I’ve gotta be missing something. The Elyrium enhanced laser appears to have the same stats as the non Elyrium laser. The only difference that I can see is that the Elyrium one weighs more.
I think the first weapon techs cost resources, then with more research you can build the equivalent without special resources. Next in the chain is an eleroum beam weapon that’s twice as good. So you really only use the first weapons if you can’t afford the time to research starting beam starting missile etc.
OK, thanks.
The May dev journal for GalCiv III is up and talks about Crusade and the road map ahead.
http://www.stardock.com/games/article/483144/galciv-journal-may-2017
The fact this expansion has a “mixed” score on Steam baffles me. I wonder if it’s mostly due to bugs or something, because Crusade is ridiculously better than the base game, IMO.
Isn’t the “non-cheating AI” claim false since the AI can see everything?
I guess that depends on what you consider “cheating” in a game AI. At some point, an AI is going to have advantages that no human can have, just because it’s not a flesh & blood brain.
I think most players consider AI cheating to be when it gets straight-up numerical advantages like a bonus to money or free ships every 10 turns.
I believe that most players consider both cheating. A straight up numerical advantage or being given resources outright is cheating but so is the AI seeing and being able to plan against the entire map. I have played a few strategy games in my time where the AI would make a beeline for an undefended city deep in my territory. To me that is a game breaking, immersion-ruining cheat that just turned me off from playing those games again.
The vision cheating doesn’t seem as obvious or as blatant in Crusade as it did in the base game. It was one of the main issues I couldn’t get into the game originally, as I’d have (previously unmet) civilizations swarming my homeworld area with colony ships and constructors.
Maybe that’s more limited now by Administrators or I’ve just gotten lucky these last few games, but that behavior seems to be curbed at least.
Age of Wonders 3 is notorious for this. It’s obnoxious.I ended up creating a mod that greatly extended the LOS of a city once you built city walls, which helped a little.
I don’t like “vision cheating” either, and I know little about AI programming (other than my primitive efforts at coding my own games, like checkers and air hockey). But I do sometimes wonder whether it’s a non-trivial task to “cloud” an AI’s vision, as by default an AI “sees” everything.
I imagine it’s easy enough for a programmer to alter the “apparent” board state so that the AI “sees” no units, or an uncertain number of units, at an enemy city. But should the AI be allowed to guess or deduce how many units are there? What if it can deduce how many units are there by doing the sort of calculation computers are good at and people aren’t? For example, an AI might be able to calculate how many total units possibly have been produced by the opponent, then count up how many units it actually sees, and then subtract seen from possibly-built? That would strike me as “smart” play, not cheating.
The AI has algorithms in place to make sure it can’t see everything. The stuff I saw says this is non-trivial to do, but Brad did it.
That said, I do believe the AI understands how the random map tends to be generated, so it can make a good guess which stars are more likely to have planets.
Both of these things came from Brad himself.
When I played PBEM CIV IV, I saw this technique used to derive expected unit-count & type from the demographics screen. The power-system is a bit more opaque in GalCiv, but you could probably back-of-the-envelope ship count by looking at the graph as you built (roughly) equivalent ships and then seeing their impact on the graph to back out the per-ship contribution.
Yeah, the original Heroes of Might and Magic. It appeared to count the exact number of tiles and beeline your undefended city deep in the fog of war, if it could get there before your army could.
I’m not one who rages against all “AI cheating” but that one just struck me as beyond the pale.
I think the problem is getting the AI to respond intelligently to the known unknowns, to think about what might be in the FOW, rather than blissfully ignoring it. Building up a model of what could be hidden is a much tougher programming task than just responding to what you see. Maybe the best option is to give the AI noisy information about what might be beyond the FOW, to replace human intuition.
So say instead of knowing there’s a human fleet of strength X at location Y, it has say 3 possible locations. One of which is the right one.
It’s very obvious if you read the reviews that the main reason for the negative reviews is all the bugs. Stardock even admits the game is buggy in the latest announcement on Steam. I bought Crusade but haven’t played it yet until they polish it up more.
I’ve had 3 crashes within the last several hours of my current game. I’m getting to the point I’m going to quit.
Are you on the opt-in branch or the main one?
The main one.
I would say it’s a combination of bugginess and the drastic changes (a lot of people like the base game).
Here’s my analogy:
The world is made up of two types of people. People who liked Antman and people who didn’t.
The people who didn’t like Antman (like me) had a real problem with the tank not having the right mass and that ruined the movie. Other people just enjoyed the overall story and experience.
With Crusade, there are enough glitches that it passes an invisible threshold to where someone says “I can’t recommend this.” Now, I still maintain that Crusade is the best thing Stardock has ever released in its 23 year history. It’s really the first time I’ve been given the time (and resources) to do a GalCiv game the way I wanted (Crusade’s budget is bigger than the entire GalCiv II budget).
But, that said, even if you ignore the typos and inconsistent chicks (our tooltip system) you still have a game that doesn’t explain itself very well to new players.
For example:
- How do I adjust my economy? (with leaders, but where is that explained?)
- How do I build ships? (you build a shipyard, but where is that explained?)
- How do I trade with other players (you build a freighter and send it to another planet but where is that explained?)
You take that, combine it with cases where the text on the screen is missing something or wrong and you can really spoil the experience for some people.
I REALLY wish I had been part of GalCiv III from the start. If any game is screaming for an intelligent (i.e. AI driven ) advisor, it’s GalCiv.
I mean, imagine the snarky but helpful suggestions your in game advisors could give players on what to build and how. With our AI system, I could have the advisors be unlike anything you’ve seen before. I could go on with how much this new multi-core stuff lets me do. In MY day, we had 1 core and had to carefully use threads to keep it busy!