First Time Gal Civ-er

GC2 is constantly being improved by the devs. If it is something that can be easily fixed the devs will try to do so in a patch, if you can catch thier attention and present your case in a reasonable, polite manner. If it is a major fix like ship combat the best you can hope for is trying to get them to include it in the future expansion. They have been very understanding in the past and very eager to improve the game experience for everyone. Don't get discouraged other people have made the same observations, and the devs do make an effort to read through the post and make changes.

I'd really like some improvement to ship-to-ship combat as well. I know we aren't going to get tactical battles, but it would be nice if the ships actually faced towards the enemy ship when they fired. It isn't THAT hard to do. I know this because I've done it myself, and I suck at programming AI.

The orbit and 3d things were discussed, but won't arrive because a) 3d is damn hand to handle properly, and orbit takes up too much cpu time, same reason 5 planets is the max in a system.

Also, if you look hard enough, missiles come out of launchers. Zoom in, and they DO fire from their weapons.

Orbits could be handled by displaying a star and its planets as one object on the map, with the planets themselves showing as orbiting their star much like the moons orbit their planets presently. You would have to "enter" a system (much like how you enter orbit around a planet presently), which would open a "star system sub map", to go to a particular planet. This would make a whole lot more sense than the current system, which shows planets as orbiting 2 and 3 parsecs from their stars, or 600-900 trillion km (370-560 miles), roughly. That is 2-3 million times as far as the average distance between Earth and Sol (the sun, for those who do not know), which would make every planet in GalCiv2 uninhabitable by anything whose blood was not made of liquid nitrogen.

3D is not hard to handle, Relic has done it with the Homeworld line of games, and in RTS format too, so a nice, slow-paced TBS implementation should be easier. It's also been done in many other games before, heck, Ascendancy was a 3D 4x TBS game and it came out ten years ago! "Hard" is a state of mind, find an innovative approach to something and it is no longer hard. It's only when you decide in your mind, "this is too hard", that it becomes too hard. I believe Stardock was and is capable of doing a 3D GalCiv game, but they have to decide whether they want to do a 3D GalCiv game. If that ever happens, though, it will have to be "GalCiv3", as it's too late to make such a fundamental paradigm shift now.

I can't believe missles don't get fired from the missle launchers, lasers don't get fired out of the cannons and bullets don't come out of the guns, instead the ships just meander in circles and projectiles fly out of nowhere. I wasn't hoping for the death star trench scene, but at least some combat that looked equivalent to wing commander 2 or the like.

The lasers, missiles, and mass drivers ARE fired from their respective weapons. They usually only fire out of half of the weapons that you have put on the ship at a time though. I have never seen a weapon not being fired from the point it was placed on the ship.

Galciv 2 has a nice 3d engine so i dont know what are u talking about ... just uncheck the camera angle in game options and u can watch it wfrom whatever angle u like but i ahve to amit that this game feels empty without any realtime based skills ( except for the invasion thing ^^) i would really love to micro my fleets in a realtime battle.

Butcgerski, by 3D I meant that the game is still layed out as if it were on a 2D game board. In real life space is not flat. There are stars in every which direction. Check out Link to see what I mean. Its not a game, but it is an awesome free open source space sim.

Martimus, I'll have to look again, but so far I've seen lasers for sure come out of every side of the ship including the rear. I think they should only come out of the weapon hardpoint and only in the direction the hardpoint is pointing.

Mistoffeles said- "Orbits could be handled by displaying a star and its planets as one object on the map, with the planets themselves showing as orbiting their star much like the moons orbit their planets presently. You would have to "enter" a system (much like how you enter orbit around a planet presently), which would open a "star system sub map", to go to a particular planet. "

That sounds very much like GalCiv I, and trust me, you do not want that back. It didn't make a lot of sense and required too much clicking and it didn't look good graphically either.