Bad Aspects of the game

Yes, because events that could potentially wipe out a couple of your top planets in a single turn is fun

Besides, the probability that any sun on the map would go supernova in the limited time that a game takes place (one turn being a week) is probably non-existant.
And I really don't see what black holes would add to the game.

Second that. I think most of us wouldn't like to have purely random events beyond our influence that destroy whole planets.

I really love the title... you are a little drastic.

As other replied, having your starting solar system going supernova is a really bad idea. Same for some of your key system.

Supernovas aren't fun. You never want to take a resource as massive as a set of planets away from a player for no reason at all. It's different to lose a planet to invasion or rebellion, because those are controllable events. To suddenly have a set of key planets go poof is just frustrating and can cripple an empire.

Also stars that are near nova or supernova stage tend to not be capable of supporting life on surrounding planets anyway. In the galactic time scale, since we deal with a turn equalling one week Earth time, and entire games going over just a few years, if a star was to go boom, it would be so near it in-game that it would be a useless system anyway. Including novas in the game would just mean those stars with all 0 planets might go away.

Black holes were discussed at one point a while back, but due to the scale of space, they would be completely meaningless. You'd end up with, at best, one grid square on the map being un-travelable.

Birth of stars from nebulas etc... Again, we're dealing with a time scale of weeks to a few years. Stars take a LOT longer to form. If we were dealing with timescales of tens of thousands of years a turn etc... maybe... maybe... but we're not.

Maybe if you fine tuned your ideas slightly for instance

with supernovas its increadibly annoying that your best system is destroed for no reason like on moo2. So when you explore a new planet a popup can come up that says 'our scientists have concluded that this star will no nova in approx 25 turns, but there are super minerals on the planet that will boost productivity by 500%' So I would be quuite content to colonise the planet for a short time to get the production bonus.

That was just of the top of my head some other fine tuning can go on

I would much prefer to deal with a nova than a damn recession that lasts an interminably long time.

I would much prefer to deal with a nova than a damn recession that lasts an interminably long time.

I think many real Earth politicians would agree on that one!

Yea but these thing arn´t suppose to be fun. The actually can happen and you know it, though very unlikly. If you have 3 sectors with 3 planets in each, and one of the sun goes supernova (the best sector you have offcourse). Then it would make the game alot harder but more challeging.

And i know i loved the game Space Empires IV and when my best system´s sun (aka 5 planets highly rated) went supernova i was mad as hell but the game turned out to be more challeging (cant spell it...)

And what i didn´t think of was that the turn only was a week

But hey the idea wasn´t bad.

On this time scale, cosmic events will almost certainly not occure. On this time scale, a recession will almost certainly last most the game.

Yea but these thing arn´t suppose to be fun

But the game IS supposed to be fun.

Not missed.

haha you dont get it:P Every spacegame has disasters would you laugh if you got a message from Yor that on of their sectors sun has gone supernova

In the real world we could colonize type G stars for millions of years without a super nova.

Exciting? If you say so but not realistic.

And there are disasters in GC2, just not ones that completely obliterate a planet completely randomly.

Realism in Sci-Fi Videogames is a sort of oxymoron considering we're already dealing with FTL travel, shields, laser blasters, aliens, and a visual map that is nowhere near scale and physics is largely meaningless.

You reference SEIV as an example of a game that does it. Well, the SE games have a pretty hardcore, but relatively small, following. They aren't mass market titles. They focus more on the deep strategy and attempt at realism than most games do. The focus there is on managing information, tweaking formulas etc.

GC2 however is a game first. It is supposed to be fun. It is as detailed as it can get without becoming overbearing. If I wanted to manage a spreadsheet, or play a game that took weeks of real-life time to build a ship or planetary improvement, I'd load of a SE game, or MoO3.

Games fail quite often when they go for realism over fun.

And there are disasters in GC2,

The influence shrinking event for example. It is very nasty for your influence zone.

BTW, recessions have been toned down.

I once played a space conquest game where you could pray. Build shrines and temples and your planets terraformed, your risk of bad events was lowered, your weapons and defenses became more powerful, stick a little talisman on your ship (ok, a 50 megaton talisman) and it's direct-fire weapons (lasers, depleted urainium cannons, etc.) would never miss. I could lead my pious empire to glory in cooperation with the Ferengi while we smote Space Vikings and the Starship Troopers' fleet. If things got really tough we could call for back up from a civilization of hogies (like the sandwich). They proved to be heroes many a time.

OK, I pre-ordered galciv2 just based on playing the demo of #1. This is going to be a wonderful experience and I am syked. That being the case, Space Empires doesen't need to be any better or worse. We probably will have enough time in our lives to play both, I even built time shrines in all my systems to make sure. As you can see from the proceeding paragraph SE can be pretty much whatever you want it to be (there's even a mod that turns it into a fantasy game, like with fairies -hey, nothing's perfect). It's great to get stoked about galciv but you'd be cheating yourselves to dismiss SE.

While these things do take many millions of years to happen, it seems reasonable to allow a certain degree of abstraction in regards to these events. We already do that with plenty of other things. No one is suggesting that these things would happen more than once per game per galaxy (and even that wouldn't be certain), nor is anyone suggesting that you wouldn't have any warning. You'd probably know whether or not there was the possibility of a star exploding during the game the first time you saw it. You could give the player at least 20 turns of warning. Thus disaster management/evacuation would be an interesting challenge for the player to deal with. I remember one other game that did this. Imperium Galactica 2 anyone?

Anyway, there are plenty of other stellar phenomenon that could have a place in the game. What about ultra high density neutron star systems? These could be loaded with resources (heavy elements) but have no planets (or at least habitable ones). The radiation here could damage ships, forcing the player to make new designs. It would make combat interesting if nothing else.
How about a planet that got knocked out of orbit and is now travelling through the galaxy starless?
What about a binary star system that caused incedibly high volcanic activity in orbiting planets? This would be a blessing as well as a curse since more seismic activity means more resources.
How about planets where one side is in constant daylight and another constantly at night? This would mean less capacity for development, but higher productivity, or something.

This is just a few things from the top of my head, but you get my drift.

The influence shrinking event for example. It is very nasty for your influence zone.

Nasty is not the word I would use, more like DEADLY!

I was winning the game on all fronts in the Beta 5 when there was a backlash against my growing Terran influence. Suddenly blue completely disappeared from the map! I needed to build a mega cultural starbase between Earth(home world and tech capital) and another world(manufacturing capital and omega shipyard) to keep them from rebelling! I began invading the other races worlds only to see their influence zone shrink to be replaced not by mine but instead another race's! Only after building up my cultural star bases and taking over enough planets did I once again see my influence re-appear and begin growing. Now my influence covers 3/4 of the galaxy as a mop up the last two races!

Something that would be a nice addition to GalCiv would be something like player-caused disasters. Sure, a star may not go supernova in the timescale of the game naturally, but given a sufficient technology level, is there any reason why a player should not be able to blow another player's star? Or collapse it to a black hole? THAT would be fun!

I was winning the game on all fronts in the Beta 5 when there was a backlash against my growing Terran influence. Suddenly blue completely disappeared from the map!

I'm pretty sure the influence borders were buggy in the Beta. I had several very radical changes, like almost the whole map taking one colour all of a sudden without reason noticeable to me, which I can't explain otherwise.

I say that supernovas would be cool, and like some1 here said, stars that are going nova should'nt have planets around them since they'd be melted and vaporized, so you would know that star was going nova from the begining of the game, and if it had planets they should be unhabitable, I think it would look cool to see a star transformed into a black hole wouldn't you think?? Why not have stars go nova if they aren't going to affect the game, since no planets were around them??

Also the idea of having binary systems would be interesting to see


Monclova34

While these things do take many millions of years to happen, it seems reasonable to allow a certain degree of abstraction in regards to these events. We already do that with plenty of other things. No one is suggesting that these things would happen more than once per game per galaxy (and even that wouldn't be certain), nor is anyone suggesting that you wouldn't have any warning. You'd probably know whether or not there was the possibility of a star exploding during the game the first time you saw it. You could give the player at least 20 turns of warning. Thus disaster management/evacuation would be an interesting challenge for the player to deal with. I remember one other game that did this. Imperium Galactica 2 anyone? Anyway, there are plenty of other stellar phenomenon that could have a place in the game. What about ultra high density neutron star systems? These could be loaded with resources (heavy elements) but have no planets (or at least habitable ones). The radiation here could damage ships, forcing the player to make new designs. It would make combat interesting if nothing else.

These are some nice ideas! Maybe in an expansion something like that will be included. I would also add the suggestion that a race's starting solar system would never go super nova to avoid complaints.

Why nova the sun?

Just have some solar flares every now and than. Total disruption of communications results in a 75% loss of research, 66% loss of manufacturing and a loss of say 10% of the population!

In the words of my old warefare instructor, KISS!

Realistic and to the point, provides an "OH NO!" appeal and for those folks that like to horn all of the racial goodies on one planet... you know who you are Mr./Ms. I got a PQ 19 planet and I am going to put my capitals all on here person. This solar flares for you!

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Just Katting About

I think adding catastrophic disasters would be a mistake. First, it can hurt game play. Did anyone play "Star Trek Birth of the Federation." There was nothing worse then having to fend off a random Borg attack (I know that's not exactly a disaster). Oh wait, there was one thing that was worse... When you could fend of the Borg but the other races couldn't. The Borg would decimate the other races completely ruining a game.

As far as scientifically, most stars don't even go supernova. The Sun, for instance, is about four times too small to result in a supernova. Also stars have a pretty distinct lifetime. That is, a star stays in it's mature stage most of its lifetime. Then it becomes a red giant. Well, in the game red stars don't usually hold habitable planets anyway. Three stages later the star might supernova. The next issue is that we have a decent grasp on the aging and lifespan of stars. For example, we know our star has billions of years before it turns into a red giant. We base this on the mass of a star and how fast it consumes fuel for nuclear fusion (larger stars consume fuel faster and thus live shorter lifespans). For a scientifically advanced race to only have a few weeks or even only a few years of notice that their star is going to die isn't really logical.

Meteors don't seem very reasonable considering that, again the trajectory of a meteor can be predicted in advance enough so that a planet that is at a sufficient technology level could take action.

As far as having the formation of stars and planets, that again takes a long time. If they were going to be in the game as "just growing" there would have to be a reason. Say, a starbase could be planted in a nebula with developing stars to steal resources.

There are some interesting thoughts in what's been mentioned but personally, I'd rather see an intelligent AI than a lot of random events. Epically when the events shouldn't really be random. I don't think it's quite right to say that a space-faring race couldn't see the meteor coming that wiped out their home world or colony.