Judging by the trailer, they are going without the ‘humor’ angle this time I take it?
Excellent. Interested to see what mechanics are in the game. There’s been a lot of different takes on 4x games lately. It’s a rich genre but no game has risen to the top to dominate the Space 4x crown. I hope Gal Civ III will be that game.
So, when we will have the first info? The announcement has been exactly that, an announcement about “hey we are doing a game!”, but zero information about new features and what not, apart from multiplayer and 64bits (and that’s not a gameplay feature).
It was generally acknowledged to have great AI, at least until the last expansion, which added significantly different races. So… make of that what you will.
Re: designing ships. I think what was being requested by Demorve was a way to get a new ship design with given components without having to muck around with hardpoints. Which, IIRC, you could do I think by just double clicking the components that you wanted, and they would get auto-placed. But I don’t think it was documented. Using only the stock designs would put you at a bit of a disadvantage, especially if you needed to switch lasers to missiles or whatever. At least that’s how I remember it, it’s been a few years.
As always, there will be developer journals and information coming out when available. :)
Soon™
Alpha comes this winter, beta shortly thereafter. So…before then.
This is what I’m talking about, the ship model designer can still be in there just separate the two. This way if one wants to create a snazzy looking ship you can, maybe even share them with other people, but let me decide what components to install without having to create the ship model and use hard points. Yea I knew I could use the stock design and add components, but I didn’t know that you could double click on a component to auto place it.
No novel??
— Alan
Again I’m not positive but I’m fairly sure I did it at least once. That said, I actually enjoyed making them pretty, and turned new ship designs into an event, complete with my being too lazy to do them as often as might have been strategically optimal. (RP’ing, if you will, what I can only imagine must be serious government procurement delays, extrapolating from current experience with the F-22s or F-35s or whatever they are.)
Still, it would have been better, from a marketing perspective, to give some info about new stuff together the press release, as the announcement of the game is being posted in several sites, that normally don’t cover strategy news. It’s a question of visibility. When you will give us the info in three weeks in a dev journal, it won’t have the same echo in the gaming community.
Look at the Xcom reveal, it came with a full preview.
I know, it’s a shame there’s nobody at Stardock with any familiarity with the XCOM announcement.
Well, fingers crossed and all that. Thanks for providing the OCD among us a “BUY EVERYTHING EVER” option.
I do not think it is fair for some to say, hey they said this would be in a game and then did not do it (multiplayer) and on the other hand say why are they not revealing everything? Maybe they learned a lesson about the revealing aspect.
I have seen a lot of negative comments about Stardock but how about something positive.
Stardock did do its best to try and make up for its mistake on Elemental. Not many companies try to make right.
At least GC3 is a game that we have an idea about whether we like the earlier games.
Question: Does the iOS space game have anything to do with this announcement? Are they the same game?
This + the Elemental fiasco + Demigod fiasco = may buy after reviews are out + it’s on sale
Stardock once had earned my “sight-unseen” money, but not anymore.
I really hope they change the combat system for this game.
In truth I didn’t play GalCivII that much, so maybe I’m missing some of its subtle depth, but I was immediately turned off by the (seemingly) simplistic lasers/guns/missiles vs. shields/armor/point defense combat model, especially because the upgrades came as boring numerical upgrades to the dice-rolling (Lasers 1, Lasers 2, Lasers 3), etc.
I just read through a wiki article on the GalCivII combat to refresh my memory (and make sure I wasn’t spouting total nonsense), and I see that the underlying math is a bit more complex than I’d thought. However, the complexity seems to involve a series of weird abstractions layered on top of other weird abstractions. It makes some sense for a (hideously complex) board game, but I feel like there must be a more elegant solution to the way they’re simulating (auto resolving) the combat.
All I know is, after playing with the paper-doll ship builder in GalCivII where…
…And then playing Sword of the Stars, where the weapons and hull sections determined not only HP and raw damage, but also optimal range, ship speed, turning rate, and weapon arcs (which determines whether a ship has distributed damage or damage focused on a single enemy, and whether it can successfully target small fast ships or even survive long enough to engage big deadly ships), I felt like the GalCivII combat (and thus also the research and the ship designing) were shallow and pointless.
I’m not saying that GalCivII needs real time tactical battles, but I’d like to, at least, see something as sophisticated as you get in Civilizations or Warlock:MotA (e.g., where ‘stacks’ or fleets can be tactically maneuvered on the strategic layer, and where you can choose between a brute force frontal attack or using stand-off weapons and area-of-effect weapons to soften up the enemy).
I also loved the ship design editor. I was able to create vast fleets of Star Trek Cruisers and Stardock was able to avoid a lawsuit with Paramount Studios, so it was a win, win.
I think that’s the flip side to have a good non-cheating AI. AFAICT Stardock tossed out everything that was likely to cause the AI to have problems, no Black Hole Generator, No Boarding Shuttles, none of the fun and exotic technologies found in MOO. Instead a very bland system that is easy for the AI to understand.
I’d prefer something more in the middle though, I agree the GalCiv2 combat system was pretty dull.
Stardock better pray that Rob Zacny doesn’t get assigned this game for review…
Yup. I’ll sacrifice tactical depth for creativity in the ship designer any day.