GalCiv2 offering no fun on huge/gigantic maps

I can't stand playing 4x games on small or medium maps that I can finish inbetween supper and bedtime.

what settings would you use for a medium map? I guess you have also a fast computer

That's an interesting point of view, and something that I also experience. But I still enjoy playing the game.

I have thought of two interesting dimensions that the game may benefit from that would increase the player's playing experience. The ideas focus on C3 (command, control, and communications).

1. Slower than instantaneous communications. A player has 100% control over units and production at any given moment. It would be fun to have an option for "time delay" command sequences, such that changing construction orders or fleet destinations would not be instantaneous. Colonies could decide to build different things or queue up different ships.

2. Deeper political infighting. I have yet to lose control of the government. Random political events should be implemented. There is always something going on in the political sphere, and it should directly influence game play.

These two ideas should make large / huge / gigantic map playing more challenging. Just imagine a rim or peripheral colony deciding to build something else and fleets on long-range missions deciding to attack or not attack certain objectives. This could add a completely new line of strategic game play using governors and fleet admirals (e.g. C3 – Command, control, and communications).

-Kassad

I agree that there is very little to disrupt your position if you get ahead. Along with more outrageous random events, there needs to be a everyone likes you less when you are in front. You could call it the USA syndrome or something. It should mean that pirates/terrorists target you, diplomacy is harder, nations start to act together against your interests, no civ surrenders to you. This actually would improve the earlier parts too to stop you being steamrollered by a runaway civ, as everyone initially would not like them.

And it doesn't matter what game difficulty you play on, from easy to suicidial, once you're over the initial "hump" you won the game.

I think this is more a factor of 4x gaming actually (that and political/military reality in these games). I can not think of a good one I have ever played that did not suffer from this eventually.

Perhaps a bit off topic but with that said the only way to make the game more "fun" in these circumstances is to tweak the AI to gang up on the leader when they get "over the hump".

My two cents,
GG

The only thing that I can think of to add to help would be if the lesser races allied and declared war together on you. Individually you out power them but together they could have a chance, like the Dread Lord campaign. Solo against them to start and you would be wiped out, but you have a chance together. Maybe some tweaks to the AI for alliances would help.

Actually one really nice thing about this game is once you do have a huge lead there are more than military options to get the game over! If nothing else one can go for a tech victory,.

I think this is more a factor of 4x gaming actually (that and political/military reality in these games). I can not think of a good one I have ever played that did not suffer from this eventually. Perhaps a bit off topic but with that said the only way to make the game more "fun" in these circumstances is to tweak the AI to gang up on the leader when they get "over the hump".

Precisely. Every 4x game that I've ever played has been like this.

The "ganging up" idea is one solution. Another might be to generate more extreme random events once a race reaches a point of dominance (though this should be an option). There certainly should be some difficulty to running an huge empire - e.g., something like the corruption/waste in Civilization II.

what settings would you use for a medium map? I guess you have also a fast computer

As I said i don't like meduim/small maps that much so I don't even bother to play them. The smallest i play is large,
usually with at least 6 races, adundant planets, habitable planets also set to abundant and starsystems set to uncommon, at the very max to common on large maps. Furthermore I switch off Trade and have blind exploration and slow research. These are my common games settings. To get a challenge I often play on crippling as the only evil civ in a galaxy of good and neutral civs. I think I got pretty good at this game, on crippling I usually outresearch th ai, have the biggest army and the biggest military. It's practically always me declaring war! The ai just seems extremly coward towards a civ which is a little stronger. I simply take out one civ after the other, one by one. The Crippling -difficulty isn't much of a challenge anymore. On the otherhand everything above Crippling I don't find very amusing either, because its only beatable under very special conditions, and a nice porion of luck for the initial planet and ressource distribution is also required. Game Modes above crippling just limit the player way to much on his possiblities to achieve victory because of the steep difficulty jump.

Along with more outrageous random events, there needs to be a everyone likes you less when you are in front. You could call it the USA syndrome or something

Yeah eventually that could help.

Actually one really nice thing about this game is once you do have a huge lead there are more than military options to get the game over! If nothing else one can go for a tech victory,.

Well if the game is still fun to you at that point, than good for you I in every case get bored at time I know I'm winning, how I perform the final blow (tech victory, conquest victory, diplo victory etc.) is not important than anymore.

I also have the same experience with all 4X games. The only solution (in my view) was already mentioned in a journal on the 18th of April:
"AI (all players and not just the Drath) have the capability of paying others off to go to war with others and now it will tell you if they've been paid off (before they'd just go to war and you might not know why).
AI (all players) is aware of conquerors and will take steps to try to thwart them by acting together."

I did not play 1.2 beta yet. If it works, this point should be solved.

I think this is more a factor of 4x gaming actually (that and political/military reality in these games). I can not think of a good one I have ever played that did not suffer from this eventually.

It may be so to some extent, but it's undeniably extreme in galciv2. One difference from galciv2 to other games is that the ai treats every player the same way. Other games usualy have a programmed goal to destroy the human player. The latter may sound unfair, but thats the way most other 4x games work ( as far as I can tell), and this way it's guaranteed you'l never be bored.
Except galciv 1+2 I also played moo2, imperium galactica2 and a little SE4 and I can say with 100% certainty that these games don't have that problem to such an extrem extent.
I

Waay back during interviews for GalCiv I, Frogboy mad a discussion about AI in gaming and in strategic games in general, It was something to the effect that in the real world, your allies don't defect on you when you are winning the war.

That was meant to criticise the AI cheat where every civ would turn against you when you are winning, just to try to make the game harder to win. I understand that point of view and I like it.

But I also like the new fear component in 1.1.2 .009 Beta where the civ's will gang up on you if you get too powerful, supposedly. I have noticed so far my relations going south in a hurry after I start conquering others,but I have completed my conquest before any body has ganged up on me.

Any body notice any difference with 1.12 yet?

I couldn't disagree more with the OP. I currently am in the middle of a gigantic map game where I am totally dominating everyone. I have all of my settings set to random and find that I am still suffering through events that cause the other civs to declare war on me for things such as (mainly) killing their leader at some factory while on visit.

Once one of the weaker civs declares war on me the others soon jump in due to them all being allied. It becomes challenging and fun mainly because they swarm me with lesser built craft and a weaker technology forcing me to try and conquer several civs on different fronts draining my funds rapidly.

My alignment is evil and this helps alot I think since so many of the races think that they are "good". In my experience thus far playing this game I have found that evil is the most fun and keeps you in the game longer, allowing you to attack anyone anywhere anytime without sufffering too many penalties. It is a blast trying to keep the federation of planets from constantly cripling you with their laws limiting trade, mods on your starbases, etc.

Anyhoo, the game is extremely fun on the gigantic/huge maps. It just comes down to how you play it.

But I also like the new fear component in 1.1.2 .009 Beta where the civ's will gang up on you if you get too powerful, supposedly. I have noticed so far my relations going south in a hurry after I start conquering others,but I have completed my conquest before any body has ganged up on me.

I played 2 games on 1.2 beta, both games with my all time favourite super-evil-conquer everybody-race. My enemies have not ganged up against me. Yes, all races had bad relation with be, but what does that help if they won't attack anyhow?

Anyhoo, the game is extremely fun on the gigantic/huge maps. It just comes down to how you play it.

People writing stuff like this makes me frustrated. What your telling me? Am playing the game the wrong way? what am I doing wrong? I don't find it my responsability to have to find out "the right way" to play it. I played this game enough and I know what experiance I made, as I said my last 2 games on beta 1.2 were no better concering this.

Morghenes

I've found the same. It needs to be tweaked so that they attack before you get to just roll them over as before. At the point where I've got the biggest econ & military I would expect a warning followed quickly by a mass attack from all races not of exactly the same alignment. However if they start winning to the point where someone else is the leader it needs to redress itself.

I LOVED the alien space crystal in MOO. If it appeared early in the game, it could wipe out 1/2 of your colonies. It was awesome to drop everything you were trying to do, and manufacturer/research enough ships to take the crystal out. I have yet to see anything like this in GalCiv II. The only thing is if a diplomat is murdered, and then a billion ships appear. But they're worthless little fighters that are easily fended off.

This might add some flavor if you're playing a large map. Perhaps if larger the map, the more chance of these happening? and/or if you are leading in "power", the more chance of it hitting you directly?

How about some horrible catastrophes? Like:

1. A star going super-nova and taking out 1/6th the map? Ships, planets, etc....everything gone or at least damaged horribly?
2. Alien invader(s) of the 4th dimensional kind? So horribly advanced, you'll have to drop everything you're doing to destroy the invader(s).
3. Political chaos, caused by any of numerous reasons. You might have to win back a few colonies via invasion.
4. Wide-spread terrorism. Want to be the big guy? Then you have to deal with terrorists. Ships explode randomly.
5. Technological suicide. Your scientists accidentally cause a temporary MASSIVE blackhole in the middle of your sector, that drags 3/4ths of the ships in a radious around it into it?
6. Religious Cults. 1/2 of your own ships defect to a religious cult, bent on taking you down. Showdown Wacco-style!


These along with Adama's post of the Journal update on April 18th sound very good to me.

There actually is a risk of number 3 if you're evil. It's a random event though, and it's planets from all of the evil races that revolt and form the Fundamentalists.



Also, I saw mention of the Civ series' old use of corruption. Please never suggest it again. A better alternative would be, well, what's used now--colony maintainance. It's the same sort of system that Civ IV replaced corruption with, and it works much, much better at preventing infinite sprawl. What's needed currently is to just increase the maintainance costs enough that you can't afford to rampantly build colonies everywhere. It works beautifully in Civ IV, anyway.

Good or evil having a large empire should also run the risk of rebellion. Maybe play it off of culture scores on your planet. The lower it is the higher the chance of rebellion against you. Might be kind of fun when you think you've won and all of a sudden a united uprising happens against you.

i haven't played 1.2 yet, and don't play at the hardest levels or anything, but i do prefer playing on the largest maps... gotta have that epic feel, me.

and i agree that the "once you start winning, you keep winning" syndrome is present in GC2, as it is in all 4x games.

but i don't agree that it is present moreso than in, say, Moo2 or Moo3, or the Civ series, or SMAC, and so on. i'm not sure how i'd measure that, anyway!

in Moo3 there's an emergent phenomenon the community calls the "Lone Superpower Effect", where once you're in the lead, the AI players start to turn against you. interestingly, the modders/patchers who've taken the game apart and put it back together again assure us that in fact there is no such code in the game to make it do that!

the best we can figure out, the AI players start to get upset when there are no planets left to settle, and the ones they do own start to fill up... and who do they get upset with? their neighbors. and who tends to be everybody's neighbor? the Lone Superpower!

in any case, having a Lone Superpower Effect seems to be what people are asking for above.

but what was the result in a game that had it? you guessed it: people complained about it, and wanted it taken out.

why? because they spent the early game building alliances and making friends, and in the endgame their friends would start turning on them, and backstabbing them!

for players that prefer a diplomatic game, such an Effect can be extremely frustrating!

in it's extreme form it can make the Diplomatic/Allied victory condition degenerate back into the Military/Sole Survivor victory condition, since each time you take out a traitor, it makes you stronger, which promotes further defection, until you're the only member of your once Grand Alliance left! (thankfully, in Moo3, we've figure out how to avoid the worst effects of the Effect)

so while i think in the later game that your enemies should indeed band together and come after you if you're winning, it should be implemented with care...

your Allies shouldn't turn from you, for example! why would they leave the winning side?

and empires with good relations who can see the writing on the wall, wouldn't they want to sign up as Allies, so that they can be on the winning side?

i don't know if GC2 AIs do "Enemy of My Enemy" thinking like they do in Moo3, but one thing Moo3 got wrong (imo) was to have the effect decrease over time, instead of increase.

in the endgame, empires should be looking for Friends to help them fight, and Friends-of-Friends and Enemies-of-Enemies are who they should naturally gravitate towards.

also, they should increasingly turn their destructive attention on Enemies-of-Friends, and Friends-of-Enemies... for example, they could look at the worst Enemy of their coalition, see who the weakest Friend of the that Enemy is, and all attack the weakling... forcing the stronger human player to help defend the weaker AI player.

if the Superpower didn't come to the defense, their Grand Alliance would be made weaker, while the Enemy Coalition would be made stronger, right? or, if the Superpower tried to defend all it's weaker friends, it might be stretched too thin, and become vulnerable to a coordinated strike?

if done right, enhanced Enemy of My Enemy type thinking in the mid/late game might have the effect people are looking for, without breaking the Diplomatic victory the way a Lone Superpower Effect would?

and yeah, i'd like to see more likelihood of Lost Elections and things like Civil War (perhaps as a result of a lost Election?) or Revolting Provences breaking up a Superpower... that would be super-shweet.

Except galciv 1+2 I also played moo2, imperium galactica2 and a little SE4 and I can say with 100% certainty that these games don't have that problem to such an extrem extent. I

I just played MoO2 yesterday on a giant map and in "hard" difficulty, and I have to say I experienced exactly what you described here for GalCiv2: Once you're "over the hump" it's just boring. When you're technologically somewhat adanced, you just can conquer one planet after the other.

But the beginning in MoO2 is indeed really challenging. If some races declare early war on you, (and those suckers do it all the time ), you're in big trouble.

And I hate to say it, but I still like MoO2 much better than GalCiv2. It would go too far to make a whole comparison now, but I'd say MoO2 is just much more sophisticated, wheras GalCiv2 is simpler. Not in the difficulty, but for example in the planetary management, fighting system or ship design.

Just MHO. And GalCiv2 is of course still a good game

I 'd welcome any increase in AI agresivity, but I think the main problem is that a good economic posoition can be achieved way too fast. Maybe slow down population growth and increase the cost of economical technologies, given the AI bonus at higher difficulty levels, it'd be really hard for the player get on top. But I guess that would also bring its own issues.

Maybe population growth could be set by the player as a map option like tech speed, I'd like that.

People writing stuff like this makes me frustrated. What your telling me? Am playing the game the wrong way? what am I doing wrong? I don't find it my responsability to have to find out "the right way" to play it. I played this game enough and I know what experiance I made, as I said my last 2 games on beta 1.2 were no better concering this.

IT is how you chose to play the game. That is it and it really is that simple. IF you are playing the maps on anything at normal AI setting or lower then you will continue to have the experience you are describing over and over. Challenge yourself and crank up the AI, unless you like easy mode and winning all of the time.

The game is challenging on those maps for various reasons. As I said, I have had no problems having other civilizations declare war on me even after I have taken over all categories at the top spot.

I am unsure what this enemy of my enemy thing is that people are talking about but Glaciv has this if I understand it correctly. Once a civ declares war or is attacked then their allies have to come to their aid and seemingly always do. We as human players get the option of helping or breaking the alliance but that is anther topic of discussion.

Again I have found it difficult once these civs decide to war with me. Some that remain out of the war are obviously helping the computer and by this I mean all of the "Vengenace" class type of ships that I encounter all of the sudden in my territory and theirs. Although they are just fodder, they are fodder that has to be dealt with because on gigantic maps it can be difficult making sure that each planet has a defense force or one adequate enough to not get sniped by a troop carrier that gets by my picket line. Plus they offer some form of annoyance by destroying freighters, starbases that are not defended, etc.

I find that my style of play leads to challenging and entertaining games. You get what you put into it.

Good or evil having a large empire should also run the risk of rebellion. Maybe play it off of culture scores on your planet. The lower it is the higher the chance of rebellion against you. Might be kind of fun when you think you've won and all of a sudden a united uprising happens against you.

That will probably never work. I am playing on a huge map currently and have pretty much got the game in hand. I have 69% of the galactic influence and only 5 or 6 of my 92 planets is under 80% happiness and better than 60% are locked down at 100% happiness. My overall approval is in the mid-90% range. Its very unlikely that a significant portion of my population is in the mood to defect.

The issue is that at some point in ANY game, regardless of settings, there comes a point of no return where you are assured of a win. The problem is that on a very big map, you can sew up a victory and spend years mopping up the remaining holdouts. Everyone in the galaxy recognises your dominance, but if you want a military victory, you gotta finish them off. Maybe another diplomatic option is required, something called "Demand Surrender" to help speed the process. Hey, that might even prod the other civs into war.

I think that the most effective solution will be the AI fix that convinces AI to gang up on the player civ before that power gets out of hand. In my current game, at one point every civ was at war with someone or other except my civ, I even propped up a couple of those civs with ships to keep the game going while I used influence to flip entire civilizations. It just seems like these guys are fighting over second place and thats not helping matters. Next game I will be less helpful to falling civilizations.

Cheers,
Reaver

People writing stuff like this makes me frustrated. What your telling me? Am playing the game the wrong way? what am I doing wrong? I don't find it my responsability to have to find out "the right way" to play it. I played this game enough and I know what experiance I made, as I said my last 2 games on beta 1.2 were no better concering this.

I think it all comes down to attitude. I've noticed a lot of people who complain about the game never being hard enough for them are power gamers types. Most of the people of the who think the opposite are causal gamers.

Now I am totally aware of how easy it is to gain an unovercomeable early lead in larger maps. That's becuase the AI isn't nearly as aggressive is colonizing as myself or as image most players to be.

But if you're looking for a challenge, hit Control+N until you you have a map where you're stuck between two AIs of the same alignment. Then choose the opposite one play, and you can be fighting a very vicious war with inferior resources very quickly- The best game I ever play I was a neutral civilization stuck in a corner between the Torians and Atlarians. They declared war on me constantly and after a long struggle in which I acquired medium hulls first, I eventually managed to take over most of their planets.

I also have to say I agree with #18 completely.

What I would like to see would be Military Strength removed entirely from calculations of race relations, except for the negative effects in the case of militaristic civs like the Drengin.

When relations reach the point where the civ wants to declare war on you, it'll then compare military strengths, and the military strength of whatever allies you have, or whoever you are at war with and so on. If it reckons it can win, it then declares war.

If it doesn't think it can win, it will try to find one (or more) civilisations that also dislike you, and they will declare war on you together. Or it will try to destabalise you in other ways (assisting your enemies etc.).

There'd also be a new factor, 'jealousy', which comes into effect if they are much smaller than you are in terms of planets. This would mean that if you own half the galaxy, everyone else will hate you and they'll all declare war on you together, or near enough.

I don't know how practical that would be, but it would:

a. Make things harder as your empire got larger, instead of the current system where everyone loves you because you're so big
b. Stop 'good' races attacking other good races solely because of comparative military strengths (You'd still get wars between good civs if relationships sour for other reasons)

IT is how you chose to play the game. That is it and it really is that simple. IF you are playing the maps on anything at normal AI setting or lower then you will continue to have the experience you are describing over and over. Challenge yourself and crank up the AI, unless you like easy mode and winning all of the time.

As I wrote above: Crippling is the minimum I play on. When I play Evil on crippling my game usually looks like this:
1. I explore/Colonize Galaxy,
2. nearly max my social production for a while
3. Set research to max and get the first couple of structure upgrades, first basic weapons and defenses.
4. Set social production to max again, all colonies that have finished upgrade their structures builed their first basic defense ships. After all planets are upgraded I also have enough military rating so that I wont be attacked right away.
5. Set Researcg to max again and rush-research the psionic weapon.
6. Build new ships with psionic weapons and attack first enemy empire. This first pray of mine is utterly chanceless,
my fleets just roll over them, it almost resembles a war between gods and dung beetles
7. I invade all his worlds, at this point I have double as many planets as all other empires.
8. Now this is the last opportunity for the other empires to attack me before I become very powerful. If they hasitate too long ( and that they mostly do), the game is over...for those stinky aliens
9. Once again, my enemies have hesitated too long. They have given me enough time do developod all the worlds captured previously, I have become omnipotent, economically and military.
10. The aliens do nothing, when I talk to them all I get to hear from them is how they admire my might
11. I quit the game right away and do something else.