Gal Civ 3

[Commodore]

Is it better than Stars! though?

That's my 4x litmus test that every space 4x ever fails. Although Imperium Galactica II was fun...

[BRickAstley]

I'm actually kind of sad that we don't have the Single Player-focused Realms Beyond community of ten years ago, which would have eaten this game up.

Who says we don't? Let's try it. Give it a month or two for some more patching, but then let's run some Imperiums.

I'll be in for that.

[Sullla]

Let me say that I would be happy to be proven wrong. I'd love to try some Imperia down the road too.

[Gustaran]

Needless to say, after you can get over the shock of being overwhelmed by so many techs (there are roughly 300 in the game), the opportunities begin to open up. While it's pretty much always a good idea to get the basic stuff in every field, there's a major incentive to dive deeply into one of the different areas and specialize your empire around that goal. You can have awesome production and terrible research if you want, or ridiculous trade bonuses and horrible military. You can specialize even further than that, however - it's possible to go nuts with something as specific as engine speed while skipping ship range techs almost completely. The amount of different things that you can do with starbases alone would be enough for a dozen succession game ideas.

I think the interesting question is how well balanced the tech tree is. No use for 300 techs if after 4 weeks the RB community has figured out there is exactly one optimal way through the tech tree. And the RB community is very good at this kind of thing.

* Final point: this game's interface is still very much in beta. There are bugs and inaccurate information all over the place. For the life of me, I don't understand why they didn't wait two more months to finish polishing this game before releasing it. What made a release date in mid-May, of all times of the calendar year, so necessary? GC3 is clearly rough around the edges at the moment. Stardock is getting a lot of negative reviews for their not-quite-done product, and deservedly so. It baffles me why they would damage their game's early reputation to squeeze it out the door slightly faster. (It's not a publisher making the call, they publish their own games. Strange.)

This may be one reason why the game is somewhat slow to catch on: I'd rather wait another 6 weeks and get the game with the most important balance changes and bugfixes. In addition, if you don't mind buying your key at a dedicated store, the game is ~10 Euros cheaper by then as well.

Any thoughts on the quality of the AI? To me that's one of the most important aspects of a single player game.

Indeed, aa good point. No point in learning the intricacies of the game only to find out the AI is completely stupid. Sure, AIs always need certain bonuses, but I daresay raising interest in single player competitions as well as long term motivation will depend in no small part on the quality of the AI.

[Sirian]

Sulla mentioned planetary invasions, but that's one area of the game where I'm unhappy with the initial balance. I am running a +1 Difficulty game (Challenging?) with a bit of a runaway Yor empire (not in planet count, but the race itself was one of the last added and may have skipped the balance part of development). I had like a 400% Resistance level on a world and 30% Planetary defense -- not a planet completely specialized with all slots to defense, but much more than a cursory defense effort -- and with their bio-weapons my defense dropped their success chance from 100% to 94%. With a single 2.5m transport vs a 20mil pop world. ... Verdict: planetary defenses are wholly, utterly useless, at least vs these Yor invaders.

That's particularly bad when the ship counts are so low. You can't have enough ships and fleets to defend a wide frontier, much less a sneak attack vs back lines. The AI isn't likely to be that sneaky, but players can be. Flip the problem around and a few speedy transports can Alpha Strike a whole empire. That would not be good, as unlike an exploit on saved ship templates, this one is not easily managed by a variant rule or a "code of broken mechanics to avoid" in a tourney rule set.

This kind of issue seems readily fixable: a mod might do it. Just need to pin down which elements are broken and by how much.


One might argue that if the planetary defenses got much more effective, then the AI might be disarmed and the whole game might be harmed. This if the AI is only capable of bringing a single 2.5m transport per fleet. But if that should prove to be the case, then the planetary defenses should have hit the cutting room floor -- and the ship costs should be dropped a lot, to permit a larger ship count for a less porous defense network.

GalCiv1's AI's greatest strategic weakness, IIRC, was its vulnerability to Alpha Strikes. Line up a host of sucker punches and take bunches of worlds on turn 1 of a war, with the AI unable to see it coming or do anything about it. MOO1 tilted its balance more to defense, making such alpha strikes impossible, as you were lucky if your entire fleet could penetrate the defense of the enemy's weakest planetary defense.

On the other hand, GC was always designed to be a loose game, with many exploitable aspects. It focused on fun for regular players, not shelf life for grognards (especially not for those lacking the will to resist using some of the opportunities, which if fully exploited could decimate the game's legs.) For more info on what I'm referring to, you can read my spot reports on my old GC1 page, at warpcore.org. Some of the things I was able to do in some of those reports sound incredible to me upon re-reading, because there were just so many levers available to manipulate the AIs. But finding the levers was part of the fun, and my GC1 fun lasted six months. That would be an excellent run for a game today. Skyrim and Mount-and-Blade are the only two games in the last five or six years that have a run that long for me.

The length of your run with GC will likely depend on your taste for variantism. If you crave variety of scenarios, exploring ideas and trying out things for fun, you should get a decent run out of it. The MP crowd, wanting a sturdy game with robust balance and a simple, trim set of mechanics should look elsewhere. Just the map itself, on generation, is grossly UNbalanced, and meant to be that way. (On the up side of that, you can get huge swings in challenge off the same starting settings based on your map luck alone, which opens the possibility of looking for poor and weak map situations, when you are on the hunt for challenge. I dare say, a bad start may be worth up to two or even three difficulty levels vs a great start, on the same map.)


The game definitely could use more polish, but what empire game is going to ship in ideal shape? The question, I suppose, is where to post feedback so it will be seen by the correct eyeballs and have a chance at impacting the patching effort.


- Sirian

[VarisNox]

Sulla mentioned planetary invasions, but that's one area of the game where I'm unhappy with the initial balance. I am running a +1 Difficulty game (Challenging?) with a bit of a runaway Yor empire (not in planet count, but the race itself was one of the last added and may have skipped the balance part of development). I had like a 400% Resistance level on a world and 30% Planetary defense -- not a planet completely specialized with all slots to defense, but much more than a cursory defense effort -- and with their bio-weapons my defense dropped their success chance from 100% to 94%. With a single 2.5m transport vs a 20mil pop world. ... Verdict: planetary defenses are wholly, utterly useless, at least vs these Yor invaders.

I totally agree - something seems pretty weird with the planetary invasion calculations. I've seen high resistance, population, and planetary defenses do better when a "conventional warfare" invasion occurs (my 12 population worth of attackers had 4% chance to take a 85% resistance, 35% planetary defense, 24 pop planet), but the invasion math just seems to go right out the window if a special invasion is used. Paid 1k for an information warfare and I had a 100% chance to win - a hilariously small amount for such a high swing in conquest chance.

Besides planetary bombardment, no special invasion options have any real risk associated with it either - just a small monetary cost or rebuilding time. I mean, sure, they're supposed to have "risks", but they really don't due to tech/game reasons:

Tier 1 Invasions

• Planetary bombardment: Low approval for 50 turns, can lower a planet's quality. This one is actually the worst one with an actual penalty. The low approval is just brutal if you plan on keeping a planet, since it slows the rebuilding process. I never research this, since bio weapons are the same cost for less colony impact.
  
  
• Information Warfare: It's only drawback is that it's expensive early game, and the AI likes to go for it as their invasion immunity. As far as I can tell, that's it. It just lowers enemy resistance to near nothing, meaning the enemy fields no troops and you win. For 1k credits, it's a pretty big steal since you also start with a higher pop from "conversions" of enemy population.
  
  
• Bio Weapons: Most of your soldiers and the enemy die, leaving you with a low pop planet. This one can be an issue - if you send all of your transports to the planet, you end up with 0 remaining troops. However, send one transport with 1-3 pop and pick this option, you'll get 100% chance to conquer anyway. That means you can just send another transport full of pop or let it regrow naturally if you don't want to stand it up quickly. This option would be a way bigger risk if you had to send more troops to attack a planet, instead of the special invasions being an "I Win" button, since you'd have to invest a significant amount of troops to take any planet.
  

Tier 2 Invasions

• Tidal Disruption: Destroys a lot of improvements, usually all of them, and a higher amount of pop. Uh, I usually do this anyway when I conquer a planet and convert it to a useful piece of my empire instead of an AI managed mess. Now I get an invasion that does it for me and adds a substantial boost to my win chances too? Yes, please. It can also destroy the special planet resources, which is probably the only real risk of using this attack, but that loss of a 5% increase to ship range isn't going to stop me from picking this every single time once I unlock it.
  
  
• Core Detonation: This one has a high chance of reducing a planet quality by 2-5, and therefore, the amount of tiles available on the planet. In exchange, you get basically a guaranteed 100% invasion rate with minimal troops. At first, I thought this invasion was the biggest overall cost to use, finally something I would shun more than planetary bombardment. This cost is especially silly to pick when you have a choice between this or Tidal Disruption in the tech tree. However, near the top of the terraforming techs, you get a spammable terraform project that's super cheap to build that recovers every "land" tile on a map, which also includes tiles destroyed by Core Detonation. If you're at the point you have Core Detonation, you probably have this terraforming tech or can get it easily. Tidal Disruption is still way better because of the lesser time cost needed to rebuild a planet, but it just seems silly how easy it is to reverse Core Detonation at this stage of the game.
  

One of the stranger choices is only being able to choice one tier 1 invasion type and one tier 2 invasion type instead of having all of them available, with their associated risks/rewards. I know Stardock is doing a big push for "specialize your tech path" and all for the tech tree, but the invasion choices being locked away don't really fit that well.

Gal Civ 2 was much better at invasions and it had a pretty straightforward approach. It took your tech, soldiering skill, and troop number and gave it an "advantage" scoring range. This scoring range could then be influenced based on the type of invasion - invasion types besides conventional warfare had their own risks and costs to the planet and their own advantage gains. Then, invaders/defenders would be whittled down based on combat rolls, with higher advantage having better rolls. It was a decent enough system, easy to understand on the surface, and worked pretty well. It's clear that Gal Civ 3 tried to do something similar, but it just comes off as a worse attempt. I wouldn't be surprised if they had more plans for an invasion system, but ran out of time or something and just did what worked before at a more simplistic level.

That's particularly bad when the ship counts are so low. You can't have enough ships and fleets to defend a wide frontier, much less a sneak attack vs back lines. The AI isn't likely to be that sneaky, but players can be. Flip the problem around and a few speedy transports can Alpha Strike a whole empire. That would not be good, as unlike an exploit on saved ship templates, this one is not easily managed by a variant rule or a "code of broken mechanics to avoid" in a tourney rule set.

No kidding - transports with 6+ engines and 30-40 (early game) or 70-80+ (late game) moves are really easy to create. Just park them outside at a starbase or something far away, and send them in when the planet is clear; no risk invasions and pretty easy to set up.

Honestly, there just needs to be a cap on certain components or features. Troop transport module? Can't have more than X moves/engines. Sensors with a range limit per ship or limit to how many you can place is also needed. Carriers really need their fighters to be tiny hulls as well instead of small - they bring so much extra firepower to a battle for free every fight that goes over the logistics cap, they don't need to be more durable and able to carry more weapons too because of a bigger hull. Besides UI changes, I think those are my three biggest balance requests.

[Sullla]

I have a bit of an introductory writeup for a GC3 game on my website. I'd be curious to hear everyone else's opinions. I also posted a link to the report (and this forum) in the Gaming Table, since this forum doesn't attract much attention at the moment.

I've been disappointed in the community on the official GC3 forums. It feels as though the most vocal posters there are all playing on the ridiculously huge Insane maps, using the most broken combination of custom racial picks/traits possible... then complaining the AI doesn't put up a challenge, and that managing 100+ planets is boring. I'm not learning very much from that crowd, I'm afraid. More discussion here would be a lot of fun.

[Kylearan]

Thanks for the writeup, Sulla! Great and interesting read as always; looking forward to the next part.

An important quote for me as a potential buyer was this:

This isn't the snoozefest of Civ5's early game!

The game sounds really great, except for the AI. I'll buy it if/as soon as a patch with a substantial AI upgrade comes out. Substantial as in, more than just minor tweaks. *crosses fingers*

[Windsor]

It feels as though the most vocal posters there are all playing on the ridiculously huge Insane maps, using the most broken combination of custom racial picks/traits possible... then complaining the AI doesn't put up a challenge, and that managing 100+ planets is boring. I'm not learning very much from that crowd, I'm afraid. More discussion here would be a lot of fun.

Don't agree. The game gives me the option to create my own race and doesn't present that option as some weird variant-play. In fact, the devs expects you to create new races and have created a rule set for doing so. One of the reasons why Stardock can release the game with so few playable factions is because it's expected that players create their own races.

Now, I play to win. When I play Civ4 I pick the best combination of civics available to me. Why shouldn't I make the best decisions when creating a new race in GC3? Why shouldn't that be balanced like every other aspect of the game? I am not the game designer. Stardock shouldn't ask the players to balance the game for them, that's Stardocks job.

[Rowain]

Why shouldn't I make the best decisions when creating a new race in GC3? Why shouldn't that be balanced like every other aspect of the game? I am not the game designer. Stardock shouldn't ask the players to balance the game for them, that's Stardocks job.

By trying to balance for the middle-ground you give flexibility. Users can choose a combi they like without getting the totally useless feeling. They can also choose a challenging combi or an easy one.
If they balance the game towards the most easy setting becoming balanced you get a) one right choice and nothing else.
and b) many people will get frustrated as there is no longer an easy setting which they need to have fun.


There is nothing wrong with choosing an easy setting but if you constantly choose the easiest settings and then complain about the game as too easy you are equivalent to a 4th grader complaining that the 1st grades he bullies don't put up a fight.