Some of your questions might be found here:

GalCiv2 Wiki

although its a bit dated (pre DA)

An ingame Civlopedia would be nice but it doesn't really have one (not a comprehensive one). So you can research the Wiki, read the stickies and posts here, or, as you did, ask questions. What I can answer:

- trade goods, the specials (like Diplomatic Translators, Nano Recorders, etc) affect your entire empire

- Influence starbases "radiate" their own sphere of influence

- Improvements have a maintenance cost. If its not displayed for Wonders it has none (might double-check the Wiki on that one)

- percentages, bonuses, that info - again, there's charts on the wiki.

One good tip: when trading technology, you can right click on the tech to get basic tooltip text on what it does.

I agree. Besides of GalCiv2 I also like playing Civilization IV. Unfortunately, when comparing UI of both games, GalCiv2 seems very poor. In CIV all numbers are clearly visible, there are tons of contextual help, you don't need to guess anything.
For instance take technology tree - in CIV it's perfect, when you hover mouse over any item, you get detailed description what the specified building/unit/etc. does - in GC2 you only see that a tech allows you to build X, but there is no explanation at all what the X does. If you play for the first time, or you don't remember what particular buildings do, you can equally well research random techs.
I hope the devs will add more tooltips here and there in next patch/expansion.

I agree.
I also agree with OP.

I hate the things that just are/happen in a certain manner without any explanation.
Traderoutes' implementation in Civ4 is annoying.
Some more things in GalCiv2 are annoying. But hey, it is an indie product!

I agree about the lack of documentation. Not only about gameplay, but mainly about modding... Only some files contains usefull comments, and many you have to "Guess and try" to see how it works... and some time work around for hours until you get what you want... Admins posts howtos sometimes, but they're often kept outdated, or incomplete... It would be much easyer for everyone just having each field of each file commented like in the header of PlanetImprovements.xml, knowing what to work with can help instead of "doing with examples, and missing a lot of subtilities", and with that, admins would'nt have to do incomplete howtos that will get older and beeing covered by dust as they are outdated, and they would spare much time they actually spend at answering questions that could be avoided with just a few documentation (just like the questions I ask in other threads for example... lol).

At the UI level, the only thing I hate is the tech tree limitations on display...
Technically, you can write your own technology with many dependencies, but the more dependencies you define, the worse the tech tree display gets... So I limited my techs to 1 dependency because of that... Well, not critical... I just set my tech costs higher to compensate the non-dependency to the techs where I removed multiple-dependencies
I'd also appreciate to have a "buy" button for building and starport columns in colonies list, with the support of "shift" for multiple-colonies selection, to "buy" production massively in 1 click

Well there's one point I don't agree. making an huge UI patch isn't a priority, they still are too many "little bugs" that are annoying and so has an higher priority
(some bugs such as Planet quality bonus not applied after conquering a planet even when your attack don't penalize you, the multiple issues with the "non-displaying of GNN" while you are in planet-view... and I noticed many more... and most are easyly fixable... well, I guess Dark Avatar 1.5 can be considered as a "1.0" version, so, it's excuseable )

I'd agree that the UI could be more informative. A lot of the forumulas and math for GalCiv2 are "interesting" and it's often hard to figure out what's going on. But, I'm also more of a "feel" players - I don't like reducing games like this or Civ IV to a mathematical exercise. Regardless of how the math works out, it's usually pretty obvious to me whether I'm doing the right thing and winning or losing.

I would have to disagree about starbases. 4 per sector is reasonable enough balance. They're expensive and take time to build up, and are also somewhat limited by your technology level (til the mid/late game). The AIs will build starbases too, so if you build 4 per sector it's hardly cheese.

Real cheese is getting an advantage by exploiting AI faults and the like.

THe game needs a strat guide/explanation a la the good old days, speciifically the Strategy Guides for the early CIV games and more importantly, probably the best Strat Guide ever writtem, the Master of Magic strat guide by Alan Emrich, Petra Schlunk and Ton E. Hughes, Jr.

THAT was the ultimate guide, really got you inside the game and helped you make more informed decisions.

This is something that would be REALLY REALLY GREAT to have mentioned in the description of the factory technologies and the factories when you're about to build them. It's another example of something that would be easy to fix just by adding a few sentences to the right XML files.

Do econ starbase bonuses cost 50%? That would make econ starbases even more ridiculous than I thought... 5% bonus to economy, 5% bonus to production at 2.5% cost.



Oh come on, that explanation is rubbish. The game just has bad documentation, period. A strategy game of this complexity doesn't provide a streamlined experience where a player can actually go by "feel", or at least it doesn't without way, way more of the game mechanics being inherently obvious just by looking at the in-game explanations and by what is going on. Especially given the length of individual games - in an RTS you can eventually learn to go by feel but that really comes from just playing it over and over, I can play Company of Heroes ten times in the time it takes to play one Dark Avatar medium game.

I tried my first game winging it and hit HUGE gotchas that required frantically scanning through menus, flipping through the inadequate menu, and consulting the forums. I don't have any "feel" for why the heck planets should suddenly have massive disapproval when they hit a population of 18 billion. Or why the taxation and approval system should require frantic scrambling back and forth in the early game. Apparently the best solution is actually *not to construct buildings* until you've established some colonies and done some research... the exact opposite of what felt right to me. Or why EVERY single AI civilization got hostile relations with me if I had a weak military and none of them ever tried to initiate diplomatic treaties (way way different from MOO2, where they would always be trying to involve me in their machinations to get someone else). Or why some originally PQ4 worlds completely refuse to grow population even after maximum terraforming and shipping more people in. Or any number of other things.

This is not a game which has been set up so it can be played by feel. It simply hasn't. It is not intuitive. ALL important information is presented to the player in the form of NUMBERS. Basic calculation is required to succeed at the game.

It's not "min/maxing" to want to know whether something affects one planet or my entire empire.

It's not "min/maxing" to want to know if that sweet 8x bonus tile on my homeworld will stop being sweet if productivity bonuses fail to apply to it. Especially in a medium galaxy, and especially if the productivity bonuses will come from wonders I *can't get rid of* if doing what "felt right" turned out to be wrong.

It's not "min/maxing" to want to know if percentage bonuses ever multiply against each other, or only against the original (by junior high most people can tell you this is a MASSIVE difference).

It's not "min/maxing" to want to know if extra productivity from percentage bonuses costs the same as the original, or gets a big discount. If you decide to build a 100% booster this is a huge deal to your finances.

What I want from a game of this kind is a sense of IMMERSION. And if I was actually ruler of a galactic civilization, I would not be crunching every last number in the galaxy, but you can bet that I would know whether something would affect one planet or my entire empire.

First Post... Bought GC2 (Not DA of yet) this week, and it seems good but...

I agree that the GUI really is less than helpful, at the very least in learning the game (obviously i can't say how good it is when you know all that is to know).

For example, it didn't even OCCUR to me that you might not need to pay with MC for part of the bonus from, for example, the manufacturing capital. The game would profit alot from mouseovers on the numbers in planet screen, especially (yes, i am coming from CIV here). And not for "minmaxing" either, just to get into the inner workings of the game faster.
The way it is, it's hard to even come up with the right questions for the forums.

"Playing by feel" usually betrays in 4x games.
And figuring out the rules all by themselves doesn't need to be part of the fun for all of the people that were described as number crunches. Usually, the real fun is in making up hypotheses on what will work, based on their understanding of the rules and trying out if/when they hold. Inferring the rules from a subpar GUI though? That's just work. So much so actually that i usually don't bother and ignore the respective unclear parts of games - often for a long time.

On starbases: I haven't warred yet, but i expect the fact that multiple starbases makes sense means you have to defend more space, which seems like a good thing. Oh, starbase upgrading is a pain.

wowgh, this whole thread contains so much more information concerning the inner workings of the game - I'm in awe.

Lots to learn. And I do agree - some more values and precise descriptions of what things do would help tremendously.

Intellekt: With that first complaint, if you roll over the numbers on the top of the 'Planet Screen', the morale value in this case, it should bring up a tool-tip with the formula for how this numbers is calculated (population happiness - taxes + overall morale bonuses + building bonuses)...or something to that effect

In your second complain here, you can find the breakdown of how races feel about you in the Foreign Relation report screen. It'll give a list of +'s and -'s detailing how the feel about you and why (ex. ++Our Historic Friendship -Our Close Borders).

Hope this helps, and make sure you have the most recient update...I coulda' sworn we tweaked alot of your UI issues throughout the last year...but perhaps those were OTHER UI issues...there were alot that people wanted tweaked   

Inteleckt:

A little known secret (and I just learned of this my self), is that in the planets screen, there is a buttons "Details" and "Summary". One (Can't remember which at the moment) will give you hard numerical breakdown of the planet by building. It will list every structure, what it is producing, and how much it is using in maintainence. I'm not sure if it will display the effects of the spending level.
I hope that helps!

Comming from a Heavy MOO and MOO2 background, I have to admit, I was totally lost when I tried Galciv. Hell, Even now, My games are a kinda Giant train wreck, lol .

Fued, I believe you have your time line mixed up, Sorry pal:

MOO was published in 1993, With its highpoint, MOO2, in 1996.
WWW Link
Galciv for OS/2 was not started until 1993 and not published until 1994. The modern version of Galciv for Windows came out in 2003
WWW Link

For a complex turn-based strategy like this, you should expect to have to study the manual carefully. A good share of your questions are answered in the manual. For instance:

In a battle, your defense will roll between 0 and the defense value. However, against a non-optimal weapon, your defense will only roll between 0 and the square root of your defense.
Hence, if your opponent fires a missile at your ship and your ship is only equipped with shields totaling a defense rating of 16, you will only roll between 0 and 4 instead of 0 and 16.

There's a description of the effect of each trade goods in the manual: some affect your entire colony, some only affect the planet on which it is built.

Again, about the effect of influence starbases:

Influencer starbases take the influence you have in a given corner of the galaxy and multiplies it by the percentage of the accumulated modules. Its effect on influence is strictly defined by the area of effect of the starbase.