SleekDD

I'd would be sad to see the epic generator cut from the game but everyone will acknowledge that is was a very ambitious project. After all, it's all about making the computer churn out a well-written text without making it look too much like a template or deviating from what really happened in the game instead of what it thinks happened. As others suggested, perhaps using a more bare-bones version would be a good compromise? If events get logged and newly designed vessels can get a scre

The thing is that a fixed number on the range of borders doesn't really work unless you're willing to go to a very large number. If ships were relatively slow, say 5 squares per turn, you could try to incorporate borders given that you manage to deal with all the other issues such as systems belonging to several empires and such. Ships can easily get 10+ movement points and more making a border nothing more than a line where a guy shows up and says :gentlemen, start your engines. You place fleet

Well, Stardock has re-worked the combat system and it looks like it was done in a pretty fundamental way. It looks like larger ships will be able to take on several smaller ships at once. How the offence/defence balance and the size balance will work out is something we can't comment on until the new system is comepleted and tweaked. The one issue I do find worth pointing out now is that the relatively high variance, especially later in the game, is making defences worth less while it

I feel that most graphics and cutscenes are eventually cut short because the player wants to move on with the game. Sure, it would be nice to see a fighter HUD, but how often would you be willing to see it again? In my experience, even very good cutscenes are skipped after a few views and since they are (relatively) expensive to produce, I'm not sure how much value they would add to the game aside the short-lived wow-factor. <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles/Wink.gif

I believe you can trace back most permanent events on planets when you check the 'details' tab on your colony view. Bonuses for research and production are stored there. Keep in mind that economic buildings and capitals also put their bonuses there so don't be fooled by those. I can see why people feel the 'Good' guys are getting a raw deal, most, if not all the choices they make affect their empire adversely. On the other hand, the defensive techs you can research when you're Good also

Perhaps we should be considering borders in a slightly different perspective. In the earlier times, says 50 years ago and further back, borders were pretty much solid. You come in here, we slug it out. This worked pretty much since we could define hostile intent as someone crossing our border. However, as technologies evolved, so did the range or our weaponry and speed of our armies. At present day, the whole world is in a fuzz about nuclear weaponry, mostly because it can be launched f

In my experience, the game breaks down into three parts. The first part is all about the land grab. Everyone sends out colony ships and tries to claim as many planets as possible, preferably those with a better quality but I'm not sure to what degree the computer makes a distinction there. I think he's just colonizing from his own position outward, rather than looking for good pickings. Once all planets have been colonized, this phase ends. Avoiding war is easy here as you normally don'

From what I've seen in the developer journals, the combat system will see some changes although I'm not completely clear what kind of changes they will be. The problem is that they have two kinds of balance they intend to maintain: offence/defence and small/large. If they make defences worth more, they are likely to debalance the size-issues with capital ships becoming untouchable. Whereas the balance between offence/defence suffers from variance (in my humble opinion anyway), the balan

I'm not all that much in favour of tactical combat added to the game, unless GalCivIII would work very differently. With target selection, it would make the concept of escorts less meaningful. You see a fleet of three escorts and a troop transport making its way to a planet of yours. You sortie a single fighter, engage, target and kill the 1HP transport and then get shot back in return. It is because of target selection rules that escorts make sense. As other said before, tacti

As DethAdder mentioned, some of the racial abilities are selected using the 10 points you get when designed a race. Some other abilities are natural to that specific race, meaning that you get that bonus regardless of other choices as long as you don't overwrite those with your own racial picks. For example, the custom race gets a hefty 25% soldiering bonus. If you pick a 10% soldiering bonus, you lose the remaining 15% and spend a point on that. You could, of course, spend three points

@Ceylin: True, you could see that as a critical hit, but it is one that'll have more chances of occurring between evenly matched/sized ships. The idea of a critical hit was to give the little guys a (fixed) chance to do some form of damage. The possible new system might make critical hits superfluous as little craft can swarm a big one. Having defences weaken as hits come in sounds nice but I'm wondering what the effect will be on ship design and hull selection. Smaller ships will e

I believe wastage is an issue in second order. Sure, it can be annoying that your 50+ attack power vaporizes a 6HP fighter but if the little bugger just can't touch you, all this does is make fights take longer. Wastage becomes an issue when time is an issue and that pops up when both sides can deal out some degree of pain. Equipment options that allow multiple target tracking could make a worthy addition to the ship design system although some design issues accompany this (should it always

I suspect the balance between capital ships and fighters isn't as easy as it sounds at first. One has to take into account that the discrepancy between the attack value on the small craft and the defence value on the large craft is something very fragile. A more predictable system would also make differences in values more pronounced. Small fighters might end up becoming useless against bigger ships. In the end, variance might be what turns out to be the leveller of the playing field. I

Just to add my thoughts to this big thread... As many already said, the patches were not really needed to make the game stable. Sure, there were some bugs in it but after 1.1, the fixes related to minour issues. There are still some left (mind control center?) but they don't break the game. Everything after 1.1 focused more on player feedback to make the game last longer. It was about

I won't claim to know much about politics but Chavez calling Bush the devil is not all that surprising to me. Unpopular, incompetent, threatened and/or dictatorial leaders often suffer from an unrulier populace which hampers their efforts to follow their agenda. It is common practice for those people to create a foreign threat since that forms a feeling of unity on the domestic front. Even if the populace doesn't like their leader, they will often support him/her just because they feel they shou

Quite a few magazines link their opinions to certain products directly to the amount of advertisment space those companies buy. It is a sad fact, but it does happen. I'm certainly not saying this is what happened here but I can understand people being a little edgy about this whole thing. Anyway, relying on a single review is not the best way to proceed and I found that out the hard way. The review said that the game was good although it suffered from a few minour bugs. The game was so

Although I would love to see the political aspect of the game a little deepened, I fear the system proposed here would make larger games very hard. If planets or systems with similar parties have a chance of splitting off, the chances of something like this happening increases as your empire increases. I would keep the result of the votes centralised in the senate rather than spreading them over the planets themselves. Otherwise, the prospect of civil wars will not only become real, it

I must say I agree with most of Brad Wardel's opinions on the matter. Ironically, those games that had the most oppressive protection often ended up delivering the weaker games. Not to mention that every once in a while, a protection program may go haywire and believe you are running a pirated copy, thus shutting you out. Some protection mechanisms actually made me feel like a criminal as if a gamer just can't be up to no good. The no-copy-protection aspect of GalCivII was part of the r

I would guess that farming strategies are closely related to how you play the game on other fronts. In my approach, for example, population is very important. As you know, your citizens do two things for you: they pay taxes and they fight. Usually, I pick my racial traits to boost that aspect with Economics and Soldiering. On most planets, the population cap lies over 5 billion so I often build one farm (sometimes two) on all planets, accompanied with a Stock Market or two if the planet

I usually work with medium sized hulls whenever possible. I find these give me enough space to put on the necessary systems, enough HP to warrant defences and a reasonable manufacturing cost. I used to build larger ships but after a spree of losing tricked out huge hulls to medium vessels I decided the risk wasn't worth taking anymore. Also, by using only medium hulls or small hulls even, you present a nice mixture of target saturation and the option to spread your fire when possible.<b

Veblen and I did some work on the worth of defences. We found that all-attack ship destroyed more manufacturing points than the cost. We found that defences became less useful as the ratio of HP to attack or defence power dropped. Also, defences became less reliable as a whole as power increased. Outliers and fluke rolls could impact the battle heavily while in low-tech battles, the effects were rather small. So, on small ships and with hi-tech games, defences become less useful. So, wh

Aside paying taxes, your citizens are also soldiers. Having a farm at a manufacturing planet makes it a little easier to fill the transports immediately with fresh troops. Planets that are valuable or at risk of being invaded benefit a lot from a farm since your defensive capacity increases a lot. If you happen to have some decent soldier bonuses, the planet becomes a veritable fortress. I have seldomly experienced trouble with morale. Stock Markets boost morale as well as revenue so a

When my technological situation allows it, I only choose between information warfare or mini-soldiers. Information warfare stays useful on planets with a low morale while mini-soldiers are useful in just about every situation. Of course, I usually attack with a huge amount of soldiers (3000-9000) which means that any boost will weight that much harder. There have been situations where no transports were emptied; the defectors had survived the onslaught and occupied the planet. As a ru

On top of my head: - Reduce morale of a target planet. This will only be helpful if low morale will actually hurt a planet. As it is, I've never seen planets go into revolt so the only hit is on pop growth and taxing. I could be missing something, though. - Cause a planet to change a percentage of the influence to your kind instead of it's native kind (represents it becoming easier to defect to your side). This is a replacement for snatching a planet. Now, you need to be cl

So, you want the Altarians dead because they're good at what they do? As I read it, the poll is just for entertainment purposes. It's just for gossip and fun, not to actually interfere with the storyline. Besides, I voted Arceans.