I have absolutely no idea what is wrong with the UI. It is intensely easy to use. Yeah there are a couple places where specific buttons or pieces of information would be useful, but these things are hardly needed to play the game effectively, and may even be added someday.

Also, unless I am completely missing something you don't NEED the 3rd mouse button for ANYTHING. Yeah, it makes ship building a bit easier at times but the interface has buttons that work just fine when I am building on my laptop without a mouse attached. Outside of that it doesn't do much of anything in the game.

As for the social production dump and the lack of transparency in some of the calculations... Those are all easily dealt with by learning what they are and then planning colonies and expansions based on working around them. Would I PREFER a simpler production interface... Yes, but it also forces me to LEARN more to play effectively, and this is good as well.

Yes, I have a three button mouse. I have a five button mouse AND the super high end video card that the other games require. That has nothing to do with my criticism of GC2.

I don't use buttons #3-5 because every other application on my computer with the exception of GC2 gets back with just left and right click.

Maybe when every other application on the market does things a certain way, it's because it's the best, most intuitive way.

bah this guy wants someone to play the game for him and give him a cookie cutter build. you must be a starcraft guy that needs to know when and how many to build and if you dont get the order right you just start over. wanna know how many factories? do a search. lots of posts about strategies. dont find anything you like there then try playing the game and figuring out how many factories you need, they got cakewalk for a reason, use it and experiment. and if you cant get over the fact that social production uses money just think of it as maintenance. you paid to build em and now you pay to keep em up and running. sewage, power, heating, cooling, trash collection. all adds up!!

as far as buyer regret well i have to go with EQ2 for that. sony sure can screw up a game.

wanna know how many factories? do a search. lots of posts about strategies.

I don't want to do that. Reading a web forum just to find out how to play a game is unacceptable. There's absolutely no reason why the information can't be in the game or at least the manual. Stop making excuses for Stardock.

One of the developers just posted an interesting piece that the original poster should read:
https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=106645

Clearly you missed this in my previous post, Citizen Heavensblade23, as to an application that was made available to help with some game documentation. It contains mainly research data at this point but is likely to expand more:
http://www.kynosarges.de/Galactopedia.html

One of the developers just posted an interesting piece that the original poster should read:

Reading it now. I don't feel I'm being unreasonable. I realize it's not feasible to redo the entire economic system at this point, but a number of suggestions have been made that don't require that.

Soooo your goal is what exactly with this thread?

-signed the 1m4tur3 pr1ck that called you a troll, and still thinks you are a flame baiting troll.

Soooo your goal is what exactly with this thread?

You're not worth addressing, sorry. Treat my concerns with respect and I'll treat yours with respect.

Finished reading. What he says makes sense, and I can understand his point of view, but at this point i want results and not promises. Saying "We're listening to player concerns" doesn't mean anything to me. I'll believe they're listening when I start seeing some of these issues getting taken care of. Especially when I've seen some concerns waved off as design decisions in prior threads. Which is probably why most companies have PR interact with the fanbase and not the devs.

Do you read the changelogs that are posted with each update? So far the list of corrections is fairly lengthy and many, many of the issues listed in the bug reports forum have already been addressed.

To make it easier on you, as you do not like forums anyway from what you said, here is a link:
https://www.galciv2.com/Journals.aspx?AID=104660

I'll believe they're listening when I start seeing some of these issues getting taken care of

Follow the link and then reconsider that statement.

I've played multiple full games of GalCiv 2 now and I don't think I've even used the right mouse button, let alone the middle one. Am I missing something?

Hell yes!

I agree that there is a huge lack of information about the game mechanics. Overall though, I still think it is very fun. I look at it as a game. I can get over the social spending thing, and I can also get over the fact that I am basically playing with my eyes closed. However, I still have fun with the parts that are great. I have faith that the devs will eventually give us some usefull info on the way the game percentages work. I really hope I am not dissapointed.

I agree!

Anyone else have buyer's regret?

Absolutely NOT. I love this game, although I'm spending WAY too much time playing...

the UI and ingame documentation needs help.

ingame documentation = non existant.
UI issues
-doing stuff with individual ships while they are in fleets is not possible at all(to upgrade a ship you gotta disband the fleet).
-some windows need to be changed to make the game go faster.
-going in and out of specific windows has to be smoother.
im sure some UI mod or stardock will change this.

a theme I see on this forum is ppl flaming posters who dont like something in galciv2, which is quite sad to see on this forum.

You talk about REGRET??


Link This is regret.

I kid you not.. I played the game for all of ... oh an hour. And kept getting more and more aggravated. It has NOTHING to do with D&D. Ah Marone!

Seriously.. the f-tards, who came up with THAT game.. deserve to have to work some nasty foul, grease trap cleaning job for year.

So you talk to me here about some of your fundamental problems.. and I can say okay. But those are YOUR hangups. And you need to accept that they are your hang ups. It's not like you had anything to really go on for what was going to be presented to you.

Dragonshard.. is based off of Eberron (Dungeons & Dragons).. there is NO excuse for that piece of crap game to have ever been put out. And it's NOT even a good RTS.

So don't tell me you have buyers regret over this good game. I ended up giving my copy of Dragonshard to a friend and told him not to give it back to me. He played it.. and after two days wanted to return it. Saying he wouldn't ever play it again. I said nope.. keep it.. do with it as you will. I wasted $50 bucks on that piece of crap. It was a lesson I learned.

Gal Civ 2 .... has been a pleasure. A smart intelligent AI that get's tricky. That is willing to start wars with you, and it will turn out you were set up ... by your friends.. Ah Marone!

So.. fuggedaboutit. You don't like the things that are holding you back. Ask for some advice on how to either personally modify it.. or write to Brad to engage him directly in dialogue regarding this concept.

Woah Heavensblade, you sure know how to get a bunch of fanboys riled up

ANYHOW, let me try and take your point under a different light, maybe we can come up with something...

Your point, as I understand them:
- Developpers say they are listening to our requests but they aren't for real
- Game is hard to understand
- Lackluster documentation about the game
- Mechanics that don't make much sense
- You don't like 10% of the game

Is that right? Well, you can correct me later on if you want!

Ok, so Devellopers not listening: To this, I must ask you a question. Can you name another company who has game devellopers to be so active on their forums and so forthcoming with behind-the-scene information? I don't know of many. Even blizzard, which makes really great game, is known to be a tight-lipped "Here-is-our-corporate-reply" company.

Thing is, never any game develloper will -totally- listen to the players. They toiled away months, years on a product, they usually have a clear idea of what the product is and should be (if they don't, it flops bad). No matter what the players ask for, the devellopers might not want it in because it would upset their whole "baby".

On the other hand, the more they listen, the more the player base tends to like them. It's a juggling act. So far, from the changelogs and how much feedback the devellopers are giving back to us, the players, Stardock seems pretty engaged to implement many many things. It's an on-going progress so let's wait for it.

Game UI is too hard to use: Now, I believe this point is tied to "Game mechanics aren't transparent". Let's put it rather bluntly: The UI is utilitarian but not very user-friendly. In more layman's term it means it's very useful but hard to pick up at first. However, I can assure you, once you get the hang of it, it flies like a bird - no information is farther away than 2 clicks (that is, menu -> submenu -> information), sometimes a double-click + a click. The middle mouse button is only used to rotate the camera, as far as I know. The mouse wheel is useful to scroll down or up but it's not required. Have you played other RTS games? Most of them (if not all) make use of the mouse wheel's click function - even empire at war.

Personally, I don't see what your beef is with the 3rd mouse button - most gamers that I know make full use of all their mouse button, whatever the game type (online FPS-ers are heavy users of 3rd, 4th and 5th mouse buttons).

At any rate, it doesn't change the fact that the Interface is unforgiving at first. That's something -I- can live with. I know certain types of people can't. It is not, however, a total piece of shit (I think someone said that?) interface, it just takes a little while to understand at first.

Lackluster documentation about the game: That, I cannot argue. The stuff that comes with the game has many holes. The video tutorial should be watched though, they offer much information. The manual is semi-good but a lot of the information within is outdated (I have a buzzing sensation that GalCiv2's manual is simply an edited version of GalCiv1's manual). No arguements to be had here.

Mechanics that don't make much sense: I'm sorry, they do make sense and they are very easy to understand if you think about it for a minute - I'm able to guesstimate average production, tax and money spending, bonus applications, etc. While you'd need to be a human calculator to get everything down pat, you don't need to.
Here's an example about how your Military manufacturing works (or semi-works, it gets me close enough results)
Say you have a planet with 3 basic factories that can produce 8points each. That's a total CAPACITY of 24 points.
Now, say you have your spending at 100% - that means you are using 100% of your CAPACITY. Then you have individual spending sliders. If you set your military and civil spnding at 50/50 each (and nothing in research) you will be producing -exactly- 12 military production and 12 social production. Get it? To this comes racial bonuses to production, square bonuses, star base bonuses, etc. All of these bonuses are applied to levels that make sense, too. A tile bonus applies to the factory built on it only : If you have one factory on a 100% production bonus tile, it will produce 16 points while another factory on the same planet but with no bonus will still create only 8 points. 24 points total again. Now, say your race has a 20% military production bonus, this means that your total military production will have an extra 20% - in our previous example of 12/12, for the same spending rate you would end up having 14(14.4, but it rounds down) military (12 + 20%) and 12 civic. Now say you add a starbase that gives you an extra 25% production bonus, you will now create 18 military (14.4 +25%) and 15 civic. All this production will cost you 32 BCs -> 1 BC per production. IF you are producing a ship. What doesn't make sense about this? This same logic applies (more or less) to how much money you make given your tax level, population and economics bonuses. Like I said, it's good enough to guesstimate.

Now, your 10% of the game that you don't like... Ok, I could understand that the 10% you don't like make you hate the whole game. I mean, everday in life, little tiny things bug us out of our socks (just watch all those guys that went ballistic on you). Here again, I can't really argue for personal opinion, I'm just trying to rationalise (this post is intended at the fan-boys too!)

Now, I'd just like to say something, in a very well-educated (as much as I can sound educated anyway) manner: Your original post -was- a rant/flame incentive. The fact that you wrote it in good grammar, with pseudo arguements, do not change the fact that you originaly simply said the game wasn't a good purchase because you didn't like/understand certain things - things that you didn't try to explain farther than generalities.

Nevermind anything else, you are entitled to your opinion about this game, I'm quite sure not everyone will like it, No one likes everything and some people like things that most people don't like (I'm talking to all you 5 MOO3 lovers out there!) Yeah, I like stating the obvious and saying stupid phrases that look intelligent but that really don't mean anything

Bottom line is - if you want to discuss what you don't like about the game, DO IT. Discuss it.
Your original post was -not- a discussion (maybe it was 10% discussion, 90% rant - it hinted at underlying arguements and points but they never surfaced)

Now, I've taken a good 20 minutes of my time to write this up, I've tried to get your arguements out of the text and laid them down. Like I said, if i got your arguements wrong, let me know, we can work on it. I'd just ask of you that you don't discard my whole post because I blamed you for writting a rant at first and not an actual discussion.

I have zero remorse about buying GC2 quite the opposite actually. This is the first game in years that I have played continously for hours and found myself tottally involved in.

I do agree that the documentation for GC2 was rather bad, I have found many situations like the original poster, where I have to come to the forums and ask how stuff works. One good example was the technological bonuses. I get a new engine tech, sweet it says +10 speed, ok whats that a ability bonus or +10 parsecs per turnt? Small things I know and can be fixed in patch or content package. Besides these little things GC2 is the best game I have bought in years. And when you compare SD to other developers out there, its a no brainer. What other developer gives this kinda support for their game, None that I know.

I agree with Heavensblade23 on certain points.

Personally, I don't understand if the use of third mouse button is that bad. I would rather have customizable hot-keys, but eh.

I do agree on his points about the manual being out-dated and a lot of designs being flawed. Someone was saying that Heavensblade23 should just list the problems instead of just complaining. Again, I agree with him in that a lot of problems are addressed by the Devs but the changes aren't made to the manual.

Having actively watched the forum for the last few weeks, I realized that a lot posts about problems and bugs are result of poor documentation. For example, the question about social production going to waste is mentioned many many times. If the pdf manual is edited and updated, there might be a lot of players less confused about it.

As for

Game is hard to understand

, I don't think that's what he meant. The game is hard to LEARN because the lack of proper information. Take one of the bug that was fixed, the virtual reality center. You happily build one on your planet and think that it will help you with the morale, but ithe morale actually drops when the building finishes. What is up with that? The lack of transparency make it harder to learn the game. Sure, you don't need every single detail and do calculation to optimize the results, but it should be something you can do if you are so determined.

In any case, he mentioned that he had buyer's regret and asked if others had the same feeling. I don't feel like he was particularly 'trolling.' Sometimes I feel some people are too quick to call a person troll. Sure, he may not be providing constructive criticsm, but he should be entitled to his opinions.

I would say.. due to stardock's involvement in the game, the value of GC2 will rise as time pass by. The original retail version may not be worth the 40 dollars, but it will eventually surpass that value.

For sure there are things in the game I personally don´t like. The devs put up a thread to put ideas in there and I am really confident that from time to time they read it if something new and shiny comes up.

IMHO I got a really nice game for a really acceptable price. Great support from the devs and I am looking forwrad to the additions they promisded along the lines. Until then I have fun

You ever notice how when someone rants they always say and "most of the people agree with me" or "most of the people I've talked to agree with me". LOL ROFLMAO That most is usually 1 or 2 other people hahah it's not like it's any significant portion of the game purchasers.

This game rocks and if people don't like it, then just don't play it. This is one of those games you can knock, but, it will just keep on rockin cause it's that good overall. I personally don't have or have had any issues with the game, the math or any parts of it that make it complicated or frustrating to play.

I've always found ranting about ones dislikes about a game on the official FAN site is rather silly. You aren't going to convince anyone that just because you don't like the game or find it frustrating or it doesn't have the features you wanted to follow in your footsteps that doesn't already feel that way in the first place.

Of course now if you come in here and make "suggestions" of "improvements" WITHOUT RANTING, then you might get some attention. Otherwise you just get laughed at. LOLOLOLOLOL!

I agree with the creator of the this thread, so I guess I can start putting on my flameproof suit.
Beside few notable exceptions all I see here are fanboys, blindly trashing anyone for simply
having different opinion on their beloved game, unable to make any civilized discussion about it.
Those I pity.
There are also people who simply like this game, can state they disagree and motivate why.
Those I understand and accept perfectly well.
I currently put on hold playing the game, simply because there are some bugs / issues
discouraging me from playing. For me they just diminish the fun factor enough to do so.

Do you agree with any of the following, psychoravin?

In the retail version:
The manual is outdated
Lack of a neutrality learning center
The lack of responsive tool tips
"What would you trade for this" option would be nice
Auto-adjustment for money/influence for diplomacy screen would be nice
Annoyance in that Social Production Ability did not apply properly
Annoyance in not being able to get the benefit of a trade good/galactic achievement even though you conquered the planet
Annoyance in that designed Ships can not be transferred to the game after the update
A bug had made it so you can't build another starbase after one is destroyed
annoyance in that Social Project never completing


Granted, most of the problems are fixed in the patch. However, if you just played the original version, all these little bits of annoyance would really bother you and make you think that the game is not worth your money. Personally, I was a bit disappointed just like the OP. What kept me going is stardock's quick fixes and updates. That made me believe the game will get better as time goes by, increasing its value. This is what kept me going. Then again, everytime I hear about a new update coming up, I would be hesitant to boot the game up. I would rather wait till I get the update to start a new game because I'm hoping I'll get what the game is lacking.


Now, let me ask you this:
If galciv2 did not have the support and updates as it does now, would you still think that it's worth 40 bucks? If all those issues were not fixed and no future bonus content would be added, do you truly think that it's worth every dollar you paid for?

If you get your knickers in a bunch over the fact that someone, somewhere may have said an unkind word about a game it's time to seek professional help. Or get a life. Or both. Last I heard this sort of game is supposed to appeal to the "mature" gamer, but I'm sure as sh!t not seeing a lot of that on this thread.

On-topic, the original poster is right. Documentation is either lacking or wrong on most game mechanics. And this includes wrong values being displayed in the game itself. It's damn near impossible to get any real clue on what certain game items do without cracking the files open, and even there the numbers often don't make sense without context.

In the context of the little snippiness over "constructive critcism", here's a possible fix: DOCUMENTATION! I know, I know, a radical concept, but one that could be employed here, in the form of a downloadable text file included with a patch. The designers must know what each little doohickey does, and it boggles the mind to think that THEY haven't documented it somewhere; they just need to turn it into English, slap it into a file, and hand it to us with a patch.

Then there's the hype over modability. Let's burst that bubble, because as bad as MOO3 was (and boy, did it suck) GC2 isn't anywhere near as open to manipulation. Game mechanics which were exposed for tweaking in MOO3 can't be touched in GC2. Anyone who's modded both games will know exactly what I'm talking about here. Not only can a variety of items not be modded, but they're black-boxed as well. And that means you can only guess at how they work, or how they interact with those items that CAN be modded.

Fix: none. Have to wait for GC3 on that one. Although the same comments were made about GC1 and nothing was done about them, so I don't have much hope for GC3 either.

The UI isn't very good, but it's about on par with that of MOO1 and that I could handle so I won't complain...too much. Certain things need to go right away, though, like using the arrow keys to move ships (completely nonuntuitive). Also, an easier way to examine single ships in the same square would be nice (e.g., two colony ships in the same square - how many colonists on board each? If in separate squares the appropriate window comes right up, but if 2+ ships in the same square I fumble around trying to get the relevent info on them - why not a standard click-through on stacks?).

It'd also be nice if you could get menus that sort by: a) all known systems (with known info); all habitable systems; c) all habitable and currently colonized systems; d) all habitable, uncolonized systems; and e) all habitable, uncolonized systems that don't have colony ships en route (the last so I know which systems I have ships tasked for, and which I don't; otherwise I lose track in 'huge' games and have to scroll through the ships looking for destinations to see if I've missed a planet).

This is just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could think of more. But the GUI I can handle, even if it is annoying.

Fix: easy enough in a patch for the first two; the third would need an additional menu item and more art for the display, although little programming since the info is already being used by the game.

A rehash of farms and social production. Farms are good for what, exactly? In limited (very limited cases) it works to build a single farm for greater tax revenue, but in most places feeding your hordes just seems to incite rebellion. In real life that usually works the other way around, but this IS scifi, I guess. Starvation good!

Even if it's a "feature" to have social production wasted, it'd be nice to be able to tweak it by planet, along with a button along the lines of "if SP queue empty, divert all SP production for this planet to military/research".

Fix: the farm thing qualifies as a bug since farms and farmland are currently a waste. The SP thing seems to qualify as a bug for a good many gamers here, but the devs seem to think it's hunky-dory just the way it is. Both need to be re-evaluated and changed. Neither is a particularly monumental task.

In line with a lack of documentation, it seems that a number of the moddable files don't actually do what they imply they do. I'll use PlanetDescriptions.xml as an example, which leads the casual observer to believe that one can do things like change the instance of planet types, alter the range values of said planet types, replace the maps, and so on. Lo! It turns out that this isn't the case at all! All of these things are set elsewhere when the galaxy is generated, and the only value change that works 'Enhancement Potential' (which, alas, allows you to set values which can give a planet over 26 usable squares, or which will turn water into usable squares on water planets). Trying to reset the range value won't do anything other than confuse the galaxy generator, which hard-codes those ranges and seems to use this file only to set up graphics. If, for example, you change the range of Jungle planets from 4 to 7 to 6 to 7, the generator will *still* make Jungle planets of class 4 and 5, only it won't be able to find the appropriate graphic - so it replaces those planets with terran-type planets with messed up height maps and shadow values (easily seen on the galaxy screen and colony screen). Yet no mention of this is made in the file; even a one-line piece of text like "you can only change Enhancement Potential for planets here, and you need to make sure that the total number of usable squares for the planet doesn't exceed 26" would've saved me a couple of days of playing with this file trying to get unique galaxies to properly generate.

And then there's the weirdness of having the first half of the file being nothing more than a huge comment. Yes, a programmer will see that - but the casual non-programming modder? How long will he/she play with the values in the comment before coming to the conclusion that they do nothing, if they ever come to that conclusion?

Nothing pisses off a modder as much as finding out that moddable files can't, well, actually be modded - and that this fact, which could have been revealed with a single sentence within the file itself, instead required you to waste hours of your own time to discover it.

Or another: RaceConfig.xml. If, for example, you have a smokin' system and decide you'd like to have large fleet battles, you might think to yourself that changing the logistics value in this file would do the trick - and you'd be right. EXCEPT for custom races. Yes, there's an entry for custom races but this entry *is not used* if you make a custom race. The actual file you have to modify for your custom race is located in the MyDocuments subdirectory chain, in a file called "whatevermyracenameis.raceconfig". Imagine your surprise when, say, you give everyone in the galaxy a logistics of 50, only to find out about a couple of hundred turns in that YOUR logistics value is, oh, 11. And you can't fix this by fixing the file, because after the game starts it no longer references either this file or the generated "CurrentCustomRaceX.raceconfig" file; all of the data for these files (and, in fact, every xml file - I went through the save with a hex editor trying to find the info) is actually kept in the .sav file itself. But there ain't no documentation for this, nor for the fact that once the game begins none of the moddable files are used anymore since all the data is loaded into the save.

Modding on the fly is not possible. And that certainly blows from a playtest point of view.

Last (for this comment) but certainly not least is the save bug. It's one hundred percent reproducible on my system, and that bites. As in, the game works just fine so long as you don't reload. But if you do it doesn't rebuild the map correctly and graphical anomalies appear in certain areas. If the graphical anomaly is within explored space your game will crash as soon as you load it; if it's outside of your explored space it'll crash as soon as it's exposed by one of your ships. This leads people to believe that it happens "variably", but it doesn't; it's the same graphical bug, they just expose it at different times from save to save (e.g., after one reload they send a scout straight for it and crash in a few turns, after another reload they don't send the scout in that direction and only expose it 50 or 100 turns later, crashing again). It's not graphics that're the problem here, but that the savegame feature doesn't work correctly and that upon reloading it builds a bad map - resulting in a graphical glitch which can't be displayed, followed by a memory error and a crash.

That took me most of today to figure out. It could be that it's Win2000-specific. If you want to know if you have the same problem, do this:

- enable cheats. Do this by changing the command line to: "C:\Program Files\games\strategy\galactic civilizations 2\GalCiv2.exe" cheat

- start a new game. You don't have to do anything, just start the game.

- now save the game, then reload it. You don't have to exit the game, just load from your save.

- now press CTRL+U. This is the cheat for exposing the entire map, which will also expose any graphical glitches on said map. If you have the savegame problem your game will crash straight to the desktop. Note that if the game appears to freeze it isn't actually frozen, it's just that the CTRL+U command takes a long, long time to process even on fast systems. Also note that the problem isn't with CTRL+U, since you can use this command effectively when you start a new game, and from any point on, so long as you don't reload. It's the save that's broken, not the command.

I list these little morsels here just to prove that the OP has a valid point, despite what the fanboys are chanting. And to reiterate that rabidly flying to the defense of a GAME is at the very least a sign that you need to get out more. A lot more. Perhaps a girlfriend would help, too.

Max

I have no regrets at all (except, maybe, that I didn't get involved in the beta). For the meager price and the number of hours of fun I've already had, it has been one of my best bargains in gaming yet (right up there with the Civ series).

Citizen maxpublic , you listed some things in an orderly fashion and voiced your concerns about them. That part is constructive. The part where you postulate "solutions" mocking the developers is not.

The original poster was not even as constructive as you were.

The game does have some issues right now that you and others have delineated, Max. My approach to that, however, is not as pessimistic as yours. I am only trying to help the original poster give better form to his complaint, one that perhaps developers could actually use. Does trying to help the original poster make a more balanced post make me a fanboy? Fanboys would just flame the original poster and have done with it.

Some people look for every opportunity to complain without considering that their approach might not be useful at all to actually address the issue at hand. Making a more balanced and constructive post will usually call better attention to your concerns while making your post as flameproof as possible.