Are you sure it comes with the base game? It doesn’t say so.
Yes, it comes with the base game.
I hope they are putting out an OS/2 version.
No, doesn’t look like him. Now I’m going to end up wasting 20 hours in Sims 3 trying to make Star Trek TNG crew - LOL.
Just played some GalCiv 2 tonight and found another annoying thing. When you colonized a planet you sometimes get an event and it always seemed that you needed to pick the evil choice to get any benefits. If they keep that I hope they make it so that if you choose good over evil you get some positive modifier not always negative such as the evil choice you get +10 research or the good choice you get +10 happiness. At least that would make it worth while to choose good over evil.
I think the extremely boring Laser1, Lasers2, Lasers3 stuff was changed in one of the expansions, but I completely agree in principle - it was a very dull combat (and research, initially) implementation.
This also concerns the ship designer issue, as more complex/different weapons/armor/equipment would require taking more care when designing a ship, whilst in GC2 this was a strictly esthetic affair.
While I personally enjoy designing ships, I do agree that it basically is an “unrealistic” mechanic, when I’m running a star empire I’ll likely not be the one that decides where exactly a laser cannon on a fighter is installed.
I kinda wish someone would model this to work like the RLM in WW2, you’d have design bureaus (like the teams in HoI2) and could issue requirements (maneuverable cruiser with fighter bay that can fit our FX3 fighters and a stong pulse cannon …) and then would get proposals from the teams, and each one you’d accept would usually develop into a design, but not always one really able to fulfill the described role, sometimes the design would turn out non-feasible at all and sometimes you’d get an unexpected superweapon. But maybe something like that would be a better fit for a game like Distant Worlds.
When I saw the first screenshots of cliffski’s GSB, I initially thought it would kinda work like that, only with you playing a design bureau - that could make a cool game as well.
rezaf
This is an area of the game I am hoping gets revamped.
Well I’m hoping for a clearer and easier economy system. I could never wrap my head around the one in GC2.
Once you focused your economy a certain way, then it was easy. But I remember back in Gal Civ 1 having to ask how to jump-start my economy as well. For a difficult system to wrap your head around, try Crusader Kings 2 :) But the more challenging it is, the more rewarding too.
This can be seen as the influence of Randian ideology on game design. Now bow down to your Better Corporate Overlord!
I really really hope spaceship battles are more exciting, few 4x games deliver in this premise.
I think its because the way we play games have changed. Remember Moo and Moo2 which I still see as the Pinnacle of 4x’s? The spaceship games are…rather slow and boring if I play them today, and its not just because time has caught up or passed the games - I think its because we no longer have the patience for that kind of gaming. Its a western culture thing, actually, that I see as prevalent in many, many things, TV shows, movies and the like are all faster, more concentrated today than 10 years ago. Most people I know can’t watch a show or god forbid an entire movie without being connected to the net at the same time, because facebook or some other entity is important, and the entertainment industry knows this, and makes shows easier to understand and follow for this very reason. Our attention span differs vastly from 10 years ago, and game design should probably reflect this.
That was a messy post, I know, but I’m a bit short on time so I hope the idea comes through.
haha, there is a strange irony to that post! :)
No, it was balanced, but in a more indirect way. From what I remember, the good techs were better than the evil techs, and picking good aligned your moral to Good, and in your average game there were more good races than evil ones (and evil ones were more warmongering and less prone to alliances).
Don’t generalize from yourself.
There certainly is some truth in what you write, but Civ5, for example, seems to have been pretty successful despite having fairly slow turns.
Same is true for XCOM, the battles are pretty slow and tend to drag on for a bit, but the important point is: you need to have something to do, then it’s ok.
And you usually had something to do in MoO space battles, which is why I think they are fine even today. Especially since they didn’t have fancy animation crap you can’t turn off back in the day, so turns can potentially fly by - modern games ironically often play a lot slower because you need to watch the beautifully animated 3D models.
I have to agree that late-game MoO2 kinda broke down on that front, because battling with endless numbers of doom stars was indeed a slow grind.
But I liked this much better than GC2, where all combat took place on the main map and you had to babysit a ton of units that would just be a single fleet in MoO.
We’ll see how GC3 tackles this in time, I guess.
rezaf
I am really looking forward to this. Gal Civ 2 gave me some of the most memorable 4x games I have ever had. The last expansion really opened things up for me when they specialized the tech trees more and I started to try to play the alien races; especially the ones that had higher population growth. The whole series seemed to give me just the right amount of detail, options and challenge.
It should be exciting to see what some of the new talent Stardock has acquired over the past couple years can do with the series. I cant believe the alpha and beta appear to be so close on the schedule.
At long as the alpha isn’t out as ‘Gal Civ 3’, the beta ‘Gal Civ 3: Fallen Empire’ and the release candidate ‘Gal Civ 3: Empire Resurrected’ :)
That… doesn’t make sense. They aren’t the pinnacle of 4x because they are old. What would be the pinnacle of 4x, if not them? a modern, fast game? But we are talking of 4x, basically a subgenre of turn based game focused on empire management!! How may empire TBS games are actually “fast”??
And of course saying our attention span differs vastly from 10 years ago is crazy. It’s just 10 years ago, not 10000 years ago. Humans haven’t changed that much since 2003 you know?
People who connect to Facebook while watching a movie are the same that would talk with friends about whatever while watching a movie.
And movies are still from 90 to 120 min on average, and lots of them are definitively “slow”.
You are old Razgon, so old. :P
I disagree. Imagine how much more gameplay related content you can fit into 32 extra bits ! :-)
[---- old 32 bit gameplay -----] [extra awesome 64-bit gameplay!]
00000000000000000000000000001010 00000000000000000000000000001011
Got to side with a couple of early posters and say that after disappointing preorder experiences with both Demigod and Elemental, I’m VERY hesitant to pre-pay these guys for GC3. That said, I enjoyed GC2 throughout most of college, so I expect that unless they do something to horribly muck it up, I’ll be in for the $50 next year, because a good space 4X is a very good thing indeed :)