Gripes

-AI builds structures on bonus tiles that don't take advantage of the bonus (such as factories on fertile soil)

I do that too. Especailly with food.

Rampant overpopulation is the easiest way to stunt the ability to raise taxes reasonably. Those bonuses aren't free, after all.

Wow, so rarely do you see such a textbook case of "if someone implements something differently than me then it is a bug."

Sorry Strategist but I wish you'd just go back to Civ 4 (which you keep saying you're going to) and leave us alone. Your constant bashing of the game is getting old.

For real.. maybe the races are balanced and working as intended.

unfortunately they are not very thorough

That is a very insulting comment to Stardock. Especially on the eve of a monumental release that is very solid.

Go back to your cave, troll.

-No 'fog of war' viewing mode. We get to see ownership on the minimap, we get to see ship range on the minimap yet we don't get to see fog of war on the minimap

Actually the fog of war is visible on the mini map. It is dark gray, but depending on your monitor settings, it may be difficult for you to see. I agree with most of your points though, except the point that the gameplay bugs show that the game isn't finished, because it is alright as is - there are just some features that are annoying ot me, and apparently you as well. Another feature that annoys me is that the influence doesn't show up properly in the minimap if you zoom in on it.

-AI builds structures on bonus tiles that don't take advantage of the bonus (such as factories on fertile soil)

I saw a lot more of this before Beta 4... the AI ultilzation of bonus tiles has improved and seems pretty decent now. My biggest gripe with regards to AI building choices is the computer fondness for mostly useless planetary defense structures. Also, the AIs seem to struggle with picking good numbers of farms and morale buildings. In my latest two games, the population graph showed the AI population peaking much earlier than mine because they built very few farms.

Do you have a screenshot of a 1.1 game that exhibits what you consider poor AI building? Sometimes, for example, a factory on fertile soil is a good choice, as I'm sure you know.

-No 'fog of war' viewing mode. We get to see ownership on the minimap, we get to see ship range on the minimap yet we don't get to see fog of war on the minimap

I don't have much of an opinion on this one as I don't really use the minimap... I just zoom all the way out on the main map.

-Secret police center useless - it's essentially a very, very expensive multimedia center that yields less morale bonus than aforementioned structure. Major oversight. -Galactic Guide Book useless - by the time you can construct this all anomalies will be long since gone.

Yeah. There're a handful rough patches in the planetary improvements that could sure use some polish. Some things, like the secret police center, are innocuously useless. Some things, like the Eyes of the Universe, have significant negative effects on the gameplay.

-Ai gives you more for your money if you sell techs one by one rather than all at once

Oh yeah. Don't get me started on tech trading or the diplomacy AI. Tech trading off is the only viable choice at this point, imho.

It's a hard problem to solve. If they get it right, it'd be crazy impressive. Maybe in a later patch they'll accomplish this, but I'm not holding my breath... I've thought about the problem, and I think it would take a significant change in the mechanics of tech trading (specifically, something non-instantaneous), and I haven't seen Frogboy/Draginol or others express any intention of doing this in the future. But hey, the beta 4 patches (I haven't played a game in 1.1 yet) were a bigger improvement than I had expected, so they're doing something right, and tech trading off works for now.

-No 'sleep' command. I want to be able to tell a ship to stay where it is regardless of enemies coming into range.

Oh yeah. This is one of those things where it's just kinda hard to comprehend why they didn't put it in. And what's up with Sentry and Guard?

-Galaxy setup: If number of planets etc is set to random it should stay at random next time galaxy setup screen is loaded -Abilities setup: You still have to click the reset button twice for it to reset properly. -Abilities setup: You can still shoot yourself in the foot by overwriting innate abilities (humans, for example, can overwrite their 25% diplomacy bonus with a 5% bonus and pay a point for doing so) -Customization points: Studying the RaceConfig.xml file it appears some races are supposed to get less than 10 customization points yet all get 10. -Of course the game still crashes frequently - especially when alt-tabbing - but to me that is more acceptable than the gameplay-related bugs.

These seem like reasonable points but I haven't noticed them myself. Well, with the exception of the Abilities setup. Some aspects of how it's done now (like the overwriting innate bonuses you mention, or the under-the-hood, undocumented Yor diplomacy penalty, or the "balance" of the races) strike me as dubious design choices. But I'm not a game designer, so what do I know. At the end of the day, if they fix obvious glitches (like overwriting innate bonuses) and the gameplay is good, well, that's enough for me.

it is still riddled with bugs and evident signs of an unfinished game.

I've been pretty surprised by how defensive some people get when users call this game "unfinished." Is it necessary to say, "We're releasing a new patch, but it's not because the game was unfinished or anything, just look at these awards." Just say, "Here's a new patch, enjoy!" I mean, it clearly shipped unfinished. Almost all games do, and GalCiv2 seems about average in this regard--not more or less polished than one would expect a typical game to be. Well, maybe a little less polished than average in 1.0X, but the commitment to ongoing patches more than makes up for this... with 1.1 (well, beta 4 is the most recent I've played) I think it's safe to say that they've brought to overall polish up to a little above what the average game ships at, and it will just keep getting better. It's just... well, if you're a developer, why not embrace the idea that the game is unfinished? Reject the idea that "finished" is good and "unfinished" is bad; instead, consider that "finished" is static and "unfinished" can be improved. They've made good game that can be great, and they've sold it with the pitch that they'll keep releasing patches, and they're doing a good (with some qualifications) job of living up to this. Maybe the problem is that we're all using subtly different definitions of "unfinished." But I digress.

Going back to the original post and the above quote, I think that "bug" might be the wrong word to use. An aspect of the game that needs some polish isn't necessarily a bug. There are some bugs left, and the game is riddled with things that can be improved, but "riddled with bugs," well, that might be too strong of a statement with 1.1. But I wholeheartedly agress with the overall gist, that there is still a lot of work to be done before GalCiv2 gets close to its (awesome) potential.

Martimus wrote:

Actually the fog of war is visible on the mini map. It is dark gray, but depending on your monitor settings, it may be difficult for you to see

Really? I see unexplored territory as dark gray on the minimap, but nothing showing fog of war over in areas that have been explored but are not currently within sensor range.

That is a very insulting comment to Stardock. Especially on the eve of a monumental release that is very solid.

Insulting or not, it's also far from false.

SD has fixed a number of complex and difficult problems. However, minor things (like the Secret Police thing) are just left there. It took the 1.1 patch before Neutrality Learning Centers even came into existence.

These are minor bugs, yes. But they're there. And they're gameplay bugs. You can't really call it a well-polished game with these things sitting there.

Did Civ 4, 3, 2,or even 1 (made to run in 640K of RAM, no less) ever have these kinds of issues? Where something was supposed to be there but wasn't? Or a new building wasn't any better for you than an old one? Of course not.

These kinds of minor bugs are part of what separates good games from great games, and great games from legendary ones.

Calling the game "unfinished" is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false either. There are definately some significant oversights in the 1.0X game, and the testers that claimed that the developers had "separation anxiety" need to be fired. But so far, StarDock's ongoing committment seems to be more towards the big things that they harp about for GC2 (AI, etc) than the little things that make a game really special (improved UI, tree cleanup, quality-of-player-life issues).

I mean, I can sit down and play the game for 2 hours, and run into at least 5 things that are annoying about the interface. And while, in general, the game is good enough to overcome those issues, the greatest games don't have these kinds of weaknesses.

Did Civ 4, 3, 2,or even 1 (made to run in 640K of RAM, no less) ever have these kinds of issues? Where something was supposed to be there but wasn't? Or a new building wasn't any better for you than an old one? Of course not.

I have played all of these, so I will answer.
Civ 1 - solid game, no major issues (but this was a DOS game, and was much simpler)
Civ 2 - You had to turn off movies or risk random crashes on all of my computers. Otherwise pretty solid (This was a Windows 3.x game using a standard window)
Civ 3 - Still crashed randomly unless movies were disabled. I also recall several units didn't work right before the first patches. (This was a windows 9x 2D DirectX game, but supported windowed)
Civ 4 - Let me count the problems:
1. Major bugs - Civ 4 wasn't 'ready to ship' for months AFTER release - it took over a month for them to release a patch to fix the most serious problems, and it still would crash after an hour or two of play. There were separate major problems with both Nvidia and ATI cards (covering almost every card to the extent that the bugs should have been found and fixed LONG before release).
2. Movies still had problems - random crashes.
3. Speed - Civ 4 runs slow on a fast PC.
4. Civilization is supposed to cover the earth (a large place), but the largest Civ 4 world is <1/4 the size of a Civ 3 world. It feels less like 'conquer the world' than 'conquer a moon'. The feeling of massiveness just isn't there.

I think GalCiv2 compares well to Civ 4 at release.
GalCiv:
mostly minor bugs at release, very few crashes (mostly older video/sound drivers, but also superfast video cards - over 100fps - had crashes)
The movies play without crashing the computer (should be a given, but Civ never got it right)
Plays well on slower computers, scales well on faster computers
Works with high resolution screens and unusual resolutions (including landscape displays)
The scale is there - feels like 'conquer the galaxy' (although it doesn't feel as large as GalCiv2 for OS/2 felt)
The few crash bugs (which affected a small fraction of users) were fixed within a month, and many improvements were made. There are still a few issues, but those are minor compared with the major problems that Civ4 and MOO3 had

Alfonse is consistent in never having anything nice to say about the game or Stardock. I am not sure why he hangs around here other than to crap on the game and the people involved.

Saying that GalCiv II was "unfinished" when it shipped is absurd. I think i've seen FB say this and I think it's true, you can't compare a game to some utopian perfect game. You can only compare it to other real games.

I don't remember civ 1 or 2 very well.

But civ 3 shipped with the corruption bug that basically made playing on large maps impossible. It was fixed. Pirates shipped with a load of missing features that are mentioned in the manual. Tobacco trading, for ex, was never added into the game. Civ 3 without patching is basically unplayable for me.

Civ 4 didn't even run out of the box for me and nearly everyone else with an ATI card. The entire "religion" aspect of the game is basically pointless. The various improvements in the game are largely pointless if they involve religion.

Talk about having rose colored glasses on. The imps in galciv 2 are a masterpiece compared to the imps in civ 4. What planet are you on? By the time you can build the more advanced civ 4 religious buildings that give a lot of culture it's too late for them to matter.

Religion, as a game mechanic, in Civ 4 doesn't really work. Neither does culture. Have you ever won a Civ 4 game with culture? Ever? It's virtually impossible. You have to have 3 cities with 50,000 culture points to do it. At any difficulty level above Noble that's very hard.

Aflonse, you're a bitter little troll. Every time I see one of your posts I know that some shitty little nastiness is going to come out. And you piss me off because what you say is almost always so negative that the only counter balancing of it is to sound like a damn fanboy....and I resent having to sound like a fanboy in order to bring some brevity to one of your countless bitch comments.

Strategist, the OP at least can be dismissed. He's the guy who said that the Civ4 computer players were more distinct than galciv's. But you alfonse always put forth stuff that if someone isn't paying attention or doesn't know your pattern of constant criticism might make the unwary think "Yea, he has a good point".

But this time you brought up specifc games and people can see your bias for what it is. Civ 4 has tons of improvements that are basically pointless. Crack open your civ 4 manual, turn to page 207. Start reading and consider the techs needed to build some of them and how pointless those benefits are. And they ain't getting fixed. At least GalCiv's imps get tweaked and improved.

Galciv 2 is a great game. That is why it keeps getting such great reviews. That's why it has so many people raving about it. Just because you're willing to nitpick something like the secret police thing even while the entire culture game mechanic in civ 4 lays broken (perhaps you should hang out at civfanatics.com like I do and read what its fans say) doesn't make what you say true.

Rant off..

Talk about having rose colored glasses on. The imps in galciv 2 are a masterpiece compared to the imps in civ 4. What planet are you on? By the time you can build the more advanced civ 4 religious buildings that give a lot of culture it's too late for them to matter.

i was thinking the same thing. the guy's complainign about secret police? i seem to recall secret police also keep planets from revolting, they're not just morale builders but i could be mistaken.

but those improvements that he complains about aren't central to a game strategy. in civ 4 you have far more useless and expensive improvements. the christian cathedral costs 300, requires christianity which is a late game tech, 3 christian temples in your civ, and does what? improves culture by 50% in the city basically. the thing costs more than a bank and by the time you can build it, culture has already long since topped out. and there is one of these useless buildings for each civ.

the islamic mosque is probably the worst. to get islam you first have to have divine right which is late game. then you have build 3 islamic temples and then you can build it to get the puny 50% increase in culture which by that time you're almost in the industrial age and if you already have 15,000 culture in the city and are doing 200 per turn, going to 300 per turn means nothing most of the time. these are buildings that are supposed to let you win through a culture victory but don't really fulfill that role.

the result in is that players can only win either by conquest which is very hard, time which is easy, or space race which is boring.

i happen to like civ 4 so i don't like having to bring up these faults. but alfonse is so dedicated to tearing down gc2 that someone needed to bring them up.

These rant posts are so misleading...
People are typing something thats plausible to put their point across but anyone who knows about it knows that its wrong.
To counter it, people have to post another rant.

I played Civ 4
I saw the problems the game had and checked the forums to check out whats getting fixed.
I like the game but it was far from rosy.
There were lots of issues with crashs, incompatibility, and many that others here posted.

If you want to rant about Galciv2's quality, at least point to a game that is better in release instead of games that are not.
Make a point with valid arguments.
Getting tired of reading posts with arguments that are inaccurate or misleading.

John Hamp wrote:

Aflonse, you're a bitter little troll. Every time I see one of your posts I know that some shitty little nastiness is going to come out.

Woah, keep it civil.

Alfonse wrote:

SD has fixed a number of complex and difficult problems. However, minor things (like the Secret Police thing) are just left there. It took the 1.1 patch before Neutrality Learning Centers even came into existence. These are minor bugs, yes. But they're there. And they're gameplay bugs. You can't really call it a well-polished game with these things sitting there.

What can possibly be controversial about that?

-Abilities setup: You can still shoot yourself in the foot by overwriting innate abilities (humans, for example, can overwrite their 25% diplomacy bonus with a 5% bonus and pay a point for doing so)

I think this is by design, and I don't see a problem. You don't want to override your defaults, then don't override them! If you do by accident it's easy to fix. Most of the other issues are either very minor or problems I haven't seen.

He is correct about the Guide Book and Secret Police Center being useless. SPC just gives a 20% bonus to moral on the world it's built on, less than a Multimedia Center but at 6 times the cost. You'd have to be an idiot to build one. It probably should give a bonus to influence resistance instead.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned that the production bonus from moons is still broken...

Sorry Strategist but I wish you'd just go back to Civ 4 (which you keep saying you're going to) and leave us alone. Your constant bashing of the game is getting old.

Go back to your cave, troll.

Sorry but I have to say that you two are fairly stupid.
Sure, his opinion about this game may differ from yours (and mine) but I have noticed the actual bugs he mentioned, they do exist. Wouldn't it be good if Stardock fixed these bugs?

Some valid gripes to be sure but honestly these posts strike me more as *if you don't fix what I want right now I'm taking my ball and going home*. Grow up. Let's run through these shall we?

-AI builds structures on bonus tiles that don't take advantage of the bonus (such as factories on fertile soil)

I don't think I've ever used the fertile soil tiles. The population just gets too large with the higher farming techs to make it worthwhile. I suspect that what you see as a flaw is something the AI is doing and you don't understand why it did it. There are times where it may decide another type of building is needed on the planet and the only space left may have a bonus tile for something else. Can't fault them there. I do it myself too. Also if you are complaining about this on anything less then *intelligent* setting then I really don't know what to say. There have been probably dozens of posts about the fact that the lower difficulties are coded to actually make mistakes. So again just because you don't know why doesn't mean it is wrong.

-No 'fog of war' viewing mode. We get to see ownership on the minimap, we get to see ship range on the minimap yet we don't get to see fog of war on the minimap

So? Would it be a nice feature for them to add? Can't say. I personally would never use it.

-Secret police center useless - it's essentially a very, very expensive multimedia center that yields less morale bonus than aforementioned structure. Major oversight. -Galactic Guide Book useless - by the time you can construct this all anomalies will be long since gone.

Going to take these two together because they are really saying the same thing. Just because you can't think of a reason to use them doesn't mean they are not valid. Major oversight. Hardly. Go look up hyperbole in the dictionary.

-Ai gives you more for your money if you sell techs one by one rather than all at once

And how exactly would you propose to let the AI player know that the human player is actually planning on doing this? This is an exploit. If you don't like it don't do it. The only thing I can think of that they might do to try to fix it would be to let the AI *remember* a couple of trades and say *hey you just gave me tech for money I'm not going to do that again*. But then how do you get it out of that loop? Seriously let's stop to think about *how would you do it* before just mouthing off. The AI doesn't have a memory like we humans do. It takes every situation as a discrete instance.

-No 'sleep' command. I want to be able to tell a ship to stay where it is regardless of enemies coming into range.

OMG. One I actually agree with and wish was there. But instead of b******* about it most of us understand that Stardock employees are human beings and not our C++ coding slaves and therefore request things we may want added to the game. I think if nothing else v1.1 has proven that they will listen to us.

-Galaxy setup: If number of planets etc is set to random it should stay at random next time galaxy setup screen is loaded

Can't verify this one yet since I've only started one game with v1.1. Chances are they will patch it since the galaxy setup screen remembered all the other options.

-Abilities setup: You still have to click the reset button twice for it to reset properly.

Don't know works fine for me.

-Abilities setup: You can still shoot yourself in the foot by overwriting innate abilities (humans, for example, can overwrite their 25% diplomacy bonus with a 5% bonus and pay a point for doing so)

There is a reason that the races are predefinied. Should it be this way? Can't say but my guess is this is intended. And if you were part of Stardock's design meetings then you'd know why it happens too.

-Customization points: Studying the RaceConfig.xml file it appears some races are supposed to get less than 10 customization points yet all get 10

Yeah and? Again this is done intentionally. Also I do believe I've seen posts by Frogboy about the fact that the AI does actually distribute those *unused* points.

-Of course the game still crashes frequently - especially when alt-tabbing - but to me that is more acceptable than the gameplay-related bugs.

Ok this one makes absolutely no sense. I think the majority of people would be MORE pissed about the game crashing then anything you listed here. Oh and a side observation: Most likely the game crashed before the v1.1 release because something is screwed up on your end. Given this fact the chances of it still crashing are pretty good if you never bothered to fix the problem with your machine in the first place. And for the record the alt-tabbing crash was fixed in like the second patch after release. It just takes it a minute or so to recover. Patience.

::count to 10::

Beyond my points above I will make one last point. A couple of things you pointed out are valid and most likely things that Stardock wants to address at some point. Others are just you complaining about things that you don't understand and since you don't understand it it must be wrong. My assessment of this is that this is the last time I waste my time with one of your posts.

Woah, why so much hostility?

I totally concur on some of the points.

Ship sleep command - please please please!
Secret police centre, Galactic Guide Book - Never ever built either of these, has anyone?
Selling techs one at a time - very tedious.

Fog of war on the mini-map I've not really checked and I'm not fussed about.

Frequent crashes? Maybe you need to look at your machine or your drivers, the game's been very stable indeed for me with only one or two crashes ever - and that's playing a beta! PC games are notoriously difficult due to the huge range of hardware, driver versions, registry settings etc, I think Stardock have done a v good job in that regard by and large, and far better than some much more experienced games developers (though of course they have a lot of desktop experience in the company, its not quite the same as the 3D graphics world).

Overall I think Stardock have done a great job, but dont be blind, there's always room for improvements and some tweaks would be very simple to make. I have faith they'll come in due time, Stardock have a great track record for post-release support and improvements as we've seen with the 1.1 betas and, now, the 1.1 release too.

Try to keep things civil and see both sides of the story everyone.

Civ 1 and 2 were FULL of bugs. You could go around in both games in a single turn and kill every enemy on the map by saving at the end of the turn, then immediately reloading that game. Your units would all have their full movement points again. If you want to talk about diplomacy bugs, Civilization invented diplomacy bugs. This was the biggest reason I could not play the game for any proloinged period of time. The diplomacy was all wacked out. Anyway, this game has fixed nearly all of the problems that I had with civilization, but has some of its own issues. Either way, it is fun, but it has a longer shelf life for me than the Civ games because it has deeper gameplay. (I did love the Civ games, but they didn't have much replay value for me.)