| I understand the exploiting issues with this. My question is why is it coded this way in the first place (it was identical in GalCiv 1 and I was hoping it would be addressed in part II). There's a lot that could be done here. |
Given that I have none of the answers to this because I dont work for Stardock and only saw them once or twice comment on this topic, I can't really give you a satisfactory reasoning why or why not. I will, of course, try!
| 1) Why is this not considered an evil act that moves your Civ toward evil? It's every bit as bad as any of the moral situations you answer during the game. This could be another one. This would give evil civ's a slight advantage to using this since they are already evil. |
This could get very very complicated. If a Saintly civ nukes a Demonic civ.... is that an evil act? Actually, they are probably doing the Universe a favour from their own terms. Looking at RPG's and seeing the different categories of Good alignment, there are plenty of examples as to why Good races can bring utter destruction onto Evil ones.
| 2) Why under voting gov'ts isn't this put to a senate vote like going to war since true democracies would likely NOT want to vote to wreak planetwide havoc on a future colony given that no matter what you think about 'insert alien race here' your also in effect killing plants, animals etc. |
That would be second guessing your action. Perhaps I dont want to colonise it.... perhaps I just want to nuke it down to remove the potential for Evil to spread. I used this tactic a lot with the Drengin when I was taking a beating from the Altarians - and again against the Dreadlords in the campaign. Use the dirtiest invasion tactics possible, take the colony, strip it then destroy it. A slash and burn type scenario. Being Good does not necessarily mean that your race cares for galactic bio-diversity.... being good could imply that you would do anything to better the position of your people.
| 3) As a penalty for using this, why not impose a slight overall morale penalty (cumulative with multiple use) on your whole civ (more for good, less for evil) for this kind of warfare. The morale penalty would gradually fade over several turns. Doesn't have to be a HUGE penalty but anything fixes this hosey issue of using it as it stands now. |
And this is where we move into the realms of divergence of opinions. We are a fairly empowered customer in this game - Stardock will listen to points and consider them and do something if they agree. However, everyone of us has their own idea about what would make this game better. We all have our "this is the single, most important thing to change".... if all player ideas were implemented, Stardock would have a total nightmare in rebalancing the game around them and the game would be far less themed as the disparity of different ideas would make it a bit of a mess. My argument to this would be.... why would my Good aligned people lose morale due to my utter destruction of an outpost of evil? Surely they'd be partying in the streets, they'd be more satisfied with their security and their morale would be high because it would be a sign that Good was winning.
| 4) Also in the diplomatic realm other races should take notice of who's using this and who's not and possibly act accordingly (send a warning not to use it again, a short term trade embargo etc) if they are good/neutral/evil. |
Basically the same as above. If another Good aligned race saw my Good race bring utter destruction to the ancient evils of a third race..... they should be sending me gifts not penalising me!!
| All these things could easily go into a patch and not require major gameplay changes (ie no new menu's and things like that) and would get rid of what's there now which is more or less a joke and by far the weakest thing in the game (invasions in general including lack of ability to bombard as noted by another poster) IMHO . |
As I mentioned above - there are so many player ideas that could just get coded, balanced, tested and implemented in the next patch.... but it's really not as easy as you make out there. They have undoubtedly got lists of things to be addressed. These things need to go through balance testing, play testing (make sure its fun) and then released. If everyone expected their good idea to go in, it would be a complete mess and totally untenable for Stardock. Beyond that, that which is a good idea to one person is not necessarily a good idea to the next.
Now, don't get me wrong.... from a gameplay perspective I agree with you that this is a horribly powerful tactic and it could be reworked to some degree. I don't particularly favour any of the ways you suggest to deal with it though..... none of them "make sense" from my perspective. With a lot of these things, where it's clearly not a bug but a design choice, that we just dont like, the best suggestion is probably to say that for now, just don't use anything you think is an exploit. It's not a perfect answer no, but if it so greatly imbalances your game as to make it an exploit, then just choose not to use that exploit.
