[B4] Feedback from a GalCiv2 vet

Preamble: I quite enjoy the game and it's many innovations in comparison to the predecessor. I will not focus on the parts that are good however (buildings with adjacency system, shipyards linked to planet and improved graphics).

A) Govern Panels:

In theory they are quite good, because you can specialize each world, e.g. playing as the Yor i usually had production + wealth or production + research. productions seems always necessary to produce/upgrade buildings and build more Yor. However, the whole mechanic is an insane micromanagement hell when you have 15+ colonies.

1) Why is the govern panel hidden behind a button? It is extremely important and should be incorporated in the main planet screen. It is very annoying to build a couple of research buildings only to find out that the govern panel was still set to production. A similar problem arises for the planet <-> shipyard slider that further splits up production.

2) The whole concept is a bit whacky, e.g. a planet that heavily focuses in production may get more money from focusing in production and converting it to money instead of building money buildings. Maybe the production to research/money conversions should be removed. They make the game unintuitive and give production an incredible flexibility advantage compared to money/research buildings.

3) There is a lack of automation, e.g. Yor planets should stop assembling, when at maximum population.

My personal opinion is to just remove those individual sliders. I rather specialize my planets just with the buildings i construct in combination with supporting starbases. Yes you loose some gameplay options, but at least the micromanagement is lessened to a large degree.

B ) Starbases:

I could not build any other economic modules when building a mining module. This seems a bit odd, considering that starbases are much rarer than in galciv2 due to the placement limits. I can't really see a purpose in this, besides that you loose starbase placement space if you have nearby resources. Secondly, the whole concept of sending streams of constructors to upgrade the starbases seems a bit dated. Maybe link starbases to shipyards and they draw production from there. This would also allow for different starbase module costs, e.g. higher tier defense modules are more costly than a low tier production module.

C) Research:

Imho there are too many starting technologies. I can only a imagine a new player being totally overwhelmed by the many options, especially considering that some are clearly superior, e.g. early weapons are useless as you can neither get to the enemy, nor invade their worlds; in comparison, early production is incredibly important.

D) Warfare:

I hope there will also be heavy weapons that can only be installed on larger ships, e.g. in Homeworld capital ships had very powerful weapons that could not target smaller targets. GalCiv2 was very shallow when it came to the combat systems as you would simply install more weapons of the same type on larger ships instead of different types. Same thing goes for defenses, e.g. shields that absorb heavy hits, but not have to recharge, making rapid fire weapons more effective.

E) Battle viewer:

What is the purpose of it going forward. Is it only meant to be a visualization of the battles or do we get at least some degree of battle managmenet, like fleet formation and targeting priorities?

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I too would like to see some type of special weapons only used by capital ships, perhaps "spinal mounts" that require huge mass or energy requirements and then would have extra long range and damage. So the big boys would truly be different from the medium ships.

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+135

First off, production is a used term for something else in this game. You seem to be using that word every time you should be saying manufacturing. Production is what you split to get manufacturing, research, or economics. Not trying to be a pain, it just confused me a first.

The governor window for planets will probably get a fix at some point. I think the devs have said something about that in one of their dev streams.

I too have problems with micromanagement. I could fix a number of problems that I have with colony management if I had a few if statements to work with. For instance: If shipyard assigned shipyard has ship in queue, set manufacturing to max out shipyard output. If planet has improvements that could be upgraded, shift production focus to max out planetary development. Else, shift all production to research or something.

I don't like the spending wheel or the added sliders. It feels like it takes several steps to convert my world from doing research to full ship production. I would be happy if they tried something else.

For starbases, I have been thinking that maybe they could be linked to planets like shipyards are. With a slider (or with some better equivalent), the planet could divert production to buy construction points for the starbase. Of course, I often use 3 economic starbases around my worlds, so you would be need to be able to assign multiple starbases to a planet or group of planets. Like shipyard, if you try to supply a far away starbase, I think think productivity should drop, thereby giving a reason to use constructors.

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Why is the govern panel hidden behind a button? It is extremely important and should be incorporated in the main planet screen.

I've also requested this previously.

D) Warfare:

I hope there will also be heavy weapons that can only be installed on larger ships, e.g. in Homeworld capital ships had very powerful weapons that could not target smaller targets. GalCiv2 was very shallow when it came to the combat systems as you would simply install more weapons of the same type on larger ships instead of different types. Same thing goes for defenses, e.g. shields that absorb heavy hits, but not have to recharge, making rapid fire weapons more effective.

Agreed! Like the wave motion gun in Starblazers.

E) Battle viewer:

What is the purpose of it going forward. Is it only meant to be a visualization of the battles or do we get at least some degree of battle managmenet, like fleet formation and targeting priorities?

As a GC2 vet, you must know that combat control only comes in how you design your ships and fleets.

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