New player impressions about the tech tree

Baqar79

Join Date 03/2006

New player impressions about the tech tree

Well technically I've had the game for a while at least I bought GC2 about a year ago when it first came out based on the rave reviews at gamespot; however I was expecting something like Moo2 and was a little disappointed with the game. I missed the tactical combat, being able to control all aspects of battle (as opposed to the automatic battle sequences on GC2), I enjoyed watching the opponents sub-systems break down as I directly inflicted damage to structural components taking out vital systems until his engines wouldn't allow for his escape and then I would board with my marines to acquire the ship for myself. I also missed the technology system of Moo2 with the not only incremental improvements in technology but also the special abilities you got with certain new weapons (ie graviton beam inflicts structural damage on top of armour damage, neutron beam kills marines, black hole generator kills units in 2 turns, time warp facilitator is a little overpowered...

(although as GC2 has no tactical combat these aren't really applicable).

Now a year later I thought I would give it another try with Dark Avatar (although I had to buy the gold edition as the expansion wasn't available at the store). I know that all you guys out there must be finding quite a bit of stuff in this game worth liking to keep playing it so I tried to approach the game as more like a Civilization in space...which seems to be working so far....I'm still new to the game as I haven't played it much buy I love to figure out the mechanics of the game so I was working out taxes last night and figured out that each 1 billion citizens makes 7.75BC unmodified (woohoo I like it when numbers make sense), though I still have much to work out which brings me to my main complaint: The Tech tree

Why does the tech tree not explain what new improvements do, why hasn't this changed since GC2? (I would of thought it would of bothered a few people). I know I'm whining but heck, it would be nice to know what an Xeno lab is before researching it (Ok I have actually gotten further then this and I know it improves the basic research building from 6 to 8 but how would I know this if I didn't research it?)...same goes for weapons, laser II doesn't help me much with whether it is worth researching or not. Also pre-requisites; I admit I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but It isn't easy to figure out how to move on to the next ship design (I just read it now and it isn't quite as bad as what I thought (I am still learning) but it still doesn't describe the new hull designs at all).

Another thing that would be nice to implement is to apply racial abilities to the planetary summary window...just so you know how much of an effect that +45% research is having or that new planetary improvement tech which gives you +10 to social, military & research.

I'm trying hard to get into this game but it seems I have to research online a lot of game play features to figure out what they do...the tutorials only scratch the surface. I think if there was one thing I would most like to see improved would be to add mouse-over help on EVERYTHING; go crazy if we mouse over social tell me a breakdown of how I'm getting that amount of research eg 12 mp base + 20% bonus then break it down further 10% from Planetary improvements, 10% xeno industrial theory for a total of 14.4 mp. Apply this to research as well so it isn't a mystery until you've played the game a few times (besides research should be fun, not a "what does this do, oh well lets research it anyway"!).

If I'm the only one bothered by this so be it, then don't let me spoil your fun, but if any of you have any similar concerns or perhaps the developers would like to share about the reason for the absence of more Technology info (perhaps it's too difficult to integrate it into the engine...I'm no programmer so I'm pretty ignorant), then I would be keen on hearing opinions

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Sorry - got the Expansion through SDC ....never have read any new manual...

If you want to, there's a pdf of it in the game's directory.

Thanks! Never looked. I'll check it out!

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2) The text descriptions are a real weakness.

Yep. If for experienced players they're really not an issue, for new players they can be a turn off. And new players are really important.

3) I do think we should get some props on the new manual in GalCiv II Gold. I mean, come on, that manual is pretty awesome I think compared to most game manuals.

Actually there's some info that is wrong in the manual. It was copy/pasted from the previous one, and it's now obsolete. Especially the last third or so of the manual.

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New Engine tech = speed +10 .. <-- WTF does that mean, it took me months to realize that the +10 actually adds 1 movement point for every ship no matter what engines they have. Talk about vague description.

This is as easy as it gets to fix, yet it's still there.

As for the Galactopedia, the Wiki (some personal opinions there too...), and the forums, that's all fine, but I imagine that not all players will have access to these forums. Having good descriptions is really the best bet, even to avoid excessive/repetitive forum traffic - which should be in the devs' interest, saves them time going through all of that.

I'm a "numbers" player, and I love reading a good manual and descriptions, BTW. I find them to be part of the appeal in a game.

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

I'm a "numbers" player, and I love reading a good manual and descriptions, BTW. I find them to be part of the appeal in a game.

i'm not a numbers player but i always read a game manual thouroughly before playing a new game, and after that i will usually be studying the manual constantly while playing.

If i have a question that needs solving in the game and the manual is no help, it is very irritating indeed.

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2) The text descriptions are a real weakness. It's one of those things that, in hindsight, I wish we had spent more time on. They are what they are. If someone else wants to put together a better set of descriptions, I'd be happy to insert them into an update, give credit and Stardock schwag to. We just don't have the budget internally to do much with them.

Frogboy,

I would be surprised if it took more than 10-15 man hours to upgrade the text descriptions. I am sure that the devs already know what each tech item does, so it should just be a matter of typing it into the text box! Even at a loaded labor rate of $95.00 per hour which is the norm for most small software companies, it represents only $1,425 in development cost. It would take around 47 games sales to break even. The ROI (return on investment) is certainly easy to figure out! Just listen to the customers. So why not just " get er done".

How many devs are there in your company? Maybe you could each take on one branch of the tree and finish this mini project in a couple of hours.

I realize that you are probably all focussing on the next new game because thats where the money will be comming from to pay the bills. But you may loose more than 47 repeat sales as a result of not doing it. Don't forget than the magority of customers will not take the time to get on the forum and tell you that your game sucks and is just collecting dust on the shelf.

A customer in hand is better than 10 in the bush!

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

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A customer in hand is better than 10 in the bush!

How did they get in the bush? are they lost? did their plane crash? What are they doing there? are they stalking me?? or perhaps their just looking for a quiet place to relieve themselves? hehehehe lol

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2422

I realize that you are probably all focussing on the next new game because thats where the money will be comming from to pay the bills. But you may loose more than 47 repeat sales as a result of not doing it. Don't forget than the magority of customers will not take the time to get on the forum and tell you that your game sucks and is just collecting dust on the shelf.

I doubt it.

Moreover, not just anyone can write good text. So it would, in effect, be me writing it and I'm not updating the text because it wouldn't be fun to go and do it.

If money was the primary motivator for this sort of thing, I'd have us focus purely on the desktop enhancement market which we totally own (GalCiv might have 100,000 active players but our desktop enhancement software has easily 5 million active users). For $1,500 we could create content for desktop enhancements that'll make 10X back and it would be fun to do.

Like I said, if someone is feeling ambitious and thinks they can do it better than what's there (and I think that's very possible) then they are welcome to do it and we'll incorporate it in with credit and such.

I can always go thorugh and list things about anything we make that I feel could have been done better (with the benefit of hindsight). But that isn't th esame as saying that it makes good sense for us to go and add it back. Re-designing the game engine for 1.6 was borderline but I felt THAT was something worthwhile for a lot of users but it was pretty iffy from a business point of view.

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

Anyone who needs the text, won't be able to write it, anyone who could write the text, no longer needs it! Is that a catch 22 situation?

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Thanks for your input Frogboy, it's at least clear where you stand on this.

Well I'll admit I'm disappointed, I basically read your text to say it's pretty boring to write the in game text so you'll not be doing it; nothing wrong with that I find my current job boring so will be leaving very shortly. It's important to make certain that where one is and what they do makes them happy, more so then any large cash incentive.

I am incredibly fussy about my games, which is why I have such a large collection of barely played games (must be at least 30, I'm a bit burned out on pc games to be honest), only a few grab my attention enough to finish them so if I am disappointed, it is because I reflect a minority (that is me

) that have extremely high standards for games (I can't believe how many games I've gotten based on gamespot's reviews only to be disappointed). I guess it must drag on you to have people always expecting demands to be fulfilled just because they handed over cash (Although if that money was difficult to raise I can then feel for those that dished out cash only to be disappointed). In the end there are so many sides to a story I guess it becomes impossible to come to any conclusion on the matter.

I'll tell you one thing that I really like about what you've done and that is the performance tuning on your game to make it run faster. I'm so sick of crap bloatware software that requires me to upgrade my graphics card to play it....and the adopting of frame rates of 30 or less as being acceptable for a top of the line graphics card (man the good old days of voodoo2 how I miss them). Your dedication to improving the performance of your game meant that I could run your game on my integrated nforce 6100 graphics @ 1024x768 smoothly when I had it, bravo.

You certainly got my attention with your last post, it sounds like from your perspective this game was not intended to be a big money maker, why create it then if you have so much fun with your desktop enhancement software?; it does seem that money was not the motivation for making this game, what was?

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Strange, not being fun writing the texts for the game. They're an integral part of the game. Not sure if this should be taken as the only fun part in developing this game is only adding stuff, even if it is superficial, inaccurate, or poorly documented. Not saying it's always the case. Feels more like a project than a game really, with these words from Frogboy. I don't think those words were really helpful in convincing anyone into editing the texts either, they somewhat showed a lack of interest in a part of the game. I'm sure I'm nitpicking and it's all about semanthics though

Also, with such a nice office and 5 million active users in the desktop enhancement sw front, is it correct to call SD a small game dev company?

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Also, with such a nice office and 5 million active users in the desktop enhancement sw front, is it correct to call SD a small game dev company?

Yes. Desktop enhancement and game development are two different things. EA is a huge game development (or publishing) company, but if they would put five or six people on desktop enhancement, they would be small in that regard, too.

3) I do think we should get some props on the new manual in GalCiv II Gold. I mean, come on, that manual is pretty awesome I think compared to most game manuals

In comparison to major company, mainstream titles, yes. In comparison to more hardcore titles (Falcon 4.0 / AF: 400+ pages, Dominions 3: 300+ pages) it is adequate. It has all the important tables more or less in one place, explains the mechanics of combat and provides a bit of background story. So, yes, good work indeed. But there's always room for improvement.

You know, if English wasn't my second language, I would be tempted to take a vacation and try it. Just because I would like seeing the techtree and research UI improved. Getting the information itself should be doable using the Galaktopedia or just parsing the XML yourself. Maybe you could do just that? Instead of 'hardcoding' the text, you could just add a bit of code that displays the information already in the XML?

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Yes. Desktop enhancement and game development are two different things.

Really?! Never noticed that...

Seriously though,

EA is a huge game development (or publishing) company, but if they would put five or six people on desktop enhancement, they would be small in that regard, too.

Would you see it as a small company though? Those people would have access to a pretty large resource pool. I was talking about perceptions. Most small game developers I know don't have this kind of perceived "size". I just asked because when comparisons are made, the "small company" thing always comes up.

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See, glad we cleared that up. I mean, the difference blurs more and more with every iteration of windows.

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Someone mentioned using the Galactopedia earlier. Well, I think that only works for
DL.

It would be nice to have something like that for DA.

There are a lot of improvements in DA that need explanation. (I am a newbie, but played DL for a long time). If I get desperate, I look at the .xml files and get some info. Or ask here.

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The only thing I had a bit of trouble with (I've been playing for about a week now) is finding the techs to build better ships. I was getting to the point where I had (I thought, anyway) some pretty awesome techs researched, but no new ship designs (I dont think Im at the self designing point yet).

As a new player I think its quite refreshing not knowing what any given tech will do for you, other than its a step in a certain direction. The interface is a bit awkward, but thats ok.

I think its a fantastic game, and I can see me losing track of more than a few nights!

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Maybe you could do just that? Instead of 'hardcoding' the text, you could just add a bit of code that displays the information already in the XML?

Yeah. In my opinion, no matter how pretty a description is, its no good if you don't see the numbers.

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I doubt it.
Moreover, not just anyone can write good text. So it would, in effect, be me writing it and I'm not updating the text because it wouldn't be fun to go and do it.
If money was the primary motivator for this sort of thing, I'd have us focus purely on the desktop enhancement market which we totally own (GalCiv might have 100,000 active players but our desktop enhancement software has easily 5 million active users). For $1,500 we could create content for desktop enhancements that'll make 10X back and it would be fun to do.
Like I said, if someone is feeling ambitious and thinks they can do it better than what's there (and I think that's very possible) then they are welcome to do it and we'll incorporate it in with credit and such.
I can always go thorugh and list things about anything we make that I feel could have been done better (with the benefit of hindsight). But that isn't th esame as saying that it makes good sense for us to go and add it back. Re-designing the game engine for 1.6 was borderline but I felt THAT was something worthwhile for a lot of users but it was pretty iffy from a business point of view.

Frogboy,
That reply surprised me. I was under the impression that the desktop stuff was just a small sideline, I never found a need for any of that software myself. Your company is obviously not as small as I had envisioned. Although I must admit that your tone leaves one to beleive that the game business is really a lost leader for the opportunity to advertise your desktop software on the site and on your stardock! Could it be?

On the other hand, your investment in the revamp of the engine for DA at this late date, must be applauded. I do suspect that maybe it had to be done for the lauch of "Sins of a solar empire" anyways. But regardless, that was a job well done. Congrats to the whole team.

To get back to the original point, if there are in fact 100,000 active players, and we assume that 25% of sales are not active, then a total sales volume of 125,000 unit can be assumed. At todays price, this represents $5.7 million in game sales. Your stated actice desktop software sales of 5 million units at an average price of $25.00 add up to a stagering $ 125,000,000 in sales. This means that in the last 8 years you have averaged $16.00 million dollars in sales per year. That is not a small company!

It makes the $1,500 in text updates rather insignificant! Would you not agree?

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Subtract the absurd costs for advertising and every single expense made from the moment GalCiv2 had a budget written up for it and you have a far, far smaller number.

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Subtract the absurd costs for advertising and every single expense made from the moment GalCiv2 had a budget written up for it and you have a far, far smaller number.

I am quite familiar with sales and marketing costs. The fact remains, with $ 16 million a years and such a small staff, they must be doing all right. I take my hat off to them. Hard to pull that off in just a few years.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2422

LightVader: No matter what the business justification is (and I really don't think there is one - and that's 15 years of game design experience talking) for rewriting text descriptions, we're not going to do it. The # of people who really demand it is very small and I would rather use that time to be writing the backstory for the fantasy strategy game that we're working on. For a future sequel of GalCiv, certainly we'll re-do it. But while I agree the text for the tech tree could be better, I don't think it's weak to the point of justifying an update.

The argument you make could be used on virtually any aspect of the game (whether it be better invasion dialog backgrounds, updated textures, etc.). The reality is that the people who are good at doing specific parts of a given game are working on things that have a better ROI and more importantly, more fun and interesting to do.

Anyway, there's definitely lots of things that I can think of to improve in GalCiv, LOTS of things. And we can look at those things in a future sequel.

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Someone mentioned using the Galactopedia earlier. Well, I think that only works for
DL.

It would be nice to have something like that for DA.

Galactopedia works just fine for DA. Nice pull-down version selector and all.

BTW, does everyone interested in this thread realize that most of the Techs' impacts ARE available at any time in the text window of the Research screen. Some of the tech results may be squeezed down off the initial screen by the position that the ship design descriptions take in the scolling text box, but they are there if you scroll.

The only thing that is not there (and admittedly it is a sometimes very inconvenient lack) is the indirect capabilities of subsequently built improvements.

drrider

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How do you get Galactopedia to do DA?

I had it point to the DA directory. It crashed immediately and I had to uninstall and reinstall it.

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Frogboy,

We hear you. From now on, I will only suggest improvements that would be fun, and interesting to do.

Sure would love to have a job like that?

Would you mine if I asked what your position is in the company?

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well, it just so happens that i have nothing to do for a month or two and a currently very bored, if someone could give me a few pointers on how to get started, i would definitely like to try to improve the the techtree and anything else that seems lacking. (They might suck but atleast its worth a try right?)

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You could compile a spreadsheet of all techtree items and copy the existing text description in the first row. Then in the next row type in the new text you would like to see in its place. Then post it for comments.

Good luck.

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