Hi MRW1969,

There is a lot wrong with this game the way it is but is still only halfway through Alpha. These poor folks haven't had much of a chance to fine-tune things yet.

I say, give them that chance before making comparisons to games that have had time to mature,

Richard

We appreciate feedback and part of the point of having the game in alpha is to learn what is fun and what is not fun.

However, I am going to ask that you refrain from personal comments on individual developers. Please focus on the game, not individuals. Many people are working on making GalCiv IV the best it can be, including fans testing the game.

Massive good reply Derek.

like the ship designer and some of the other features are currently turned off on purpose.. the release notes even say that...

I'll never understand how people fail to understand what "Early Access" means. I just went through this for over a year with Hell Let Loose. Wait, at least, until it gets to beta state before quitting. 

I mean he's an asshole and it sounds like has beef with that other guy but he's right in general about the fun being sucked out and the interpretation of micro management, these are OCD games for weirdos they MUST be micromanaged, the whole idea of collapsing the hull points points for a cargo hull is ludicrous and just bins the entire ship building pull of the game, which is a _massive_ part of galciv for me, and to think 4x attracts "casual players" is a misreading of the market so deep my brain boggles at the mention, this is Steve Balmer telling us mobile phones won't be big and he doesn't care about that industry. Dude if anything you want to go DEEPER into the micro.  I've been playing both gc3 and gc4 in tandem and gc4 so far is just a gutted and perplexing version of gc3, but with 2 main features with massive potential - planet contributors and cluster separation, the latter makes it a lot more friendly for macro planning.  I mean if you want to make mobile games have at it, but i'd avoid doing that on the downlow with galciv fans.

I think If you just pull out that terrible 1990's UI library and incomprehensible UX from gc3 then you'd improve upon the design infinitely, but wildly enough the frustration of the UI is _enhanced/extended_ in gc4, taking nigh on 7 seconds to open a shipyard and every build command takes a few seconds to register.  Also the game is goddamn glacial by comparison, i'm still rockin 11 move units at 2.5 days worth of play (60 hours?), if you want people to playtest this thing you might consider putting some cheats up front, because after 2.5 days i can safely say i don't want to continue testing this thing because it's just sooooo yawnful, eager to get back to playing galciv3 tho, just wish it had planet contributors and clusters

Oh and 4k doesn't work with "4k large ui" you have to use small UI otherwise it's all overflowing and broken, not sure why that logic was inverted, i'm sure the text/intent was opposite in galciv3.

The original poster clearly has frustrations with this, and to some extent I understand them.  However, it's really not helpful to just flame the forum and say "everything sux!".  If we want things to be different/better, we should at least offer some specifics instead of "guess again, you got it wrong".

There are a few things from the list that do specifically bother me, and I have actionable requests regarding them:

1.  This is a hex-based game.  We all know it.  The circles do actually make it harder to tell where the border is drawn.  Please just make the hex grid visible, at least when I am sufficiently zoomed in.  Then I can tell when my constructor will be close enough, without any guessing.

2.  The planet markers do obscure things when I zoom out a little.  Please make the markers disappear unless I am zoomed in close.

3. The new queuing system is definitely more difficult to manage.  While it looks flashier than the one in GC3, I don't think most of us care about flashy here -- we just want functional.  Could you please just give us back the old queue management?

4.  Some company out there (here) is making money selling cheats.  It really is a bit tedious to get further into the game to explore more of what's new, if we have to go through all the motions.  Please help us, and take away the business they have created off of this game -- either just add some basic cheats for us, or make save games editable so we can jump ourselves ahead.

Anyway -- clearly it's a ways until we call this done, and I look forward to seeing the final product, and the eventual DLC that will follow.  Thank you for keeping GC alive for us!

Okay I'll add my two cents...

I would rather see hex boundries instead of circle as well, Big hexes for sectors, hex area of influence for star base ect.... say 4 tiles away or 5 tiles away in all directions, not just a circle.  That would be nice and easy to understand, and cleaner as an interface.

About the same as it was in Galactic Civilizations III.

Agree, but Derek has addressed.

Everything should have a repeat option.

About the same as Galactic Civilizations III with the exception of all the diplomacy pop-ups (which they are working on).

It would be nice to have this pop last in the order of things, can this be done?

I liked all the different options available for the different modules to place on ships.  This process has been simplified to this point as a vast majority of people don't add all the different things to their ships, they want it simple and clean which narrows everything down to weapons and defenses other than cosmetics (for the most part).  Because of these changes it makes it difficult to merge existing ships from Galactic Civilizations III into Galactic Civilizations IV.  Now if it was just the template and not all the modules, I'm not sure the reasoning on why we can't as it uses the same engine as Galactic Civilizations III.  That's a question for the devs.

Surveying and collecting stealth modules ect... has been a hot topic from time to time on discord and the forums.  Why doesn't this just collect so you can use all 597 collected?  I agree you should be able to, otherwise why am I still surveying.  I should stop after I collect a few different items so I don't waste them.  Please let these stack, so I can collect 597 instead of just go to waste.

As others have stated this game is in ALPHA so therefore there are things that need to be corrected and changed prior to release.  This is a great list of things you'd like to see changed, which I completely agree with some of your points.  Instead of tearing down the designers of the game, lets continue this wonderful discussion to help shape the game into something great.  Thanks for your feedback.

Galactic Civilizations II was a great game, too bad it didn't have the scale that Galactic Civilizations III had.  If it had the scale of Galactic Civilizations III, I'd still be playing it today.  I would agree that at this point it doesn't appear that Galactic Civilizations IV will match the magic that Galactic Civilizations II had, but it's also a different game.  Other than being in the same universe (or galaxy) it's different, with different features and options.  But yes, I'd like to see a modernized Galactic Civilizations II with bigger maps, more factions, and support to maximize the modern top end computers with 64 cores, and 256 gb of memory .  Unfortunately there is no financial reason for it, so it wouldn't justify the time and effort to attempt to do it.

Thanks Derek and the team for the continued great communication with the fans and picking up on different suggestions.  Let's make this game great.

Commenting in a thread that is 3 years old is an indication of a 'troll' or 'spammer'.

Which, pray tell are you?

This is an incredibly blunt critique of Galciv4 on their own forum that they host.  More was allowed to stand than I would have expected.  

I am on Stardock's side, and I want their games to succeed--for me, not just for them.  Galciv2-4 have always been this mixture of very good and very frustrating, just to the point of driving you nuts.  How I wish it was either or.  I, of course, attribute both the good and the bad to the obvious person, and it's not Derek.  

Personally, it looks to me like Galciv4 took on more features, more races. more aspects of the economy than you had the wherewithal to develop an AI for--which historically, Brad did the AI.   You tried to make everything moddable, but that made it difficult to wrap your head around how exactly to AI a bunch of parameters.  Also--and this is what gets me--it looks like you left it to one of us to create that good mod.   There are so many nifty, fun--and utterly useless features in the game, because it just never all got balanced.  You were too busy enabling the XML so that we could do it.  When I tried to mod myself, it took no time at all to realize that what I wanted to mod, I couldn't.  Not with XML.  

The ultimate mod project I'm aware of is Nethack.  Oh my gosh, I love that game.  But nobody ever got rich off of that (and some of us probably got poor, playing it during work).  It's open source. 

There's also the aspect of how do you do QA.when the game pace is so sloooooow.  That takes manpower.  Manpower takes money.  Okay, so innovative idea:  leave it to the beta testers.  Nope.  Only about 10% of that feedback got listened to, and it was the wrong 10%.  

So after the third iteration of this, I learned my lesson with Galciv4 and did two things:  1) wait for all the patches before buying it and 2) have fun with the exploration aspect of the game, but once you've explored it all, don't expect to have fun really getting good at playing it.  I put in my 200 hours on Steam (more than I expected), got my money's worth, and moved on.  There are games out there that are all about discovery (like Myst).  But Galciv has a different set of expectations, as a 4X. 

I haven't modded online forums much, so I don't know if necroing threads is an indication of sock troll accounts or AI.  However, I know I do necro threads myself sometimes, and I am neither of those.   I'm just trying to keep the threads organized; after all, just because a thread is old doesn't mean you should break off into another thread if it's the same topic.   Sometimes boards can be inactive, and it's not very hard to find old, but related threads to comment on.   This board is, sadly, less active than I wish it was.  But it does go back to the game.