Sidesteppingsuperman

By the way, thanks everyone, esp. Zyxpsilon for your comments.

Maybe I'll spend time playing around with the new editor in Arnor and see how much I can pare off this thing to make it lose some weight. As great as Galciv is, maybe there's a great "lite" game in there somewhere too after gutting it a good bit. That may sound strange, but I'd like to see movement in the direction of simplicity, in keeping with some of what made MOOI, Spaceward Ho!, and Stars! successful. It's probably up to the modders to do it too since there's probably no money in it given h

Hello... I love Galactic Civilizations. But the thought of getting into another game of it makes me take a deep breath of mental preparation for all the mental involvement it demands. Relaxing at the game is not realistic because it's so demanding and immersive. Are there any heroic modders out there who've found ways to strip things out of it and "lightened up" the game for the less mentally mighty like me? I was just curious. I'd like the game to go a little better with my beer and pretzels in

You know, after thinking about it, diplomacy might be possible somehow if something is true about the saved game file. It's just that I noticed that when the player interracts with the AI, it makes decisions on the fly or "live", based upon what you offer in that moment. I'm trying to remember from way back when Brad Wardell posted some info on how diplomacy worked between turns. Maybe offers can be sent via saved game file. I'm not sure if trades are recorded in the save game after they happen

I see what you are saying. I guess I'm looking at this from a third party perspective, since a third party would probably be the one to make an interface for Galciv 2. So it looks like the map information can be strictly obtained from a saved game file then and described in grid fashion which is what you are comfortable with. I think that a description of the map as a grid or anything else can be made from a saved game file without needing to obtain anything from the screen. However, fo

As a programmer, what occurs to me as a solution to the technical problem of doing this as a mod would be: 1. Writing an app that samples the screen bitmap for GalCiv 2 at a settable rate or when the user indicates it is to do so 2. The app would then use an optical character recognition library (common and available) to read the text it can find on the GalCiv 2 screen to decide which screen it's looking at 3. Knowing which GalCiv 2 screen it's looking at would then let i

I do occasionally see them and I think it's a great touch to the game. I like studying geography and seeing those cities at night time inspires the perverted desire to write fanboy fiction about how the geography caused those cities to develop and spread over that particular world. However, I have noticed quite often that of multiple random worlds of close population (10 billion), only one or rarely two will show city lights. This was during

Just wanted to add my observations to this as well. I see no city lights on worlds of any state of development/population/class on the main map. I have seen them on the planet detail screen however (double-click on planet -> Detail button). My card is a GeForce FX6200 w/256MB . I also want to point out Stardock's outstanding diligence in taking note of this kind of feedback, so no doubt they've seen this thread and will get to it when they get to it.</