Dark Avatar: Which features do you want the most?

Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2422

Dark Avatar: Which features do you want the most?

The new poll...

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The last poll showed that the largest player demographic for GalCiv II is 26 to 35. So I'm in the majority -- barely at 35. Teh second was 19 to 25 with it declining dramatically in-between.

This week's poll asks which feature of Dark Avatar (the expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations II) are people most looking forward to?

Dark Avatar isn't a traditional expansion pack. While it does add new units, new opponents, etc. That's where it starts. The real meat is how it fundamentally changes the actual game play. It's not quite a sequel but it's definitely closer to a sequel in terms of new features and content than it is to a typical expansion pack.

So the question is, which feature of Dark Avatar do you find the most interesting?

You have the ability to design your own opponents from scratch and play against them in future games. You have your spies that you can send to do nasty things to your enemies or to protect yourself. You have the environment categorization of planets so that you can't just rush out and colonize every planet at first. You have the epic generator which is designed to export your finished games as stories. There's the asteroid fields which players can build labs on or defense platforms and the like. There's the new AI options where rather than just setting the difficulty to "hard" you can instead adjust resource bonus/penalty and AI playing intelligence independently. and of course the new campaign where you play as the Drengin, conquering and enslaving. And lastly the new ships, hulls, and other goodies.

And that's just a surface level list. There's going to be a ton of detail work from large chunks of the AI being rewritten with new techniques to enhanced graphics, a Drengin UI, etc.

If you don't have Galactic Civilizations II, it's at store near you. If you know someone who likes strategy games, please let them know. Staying on shelves, like Walmart, into the Fall is going to be tough so every sale counts. If you already have Galactic Civilizations II, you can pre-order Dark Avatar and get a discount.

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I'm talking about one (yes, one, single) module in 5 (five) turns.

Starbases are very powerful.

Vain

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Note: Before I go on, i'd like to mention an interesting thing I discovered while playing the game. Starngely, when I selected an enemy planet and was inspecting it. I, for no reason at all, clicked the funny button next to the I button which comes after the name of the planet. When I clicked it though, a box came up asking what I wanted to rename the planet. I discovered that this allowed me to effectively rename any planet I wanted. Not just mine, but my allies, my enemies, all of them. This is funny because I called my enemies planet: I'am'n'ediot.
Is this a hidden easter egg, or just a bug?

It's a feature. You're free to call planets and ships whatever you like, regardless whose they are. Alien races will of course have their own names for them in their own langauges, and care less what you call them

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Interesting feature. I have to say I found it useful for renaming their planets more interesting names. (For example Hoth III to Hethesius)

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I like the Idea from vain:
- limit starbases to add only 1/2 module/turn
- carrier/transporter for small-hull-ships (fighters) to transport them a lot faster

other stuff:
- add to the space: some monster and black-holes
- make the ships larger, otherwise i always must zoom out to strategie map ^^
- make the invasion a bit more interessting

(perhaps add some more information on the invasion screen or add some tactical options (like retreat...)

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I have been thinking, and I believe what I want from the expantion is more diplomacy. I think Stardock will be adding in new treaties, which is a good start. In addition, I have hearded countless complaints about how the Alliance Victory is too easy. This is what I would love Stardock to do to change to make it more interesting.

Currently, when the player make an alliance, the relationship slider goes all the way to the right (as high as possible). I propose that instead the relationship bar should fluctuate as normal, with the addition of a positive "alliance" relationship modifier. If therelationship starts to sink (about warm), then the player will be forced to renegotiate the alliance. If the relationship really goes down the tube(to about neutral), then the alliance should fall apart entirely. This would make bribing into an alliance much harder, and would an ally will complain if the player tries to crush them with influence. Finally, to win an alliance victory, the player should need to hold the alliances together for a certain number of turns, allowing time for it to fall a part.

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I have had galciv2 for a while and its addicting. What I love is the races and tecs and the game design. I am a space nut anyways with watching star trek and the scifi channel. I like anomolies like worm holes and stuff why not make say hazardous clouds which you have to have certain a type of life support shielding and sensors to go into . In these clouds would be resources or planets which would be rich in technology. I also like more hulls to work with alot of the mods like kshm I downloaded from the library allows me to do that. I want more hull designs for the races which I love designing ships. Large i like large and huge capital ship able to really vaporize planet. I also would like to see in the planetary invasion part/Bombardment a tech that
that allows for total planet wide destruction. This planet would be uncolonizable or unhabitable. The dregin empire would be a sure bet for this and it would be available to evil races only. Good joy on a great game.

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I also agree in part with VAIN. There needs to be a carrier weapons module within the missile tech tree. Tied to hull size, internal capacity (influenced by miniturization), and logistics points; it would allow for carrying (sp) tiny ships within (or on external bays) on large or huge hulls, to include space stations.

There would of course need to be some balancing, but I'm for it adding to a fleets total logistic capacity. The real draw back would be loss of the fighters, they would be treated like normal ships as far as replacement and logistics vice auto refill after each battle as normal missile weapons are. By way of example a fleet with logistics 16 could carry up to a total of 5 fighters (tiny julls)(3 points each), in addition to whatever combination of ships make up the fleet.

Of course I always double the hull points (and cost) of of medium ships and larger to more signifigantly demonstrate the power of such grand ships.

On a related but side note, a planet based fighter base (as a planet defense tech) would be nice that could house up to the players logistics points worth of control above and beyond any fleet in orbit. The fighters filling the base would be normal tiny ships for production and fleet upkeep costs that are slaved to the module.

Thoughts?

Darvroth

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There seems to be something very overlooked - high scores.

At the moment we only have the Metaverse, and that doesn't support mods.

We should have a high score table, showing the mod name if one has been used. This is a basic feature present in every (good) other game of its type, why is it missing?

And why isn't the end game score screen even sorted into some kind of order?

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GalCiv2 is really great, but there are two things that kept it from being no.1 on my list.
First is the space system, which I find more then slightly dissapointing for one main reason, there is none to speak of, the entire battle is decided behind the scenes without any player input with only the overly repetetive "course of battle" sequence, which I find a bit of a let down. I belive that the space battles would be much improved if the player had the ability to controll his ships, unfortunatly this would be meaningless without the intoduction of weapon ranges, beam weapon dissipation, range/accuracy calculations for mass drivers and beam weapons, the speed of missiles and the movement of ships, those in turn will require a whole set of new technologies (Boarding and capturing vessals could be nice too), all of this would probably require some kind of either turn based of pauseble real time space battle engine.
Second is the lack of real costumization of ships beyond cosmetics and the rock-paper-scisors weapon options. Don't get me wrong, I love the shipbuilder, but I can't help the feeling that real costumization is quite limited. The game could really use ship systems like warp inhibitors, cloacking devices, teleporters, and a myriad of other one-per-ship systems that could turn the tide if used wisely.

I know it is a lot to ask, but I truely believe that this is what stands between GalCiv2 and the Greatness it deserves as the undisputed champion of the empire building genere.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

First is the space system, which I find more then slightly dissapointing for one main reason, there is none to speak of.........

Tactical combat is not going to happen in GalCiv2. The battle system is more or less an evolved version of a Civ-like system, and has been in all GC games. The combat viewer is just eye candy and a tool for seeing exaclty how well each ship performs in fleet combat.

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That is exactly the problem, I want space combat to be more then that. In Master of Orion 2 I once turned the tide of a war by capturing an enemy ship and reverse engeneering its mark X shields, major battles were won thanks to ship designs whose sole purpuse was to shoot down incoming fighters/missiles allowing larger vessals to decimate the enemy fleet with near impunity. That game is over 10 years old, and yet it sports a space combat system that is imeasurably deeper and more gradifying then that of GalCiv2. The simplistic combat that seems to dominate the turn based empire building genere does nothing but hurt the game experience, and serves no goal other then to make GalCiv2 into the game that almoast surpased moo2.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

That game is over 10 years old, and yet it sports a space combat system that is imeasurably deeper and more gradifying then that of GalCiv2.

Except the fact that the tactical AI is terrible. The GC series won't get tactical unless Brad can design a tactical AI to his own satisfaction, and that's not going to happen in a GC2/expansion time frame/budget.

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*wails* my dream has died *cries*

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My Favorites:
New Ship parts, Special Worlds, Asteroid Fields

But the big pain is the price (I know its much work and so on but about 30$ is much money for me).

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My vote for a new feature would be a multi threded research option
instead of researching one thing you could chose to research, lets say up to 3 different technologies at a time, and even adjust the distribution of the research budget

also a mine field technology as that way you can lay mines in empty space to help with defenses and slow down enemy ships

an option to mine the astroid belts for resources if not already included

lastly planetary destruction option to lay waste to an enemys worlds and astroids and genesis options to help convert garbage into tactical advantages, like a gas giant or astroid belt

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Like other people have said include more random galactic events to make the universe seem more like the universe really is (dangerous), add a little spice to the universe with random events
RANDOM EVENT IDEAS
1. Have space pirates/bandits/terrorists roaming the galaxy in their own ships. Give them the ability to hijack ships/attack ships/steal your ships for their use for example:
COLONY SHIPS: bandits would hold them for ransom or they won't allow it to reach their destination/destroy it and kill everyone on board. Have it so that the bandits ask for big sums of money not just pennies which put the player on tough decisions, either pay the money to have their citizens released, or suffer the consequences of not paying (morale taking big hits in your empire, unrest in home planet of the colony ship stolen etc, just make sure the player suffers, make it a big deal). Make it so that you can even negotiate with the terrorists just like you would with another civilization (by the trade screen). You can offer them cash, or even technology which they could sell to other civilizations, as long as you get your people back safely. Make it so that this doesnt just happen once a game and that the outcome isn't always a negotiation but half they time they will just destroy the colony ship hurting your empire's morale bigtime.

just make sure that space terrorist pop up randomly in the game so there is not just a set number of space terrorists that one can track down and kill and that's it. So if you spot 3 terrorist ships in your sector and destroy them all, maybe 10 weeks later (10 turns later) you might see a report on GNN about another civ getting a ship hijacked. Sometimes they should contact you to negotiate, like for example they want to sell you a tech they got from another civ or a ship they stole. Maybe in the tougher game settings there would be different groups of space terrorists all vying to increase their power (for example in real life we have al qaeda and hezbollah etc).
2. ASTEROIDS: make it so that asteroids crash into planets leading to big disasters. I don't know if there is a tech that defends against asteroids already but if there isn't make one, thus not having one is a gamble by the player and if an asteroid does hit it would kill most of the planet's population.
3. Space monsters, black holes, comets flying through space and other events: I think you get the idea

If such events will be put into the game DON'T JUST MAKE THEM A POP UP WINDOW LIKE A FLAGSHIP DISCOVERY! have real animations of asteroids crashing into planets, have real ships of terrorists causing chaos, real comets flying through space etc.

OTHER IDEAS
1. SPACE STAR PORT: Like in star trek, a huge space garage for parking ships (would look like another starbase). Make it so that you can store 3 or more planet starports worth of ships in the space star port. Also make it so that ships repair faster in space starports and that ships can get training and upgrade their level of expertise. Space starports should only be built in sectors under your cultural indluence and that have at least 2 of your planets (so people don't just go and build a space startport in every place they plan to launch an attack in order to pack it with ships). They should also be very expensive and take a lot to upkeep (maybe limit players to building 1 space starport for every 3 sectors under cultural influence). Not only that but make it so that they require constant upgrading just like starbases. Don't just have us build a space starport and instantly have capacity to park 20 ships. Upgrades would increase capacity and add defense, attack etc (some chips can automatically defend it also)
2. SHIP PATROL: Have an option to where ships patrol designated squares on the map and immediately chase any enemy ships that enter into those designed patrol squares. Have 2 options related to that, 1 would be to attack inside patrol area only (which means if enemy ship leaves patrol area the player ships would not chase them and instead go back to patroling), the other option would be to chase outside patrol area.
3. STARGATES: Make them a tech option but very late into the tech tree. Just make sure they can only be built in sectors under your cultural influence and are expensive so we don't have the universe full of them. Aside from the obvious tactical implications this would speed up play as you could send ships to the stargate and they would immediately pop up in the other side of the universe, thus reducing all the calculations of having them more from sector to sector.
3. REPAIR SHIPS: If we don't have this already, ships for the sole purpose of repairing other ships.
4. ACTUAL DIPLOMATS: like in the sid meiers civilization, we should have one of the ships transport diplomats to planets of civilizations we want to be friendly with and to expand our influence in, thus giving us and those civilization bonuses etc. I don't know about actually making a diplomat since we can only make ships.

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What I would like to see is the ability to *TOTALLY* design races from scratch. In other words, every advantage that a race gets should be available for some # of points that is consistent when designing a race from scratch. So no "off board" bonuses like +100 loyalty or +25 miniturization that can not be "bought" when you are designing a custom race.

So, in general, that means I am looking for both a higher # of customization points, as well as more options for how to allocate those points.

I'd also like political parties to be more in depth. Right now they're pretty superficial... more detail, more possibilities... even *gasp* design your own political party????! Yes, please!

Also - for extra spice, the ability to change the frequencies of "goodies" on your home and other planets as a global option.

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My favorite points in the DA list (where do I need to vote for a poll here? Or was I just too late?) :

1. designing your opponents
2. planet-specific environments
3. new ships/hulls/goodies
4. epic generator

And what else I'd want in? Hm, special ship systems/race traits - i.e. that have some feel of sense/personality and not just numbers - would be my first favourite, and quite some other ideas I assembled over time while playing other such games (sorry, but it's getting late here) ... and I'd really like to see some species like the MO2 Antarans pop up at late-game stage (in sandbox games, too)

. Space monsters or something like that would be nice, too.
And something I already really miss by just reading the manuals are MO2-style shields... PLEASE add shield-types that have hitpoints of their own

.
(well, yes, MO2 still resides in my top 5 for pc-games, though I do REALLY miss new techs/race traits for it by now...

)

Well, as I said in the other post, I'm new here (relatively - I played a bit GalCiv1 last year or so) and the game (GC2) doesn't yet work for me, so these statements are preliminary only

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