what i would like to see in 1.2 » Forum Post by lord of ruin

First off, I love GalCiv 2. I'm more of an FPS to an RTS gamer, however GC2 has really changed my prespective on strategy games. I never knew it could be so fun to trade, build and expand an empire. Here are some suggestions of mines that could be considered for future realeses.

I like alot of the above suggestions. Including

-The ability to build older tech buildings
-Starbase Movement, this way we could create a "DeathStar" that could litteraly blow up planets
-Improvements on minor races. I think a race should be considered minor in terms of how many plaents they own. Minor races should virtually be able to become superpowers among the universe.
-New and more portraits on Minor Races, as well as new names instead of just the Dark Yor and Scottilings

-I also like the ability to create a certain alliance. However, let me extend on that. How about creating certain organizations with certain terms. An example.

"The Good Guys Alliance"
-Must be ethically "light side"
-Must have established trade routes with respective members of the organization
-Must have researched into Xeno Ethics
-If one member declares war on another nation, you must support the member.

If for whatever reason a civiliazation violates the terms, the other nations can choose to vote them out. A nation can also request membership, and the current members would have to vote them in. You can also send invitations to civilzations as well.

-With United Planets, I want to be able to discuss [b]multiple issues, not just one. You can propose your own issues as well as other nations. For instance you can ask the council to intiate a trade embargo on a certain nation. However, you must state a reason why. You can also choose not to comply with certain laws as well. However, nations may very well act against you with trade embargos, espionage etc.

- Carriers
I don't know. Maybe I haven't gotten far enough into my own game yet. But are there carrier type modules in game? If not, it would be a neat addition. Basically you reaserch into the Galactic Warfare or Xeno Engineering branches. Once you've researched far enough you get to have this space craft module. Basically it allows for a large to massive size hull to carrier small to tiny hull types. This could help when you don't fell like equiping your smaller fighters with fast engines. Virtually, whatever features the smaller hull have will build on to the carrier's stats. You can also select the carrier and deselect the smaller hulls seperatly for your own purposes.

- Advisors
How about with certain forms of governments, you can have these advisors that bring up important subjects. For instance you can have a military advisor, finacial/economic advisor, habitat advisor, etc. You can schedule important meetings with your advisors from weeks to years. Advisors can also bring important subjects to your attention every now and then. So if a player is focusing too much on Industry, but not enough on research, a technological advisor will ask that you construct more research buildings and increase spending into research. You get the picture right? Each race can come with their own advisors, each with their own animated portrait that shows up like they do with trade and united planets. They can be turned on and off as well, in case the player doesn't want advisors.

- Enhanced Ground/Space combat
Perhaps in the far future, you guys can make ground combat just as fun as space combat. For instance, the ability to design troop armor and vehicles. You would be able to design your own tanks to artillery. Also, how about instead of just one battle which seems to all happen in one turn or one week; we could prolong the battles. This way, you can be invading a planet for a matter of months, or even years if its heavily defended. Reinforcements can be sent to the battle, and the invading forces can also retreat as well. This option to "prolong" invasions can be turned on and off.

- High Tech Terraforming
How about having the ability to virtually make every single tile on a planet useable. As well as being able to make uninhabitable worlds; habitable. By extending research into the planetary improvements branch, you can virtually use every planet to its max potential.

- Mining Planets
Perhaps every planet contains there own raw elements that could be used to advace in technology. Basically, if your mining a certain metal resource/element, you can create stronger hull types, thus making for higher hit points on the ships. With certain fuel resources, you can extend the range on your ships as well. Be creative with it too.

-Playing against your own custom races
I don't know if its possible, but I always wanted to play against some of my own races. I think the main issue is AI correct? Perhaps we can customize our own races AI. In terms of what they focus on, their general ethical alignment etc.

-Last but not least, the ability for the head of a civilization to change over time. More than likely, people will die eventually (Lifespan can vary with certain races). This is mainly targeted at opposing races. Basically, for whatever reason the leader may die, give up his/her postion, a new leader will take his/her place. A change in leadership can vary too. For instance, with enough espionage you were able to assainate Lord Kona of the Drengins. However, perhaps his young prodigy takes the throne, who may even be worse than Kona himself. Or perhaps the Terran Alliance adopts a Republic/Federation. Alan's term is up, and a new leader is voted into power. The AI can dramtically change from leadership changes as well. Leaders can also try to hold their power with "corruption" funds. By systematically fixing their own elections, killing off poltical rivals or simply spending money on protection to keep enemy races from trying to assainate your leader. You get the general picture though right?

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I LOVE my ship designs...
...I HATE having to obsolete the core designs every game (clutters my shipyard build box!) so...

1) Can we have a way to add/remove the default ship designs that appear as soon as you have all the required techs? Ideally I'd have zero such ships, forcing me to tailor make new ships every game

2) ...oops, beta 2 is downloaded... can't offer more suggestions... have to go play!!!

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Hi!

The ability to train spies as in MOO 3 and have them do specific jobs was a cool idea. The espionage in this game is a little too little.

I see a big potential for complaints here. On higher AI levels they get bonuses, NOT only in economy. In my current masochistic game they have more than 100% bonus on production. But even if they produce HUGE fleets, need those fleets to travel through lots of space to get to my planets. OTOH spies don't need that, they're alrady there. And I'm not ready to fight 100+ spies one ultra-bonused AI planted in just a few turns into my empire to wreak havoc. I had enough of that in MoO2 where I've been on constant espionage war with other races, that were unable to break me militarily. I wouldn't like this would repeat here.
BR, Iztok

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I especially second requests for more in-depth-diplomacy options (e.g. being able to threaten with declaration of war if not certain conditions are met ... maybe continuous payment of a small tribute, or an ultimatum to remove military units from your sector) and UP improvements. Proposing custom Bills and not only meeting once a year, exactly as Baron Vladimir suggested, are things i'd love to see.

Another thing -if not to be implemented in 1.1- are some UI-improvements... For example Sorting-options (e.g. those in the colonies/ships-overwiev) would be nicer to handle, if they got a dropdown to pick how things get sorted instead of clicking those arrows multiple times. Also the Ship-Design Manager, as it was suggested here, is a good idea.

Stargates to quickly move ships from colony to colony or stable wormholes (maybe collapsing after a random number of rounds and saying this 5 rounds before this happens or so ... or with the ability to "seal" them) - Maybe a Stargate-Module for Starbases... Transfering Ships with stargates, however, should take bc ... Depending on how much you spend, the faster it is... The size of the ship shold also have an impact - for example you could transfer a small ship for 400bc, having it at the destination the next turn or spend 100 to have it there 3 turns later (instead of moving it there in 8 turns or so...) - to transfer a capital ship in one turn you need to pay 1300 and so on... The numbers are just for example now... sure this needs balancing... it would require a new tech anyway, which could then -at higher levels- lower the price. (Reason? Uhm... dunno... Maybe there are those shiny and pretty expensive crystals needed for the stargates to work and unfortunately get wasted during the process - if you want it faster or more matter to be transfered, you need more of them...)

What else... Unusable planets should get involved somehow... not saying you should be able to colonize them in a normal way...

so far..

Anyway ... I'm looking forward to any enhancements made to this already great game... (btw: I purchased TES IV: Oblivion days before GalCiv 2 and while most friends play Oblivion now, I stick to GalCiv 2

)

Thanks to stardock and all who are interested in making the game even better

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Tactical Combat gets my vote for 1.2.

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New ship Modules would be nice:

Reverse Engineering Lab- if a ship has one of these when it is in a fight you get a random amount of percentage reserached on the enemy's defensive and attacking technologies, and maybe also the defense for their attack (only the most basic form, shields for plasma where as deflectors for laser). No more than 50% research can be accumulated this way (it's only a starting point). However, this would allow you to begin researching this tech even if it is way up the research branch, though there should probably be some "exposure" threshold (see it enough to start figuring out how it works, can't research right away). (Dread Lord Positronic Torp II anyone?) If the ship is desstroyed you get .1 of the research value you would have gotten because you still got a databurst but not an all-inclusive one. More labs = more research.

Jammer- Used mostly to combat the reverse engineering lab. Makes the percentage acheived by the enemy race much less.

Salvager- when ships are destroyed in battle any leftover ships with salvage modules take the ships and sell them for scrap. Money received is based on how many modules are on how much of the fleet, and each hull size has a base "sell" amount that is modified by all components on it and what I said last sentence.

I agree with almost everything else everyone else said as well.

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Tactical Combat gets my vote for 1.2.

Now alot of people may be against this. But programming wise it would not be that difficult if they use the free camera mode since it already allows you to grab the screen and ships in it.

My vote is (to make it simple) to change free roam camera mode into a tactical combat mode.

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Cloaking Device module it would be an a extenstion of sensors in the tech tree

Stellar Cartography-------Sensors------Snesors Mark II
\
\
\------ Cloaking Device ------ Cloaking Deive Mark II

Would be really fun for suprize attacks

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Cloaking Devices? cool...
...I hate this in other games because if/when the computer uses it I'll scream "filthy (explative deleted) cheating computer!!!"
but with Gal Civ 2, I could relax and enjoy being pummeled, safe in the knowlage that it was no ones fault but my own.

Tactical Combat would be a dream (probably not in 1.2)... and would likely be easiest if implemented along the lines of birth of the federation (general orders carried out by the fleet), as opposed to 100% control over each of your ship's tactical behavior.

New ideas:

How about jewlery that looks the same as component models (to help with my symmatry w/o using up all the ship's space on colony modules )

or perhaps a "symmatry button" for ship design. You design one side and it automatically applies the same additions to the other side.

How about more selection of colors from the dot of "light" piece of jewlery.

And the big one: (not gonna happen in 1.2, but maybe an expansion)
I sure would like to play as a "pirate" some day. Perhaps have a "secret" "homeworld" on an otherwise uninhabitable planet off in the boondocks somewhere. The PQ would be trash, but then, the plan wouldn't be about conquering the universe, it would be about slowly amassing a raiding force to sneak in, ambush freighters on trade routes (to supply my income/tech) and slipping out unnoticed to bring the supplies back to the base.
The ultimate goal??
WEALTH!
HAVOC!
INFAMY!!!
I'd love to dial up a neighbor and threaten him with heightened raiding... unless of course, he were to pay me a hefty fee perhaps? Because I could always... in theory... raid an opposing faction of his... if, of course, I were provided some *AHEM* "incentive"?

Sure, eventually I'd become such a nuisance that some vast military would seek me out, chase me down and hang me...
...but what great pirate dies from old age??

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I have to agree with instead of a moon auto maticaly giving you a bonus to production you should be able to chose what kind of moonbase is on it (bonus to reseach, production, or planitary defense)
also would love to see an ablity to Teraform an entire planet. I am thinking it could be an atachment to a ship ( one per ship) make any planet into an empty planet of class X where X is your tech level. The new techs could branch off the current teraforming tech and allow for example a class 5 planet first level and for a final level a class 20 planet. Clearly doing that to a planet already populated by any race even your own is an evil act since it kills all current buildings and life ( think search for spock). In addition planets not controled by you would be an act of war. Also missle silos for planets. The idea is you could fire missles form one planet to another within a limmited range prehaps a sector or 2. to also help with invasion fleets. the ultimate missle could be a teraforming one avalible once you reach the end of the new teraforming tech decribed above. the teraforming missle would do the same as a ship but for less cost and faster build. I Was thinking missles take the place of ship building but be fairly fast to build thus the limmited range.

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Two things I would like to see....

I have seen the thread for moving starbases... and think that, the Idea of a jugernaught/ death-star hull class is a better idea....

Second, is there any reason that you cannot put starbases in planetary orbit.

imagine the defensive possibilities....

also the could the tech trading have an option where you trade plans (with a x2 advancement) rather than the whole tech lock stock and barrel....

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1) Increased diplomatic options as posted by many people. The only way I can get the Drengin to behave is to declare war. It would be nice to be able to coerce them in various ways. Or use allies to coerce them. Even when I have overwhelming military, I can’t get anyone to make peace with other races.

2) It would be nice to be able to also get races to align themselves with you (at great cost, naturally). I mean that if you are playing "Good" and the Yor are "Neutral" it would be cool to spend influence money to actually get them to closer to your alignment. This is for an alliance victory, not galactic influence victory.

3) List the influence points within each parsec. GalCiv I had this and it helped to know how effective your influence starbases were.

4) Stop the wasted movement points! Right now, I hit "Turn" and the game moves my ships to where I had specified but if the it's only 1 parsec away I have all these extra movement points I can use. What should happen is that I hit "Turn" it moves my ships and then checks to see if there are any movement points left over. If there are, it selects a ship with MP and I can either pass, or move it more. Rinse and repeat until all MP is spent (or ships are passed).

5) This is minor, but when I create a fleet I would like to have that fleet selected automatically. Now if I create a fleet it deselects everything.

6) Upgrade ships within fleets. As it is now I have to tear my fleet apart and separate the ships to upgrade. I should also be able to upgrade in orbit.

7) More orbit space on planets.

8) The whole espionage system seems a bit thin. All I do now is spend a few BC each turn until I get to advanced and then turn it off when I know everything about a race. I think it should be a little more specific where you can either espionage a particular planet or try to steal techs or find out about their research, etc. Naturally, there should be consequences when you are caught.

9) Ships in orbit around star bases. There could be a limited amount of parking space around a star base to aid in defense and uses as a staging point.
10) If you accidently hit the space bar to skip a ship or fleet, you should still be able to go back and move it.

11) When you have two fleets stacked in a parsec, you should be able to tell what ships are in each fleet.

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I would like to be able to start random maps part way through the tech treee.
I've felt this way about most of the Civ games too. Often times the game is over
before you get to the interesting units and abilities.

I think the game goes too slowly at first (though I know you can speed up
the tech rate at the beginning).

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1. A Quick Start on the Menu that will launch the game with previous settings with one click and a confirmation click.
2. If you change the trade because of people complaining about the color code, please make it an option. I like it the way it is. The way I figure it my experts who are doing the trading would know the true value of the trade. Its just very frustrating playing the guessing game, at lest for me.
3. I would like to see more options for researching ground forces. Like in MOO2, build a tank factory and you get tanks on the planet. With this I would like to see the ground combat animation correctly reflect the actual troops fighting and have different looks for each race. Might as well ask for the world.

4. Aircraft carriers
5. The ability to add the star base into your fleet so they can fight together.

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I floated the moonbase idea long time ago IIRC. It was ntot aken seriously. It's a good idea but I think we shoudl hold off on moons till galciv3 where they can be implemented in a VERY meanigful way, or so I hope!

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6) Upgrade ships within fleets. As it is now I have to tear my fleet apart and separate the ships to upgrade. I should also be able to upgrade in orbit.

That is a great idea. I would love to have that option. I also would like to be able to decommission a whole fleet when it is no longer needed. I dislike spending 5-10 minutes upgrading or decommissioning my fleets.

I wonder if the fleet manager in 1.1 lets you do this. I would know if my computer wasn't so nuts. I am afraid to beta test on this thing.

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I'm using Beta 2b and you can click on an individual ship to remove it from the fleet. You can also disband the entire fleet.

I also think that in addition to being able to upgrade individual ships within a fleet, it would be nice to be able to upgrade the entre fleet at once. I think some right click options on fleets would fit the bill.

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1. Beeing able to bombard a planet before invading and actually seeing the bombardment and the damage being made to the building and troops in the current planet.
2. In invasions, Different color of lazers, better sound, different soldier and tank design.

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Hi.

I'd like to offer my wish list for this excellent game.

The two biggest issues I have that I find dramatically decreases the enjoyablility of the game for me are:

1) Planetary Defense. I find it quite frustrating and unrealistic (even for a game) that there is no way to defend a planet without keeping ships in orbit. I would really like a way to create somesort of planatary defense (defense satalites, missles, planatary sheilds, starbases that can fight back, etc...). Having to manage "defense fleets" for every planet greatly increases the need for micromangment.

2) I find the micromangment during war time a real pain. The biggest issue is trying to keep track of enemy ships and where they are and heading. Ideas that would improve this are:
A. On the main display (as well as tactical maps) enemy ships would have a highlight of some sort (maybe red).
B. Ones that are headhing for one of my planets could have its highlight pulsating or something with a line/text of where they are heading.
C. this could be done when they are withing sensor range of other ships and/or starbases.
D. I should be able to desinate fleets for area defense. I.e., automaticaly patroll defined areas and engage enemy ships when found.
E. Another possiblity would be an empire defense fund that increases the danger to enemy ships the closer they get to your habited planets. for example, if you've invested in enough of this defense fund, weak ships may be intercepted and blown up by your defense force before they would get withing several parces of your planet. This would happen behind the scean. Kind of like random events but specific to defense. Also, the tech levels of the invading ships would make a difference.
F. The end of turn action report is too vague. It says "Fleet xxx destroyed Fleet yyy" but I may not even remember which fleet that was (setting to quick battles to speed up the gameplay).
G. See #1 above.
H. Ships should remember their orders (i.e., "autokill" between turns).

Other ideas that would be nice (but not as game-breaking for me as the ones above are):

3) If I have a massivley military producing planet, why can't I produce more then one ship at a time. If I am producing 100 per turn and the ship I was builing only required 10, then 10 ships should be built. Here, it only produces 1 ship at a time even if the ship cost is only a fraction of what the shipyard can do.

4) I understand some may like it, but I'm personally not a fan of having the "rock-paper-sissor" approach to attack and defense. Especialy defense. I perfer to have different armor that alters the HP of the ship regardless of what hits it (minus special weapons that bypass armor). Also, shields should be effective against beams and maybe 1/2 for missles, 1/3 for mass driver. Bottom line, I tend to put as many weapons as possible on my ship and that doesn't leave much room for defense. It would be nice to have defense more generalized and unified.

4) I like the idea of having a defense net capability on starbases and combining this with stealth techs. "Stealth and Detection" techs.

5) More map customization.
A. Be able to change the frequency of special tiles.
B. Be able to change the overall quality of planets.

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Achronous

Join Date 03/2006

+29

How about more music and more varied as well.
Sometimes especially when I am at war I get tired of hearing the same tracks playing in loop all the time. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I just turn it off and listen to my own music.

Does anybody agree?

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How about more music and more varied as well.
Sometimes especially when I am at war I get tired of hearing the same tracks playing in loop all the time. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I just turn it off and listen to my own music.

Does anybody agree?

Yes!The music is horrrible in the game, i ussually listen to my own music with games but sumtimes i liek to just play the game and nuthing else but u cant really do that with this game unless ur plan is to fall asleep

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I'm Back

last game of Galciv I played was on my old OS/2 machine.

Just bought the new windos version can not say that I am disappointed its just a lot slower, hehehe.

As before I would still like to see the ability to play multi player. or at least PBEM, hot seat etc.

Tactical combat, there are several games that use a "battle board" Maybe look into combining the best traits of several of these into one that really works well?

A single button for upgrade/decommission every ship of this class, ala cIV.

As I play I'm sure there will be other suggestions, some of these likely have already been addressed I have not read the whole board .... Yet!

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(sorry for my poor english) This game is really GOOD, my favorite strategy game since AlphaCentauri/AlienCrossifre

But after two weeks of playing is starting to get boring and linear. I not interest anymore to build an empire. I would like to play with full freedom like in Frontier Elite2.

My wishlist:

* Play as a pirate/freelancer:
- bounty hunting
- transport/excort missions
- military missions for one or another race
- buy/sell stuff between planets (a stock exchange must be available) even illegal stuff and ship improvements.
- ....

- Missions should be available on the major planets.

* Neutral self-governed stellar system full of pirates too dangerous for the main races.

*When playing as one of the major race I would like to have the option to hire pirates for some missions.

* As already mentioned more and better diplomatic and espionage options

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Fun thread, just thought I'd reply with my wishlist, not just for 1.2, but up to and including the expansion:

- Death/Terror Stars + another larger hull size after Huge
- Carrier Modules!
- New, obvious techs - Cloaking Devices (and the sensor tech to detect them), Interdicter Ships, etc
- Shipyards that are built in space using constructers. They would still cost money to operate, but perhaps get a discount and potentially be able to build ships very quickly once built up enough. Maybe difficult to balance, but more options like this would rock. Personally I feel Terror Stars should be constructed this way as well, or only in certain size space shipyards.

There are obviously more things I feel would improve the game, but I wanted to keep my list as concise as possible to stress that I REALLY want those things.

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Here's my laundry list:

I like the idea of having additional diplomatic options.

I'm most frustrated by having to use the mouse all the time. Most of the dialogs require you to move the mouse and select OK or some such.

Seeing ships on the minimap is all but impossible. It would be good to be able to select individual civs whose ships ought to be displayed.

There is no way to visualize the IP from your planets. This seems like a major oversight, given that influence is one of the approaches to victory, and the one I happen to like best.

You can't give away ships in a fleet while doing diplomacy.

In general, when a civ requests aid, you have no idea where the ships you're giving away, where they're located, etc. A context menu or some such to give away ships would be good.

I'm torn on starbase mobility. On the one hand, it would be nice if you could adjust the position once in a while, perhaps being charged a fee for it. On the other, it does change the game mechanics.

A starbase manager is essential. Not only should it be able to tell me what modules are installed on starbases and what can be installed, but also how many constructors are headed to it, and be able to tell a constructor to go there without having to hunt around the map for a constructor.

The ship and plant manager should have drop downs, not arrow scrolling.

We should also be notified when two civs go to war, not just when they make peace.

I'd like counter-espionage, but that might be too big a headache for the developers and the AI.

Once a planet is discovered and then lost again in the fog of war, we shouldn't just be able to click on it and get the latest information on the planet.

If advanced espionage gives us so much information about the enemy, why don't we know the location of all their ships etc?

Capturing a planet through influence should give us a tech discovery, just as capturing it through conquest.

We should be able to reject a defection.

The AI should get pissed if one of their planets defects to us. I know I would.

One should be able to examine old GNN news items. For ship news, one should be able to not just go to the planet (which is utterly useless for controlling the ship), but perhaps just launch it from the news item. That's what I usually want to do with ships anyway.

Wars have supply chains that can be attacked. Galciv has none. This has always struck me as weird. But I think this might be too much any time in the life of galciv2.

A planet should be able to fortify. But then that would make invasions extremely difficult. A whole extension to the tech tree involving fortifications and counters would become necessary.

Ethical alignment should be more an effect (or cause) of your actions in the game, not just random dialogs. Attacking a civilization without cause should be evil. Attacking an evil civilization is still evil. Helping a civilization defent itself is good. And so on. But again this might not be appropriate for Galciv2, but Galciv3.

I'm tired of typing.

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