Frogboy - Remove AI's knowledge of yellow stars?

It's one of the reasons Stellar Cartography is not very useful. By the time you get it, there are no stars left to colonize.

Brad has stated that this really isn't that much of an advantage, and I pretty much agree with him. After your first colony ship, crank out a scout. You'll know where the yellow stars are before your colony ships set out to colonize them. I suppose on the smaller maps this might be an issue, but it certainly is not on the larger maps.

fleabitfox

Hmm - I do play smaller maps usually, but I find it to be an issue with every game I play. For example, I'll find this juicy cluster off in the corner and dispatch colony ships, and BAM - 3-4 turns away, they're colonized by another empire that was never even in the area.

Adding the requirement of the AI scouting would also help define where they were expanding to. Right now, the AI just expands everywhere regardless of where they've been...

"Right now, the AI just expands everywhere regardless of where they've been... "

And you should too! Don't wait for your scouts to find stuff and *then* send out colony ships. Just send out colony ships to every nearby system. If there's nothing good, redirect them to the next nearest system. And so on. Since your home planet can make a colony ship in 3 turns and expansion planets can do it in about 5, you'll quickly have ships going just about everywhere.

At least, that's what I do. It always seems to work, even against genius AIs on big maps. I always at get at least as many planets as the biggest AI. On little maps I might lease the first couple ships to get a couple turns of advantage over building.

The elder races had sent probes to every promising system long before man had discovered ear-wax, and so they already knew of planets suitable for colonisation. Invention of the warp-drive finally allowed colonisation over such vast distances, and made those long trips with the kids to visit relatives seem almost bearable.

"Are we there yet?"

"How many light-years to go now Dad?"

My guess is that in playtesting the human player greatly outscouted and out colonized the ai and the devs couldnt get it to scout better or the ai would build a ton of colony ships without a clue as to where to send them.

I mean didnt you ever see an ai survey ship appear in your sector then not move for a long time?I think it explores a wormhole that sends it out of its range so it then just sits there till it researches a range tech.
Not sure on the last one but one thing I am sure of is that Ive never seen an ai scout.I just dont think the devs could get the ai to scout effectively so they came up with the probes for 10,000 years thing to give the ai a boost.The ai survey ships never scout either--they just seek out anomalies.

Of course I am probably completely wrong about all this.

Why not let the player also know the positions of the yellow stars from the beginning. I mean, determine the color of a star is not even a challenge today. To realize after 10 min gaming that you are surrounded by crappy systems is very annoying anyway.

I agree with MadAxe. I mean, we know now what stars are yellow, which are blue supergiants, etc. Shouldn't we know where the average Main Sequence stars are?

How about Stellar Cartography as a buyable startup ability

Would you be tempted to pay perhaps 3 points for it in a huge galaxy?

~SDC~

Yah, I just starteda new game with large map. I was in a great chunk of the universe - along with another empire. Even with a scout and many colonization ships, they still took all the good stars before I even knew they were there... Kinda messes things up

Let it be a option to let us see the positions of the yellow stars!!!

I certainly don't think it is outside of mankind's scope to look up at the stars and say, `that is yellow, that is red, that one is blue'...

Well Stellar Cartography is not very far down the tech chain and it's one of those things that you have to decide where to rush to...

Do I rush to Diplomatic Translators and Trade or Nano-metal to get Tri-Strotium Steel before the minor civs or Stellar Cartography so I can colonize as quick as possible etc.

The tech route to Stellar Cartography is:
Communication Theory -> Nano Electronics -> Stellar Cartography

If you simply want to try a game starting with Stellar Cartography you could make this change in GCTech.TECH:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------
TECH 140 StellarCartography
//------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name "Stellar Cartography"
Model ""
Tech_Requirement ""
Research_Cost 50
Overview "This technology will allow us to distinguish yellow stars from other colored stars on the mini map."
Description "Thanks to improved instrumentation, we can now better tell which nearby stars are likely to have inhabitable planets. Promising stars now show up with a lighter gray on the mini map."
Tech_Category 4
AI 1
ENDTECH

*If you want to reallly cheese out you could put the cost down to 1 so that it can be researched in a single turn at start of game...

...and if anyone asks I didn't tell ya

Perhaps Brad could make this AI advantage a player-selectable radio-button (with, perhaps, a small VP penalty for turning it off).

I myself like giving the AI's this knowledge/ ability (i.e., Stellar Cartography) at the start; it makes the game very challenging at the higher difficulty levels. I prefer it to the Civ3 approach (on Deity level) of making the AI's research costs so much lower than the player's that it is far better to do no research at all (but simply buy the techs from the computer), or A0W2's approach of bulking up the AI wizards starting forces and mana.

At the very least, I am finding GalCiv to continue to have a challenging AI, whereas I was able to discern and counter HOMM4's and MOO3's relatively quickly.

~SDC~