The AI doesn’t see everything.
17% of your turn is spent determining what is within the AI’s fog of war.
If I could just return TRUE, we’d get an instant 17% boost to turn times.
Try the opt-in, it fixed several issues for me and was just updated again today.
It’s definitely my favorite Stardock game thus far. The mechanic changes are what does it, but the AI changes so that it doesn’t have omniscience anymore make it playable for me like the base game was not.
I know I am an oddball nowadays, but I would love an updated manual for the game that explained the basic systems in Crusade. Maybe something like this is already on the wiki? Outside of that, I would like to see much better tooltips. While they aren’t bad, all too often they don’t tell me what I want to know.
Are there any plans to do this if sales justify further development?
Why do I need promethion to recall a citizen? I am assuming for gameplay reasons, but it seems a strange requirement. I don’t need any of it to place them, but in order to move them from one planet to another I need a particular resource to do so. Why can’t he just hop on a ship?
Yea, GalCiv III sells very wel. But even if it didn’t I’d still do it. The AI engine in Crusade is like that feeling you get when you get a brand new computer or console. I’m baaarely tapping it.
I was able to finish my first game of Crusade. I think I picked a small galaxy, which wasn’t too small. As the Terran Resistance I think I got earlier access to legions since I start with the War Collage tech. So I decided to make some war - once I figured out what I was doing and how legions worked.
My neighbors didn’t seem to make any troops, so I was able to swoop in and quickly take several planets. The first race fell quickly. It looked like the second would fall quickly too after I took another planet, but they sent a fleet to capture two of my lightly defended planets. It forced me to regroup, build up my fleet a bit and build more troops. I reclaimed my lost planets fairly fast.
After I weakened another race by taking another planet, a different race finished them off. There were 4 races left, including myself. One of the empires was larger than myself, with a bigger fleet, so I changed plans and started choosing diplomats. I made peace with everyone and started buttering them up. My focus turned to diplomacy techs. One by one I was able to overcome our past differences and gain an alliance to seal the deal for a diplomatic victory.
I think Crusades feels like a proper followup to GalCiv 2. Different enough to be interesting, but not so different so it doesn’t feel like the same game. The change to the administration points, and not using constructors for starbase modules feels a lot better. Also props for the citizens, but I wonder if they come a bit too fast. They seem very powerful.
[quote=“Brad_Wardell, post:1708, topic:73564”]
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.[/quote]
For what it’s worth, Brad, I’m a new player, and I didn’t have much trouble figuring out the three examples you mentioned. It seemed obvious to me that I should build a shipyard to build ships. Likewise, the use of citizens to boost the economy seemed perfectly well-explained to me. Admittedly, I did have to poke around a bit to figure out how to start trade, but it didn’t take long, and it confirmed my initial supposition – that I should build and dispatch a freighter.
I’m all for documentation, but I found Crusade pretty easy to learn, and I think the gameplay is great. Well done!
It’s a combination of legitimate bugginess issues and the core base of the game’s reviews not counting.
Steam’s user review scores really screwed over Stardock because founders aren’t considered legitimate customers for Steam reviews. The game would be rated a lot higher otherwise.
Brad put up an AI verdict on Crusade which was great timing since there’s been lots of discussion about the AI. :)
http://www.stardock.com/games/article/483168/Crusade-AI-verdict-May-2017
Ah! I hadn’t even considered that exclusion.
Sonofabitch, I didn’t think of that. My review didn’t count!
Yea, it’s a real missed opportunity. The people who pre-paid for all the expansions, the ones most interested in the game are excluded from having their reviews count.
The review score system favors companies who can either exploit the system or at the very least mobilize their fan base to give thumbs up.
I agree with Altein that the bugginess at release hurt it. But quite a few of the negative reviews were over things like map sizes or other non-Crusade things. But everything is relative. Another popular space strategy game had a bug that prevented the AI from declaring war and you didn’t see a big drop in that game’s >90% Steam review score (even on most recent).
Both points lead to what I think the future of PC gaming is going to be about: Player engagement. You have to make games that have overlapping player engagement so that you can reach a critical mass of fans.
Stardock, for instance, for the past few years has focused on two things that are detrimental to a cohesive fan base:
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Almost every game since 2010 has used a new game engine which translates to less polish, more buginess as the engine gets refined.
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The games don’t have a lot of overlapping fan bases. Ashes of the Singularity / Offworld Trading Company / GalCiv III / Elemental series (FE/SK/etc.) while broadly strategy games, don’t have a lot of demographic overlap except here at QT3 (which is why I think Stardock games do well with QT3 usrs because I am a QT3 person and we make games that I like which tend to be games that other QT3 people like).
That’s one of the reasons I have so much admiration for Paradox. Someday, I predict, someone will do a business book on Paradox’s rise. They went from the company that released Sword of the Stars 2 to the company that is quickly becoming the strategy gamer’s equivalent of Blizzard in just a few short years and much of it is based on building an overarching player engagement strategy from marketing to game design. (and no, i don’t have stock in Paradox, I’m just a fan).
Well, for what it’s worth, my word of mouth review still counts and netted you at least one sale. :)
I can see Valve’s counter argument: which is that their reviews are meant for Steam customers, which founders would not be part of that group.
As for Paradox- the things Brad is praising them for, some of that drove me away as a customer- particularly the constant drip of expansions. I would say that the Stardock approach is possibly particularly unsuited for how the Steam system rewards companies these days, which is aggravating because I felt the whole concept of founders was how I wanted Paradox to go with their games. I’d much rather pay $100 in one gulp than $20-40 here and a trickle of $10 2-3 times a year constantly for 5-6 years.
(switching my weatherman hat for my economist hat)
That said, I do think much of Paradox’s rise is based on the CEO’s knowledge of economics and understanding on how to manipulate customers, which is pretty much the opposite of Stardock’s philosophy- Stardock to me is more “I sell Propane and propane accessories” type of customer relations, which works for me, but might not work as well for the younger generation (and I’m not even that old!)
I do think another downside to Stardock’s approach is I wonder if folks in their 40s+ have less time for games in general on average, and Stardock games do tend to be somewhat time-intensive. That might hurt engagement. Also, ironically, I think you guys are getting the reputation of old Paradox- as in, a Stardock game is worth buying on sale, because that’s when enough of the bugs have been fixed.
(the economist hat now into the fanboy hat)
I do think the Elemental IP could work really well as a Kohan-style streamlined RTS, and I’ll keep pushing for that like I have for years. I think it’s a market that is underserved, Ashes did not fill that role. The only downside is such a game would not really use the power of Stardock’s engine, but the unit AI could be handled a lot better than how Timegate did it back in the day. Many things in Legendary Heroes would translate over into such a game easily.
Interesting to hear Brad’s opinion on Paradox. I personally avoid them like the plague and would only purchase from them if I know the game series or it gets an overwhelming good review on here. The destroyed the SOTS series and drip feed everything to the point where it’s hard to know when to jump in and what DLC to buy to improve the game or just get a bunch of pictures or music.
I totally understand from a company perspective that a slow trickle of DLC is a great way to keep a game alive and it’s customer base engaged. But that only works with me when the DLC is significant (e.g. Crusade), otherwise I have too much in my backlog to re-visit a game I burned out on when it first came out.
I’m curious as to the reasons for Stardock’s games not having overarching playerbases whereas Blizzard’s games do, despite an even more pronounced diversity of genre:
Starcraft - RTS
Heroes of the Storm - MOBA
World of Warcraft - MMORPG
Diablo - ARPG
Overwatch - FPS
Hearthstone - CCG
Is it all about the marketing and community engagement strategies? Is it the fact that they’re all developed under the same roof, albeit by different teams?
Well, to be fair, that player-base is quite used to a very passive AI by this point. ;-)
I mean the only Blizzard game I’ve liked in a decade is Starcraft 2 (loved War3 and D2 back in the day), so not all their players overlap :-)