Suggestions for GalCiv 2 expansion pack or GalCiv3

#1. Yes I would love to see heroes. Good call that they should draw a salary and have an avatar.

#2. I would love to see more “functional” ships like carriers, though it might be hard to justify since your small/tiny ships could theoretically travel as fast as your mother ships.

#3. Yes muchos strategy potential in this one. Allow for the capture of ships. And if you capture a ship with an enemy hero, you gain special abilities AGAINST that race (say do 10% more damage when fighting against that race since you “know their strategies”.

#5. Ascendancy had some really cool weapons like this. It was more feasible in that game since all their battles were turn based. The combat model in GalCiv2 might need some tweaking for this to be implemented. I would love to see ships capable of doing more then just firing a standard weapon though.

Didn't you post this before?

Hero units: Well, I can see how in some games this is good. But this is Galciv. Could be in for number 3, but personally I doubt whether it'll ever hit this game, because it just doesn't fit into the game at all. I do like games with these in though, like Rise and Fall, and others, but it just doesn't seem to go with the game.

Carriers: This one has been answered multiple times. Fighters are ALWAYS useful, because they are cheap with high firepower. Huge hulls with all firepower are a waste of money. Fighters stay useful, except for tiny. Also, carriers wouldn't be any good in battle, because it makes the combat with them tactical. Which probably won't happen in GC2. And for my 2 cents, I can't stand the idea of them.

Capturing ships: Same again, it's a tactical idea, and extremely illogical. It probably won't make it for GC2, but I like this idea more than carriers, and I hope it (or a form of) will make gc3. Perhaps if you're allowed crews, you can plant spies on the ships, and cause them to possibly defect in battle, or steal the blueprints for the ship?

Space stations already speed the repair of a ship, same way a planet does.

Special weapons, the only one I can think of is the Terror Star, planet destroyer that will be included in the first expansion (if the AI get to use them properly). The others don't make much sense, since it's not a ground battle game, and how would a weapon steal a trade good?

One thing I always thought might be interest was Blueprints. For example, your enemy builds a ship that, frankly, kicks your ass. If you set your spies onto tracking it down, you might get a chance of nabbing the blueprint, and copying it to make a replica of the ship, and then work towards researching the tech required, so it becomes a ship in shipyard.

Also, for Terror Stars, there should be some sort of beurocracy involved, testing etc. The USA (or Germany/russia for that matter) didn't just clobber together uranium and hope for the best. If that had happened, there's a chance America and England might have been fired at. No, it had to undergo testing, which is when the US nicked the uranium and blueprints for an A-bomb, and used the information to forward their own plans.

Basically, there should be a stage where before using a Terror Star, you have to build some mini-wonders to test it (like civ had the manhattan project for nukes) during which another civ might figure out what you're up to, and either steal the plans, or alert the UP. This would add an extra strategic level to them, because you won't just be able to jump out with a flying starbase of doom and say "Surrender or die".

Seems, if I want most of those suggestions, I can play MOO2. I love MOO2. I love GalCiv2. I am not sure I would love GalMOO2. I sure didn't like MOO3. So far, Brad has done a pretty good job of balancing wish lists and StarDock's capabilities.

That said, here is MY wish list, which is MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than yours. Because it is MINE! So there!

********FIRST FEATURE***********
I love to direct fights. It is my favorite part of MOM. It is my favorite part of MOO2. It is my favorite part of SE4. I would love to have this feature in GalCiv2. You could leave 'automate fights' as a game option for those who don't want to take unfair advantage of the AI.

********SECOND FEATURE***********
I want a trapdoor. That is, when the AI is kicking my butt, I want to have a technology that allows me to leave my enemies behind and take a 1 way trip to a new galaxy. I know, I can always start a new game, but that breaks the story-telling spell. I want a technology that has about 3 levels:

1st level allows me to send a single colonizer to a new galaxy. Essentially, it is a game restart with a totally random mix of opponents. It preserves story telling. And, maybe you get to keep 1/10th of your researched technologies.

2nd level allows me to send a single fleet to a new galaxy. Like before. You get to keep 1/2 of your researched technologies.

3rd level allows me to send an entire Solar system to a new galaxy. I get to keep all my researched technologies.

Of course, for this to be fun, the randomly generated galaxies should come pre-stocked with opponents of random skill and technology level. And, there is always the chance you will roll 'snake eyes' and end up in the galaxy of the PreCursors. It won't be balanced. But it would be great story-telling.

********THIRD FEATURE***********
I want the possibility for the game to continue when a computer AI manages to pull off a win.

For example, if an AI manages a 'Research Transendance' victory, the game should continue. The game should just change.

Ask yourself, If I was a computer AI that had become Transcendant, what would I do? It could be fun. Maybe Human AI transcendance would leave behind a game where all the remaining races had pinoccio noses. Maybe one AI would re-theme the look of the game. Maybe another would rearrange all the stars in the shape of their Icon. Maybe another AI would change the 'Exit' message generated when you quit the game. Maybe another AI would become aware of the limits of the computer and try to convince me to buy it a better place to live!

The game developers could have a lot of fun with this. And, so would the game players. After all, to suddenly terminate a losing game is a terrible loss of story telling. An intial loss is just the start of a great story.

Miles

Galciv doesn't have room for heroes. Even if they do, I wouldn't want them in the game.

yeam Civ4 already has something alot like this, better to keep things unique

Capturing ships in space battles seems like a nuts idea to me. How would you even approach and dock with a ship unless all of it's drives and weapons were gone? In which case, why not just blow it up? How much would it cost to return such a ship to usable status? The big question - how would it even WORK in the uncontrolled combat? At random? Let's be honest - having very damaged ships surrender is probably better than some uncontrollable, not-very-feasable 'space marine' nonsense.

Carriers and fighters don't really fit with GC2. You're either stuck with tiny hulls being fighters, in which case introducing fighter and carriers does jack shit, or you make up some smaller 'fighter' hull, which does some worthlessly low amount of damage and dies in one shot. How many fighters does it take to kill a ship with high defence? That's right - they can't.

However, bases should get repair modules. It'd be great to be able to repair your ships there. Call me nuts, but I think upgrades should be limited to planets, bases and squares adjacent too. Upgrading in the middle of nowhere? Stupid. Sploitable.

#1 i strongly dislike "hero" units. Unless it's part of a campaign. Though it would interesting for each race to have a hero "hull" type that the can be designed in the ship editor. Each race would have one non-upgradeable, non-leveling, overpowered ship. it could be self-balancing in that the creation of one hero unti would lead to an arms race to be able to take it down.
The hardest part would be to avoid "Hero rushing" early in the game.
I would hope the destruction of a "hero" unit would be memorable, like the sinking of the Bismarck.

#2 Carriers are good. I think it should just be another tech tree. You research "Carrier Modules" or something like that, and it is simple a 4th kind of weapon, with it's own opposing defense. Carriers Modules would have to be bigger enough that you can't put them on anything smaller than a Medium hull. Course, in early games, you could put them on Cargo Hulls, which neccesitat escorts.

#3 I think it would be relatively simple to do marines like an invasion. I don't think anything smaller than a medium can be captured though- Everything else is a fighter. Each hull size has X crew who fight Y marines from the attacker's marine pods, modified by Soldiering and Courage.
But I think the primary use of Marines would be capture enemy Starbases.

#4 A module for military starbases inwhich you have to pay for a quick repair would interesting.

#5 The idea has some merit, but I don't think it's doable.

I've never posted before, but it's nice to hear someone else has come up with similar ideas.

Fighters are rarely useful as is. You can pack large firepower cheaply on a small hull but any fleet of larger ships designed with even mild defensive capabilities beats just about any fleet of equal logistics that uses fighters, unless you have a massive tech advantage. Even when you mix only a few in among larger ships to try and get a weaponry advantage and rely on the selfish herd defense, they still get picked off easily because of the low HP and essentially zero defense, still waste $$$ and several turns to build up again and are a b*tch keeping track of in terms of sending back to the front line/to the appropriate fleet, even using rally points. Furthermore, the combat AI doesn't factor in that smaller ships = harder to hit. So really, what's the point? I love fighter combat, consider myself a vet strategy games player and have tried to make them work. But particularly on higher difficulty levels, they simply aren't so cheap and easy to stack firepower on that they offset dead-in-one-shot and worthless-in-an-equal-logistics-battle-vs-fleets-of-larger-ships.

So I say just cut out the middle man. Nobody says you need to use carriers, but make them an option for those of us who think they'd be badass

"how would a weapon steal a trade good"
--> Tractor beam? Beats me. I'm just saying the concept of one shot wild cards would be a nice twist on what is essentially paper,rock, scissors at the moment. We're talking about advancing a concept. The advancement of paper,rock, scissors would involve introducing a new element to the combat system...why not special weapons?

The Space marines/assault shuttles would be the hardest to implement I'm sure. The spy/defection idea sounds good. Basically I just want a way to steal enemy ships, because that's how I roll. If you want to steal his plans and build your own, I'm cool with that. I'd rather steal the keys and turn his own guns on his homeworld. bwahahah.

Hero units with avatars would only get out of hand if they were allowed to become absurdly powerful, which was their downfall in other games involving them like MOO2/MOM. I'm talking about minor buffs, limited levels of advancement and a limited # you can possess. Again, nobody would say you'd have to use them. They'd be balanced by the cost they have to your economy to pay their salary, which would increase with their level.

You could play MOO2 to get a lot of these features. You could play a lot of similar games and get a lot of similar features. As you say though, this is Brad's game, and I'd like to see Brad perfect features that I think could be largely improved upon from MOO2 and other games. I also like both Features 1 and 2 that dweller_below suggested above, although they are nowhere near as important or cool as my suggestions

Fighters are rarely useful as is.

Nonsense. Fighters, coupled with military bases, are the ultimate defensive unit. Per ship, the military base bonus becomes much more powerful with small ships than with large ones.

Granted, since fighting a defensive war is (at the moment) pointless, there's little point to it.

But before you start screwing around with the combat by suggesting such nonsense as carriers, consider that combat is already receiving a drastic/horrific change in 1.2. The usefulness of fighters can easily change, particularly if defensive forces are needed.

Basically I just want a way to steal enemy ships, because that's how I roll.

Basically, rather than trying to actually improve the design of the game, you just want stuff that sounds "cool" to you. Not stuff that's actually properly in line with the game's design. You just want to be able to capture ships and have heroes and other things of dubious utility "just because".

Great...

Even if you try and use fighters in conjunction with bases, it takes about 7 constructors before you have a (as in ONE) military base that's both adequately defended by itself and also gives them significant enough buffs to start to counteract the defensive weakness. In the time it takes to build a single powerful military starbase, you can build almost an entire fleet of mediums/larges that not only have just as good/better stats, but are MOBILE. Also, while your constructors are going towards military bases all over your territory, they aren't going towards influence, economy, or devoloping and defending any resources you control.

In the time and resources you're taking to buff up your military starbases in terms of territory and upgrades to the point where fighters actually become viable just for defense, your opponents have spent that time to expand/buff their economies, territories, influence and fleets while you've been focusing on defending only the resources you already have.

As to my suggestions, you might notice my title says suggestions for the expansion or sequel. Not changes that should be made to this game.I think this version is great as it is. I do think putting some of this stuff in the next game would be a good idea, or else you'd just be repeating this game with better graphics...

Carriers are the natural progression of any military combat system. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, would stay in line with the random combat system and would add a new stategic dimension. Hijacking/stealing ships is more than just a cool idea of dubious utility (lol), it's a realistic wartime concept. Every army has it's heroes, they'd be a fun way to give more flavor and personality to your side. And special weapons/events/wild cards are already in the game to an extent, it's those things that appear and make you make a moral decision that give you a bonus/penalty and push you towards a certain alignment. I'd just like to see it expanded a bit more into the combat system, particularly for fleet battles.

If Brad could find a way to include these elements while keeping it as balanced as this game was, I think it'd be incredible. None of this is criticism of the current game, which is outstanding. Cheers.

The suggestions sound too much like some Master Of Orion game I played a while ago; heroes and space marines capturing ships.

I dont need another one of those games - got one already thanks. I want GalCiv to be something else not some lame-o clone.

There is nothing original in those suggestions as they all are parts of another popular game or two.

Hmm, that sounds a bit harsh. Its my opinion, I just prefer games with a different flavour not rip-offs and wannabes of popular other games.

edit: double post

I too prefer games with a different flavor. I don't want a ripoff of MOO2, but even as is, GalCiv2 has many elements in common with it already (as well as the original Pax Imperia). GalCiv2 largely improves on many of these elements though, therefore it would not be unreasonable to expect it could improve on flaws of these elements from other games. Saying it would just be a ripoff of other games involving heroes is like saying Warcraft III using heroes was just a ripoff of Heroes of Might and Magic II. The best turned based strategy game I've played involving heroes so far has been Age of Wonders II, but even it had balance issues because Heroes were allowed to become way too powerful. Heroes should be a cut above your average unit, and give you a slight advantage in a way that reflects your personal playing style. Not be invincible hulks.

The reason I think heroes would work well in the GalCIv2 scheme is that they would fit in well with the existing morale/popularity/alignment systems of the game. Making those ethically good decisions and choosing the good alignment would lead the availability of good heroes. Making those darker decisions would lead to evil heroes gravitating to your cause. Both sides would have access to a set of neutral heroes. You wouldn't have to design too many specific race heroes as the overlap in general abilities means you'd just need to change the avatar/name for a base set of moulds, although a couple of specific "racial champions" per race with distinct abilities that only emerge under special circumstances would be a neat concept to toy with too. If these Racial Champions also came with their own private ship, you'd tie into what Ckayote was talking about above.

Then you also get down to what style of hero's you could use to tailor your race's style. Having a fighter captain hero for instance could boost the defense/attack of fighters in a specific fleet. A gunnery hero would aid invasion forces or planetary defenses. A merchant hero could give you an additional trade lane/trade revenue when on a specific planet, or you could place him on a specific freighter to double it's output.

Consider it. A lot of fun possibilities.