I mean this in all seriousness, Elemental probably took 5 years off my life expectancy (Demigod probably took another 5). If you look at pictures of me pre-Demigod and post Elemental it’s pretty dramatic.
Everything that could go wrong with Elemental did go wrong. It wasn’t for a lack of will or even a rush to market. It was our first really complicated game (from an engine stand point) and it showed. It took awhile (too long) to recognize the game was really buggy and that our internal development process wasn’t just flawed but completely broken.
We still want to do a full fledged Fall From Heaven game in the future built from Nitrous. :)
Paradox are definitely butting up against the limit of what their engine can do - this is painfully obvious in Stellaris where you have to press a button to switch between local and galaxy maps. It will be interesting to see how Stellaris 2 compares to GalCiv4 (btw can you please ditch the hex grid for GalCiv 4 and move to nodes?)
I assume you mean that ships can only move to their destinations, like a planet? That would be a good change in my book. I guess there would be some consistency issues, like survey ships hoovering up anomalies and stuff.
With the openness of space, being able to move to any location doesn’t really add much for me - but it does increase the micromanagement.
I think the open space is pretty much a core feature of GalCiv, so I doubt it would be going away. It doesn’t feel like it increases micro much for me, though it probably makes it a lot harder for the AI.
Hey @Brad_Wardell, I know you’re pivoting to Star Control but do you happen to know if there are engineers looking into some of the MP issues? By that, I’m referring to the crash on game startup as well as Ideology events not happening. The former has a workaround (just save the game on turn one, host save, and you can continue just fine) but for the latter it really sucks not being able to play around much with Ideology in MP games. There’s been a couple posts about it on the Stardock support forums, but I haven’t seen a developer response.
I feel like I’m not getting enough challenge in the game at the moment for things like the resource economy to really matter. Maybe I need map settings with fewer resources, but I am concerned that will handicap the AI more than me. I’m playing with all AI’s at +1, with some at +2 (Genius I think?) and they don’t seem very threatening.
One irony of Elemental (and Demigod) was that it led to us selling Impulse (we couldn’t be both a good developer and a store) which in turn allowed us to fund Oxide and Mohawk which led to the new Nitrous engine, Ashes of the Singularity and Offworld Trading Company (and the unreleased Aven Colony and sadly Servo, though we had to just eat that).
And both Oxide and Mohawk are thriving (enough that I’m going to be able to step down as President of Mohawk soon).
Stellaris and GalCiv III are a tale of two philosophies.
GalCiv III could have taken the GalCiv II engine and further polished it. But sooner or later, we would have to move to 64-bit, core-neutral so we took our medicine with GalCiv III.
Stellaris is the latest gen of Paradox’s amazing Clausewitz engine. But like you said, it’s butting up against that 32-bit limit.
Now, with GalCiv IV, my initial thought is to do both nodes and freeform. Make it a multi-galaxy game. I’d love to make a game that deals with the Virgo super cluster.
The #1 challenge I’ve had with the AI in Crusade has been the logistics system.
It goes from around 10 (early game) to over 100 (late game). It’s really tough for the AI to deal with a 10X change in a stat like that. The result is that the AI has a real challenge in deciding how big its fleets need to be.
That’s why, late game, you will see the AI with what seems like a big military but behaving very cautiously. The upcoming 2.3 does a lot in that area but it’s a non-trivial CS challenge.
Thanks, @Brad_Wardell and @Island_Dog! I’m having a blast with the game, but not getting those ideology events (sometimes not even seeing colony events) in MP like I do in SP puts a damper on it. I’m about to enter the last Age in my current game and have only had 2 ideology unlocks.
One thing I noticed playing synthetics is that the adjacency bonuses are usually much weaker (e.g. 1% bonus rather than 2.5% for adjacency in research). Also some buildings and tiles gave bonuses to social construction that didn’t help any other building (like all construction buildings). I also seemed to be lacking any buildings for ship construction. Overall, the focus seemed to be on carbon-based life, with the synthetic data often left behind.
Does this patch include a pass over the synthetic bonuses?
Good article, and the points about the disconnect between customers and developers. Everyone is going to have his own opinion here, I’m sure. But I know that I do not have the same reactions as a lot of vocal posters on various forums.
Paying for DLC does not bother me at all. I’ve got the game, I’ve been playing it for a time, and now I can buy more if I want.
As the article gets across, bugs come in all varieties. And a lot of them do not bother me all that much, as long as a fix is forthcoming. The ones that drive me nuts are the ones that imply no one with fresh eyes has play tested this game in quite some time. (Typically these are mid-level things.)
And in that vein, I cannot understand the hostility to early access. Some people want to play the game during the latter part of development, hey, that’s great. They provide the fresh eyes needed to alert developers to kinds of problems the people really close to the project can’t see. But if you personally don’t want to play the game in EA, no one is forcing you to.
However, I remain totally adamant that games have to come with clear documentation of all the parts, all the game systems. Whether it’s in “pedia” form, manual, tooltips, or wiki isn’t the point, it needs to be there, and it needs to be kept up to date. And in words, please. (ES2, I’m looking at you. The players who know what all the icons mean probably are not the people who most need the directions.) This is especially important because of the fraught nature of AI. Once you have played the game a few times, you inevitably find it too easy because you learn how to run circles around the AI… but if it takes several re-starts to learn the game mechanics, you never do get the ideal playthrough or two when you know the tools available to you, but do not know the unintended loopholes.
I’m not hostile to EA, per se; what I am hostile about is (and, granted, this is specific to Steam) the total lack of ability to hide or otherwise flag EA games in the store. When I’m looking at new releases or top sellers or looking at a category of games and it’s a long list, there is no way to know if a game is EA or not. Only on visit to the game’s page does it tell you. I am not interested in the least in playing an EA game, so why does Steam insist on denying me the ability to filter them out?
