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BigMonty

Join Date 02/2006

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Galaxy way out of scale

Astronomy

I need help. Unfortunately the map in this game isn't based on any known astronomical principles. Planets and stars represented on the same playing surface is comical.

The distances between planets in our own solar system are light minutes apart. Distances between our solar system and the nearest solar system are light years, hundreds and thousands of light years apart. It’s like everything is jumbled up.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea that in this game the possibility exists that the distance from an outer planet on one solar system to an outer planet on another solar system could be closer than the distance to the star in either solar system.

Can someone please help me rationalize this?

Thanks

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Sure, gameplay. It wouldn't be much fun to have a map with billions of tiny dots of light, most of which are useless. Further, you can't tell which has planets because they are far far smaller than stars. Also, wouldn't be much fun trying to find fleets of ships millions of times even smaller.

Astronomical...... very big... not very practicle for fun gameplay.

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you use hyperdrive technology to bend space and allow you to get from point A to point B with slow than light speed.

in other words
A - - - - - - - - - - B
you might only be able to travel one dash per week.

hyper drive bend the space so that it looks like
A +-+ B
***| |
***| |
**+-+
Thus, you would only have to travel one dash instead of 10.

In this sense, it doesn't matter if the planet is on a 3d scale in reality.. because all you care about it what the distance it would have after you bend the space.

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Exactly, what really bothers me though (and I must strain to keep suspension of disbelief) is how quickly humans replicate in the game. In a little over a year, I've gone from 5.00 billion to 24 billion souls. Maybe in the future they just clone fully grown and cybernetically educated adults? I can get over the scale stars versus planets, but the timescale is ludicrous! If I'd made the game, I'd of made turns months, if not years.

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READ THIS:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=79448

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Supposingly.. the population is the taxed population. There might already be 20 billion people on the planet but only 5 billion are taxed. Then again, the whole farm thing wouldn't make sense.

And frankly, months, weeks, it doesn't matter much. Time doesn't work too well in civilization games. Take a look at civ1~civ4. It takes a warrior 10 years to move one squares, very mind-boggling.

Now when the population bonus is implemented.. perhaps it will be more realistic.

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Are you one of those people who play UT2004 and complain about how unrealistic it is?

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DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS

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MOO2 handled the issue quite well.

It's been done purely for eye candy purposes as you've acknowledged. VGA Planets and several other 4Xers had the same issue.

It's like developing a WW2 grand strategy game without understanding major concepts of Earths geography, like the differences between continents and cities.

The gaffe makes me want to sell my copy because it's too significant.

What I find amusing is when a ship will actually divert its course to fly around a planet, as if the planet actually takes up the entire grid it's on. LoL

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This is a strategy game, not a universe simulator. If a visual scale issue like this is your biggest problem, then GC must be a pretty good game.

Think of the two great Master of Orion games that were totally unplayable by someone with your standards of realism!

LOL

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it's a strategy game, not a space-sim.

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It's like developing a WW2 grand strategy game without understanding major concepts of Earths geography, like the differences between continents and cities.

But how could you design a WW2 game? The war ended 60 years ago! Time travel is impossible. The idea that you could go back in time and experience World War II is beyond rationalization. You can't time travel! Plus, a lot of generals spent most of their time locked up in war rooms, looking over maps, and directing officers. A game consisting of paper work sounds pretty boring. They didn't have magic balloons giving them a bird's eye/isosymetric view of the battlefield. That would just be crazy. It would be cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

It just wouldn't work at all.

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I'll say it again:

READ THIS: https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=79448

It's a game. And yes, we know quite a bit about astronomy here too. Thanks. But we decided we preferred to make a game that was fun to play instead of making it realistic.

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It's like developing a WW2 grand strategy game without understanding major concepts of Earths geography, like the differences between continents and cities.

Not *understanding* ? I think the link demonstrates that they understand perfectly well.

If it bothers you so much, say that the hyperdrive's efficiency is strongly affected by local space-time curvature. Thus manuevering in-system can be a significant fraction of travel time between stars.

The gaffe makes me want to sell my copy because it's too significant.

Honestly, I think you are trolling. If not, you need to consider that everyone learned this stuff in like 3rd grade.

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I get the need to not have planets, stars, and the distances between them to scale. But, about the population exploding, am I right about the educated adult clone farms?

Don't worry, I know its just a game. And a darned good one at that.

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Don't read so much into my criticism. My criticism lies within the choices of abstraction, not the science fiction. I greatly appreciate discussions about the rationalization of the science behind the fiction.

The Link above was amusing but it comes across as more of an excuse than a reason for designing the game the way they did.

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I'm a hardcore science geek. There are no realistic strategy space sims, and no realistic tactical (cockpit level) space sims. If you want something realistic, try Orbiter (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html).

GalCiv2 is the kind of game you have to meet halfway, and buy into the concept, suspending disbelief (if you're a geek). Learn the game mechanics and see if you can have fun with it.

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Thanks all for the cool links. I'm going to try them out.

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I understand where your coming from. I would have liked to see a different scale used. I didn't really start to think about it lately until I got to a game with two stars very close to each other; so close that planets from each one were almost colliding. Give it some time though and you'll forget about it.

Think of it as a tactical map. Objects are represented in a size that is easy to understand not necessarily to scale. For instance, if you've ever gone on a plane flight that had a display of where the plane was you would see a plane about half the size of Ohio traveling from point A to point B. The plane isn't really that big but when we see it compared to what it is traveling across it makes more sense to display it that way rather than as a tiny dot spanning the globe.

If a future GalCiv is made I would love to see the scale changed. Perhaps even so that it would include tactical combat. However, for GalCivII, I think time that would have gone into revamping the scale of the game was much better spent elsewhere.

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What I find amusing is when a ship will actually divert its course to fly around a planet, as if the planet actually takes up the entire grid it's on. LoL

The Link above was amusing but it comes across as more of an excuse than a reason for designing the game the way they did.

If the technology involves bending space, then you would not want to travel too close to the stars lest you run into them. If you find that just an excuse for gameplay, so be it.
I would suggest NOT playing any games if you have problem with realism and realism from game designs. I mean since the day back in chess, there are unrealistic elements. A rook can get promoted once it reaches the 8th rank, what's up with that?

If you go with our current understanding of science and physics. Spaceships can't travel faster than the speed of light. It would take centuries to get to another system, much less a habitable system. What then? should each turn be the length of a century? Then you would complain about how you should be able to build several ships in a century. There will be no end to it.

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I can't believe we haven't gotten this far and no one has mentioned that space isn't two-dimensional (well, to be more exact, 3 dimensional objects on a 2-dimensional plane!

I would suggest NOT playing any games if you have problem with realism and realism from game designs.

That's right. If you get rid of everything unrealistic in a game you have real life... and so whats the point in having the game? Might as well go outside and do the "real life" thing.

But who wants to do that? The only reason why we are playing these games is so we can escape real life (right?...)

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The scale issue is explained by ships having to travel slower inside solar systems. The population issue is explained by overtaxed people not entering in the census so they don't have to pay taxes. Both explanations are reasonable and very well thought out.

As for the issue of realism, it's a game. Realism has to be sacrificed for gameplay. I personally like the balance here. More realistic space scale may work for another game, but I don't think it's for this one.

What bothers me about the realism of games is.. sometimes they take so long that the time skips start to amount to real life. I literally may not live long enough to get a Doom Ray if I keep up my gigantic map very slow research fetish

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Like pretty much all maps, the main playing screen is designed to convey information, not actually be 100% realistic looking. I mean, look at a street map. But if you look at the city from the air, you don't see all those numbers and symbols. And look at most globes - how many countries are actually one solid color in real life?

Pretty much any map of astronomical things will have to overstate the size of the stars and planets and understate the distance between stars.

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"It's like developing a WW2 grand strategy game without understanding major concepts of Earths geography, like the differences between continents and cities."

The difference is that a WW2 grand strategy game is, by its very nature of being based on a real war, a simulation of reality first and a game second.

GalCiv 2 is a game first. The needs of gameplay trump all in its design.

"The gaffe makes me want to sell my copy because it's too significant."

Then sell it and be done with it.

If you can't stand a simple unreality like that, then really, there's no point in trying to play the game at all. It's got Humanoid Aliens in it, which by most measures is a far greater crime (unreality wise) than a simple matter of scale. For Gods sake, GalCiv2 has the audacity to call the Human species good, despite thousands of years of documented evidence to the contrary. That's a far greater unreality than mere questions of scale.

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I can't believe we haven't gotten this far and no one has mentioned that space isn't two-dimensional (well, to be more exact, 3 dimensional objects on a 2-dimensional plane!

I would think everyone here is aware of the fact that space is 3 dimensional. It was just not mentioned because it wasn't necessary.

If you understand how the hyperdrive is supposed to work in this game, you wuld know that 3 dimensional doesn't matter much in a representative map.

Sure, it'd be cool to actually have a 3d map.. but imagine the pain to navigate ships. You would be GLAD that galciv 2 is on two dimension.

If GC can have some kind of system that feature 3d map while just as easy to use... GC would revolutionize TBS forever. Actually that would be pretty cool. Instead of complaining about the current system, we shoud figure out what the next generation map would look like.

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What I can't believe is why someone would care about "scale". It's a game for crying out loud.

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