan. awsome)
* the planet view on the planet management screen regenerates a different cloud patter on every click - is this necessary?
* ability to move ships onto a square currently occupied by a tradeship, without attacking it (the tradeship can move onto my ship's square, but not vice-versa)
* ability to re-arrange fleet order. the computer always targets the "topmost ship" in the fleet - i am assuming this has to do with how the fleet array is sorted, maybe by ship's unique ID? or improve AI so that computers can pick what ship to attack despite it is not on the top of the list.
* related to above, some control in the attack order would be nice - even if not per-ship management, general settings like "attack weakest first" or "attack transports first" or "attack ships with highest attack power first" would be really nice.
* ability to have a stardock upgrade ships instead of using money only.
* BUG WITH SENSOR RANGE SET TO 15 - PLEASE FIX ASAP
* AI to actually start putting engines on their designs
* some starbase module to increase *economy* - the economy starbase increases production and trade, but does not, for example, get you more $$ from a planet with lots of people, as stockmarkets does
* shipyard ship management: please make such designs loadable. for one thing "obselete" button has no confirmation. and sometimes ship designs are lost because of reload / crash (see below)
* if you save the game, make a ship design, and then reload the game (sorry the precise steps i forgot), the ship is not available and if you make anothership with the same name, the game crashes altogether.
* compress save-files? now they are about 11MB each but winzip compresses them down to less than 1M. The files are not text / xml so having them uncompressed does nothing for the user
* better visual indication of other races. for example, if at war, outline their icon (for the planets) in red so you have a good tactical feeling of where their planets, starbases, etc are. as of now if you are unlucky enough to pick a color similar to one of the races, you will squint forever figuring out where to arrange your fleets
* AI to actually use ships you give them - or even if they don't, at least get them out of my territory when i give it to them.
* some easier way to give / sell ships away, if giving / selling ships becomes more useful - scrolling through the tiny trade window is a pain especially all of them are named the same. on the doubleclick ship detail screen would be nice
* easier ship management. all ship / colony list (left most button on the bottom of screen) should have option to list ships individually or list as a fleet
* explain clearer how the revolt thing works - does it happen after a specific number of turns, or is it random? it is difficult to conquer planets culturally because it is very difficult to access when they "flip"

ok, that's all i can think of now.

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more feature suggestions... for whatever version they might come out

* configurable autosave - can elect to save every turn, every other turn, or whatnot. losing 4 hours (but only 6 turns, so no autosave) is not fun
* upgrade / destroy options for a fleet. as it is now i can either upgrade all ships of the same class, or i have to spread them out and upgrade individually (while upgrading they can not be in a fleet. same tedium if i want to destroy an unused fleet
* explain how the various bonuses are calculated. many of my planets have varying moral base bonuses (basic ability, it says, but it varies between 15-54%). in fact, explanation on how all the numbers are calculated are good: moral reduction as linked to population, how do you calculate the moral bonuses from buildings - sorry they never add up)
* make the tech tree and actual improvements match, or make more sense
- intensive farming has the same amount of food production as advanced farming
- advanced farming should give moral bonus as explained in tech tree (when you finish researchin it), but it does not show up in the actual building
- VR center has less moral bonus than zero G statium
* SOME kind of limit on number of ships stackable in a same square. sometimes I can see upwards of 30 ships stacked there.
* better rally point interface. (148,239) has no meaning because such coordinate system is hardly ever used anywhere else in the game - maybe display the coordinates on the minimap or main map?
* able to rally to another planet / starbase instead of a rally point: it's possible to put a rally point on a starbase, but then when you click the square you can not select if you want the starbase window or the rally point window.
* ability to disable backgrounds in the main window. it's pretty but when there is a big white patchy nebula right behind everything (sometimes) it's almost impossible to see anything (p.s. i love the 3D star background and how it shows parallax as you pan. awsome)
* the planet view on the planet management screen regenerates a different cloud patter on every click - is this necessary?
* ability to move ships onto a square currently occupied by a tradeship, without attacking it (the tradeship can move onto my ship's square, but not vice-versa)
* ability to re-arrange fleet order. the computer always targets the "topmost ship" in the fleet - i am assuming this has to do with how the fleet array is sorted, maybe by ship's unique ID? or improve AI so that computers can pick what ship to attack despite it is not on the top of the list.
* related to above, some control in the attack order would be nice - even if not per-ship management, general settings like "attack weakest first" or "attack transports first" or "attack ships with highest attack power first" would be really nice.
* ability to have a stardock upgrade ships instead of using money only.
* BUG WITH SENSOR RANGE SET TO 15 - PLEASE FIX ASAP
* AI to actually start putting engines on their designs
* some starbase module to increase *economy* - the economy starbase increases production and trade, but does not, for example, get you more $$ from a planet with lots of people, as stockmarkets does
* shipyard ship management: please make such designs loadable. for one thing "obselete" button has no confirmation. and sometimes ship designs are lost because of reload / crash (see below)
* if you save the game, make a ship design, and then reload the game (sorry the precise steps i forgot), the ship is not available and if you make anothership with the same name, the game crashes altogether.
* compress save-files? now they are about 11MB each but winzip compresses them down to less than 1M. The files are not text / xml so having them uncompressed does nothing for the user
* better visual indication of other races. for example, if at war, outline their icon (for the planets) in red so you have a good tactical feeling of where their planets, starbases, etc are. as of now if you are unlucky enough to pick a color similar to one of the races, you will squint forever figuring out where to arrange your fleets
* AI to actually use ships you give them - or even if they don't, at least get them out of my territory when i give it to them.
* some easier way to give / sell ships away, if giving / selling ships becomes more useful - scrolling through the tiny trade window is a pain especially all of them are named the same. on the doubleclick ship detail screen would be nice
* easier ship management. all ship / colony list (left most button on the bottom of screen) should have option to list ships individually or list as a fleet
* explain clearer how the revolt thing works - does it happen after a specific number of turns, or is it random? it is difficult to conquer planets culturally because it is very difficult to access when they "flip"

ok, that's all i can think of now.

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* configurable autosave - can elect to save every turn, every other turn, or whatnot. losing 4 hours (but only 6 turns, so no autosave) is not fun

This is already in the game in the options menu, its a slider.

* BUG WITH SENSOR RANGE SET TO 15 - PLEASE FIX ASAP

This is not a bug, its to limit sensor ships from being overpowered. When this wasn't in place one sensor ship could expose almost the entire map.

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WOW. More evidence to the whiners that Stardock really listens. A lot of the improvements were suggested in this very forum:

# On game setup, have an option to simply set up how many players you want to play against and have it randomly pick who you’re playing with.
# On game setup, have a checkbox that says "Randomize intelligence". The result would be that the game difficulty would be used to distribute the intelligence points. Example: I could select "Tough" and then have this checkbox selected and it would look at the # of players and the total number of intelligent points it takes to have tough and then distribute it out so that some are smarter than others (up to a 30% difference between intelligences).
# When selecting a constructor, have a very very faint circle that shows the area of effect a starbase would have.
# Unused Social Spending routed to military spending (or back to treasury if nothing is being used)

Awesome. I'm also very excited about being able to brand insignias on ships. The custom ship design freaks will go nuts over it.

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Brad, any news on the "4 starbases per sector rule"? Is this one coming with 1.1?

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This is already in the game in the options menu, its a slider.

my bad on the autosave. i kept looking for it and kept missing it. found it now

also sorry guys for posting twice. the two comments do not show up under "my posts" so i had no idea it registered. - and i can't edit it to remove it because of the same problem. doh!

This is not a bug, its to limit sensor ships from being overpowered. When this wasn't in place one sensor ship could expose almost the entire map.

I don't see how this is possible? with maximum technology the huge hull can only get you about a range of 30 spaces: that's roughly radius of 2 sectors, or an area of about 12 sectors - on the lage map (16x16 sectors) it's not even 5% of the map. At least make this an option. As i have posted in another place, my tradeships and constructors can go 50 spaces, but only gets to see 15 spaces in front?

On that note, AI does not seem to handle very well this high-speed hit and retreat stratedy I use. they just sit there, stack ships into one square, and twiddle their thumbs. whereas my fleet goes in and pick off some units and run out of their range - i don't even need defenses on the ships, a high attack power just kills anything they throw at me on the first round (if i am attacking) and these ships get to like level 50 and have absolutely MASSIVE HP (some medium hulls got to 200 - from 16! wtf?)

hmm... i just thought of two other things that might be considered improvements / enhancement requests
* when canceling a social project already underway, the credits just disappear instead of going toward the bank or at least temporarily saved in case I clicked the "cancel" in error
* auto-upgrade cancels current upgrades: for example i am upgrading a xeno farm to an entertainment center, but when advanced farm is researched, the upgrade currently scheduled automatically cancels / changes to "upgrade to advanced farm."

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This is not a bug, its to limit sensor ships from being overpowered. When this wasn't in place one sensor ship could expose almost the entire map.

Actually that wasn't the reason. From the 1.0D1 patch notes Link:

+ Sensor range capped at 15 tiles. Significant performance issues if it gets much bigger than that (> 1 sector)

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This was GREAT NEWS! Keep up the good work. Stardock should have all the credits for listening to its customers and taken account several suggestions in the upcoming patch that have been described by users.

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For example add city lights a

Well, there is already city lights

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