@Nerva- I know I said I wouldn't reply, but I was impressed with your last post. I accept your apology as well. I understand your frustration, however, I must admit, I don't really feel the same way, but that's what makes this such a whacky and wonderful little rock, because everyone is different.

As I said regarding your frustration. I felt the same way you illustrated in your first post after playing MOO 3. I didn't however vent on the forum for the same reason I didn't like the game. The Developers really didn't give a damn. They pushed out an unfinished piece of junk and collected their checks with no intention of updating or fixing it and leaving it to the community to try and fix the final title of their beloved franchise.

It's ironic though that this is Stardock you are talking abou though as they do very much give a damn and through difficulties and problems have been up front and accountable for the game they created. It's got some bugs but they are doing what they can to fix them. I appreciate that you recognize this in your most recent post (yes I'm a fanboy, but hey when I see a company and developers that treat their customers so well I nuture it! ) and I hope that even though you find fault with the game, you keep sharing your ideas (like I said some are very good) and help it get better. To that end may I suggest you starting a new thread with a title along the lines of "How To make Gal Civ Better?" or something to that effect. You would find the community alot more receptive and I think you could really get your point across better.

After reading all the comments I see Nerva making comparisons to sim and tycoon type games. Personally I dont like those kinds of games and am glad gal civ isnt like that.

He seems to want to remove some of the micromanagement, again I like micromanagement.

He seems to want to have the computer automate trade routes, personally I dont like the AI doing stuff for me without me telling it too.

I dont want an economic sim, I want a conquer the universe sim which is what I have. Unfortunately this just doesnt seem like it was the right game for you to buy. I have at least one good sized stack of those games lol.

My two cents:
Historical notions and arguments aside, I'd be just a little happier if your planetary government were smart enough to not waste money on social production when they've got nothing to build (but maybe other planets do so you don't want to reduce the galactic slider). Instead they could rebudget that to militiary, or if that queue is empty, research. And vice versa.

I know that if there's nothing in the military queue they don't waste the cash and instead just send it back to the treasury, but seriously... How basic is that? They can't figure out how to reallocate? And they *don't* do that with unused social production at all; it just disappears into the void.

This economic system always frustrated me to no end in GalCiv 1, and hence I only played two or three games of it, despite really wanting to like it. The specialize button in GalCiv 2 is an improvement, because you can at sort of turn off unused production from a planetary standpoint, but it's just a lot of micromanangement to have to do.

And now I'll surly be flamed to death. I've said my piece, so I'm done.

EDIT: And by *they* I just mean the planetary econ system. I'm not bashing StarDock's programmers.

This is ironic, because I originally loved the game *because* of the budget system...

In Galciv 1, it was much more realistic then what goes on in moo.

Galciv 2 is somewhat less realistic since now population doesen't affect manufacturing.

I don't like micromanagement. I can understand negotiating trade routes with a foreign power, but why do you have to build freighters? It's silly to have to purposefully build a freighter.

I would think that a "conquer the universe" type game should have less economic micromanagement, not more.

wow, so much interestin inputs.

It was also because it was the sequel... I was just amazed that they could get it "completely wrong" twice in a row... again, just my opinion.

I have to say that.. since you didn't voice your opinion at the first game, no one would knew that you though tit was completely wrong. The others didn't view it as an issue.. so it naturally carried onto the sequel.

Now that you have mentioned it, perhaps there will be a chance of the system being better made or refined for the future games. It is better to give constructive cricitism than just venting about it. Again, like I mentioned earlier, you have voiced your opinions after the initial post and they do provide some interesting issues to think about.

I see the point you're getting at but I think you've missed the distinction I was trying to make WRT Rome: Total War. In the case of a port, it actually figures out every turn what the most profitable trade routes are, and these will change as other cities develop. Different provinces have different resources with different local market prices. Your relations with other factions will also determine how profitable the routes are, and of course your ports can also be blockaded during wartime.

I have to say that you are right in that I didn't consider the different possibilities and effects of Rome: Total War. I reduced it to a simple comparison. I had to wonder what the gaming aspect is if the computer took care of everything once you build a structure. What can you do to affect it besides building bigger port?

While MoO3's review is bad and it certainly isn't for everyone, it does a lot of things that you talked about.

MoO3 emphasize on playing an empire game. You make general policy and the computer carry it out. Just like the research aspect. You can put more money into researching a weapon, but that doesn't mean you will get it in 3 turns like clockwork.

This is certainly more realistic, but it also create a lot of frustration for a lot of players because they feel like they have no control over the game.

I do think that splitting the technology to theoretical research and applied research is an interesting idea. A lot of technology in galciv2 is just refining what you got. The theoretical research will give a tech branch for applied research. It might take 10 turns to get the phaser tech, it might get 15 turns to get it. Once you get it though, you could have a steadily estimate of how much effort is needed to refine phaser to mark I or mark II and so on.

It sounds like MoO3 might be the game for you to try, even if it had bad reviews.

I too find the economy and populations systems rather weak, but I also don't think that's what was being focused on when the game was being made. Stardock has created an awesome ship designer with a lot of options, so it's natural that the game would focus on technology, ship construction, and ship design rather than the gritty details of each planet's economy. I'm not saying I wouldn't like added detail (I'm undecided at the moment actually,) but the chances of that detail being added this late in the game are rather slim. As Todd Hawks said in post #16, that's a long ways from what GalCiv is.

I do like some of your ideas though Nerva, maybe they'll make it into the game piece-meal over a bunch of updates?

-Dewar

Nerva, you are a troll. Your OP was incendiary and insulting, and you say "Time to go play some X-Com.", but you're responding to this thread on the hour. That's why everyone jumped on you.

I'm responding to this thread (rather than playing X-Com) because I've calmed down from my OP (even at the time I said I was in too foul a mood to be constructive). At the time I posted the OP I was of a mind to simply delete the game... then I played it a little more, figured a little more of it out, and decided to see what people had to say.

IMHO, the problem with Civ and GalCiv is that they are based on "fiat".

Yep.

What I want to see is a free-market system. The state defines laws, sets fiscal and monetary policy.

Same here -- that would be my ULTIMATE GOAL, anyway. I would also add to your thoughts, that I would let the player mess with the system to his heart's content... the underly game would be market-based, but the player could in effect turn it into a command economy through his own actions... and hopefully prove the principle that market-based systems are better because the player can't possibly micromanage the system well enough to compete. But, the player would build infrastructure and trading hubs (cities)... there would be strategy to it.

Did you know that the country is littered with small towns in seemingly random places because historically, it made sense to have towns spaced one day's travel apart... it was a network with nodes. Over time the "one day's travel" distance has increased, and this has rendered those towns obsolete. Navigable rivers were also the super-highways of their day... and you needed a port on the coast to change from one transport vessel to another.

There's actually a branch of computer and social science that deals with this. They're called complex systems. The simple actions of many individuals result in surprisingly complex societies. This is a relatively new field. And PhDs are wrestling with it. What makes you think that Stardock, at this point in time, would be able to incorporate this stuff into a GAME?

The fully developed system you describe does not need to be implemented all-or-nothing. I gave the RTW example specifically to illustrate how simple improvements can benefit the game... just improving how trade and production are handled would really make a difference. There's a middle ground between "Market: +10% income" and the "ants" you talk about... particularly if you can "compartmentalize" the improvements into separate models that don't have horrific interactions to consider. Again, start with trade and production.

And since the field is new, there's been no algorithmic research into functions that can give accurate optimizations of these things, so they're computationally intensive.

Like I said, simple stuff is understandable when you're running a 486/33 with 4MB of RAM, but computers today can handle far more complicated systems.

I suspect the real problem there is you get into issues of group behavior and information... this is why I say the developers should start small... my compaint is that they haven't started at all. Like I have said before and keep saying, these aspects of game design have been present to some degree in the Sim and Tycoon games.... there's still a lot of work to be done, but this isn't something totally pie-in-the-sky I'm describing.

In SimCity, I build the roads and decide where the residential, industrial, commercial districts are, but the game figures out what path a person living in a particular house takes to work, where he decides to shop, and if he thinks the traffic is too bad. In a Railroad Tycoon game, I might run a line from an iron mine to a nearby city, and that city might develop a steel mill.

So, in a game like this, there might be a rocky planet with TriLithium deposits... I might build an administrative center on the planet to provide law and order, an orbiting space station where interstellar freighters can dock, and in another quadrant, a starbase that my military starships operate from. The game would build the TriLithium mines and transport the fuel on freighters from the space station to the starbase where my government buys it as supplies for my starfleet.

The nice thing about this is it lets me not worry about all the minutiae and get on with the process of galactic conquest.


Another thing I'll add is that from what I can tell, the developers compensated for the extreme flexibility of the ship design features by making the combat model utterly simplistic... this was probably done for AI reasons. Basically I can arrange the phasers anywhere on the ship I want... great... totally customizeable... but also totally irrelevant as their actual location on the ship is of no significance whatsoever.

I don't mean this as a flame, but I consider this a step back from MOO2... in MOO2 you had your choice of generic starship artwork, but you could put a lot of time into the actual content of the ships, and the combat was impacted a lot by those choices -- I really liked that about the game.

What I've been hoping for is that someone would incorporate some of the sophistication of Starfleet Command (Star Fleet Battles) into the next generation of 4X space games. When I was talking to my old friend the other day and I mentioned the combat system in GalCiv2, his exact reaction was to say how he's always wanted a 4X game with space combat along the lines of Star Fleet Battles... he'd played that as a kid and while he liked the "realism", the staggering boredom of actually playing that using pen-and-paper really killed the fun... but if you put that detail into a computer simulation, it works great. Back when I was playing Starfleet Command, it was fun just to run a skirmish game with a couple dozen starships involved in a full-scale fleet battle... chunks of warp engines flying across the screen... it had a great cinematic aspect to it. I always thought that would integrate nicely in a 4X game, where you build these big fleets and send them off to deliver electric death upon your enemy.

I think the real issue here is the ability to suspend belief, and accept the inherent simplification and assumptions that are involved in making a game fun. No one really criticizes chess for being too simplified, and yet it is a classic game whose appeal is unlikely to ever wane.

Reading your ideas, Nerva, I have to say that they sound very interesting, and not 'spreadsheet'-like at all. However, you have to remember three things:

Games are necessarily abstracted models to allow:

1. For entertainment. The real world is already full of complexity and uncertainty. People come to games to enjoy exerting control, to be challenged (but only to a point that they determine), and to win.

2. Them to be developed at all. If you go too far, all of a sudden you need a staff of sociologists and economists and military strategists instead of programmers and artists.

3. For the stupidity of people. Generally, I get the impression that you are an exceptionally intelligent person. You can handle complexity on a subconscious level that most people cannot. The GalCiv 2 that currently exists is providing enough complexity for its users (generally - just look at the forums) that to increase it would drive away the main customer base.

If it comes to a point where you can't suspend your belief, then don't play any more. That's what happened to me with SimCity 4... My career is in architecture and civil engineering, and the limited paradigm adopted by simcity 4 was just too silly for me to enjoy playing. Ironically, I still enjoy the original simcity because it is so abstracted - I don't see a city, I see pieces on a board. I would argue the same thing for GalCiv: the more complexity (even under the hood) and apparent realism that you provide, the more people will want, and the less they will be satisfied.

On the days where I feel the need to push my brain with something interesting and infinitely complex, I flip on the news, or read a textbook. Reality provides the ultimate entertainment.

Games are necessarily abstracted models to allow: 1. For entertainment. The real world is already full of complexity and uncertainty. People come to games to enjoy exerting control, to be challenged (but only to a point that they determine), and to win.

I would break that "entertainment" into two sub-categories: realist and escapist. The person who plays Microsoft Flight Simulator or Sid Meier's Gettysburg are looking for fun in the form of experiencing realities that are out of their grasp in everyday life. The person who plays Baldur's Gate or Quake is looking to escape from their everyday life.

This was something that I got into debates with people involved in modding Rome: Total War. While a certain amount of "cinema" is enjoyable, ultimately the fun of a game like that is tied to real historical things like Roman Legions and Greek Phalanxes. Now, there's is always a limit to the level of realism... it's been pointed out that a realistic combat FPS would have you get shot in the gut and then writhe on the ground in agony for the next hour as you slowly bleed to death.

At the other extreme is fantasy... nobody cares about a realistic market-based economic model in a Lord of the Rings strategy game. However, they do want some tie to reality, just as a point of reference... gold needs to be worth more than silver... cavalry should be faster than infantry, etc.

There's some leeway in a sci-fi game... at one extreme you have something like Star Wars that has a lot of fantasy elements... at the other extreme is the new Battlestar Galactica where even the aliens look human, both sides use guns and missiles in combat, etc. But, I think everyone knows a sci-fi game should operate within the envelope that's been established in the various fictional universes... that's the "reality".

For example, there's sort of a tradition of space naval combat being a blend of early 20th century naval concepts... I, for one, have always enjoyed the aspect of the game that resembles the great naval arms races leading up to WW1, along with some carrier air power concepts. I like the idea of building ever larger, faster, bigger gunned warships. That was one of the fun parts of MOO2... and something like Starfleet Command had an even better representation of fleet battles.

2. Them to be developed at all. If you go too far, all of a sudden you need a staff of sociologists and economists and military strategists instead of programmers and artists.

Yes, there is always a practical aspect to it... the developers have to get paid at the end of the month. And when it comes to software projects, "until you have something, you have nothing". Hence the conservatism of most games. This is actually one reason I was so disappointed in GalCiv2... because Stardock is NOT the normal developer... they are willing to put a lot more work into a project and think outside the box... however they didn't do it in the areas I was hoping to see.

The GalCiv 2 that currently exists is providing enough complexity for its users (generally - just look at the forums) that to increase it would drive away the main customer base.

It depends on whether the added sophistication means more or less micromanagement... Again, the stuff I'm proposing doesn't mean the game manual has to be 200 pages.

My career is in architecture and civil engineering, and the limited paradigm adopted by simcity 4 was just too silly for me to enjoy playing. Ironically, I still enjoy the original simcity because it is so abstracted

I totally see where you're coming from there... there are parallels in other fields... a friend of mine who's into CGI animation tells me that there's a threshold of realism, below which your brain treats it as art that conveys a message, above which it evaluates it as "reality", and you don't want to be anywhere near the threshold... because your brain will reject it. Simcity 4 is a good example of that... it starts to resemble a real city, except it has many obvious flaws that blow the illusion, and your mind rejects it. In the case of a sci-fi 4X game, however, I don't think there's much risk of that... there's no "reality" to compare it to and find it lacking.

First off, Nerva, you never responded to me. Seriously - X-COM is old... DOS old. Jagged Alliance 2 is actually compatible with WinXP. And it's awesome. This goes for everyone here who liked X-COM and is disappointed that it has no successor... JA2 is the successor.

Second - I'd love to recruit you and other "pro-free-market" games to join my God Game Team. Together we will build a game that pulls all intelligent people away from their jobs; a drug more powerful than dopamine itself. The FPSers of the world will wither without those who did the real work, and the end will... wait... that's not really the point of entertainment.

Anyway, I've always dreamt of a TBS that successfully models economics. Until then, everything is sort of contrived... like in first person shooters where 1% of the world is "physics enabled".

Jagged Alliance 2 is actually compatible with WinXP. And it's awesome.

OK, I will have to check it out. X-Com is one of games that's so strangely perfect that not even its official successors were better... even "obvious" improvements like larger maps, more weapons, etc... arguably made the game worse. I think the only weakness it had was that while you could eventually develop flying suits, there were no aliens that could fly... it would have been "proper" to encounter flying enemies before far enough along the tech tree to gain flying suits in response. But, I'm guessing that was an AI issue... dealing with 3D movement and all...

I'd love to recruit you and other "pro-free-market" games to join my God Game Team.

OK, but I'll warn you I'm not much of a programmer... I can write scripts and mod-level stuff, but no real code. Do you have a website or something?

When people were saying "go write your own game" I happened to find this:
www.freeorion.org

It's an open-source MOO-inspired game. Could be interesting.

I've always dreamt of a TBS that successfully models economics.

The first thing I'd like to see tackled is a realistic approach to cities and trade. I mentioned earlier (and others echoed this observation) how silly it is that all the big cities in Civ are LANDLOCKED and essentially agrarian based. This misses the fact that cities result from trade, not food supply. The irony here is Sid Meier had right approach for Civiliation in hand from the start: Railroad Tycoon. Railroad Tycoon had various types of terrain -- farms would appear on farmland and they would produce agricultural products, while mountains might have coal deposits that would eventually have coal mines, and for all of these industries to thrive they must be transported to consumers elsewhere. It is often mentioned that Civ instead operates on an overblown city-state approach... civs are simply collections of almost totally independent city-states.

OK, but I'll warn you I'm not much of a programmer... I can write scripts and mod-level stuff, but no real code. Do you have a website or something?

Yes, but I'm too busy with research now (and too poor, as students are wont to be) to actually make a game. Instead I dream about it at night, and tell other people they should change their games. So, sorry, I wasn't entirely serious... But if I make my millions some day, I'll sit back and make deep economic game. Set in a low-fantasy Middle Ages-ish world, with unicorns and haunted forests, but no treants or talking spiders.

www.geocities.com/saber_marionette_cherry/index.html