Ok, ok, you convinced me (well that and Brad’s post), buying now.
Thank Christ, that’s been really bugging me.
EDIT: Damn, the turn times are insanely snappy, best I’ve seen thus far in a TBS. I’m not in late game or anything, but I’m loving the instantaneous turns. Good job on the multithreading and other engine work, Brad & Co!
One thing I’m not grokking is how to keep your economy in the black. With the sliders gone I can’t find a way to get a handle on income vs. expenses.
Is there some tech or citizen profession I have to unlock first?
enterprenuers help, tech trading helps, but you can’t cheese the system like you used to.
It’s definitely made a very positive impression thus far, I’m enjoying this far more than I ever did previously. Excellent “expansion” (and I use the quotes because it almost feels like a different game entirely). It was enough to prompt me to write a positive review on Steam, which I never do.
I’m liking it too, but I’m struggling with hotkeys. I want WASD to scroll the map, not the arrow keys, so I revised the default shortcuts accordingly. But while A and D work fine, W and S don’t scroll up and down if I have anything selected. (They work fine with nothing selected.) Is there a way to make WASD the default camera-movement setup?
Yea the map size thing is pretty frustrating because it really has nothing to do with Crusade and the idea that someone would downvote the entire expansion because they don’t like an XML value that isn’t related to the expansion makes me not like the Steam review system.
Of course, it annoys me a lot more that a different mapsettings.xml got merged into Crusade than what was the most recent base game one. Apparently it was using the mapsettings.xml from the time crusade split from the base game (1.9/2.0 time period). Anyway, they’ll sort it out in the morning.
I’m really surprised it went through the beta and it didn’t come up.
So the whole thing just makes me want to pull my hair out. :)
In the meantime, please feel free to review it as you see fit. I’d really appreciate it.
I just jumped in and ran a couple of games for about 20 or 30 turns to try and grok the new systems and didn’t have any problems other than trying to figure out how to get food to make another city and the tool tips explain it all if you are willing to read.
And then it happened. I found 2 immediately colonizable precursor planets in my neighborhood. It was close but I snagged them and have been running with that game ever since. I love the animations for those planets.
For some reason I can’t upgrade starbases. Moving constructors onto them just puts them in orbit and the upgrade button is greyed out. I’m sure I’m missing something simple here.
You don’t upgrade Starbases with constructors anymore, you just upgrade them directly.
I think it might be because it’s coming after Civ6, which took the approach of cramming all the players together for quick contact. When I played on default settings, I was surrounded by other players in just a few turns, which eliminates the explore aspect of a 4X (which is my favorite part!). It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in this sort of game.
There were people inquiring about whether this was intentional or a bug on the Steam forums, and one of your developers said it was by design because Stardock was after a particular experience, and that users should mod it if it didn’t fit their tastes.
Granted, I knew it was just an XML value and should be easy, but for others telling them to go create a mod is likely above and beyond what they feel like they are capable of. And it sounded like it was by design that the game was missing one of the four X’s. I can see why someone would have a negative first impression and be disappointed initially.
That being said, the expansion is bloody fantastic and I wrote my first (positive) Steam review. Hopefully the score swings upwards, because I’m having more fun with GC3 than I ever have.
The Steam review system is awful these days- Valve keeps making anti-consumer decisions.
That said, you’re up to mostly positive now- you deserve better for this, this is AOW3-level quality to me, but it’s a start.
Also, being isolated is a huge disadvantage in Crusade- you fall behind in tech very quickly if you don’t trade heavily.
If Crusade had the smaller, busier maps throughout its development, wouldn’t the balancing and AI tweaking to some extent be based on the denser values? I know that its easy to change and that the engine is capable of supporting giant maps, but it seems that the dense maps are the maps that it was developed and tested on.
Ok. How?
Click on the starbase. Click the “Manage” button. On the right side of the starbase screen, you should be able to choose components to add, if you can afford them.
Sorry, I should have explained in detail but I was on my phone and in a rush. Telefrog’s got ya covered, though. :)
Doh! See, I was missing something stupid!
Ok, another question. Is there a way to alter the XML file to change Galaxy size?
Trigger warning for Brad! :D
Fenris, here’s the info you need:
Modding map sizes
-
Start the game and “Enable Mods” under “game options”
-
Copy the map size defs (tweak based on your install directory)
From:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Galactic Civilizations III\DLC\EXP2_Crusade\Game\MapSizeDefs.xml
To:
C:\Users\pshaw\Documents\My Games\GC3Crusade\Mods\ExampleMod\Game
-
Open the MapSizeDefs.xm in a text editor
-
Change the hex sector size to adjust the HexSectorRadius like this:
Tiny
0
18
To:
Tiny
0
180
- Start the game up
I only got to play a little bit last night, but it certainly feels like a new game. It was not obvious to me how to boom the economy, especially as Yor, where building population is not cheap. Getting three free constructors from pragmatic definitely helped.
Judging by the relative power rankings, the AI currently understands more about how to get the ball rolling than I do!
I hear you. I was dragging ass in last place except for one category… where I was 7th (out of 9).