This can't be modd'd.

The game features a limited number of files that can be changed. If you look at them, you might be surprised at how little user modification can take place. I was shocked that I couldn't find the file to change the government type bonuses.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to be told where this file is located so I can change it.

You know, as someone really into the immersion thing and who cares a lot generally about this kind of consistency, the GalCiv "week" long turn has never bugged me. Why don't you take a look at Civ4. A turn is anywhere from a hundred years to 1 year. And does it make ANY sense that a warrior can move like 1 "square" (however far that is, but we can assume it's less than 100 miles or so) in 100 years? No, it doesn't. That's because "turn" is a turn in these games and what arbitrary measure of real-time we choose to label it doesn't matter squat.

The game does move "fast" but I don't really notice the "real time." I guess Civ has just trained me not to care.

Good post mayito8888

50 years to conquer the galaxy makes more sense than 12 years right? Oh Yeah!!!
Let's just assume that the 'week' that is displayed in the game is not Earth week but Galactic week (scientfically, science-fictionally speaking, unofficially), that could be an quivalent of a 1 Earth month, counting the point that we can also play the other alien races which for sure, won't have the same time measurement system and concept like that of the planet Earth. Comprende? Isn't that cool? But thank jsscott991 bringing it up and other posters for enforcing the logic.

strangely enough I couldn't care less what the aliens think, I personally as a Human would like my time counted in a fashion that I can relate to.

All we are asking for is the option to do this, we don't need the dev's to mess up your game, nor does it seem likely to take up very much time to implement such a change.

I don't very much care if you want to argue a semantics with me or call the argument asinine, It's a game, I love it and I'd like it more in months or years.

I'm Sad, it's pointless but It would make me happy........

I agree with Citizen BinnisterGC2, this would be a stupid thing to even bother with when they could spend there time working on other things.

I mean there is no such thing as BC and I don't see you saying "Lets change it to dollars!".

If this is your biggest problem with the game, consider it a victory!

The "galactic week" approach is a complete cop-out. The calander is a Gregorian calander and the months are the one used on Earth. What nobody seems to have mentioned is that all tax-payers aren't human. When you conquer an alien world through culture, they don't become humans. There is galactic tourism (and immegration.emmigration it can be assumed) as well as radical advancements in healthcare that may (must) have eliminated childhood illness and death. Without starvation, the Earth would have quite a few more people than it currently does.

It is also reasonable to say that only 10 billion tax paying citizens on Earth would represent at least 50 billion humans (there are six billion people now extrapolated at a modest 1% for 225 years). A new galactic empire may not be supported by everyone at first, and a lot of the unknown people may move to new colonies on new worlds. As the empire grows, more people throw their weight behind it and bang! you have 500 billion tax paying citizens (not all humans of course).

Also, I believe population growth can be nerfed through xml if you don't agree with me.

Yes, CHANGE IT.
This is a must do, take a simple Unix "grep" utility and do a global change of "weeks" to "months", or even "years". While you are at it, fix all the references to millions in places to billions (once in a while it is mixed up in the text files).
Points:
1. This should not take the developers more than 5 minutes to do, so don't worry about time wasted.
2. This will make absolutely no change to gameplay or the way a game goes.
3. The reason to make this change is because it is a glaring flaw in logic and takes the thinking player out of the "feel" of the game. Much like a movie where a single thing happens that can ruin you enjoyment because it just doesn't make sense, this simple cosmetic change will help immerse the players who care (and won't bother those that don't) into the game world and improve the experience.
4. Field mice gestate for 28 days. Right now, my Terrans put fieldmice to shame and are reproducing like bacteria (about every 8 to 16 hours, by my calculations).
5. I showed this game to my friend, within 5 minutes he was laughing at the "weeks" idea, putting the whole game into the "goofy" category. I think I still sold him, but it didn't help the demo.

A turn...is a Turn...is a TURN.

What he said.

A turn is anywhere from a hundred years to 1 year. And does it make ANY sense that a warrior can move like 1 "square" (however far that is, but we can assume it's less than 100 miles or so) in 100 years

And like he says, it's very unrealistic for a warrior to only be able to move one space every 100 years.
It's a game, games aren't completely realistic. Sometimes you should just not think so much about it. I mean, I know I don't stare at the date every turn to see what happens.

If it really bothers you that much, I hope you can find a way to just mod it in.

If the Devs officially change it, I bet there will be another group of people complaining about how stupid it is for a uber production planet to only be able to produce 1 scout a month when it can normally produce one battleship a month.

Then there's that whole can of worm about having more than one military project complete every turn.. that could be better for the game, I guess.

Just don't think it's that big of a deal.

I agree, months make a lot more sense. You could argue that each turn should even be longer, perhaps even something like 3 months. Then building a galactic empire which might have taken you 10 years in weekly turns would take you 130 years which sounds much more sensible. Technologies would take a year or so to research, the invasion of an entire planet would take 3 months instead of a week ect...

Though this would probably be much harder to change... Oh well...

There's no point in bringing up Civ on this topic. That game has to cram 4000 years into about 400 turns and has to at least attempt to make its tech levels match historical years.

GalCiv is set in a fictional galaxy hundreds of years into the future, and the measure of time can make internal sense without weird play balancing issues. You don't have to worry about ship travel making sense time-wise because there is no such thing as "hyperdrive" to say "no way it takes two months to travel 15 parsecs!"

The only thing GalCiv has to worry about is the passage of time making sense within the context of common sense and its own conventions. Having an "election year" every three months doesn't make sense internally (by its own conventions), and the epic span of the game would fit more comfortably into several decades or centuries than several years (by a common sense measure). Further, nothing within the game that feels okay in weeks (research, travel, fleet battles) suffers from the proposed change while many things that currently feel off (growth rates, invasions, UP and Senate election cycles, the aliens talking about centuries long history in sandbox games where you met four years ago) would be ameliorated.

-Foslex

PS. One exception I thought of... the lifespan of the Terran leader. Who's to say that any of the aliens wouldn't live for centuries? But a 5-10 year span of leadership of the human leader makes more sense than a 50-100 year one. I consider this point to be the inconsequential exception to the rule.

I don't think it's as simple as a unix grep, but it shouldn't be terribly difficult. Consider if you just cosmetically change week to month you'll have 52 months in a year and the UP will meet every 4 years or so. There is a little bit of programming that would need to be changed probably, but the devs should look into it as an option.

I said I wouldn’t post again but I have to post one last time.

I can’t believe weekly turns received even one post in support. I can’t believe people took the time to post and say “I can’t believe you people care about this?” (which is essentially the only argument the weekly turn supporters have mustered that is worth responding to).

The developers taking two minutes to change this or to provide players with a means to mod it is not going to reduce the quality of anyone’s future updates. The developers taking two minutes to post and say we think its reasonable for the population of an empire to grow 100x in the space of ten years also isn’t going to reduce the quality of an update (although it will greatly reduce my respect for them).

Internally, the game acts like the turns are at least one month. The election text is the best example of this, but not the only example. Galciv 1 used monthly turns. I thought they were too short considering the population growth. But at least you could make-believe a little.

One week turns might as well be one minute turns. It doesn’t make any sense. Building a battleship in weeks? Ascending to energy form in the space of 10-15 years? Building the infrastructure to not only colonize, but fully develop hundreds of planets in a decade?

People . . . its absurd! Its unbelievably absurd. Is this an issue that effects gameplay? No. But is it an issue that can effect people’s enjoyment? Yes.

There is absolutely no reason not to make this change. Will it get made? I doubt it. Having bought many Stardock games in the past, I certainly have my doubts. But it should be made and as soon as possible. Its odd to me that this survived Beta.

I also find weekly turns a turn off I also cast my vote for monthly turns.

Depends on how easy the fix is.. I would say Months as well.

By the time of testing, production and upgrades to a weapons system take, even in full blown war.. it's months that make more sense then weeks.

I'd rather have other things tweaked first though.

At first I thought this point was silly, but in retrospect I think I agree with it.

From a game standpoint it means nothing. A turn is a turn. We can say one turn takes a week, a month, a year, a century, or one picosecond. So from the game standpoint, it means nothing.

But from a story perspective, it does have an impact. I always thought years were too long in games like Civ (its right for the development, but so wrong for movement). But I think weeks are too short. Monthly would be best. Have the 'quarterly reports' appear every year (every 12 turns) and have the yearly reports every 4 years (48 turns).

I've also mentioned that I would like it if the population numbers would be changed from billions to 10 million (or maybe even just 1 million). For the same reason that the population numbers of billions seems absurd for all but the oldest and most well developed worlds. Again, from a gameplay perspective it means nothing, a unit of pop is a unit of pop, we could say its one guy or trillions, the game doesn't care. But from a story perspective I think it is important.

Anyway, that's my nickel.

I guess I never realized how important time was until now. Probably not realistic that I can play for a few days and destroy a dozen or so races. i probably should get a slower computer.

Leave it as it is. Even if it only took five minutes to "fix" (which it won't... don't forget events like the UP assembly (once a year) or laws (running for x years) or elections (twice a year) which would have to be changed as well), I'd rather see them spending those five minutes on the AI and bug fixing.

Not to mention that I don't see how changing weeks to month will accomplish anything... so it doesn't take 10 years to conquer the galaxy or increase the pop by who-knows-how-much but 4 times as long? I don't see how that's any more realistic.

Brad posted on a different thread that you can change the unit of time pretty easily as a mod. I know nothing of modding and don't feel like starting today, but it's out there.

Which means... it'd be a cinch for Stardock to change it! Bard also said that he prefered weeks as a time unit when compared to years (I agree). He didn't explicitly talk about months one way or the other.

I hope that that's the kind of mod change we can make that will still be in place for Metaverse games.

This is an assine subject. I'd much rather have the developers devote their time to fixing balancing issues & stamping out bugs than going back and making a pointless cosmetic change.

FTW!

I honestly don't think that a week is unresonable. The pace at which technology advances is pretty mind boggling already, so I think it makes snse that it will only get faster. For a planeraty battle, it is possible that everyone on the planet would be mustered to fight in a big battle because if they lose or don't fight, they all are killed by the invasion force (which is what happens in gameplay).

With new building materials and processes, building a state of the art battleship in two weeks makes sense. During WWII, American ports were building supply ships in a single day. Imagine what could be done with nanobots building the infrastructure of a planet. In under a year, all the nessecary infrastructure of an entire planet could be built with self replicating machines.

With faster than light travel, a coordinated strike could devestate an entire empire in the space of a day. If anything should be changed time wise, it should be to fit in with the week long turns (elections mostly).

Again with growth: many worlds have native populations. It makes sense that they would eventually start paying taxes to get benefits from their host empire. The way that the game seems to consider tax-payers is people who will fight for the empire anyways, and as I said before not everyone will support the empire. Since the empire doesn't really care about what is happening on a specific planet, they don't look for all the new taxpayers.

All that said, this would be easier if there were more (hidden most likely) statistics. There should be an actual population and a tax-paying population. I'm also not sure if the game engine keeps track of what races the population is comprised of.

Now if you want to continue to argue in favor of monthly turns, there are a lot of things to think about before you discount what is already in place.

Personally I would say change it but then again I generally dont pay much attention to the times listed either. My preference is that its a month so in my mind I put it as a month. Otherwise I major war only takes a few weeks, my planet can go from 2 billion people to 10 billion in less than 3 months and elections make zero sense.
So, another option is to change it to Turns! then let everyone make up thier own minds on what they think a turn is.

Actually, one of my custom races is the Space Rabbits (I'm not joking), so the population growth fits really well with them.

I have to say that this topic is dumb... My comment in regards to population growth:

Don't you read what the advisor dude says about population growing? I believe he specifically mentions that it's suggested to have grown more than possible therefore it's actually just more people filing their taxes. Those damn tax dodgers *shakes fist*

Maybe one GALACTIC Week= A few months on Earth?

I've decided to soften my stance on this.

If the Developers decided to add to the Option Screen a toggle for a 'Weeks/Months' timeframe, that would be fine (Heck, I'd probably even choose 'Months' in my games).

However, I would hope that such a change (if practical) would be WAAAAAAAY down on the priority list.....somewhere between:

'Add bunny-ears to Dregin pics to keep from scaring young players'

and

'Add Flushing Toilet component and aninmation to Ship Building screen'