Anomal0us

Join Date 08/2009

starbase limits suggestion

In Galciv 2 you were limited to 4 starbases to a sector no matter what. This wasn’t terrible but I found it kind of boring and arbitrary. I think it would be cool if players could increase this limit by developing their empire in some way, such as:

1. Technology:

Researching techs such as Interstellar construction could increase the starbase cap, or there could be separate techs just for this (“Starbase supply”, or something).

2. Logistics

Or, the starbase cap could be tied to the logistics ability.

3. United Planets

The UP could have resolutions raising the cap.

4. Population

An ambitious system would be to increase the cap based on the population you control in a sector. For instance, you would start at 4, and get an increase in the limit every billion population or so. This may seem like it would allow for unlimited starbases, but population is capped by food production (at least it was in GC2) so there still would be a limit on how many starbases a player could possibly build. This would probably be the hardest system to implement and balance though.

What do you think?

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

Well for one they're not going to have defined "sectors" this time around, so defining a cap by sector is going to be a problem.

Early in Dread Lords (possibly all the way up to Dark Avatar, it's been a while) starbases were limited by simple proximity - it had to be three spaces from any other existing base. I guess they could revert to that sort of limit.

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androshalforc

Join Date 03/2007

+62

Quoting WIllythemailboy,

reply 1

Well for one they're not going to have defined "sectors" this time around,

there are still going to be sectors in the game they're just hex shaped sectors; unless there is a special name for a hex shaped sector.

its just a rose by a different name.

https://forums.galciv3.com/449010/get;3410484
reply 53 by mormegil its a theoreical tiny map but still measured in sectors

anyway unless im mistaken a gc3 sector will be measured as a hex with 12 tiles to a side which i believe is 397 tiles.

a gc2 sector was square with 15 tiles to a side for a total of 225 tiles;

so we're looking at about a 75% increase and the starbase limit per sector should go up to about 7 which is nice because i could place 1 in the middle and one ~2/3 of the way to each of the corners for a fairly even spread

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

That directly conflicts with one of Frogboy's posts:

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 19

3. There aren't sectors anymore and it looks better as a result (less on screen noise).

That leads to a couple interesting possibilities: sectors are used only to generate the map for the game, or maybe sectors still exist in some functional manner but are hidden from the player.

Another interesting question: if sectors are no longer functional units in the game, why not develop maps that are just one enormous sector? The example 7 sector map is about the same size as a single sector of radius 32. The single sector model would give a map with much neater edges, so why isn't it being used? Is it a coordinate programming issue, or a custom map issue (allowing for non-regular shaped maps)?

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Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

Quoting WIllythemailboy,

reply 1

Well for one they're not going to have defined "sectors" this time around,

Willy, do you have a link to where a StarDock employee actually said this? As you can see from androshalforc's reply #2 above, part of which is from reply #53 in the thread on "map hexes", mormegil indicated there will be sectors. While it is possible the devs may have changed their minds, it is also possible that there has been a communication error or a misunderstanding of what someone else at StarDock has said.

Of course, Mormegil also said in the same post "not that i would know. ", which could have been an attempt to say he knew there was something else happening here, but his lips were sealed by company policy and he couldn't tell us. So we may be in for another surprise when we finally get the first Alpha build.

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

Quoting Lucky Jack,

reply 4

Quoting WIllythemailboy, reply 1
Well for one they're not going to have defined "sectors" this time around,

Willy, do you have a link to where a StarDock employee actually said this? As you can see from androshalforc's reply #2 above, part of which is from reply #53 in the thread on "map hexes", mormegil indicated there will be sectors. While it is possible the devs may have changed their minds, it is also possible that there has been a communication error or a misunderstanding of what someone else at StarDock has said.

Of course, Mormegil also said in the same post "not that i would know. ", which could have been an attempt to say he knew there was something else happening here, but his lips were sealed by company policy and he couldn't tell us. So we may be in for another surprise when we finally get the first Alpha build.

https://forums.galciv3.com/451551/page/1/#3436294

Sorry, I didn't realize the link from the Frogboy quote wasn't linking to his actual post.

The Frogboy quote above was posted 3 months after the quoted Mormegil post. It could be miscommunication, or a change in direction, or me simply reading too much into a single sentence.

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It was posted in the Let the Countdown to Alpha begin thread, reply #19.

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Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

Quoting WIllythemailboy,

reply 5

The Frogboy quote above was posted 3 months after the quoted Mormegil post. It could be miscommunication, or a change in direction, or me simply reading too much into a single sentence.

Interesting. After re-reading Brad's post, His remarks were based on what he saw at that time. So I see another possibility: the level he was checking out (ok. playing) may temporarily, for some reason, not had sectors in it, and may have mislead Brad to think it would not have sectors in the game at all. --- This is really getting too speculative on this one issue. Perhaps we should wait for the surprises when the first Alpha build is delivered.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

You can read that sectors post two ways:

1. There's no sectors in the game anymore.

2. There's still sectors in the game, but sector lines aren't drawn on the main map because they were just visual noise.

I tend towards the latter. Sectors IIRC were used for things like map size, they're likely not being thrown away entirely as a concept. Not displaying them on the main game map would just make the map easier to read.

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Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

Quoting Tridus,

reply 8

Not displaying them on the main game map would just make the map easier to read.

From another viewpoint, it can make the map harder to read as well, in that it will become harder to gauge distances. I am beginning to hope that this is all a misunderstanding somewhere, somehow, that when we finally see the first alpha build, the sectors will be there and will be displayed in some manner, maybe in a new way that we will all have to get used to, or that the distance from a selected point to where the pointer is is displayed somewhere.

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