Fixable Flaws

Range and Speed

I'm still relatively new to playing GalCiv2 but two things stand out as issues that could easily be fixed to greatly improve gameplay (and I intend to mod them for myself):

Range - It's far too easy to build ships that have enough range to travel across the largest galaxy size. Range should be reworked and at maximum it should be maybe 20% of the distance across the galaxy. This would *force* building of starbases in order to reach enemy space. This would add a lot of strategy to playing.

Speed - same as range, it should be very limited. I've read posts of people that managed to build 100+ speed ships. As a guess I'd say about 20 should be maximum speed. I'm very early into a game (one and a half years in and I've got ships travelling 11 - and I suspect I could build a much faster ship if I designed only for speed).

This is going to be a matter of taste. Some players will like fast, major conflict. While others (like myself) desire a slow, long game of exploration.

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I think it depends on factors like star density and map size. I'm playing one down from the biggest map (large?) and a speed of 24 gets me about 1/5 of the way across the map. Thats really not that far.

I could probably see a 20 parsec range as being doable IF there were some options for faster ships within your empire. Stargates or trade lanes between planets or something... otherwise getting ships from some of my original production planets takes forever to reach the front lines.

Agree on range, increasing the space that life support requires would do the trick. It would also make for some other possibilities like destroying enemy starbases and colonies to force him to retreat his forces from your base.. and designing high range low weapon scout ships to harass enemies in their own territory.

There was nothing more frustrating than getting attacked by a huge fleet then thinking I was being clever by destroying all his supplies then realizing he had something like 5 parsec range on all his ships.

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I've never modded but have read a lot of the modding guide and learned how to read the XML files.
From what I know it is easy and quick to mod both range and speed & their techs if you want to.

The only negative is that modded games can not be posted on metaverse for their score.

Good luck on your modding and when you finish getting the values tweaked, I wouldn't mind knowing what you come up with.

Pretty sure that is exactly how the devs come up with the final values for the game ( mod it and see how it plays ). But they are dedicated filthy capitalists trying to make a few bucks by doing something they truely enjoy -- so they set em for what they think most players will enjoy.

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Yes, star density and habitable planet density is very important. In my game I have those both down quite a bit and thus I only have colonized a few planets all fairly close to each other, thus demonstrating to me the fun of having restricted range. It doesn't matter so much whether it's colonizing a planet (if you can find one) or building a starbase. Keeping ships tied fairly close to your planets and starbases looks to me like a huge improvement.

I asked one friend his opinion of GalCiv2 and he said there was no "strategy there is no terrain". I ignored him and I'm enjoying GalCiv2. But I agree, without range restrictions a lot of the potential is lost. A lot of strategy goes away if your ships can reach across the largest galaxy.

I don't think the modding will be hard, but I wanted to play a fair amount on "stock" settings a bit before I modded GalCiv2. I've got a lot of experience writing software and modding other games. I'm so used to most products being crap and needing modding, so I'm pleasantly surprised by GalCiv2 that some aspects that I thought were going to be terrible actually are very well done!

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