My bad I meant one that could change on how much of the map is explored, by how much memory I have. Real and virtual. I thought that was the definition I was wrong. I will find another definition for that.

I never said the galaxy itself was expanding but more the map that you know of, as you conquer the "known" galaxy you realize there is much more galaxy out there that you haven't even begun to explore or map, look the Race A, and Race B, are just outside our space die....  Now that I conquered Race A and Race B, I would like my game to continue, look once again there is still much more galaxy out there that I haven't explored bring on Race C, Race D, and Race E.... and so on....

Now like some people pointed out, you would have to give the new races empires with a technology level similar to yours to make it feasible and not be so much a joke...

Another option, look you find a new galaxy far away, let's travel there, it will only take 200 weeks to get there, that gives the other empires time to build up their technology and planets while you take your fleet and travel there, that main good thing is you wouldn't have to launch your fleet all at once but launch 30 ships on week 1, launch 20 more on week 4, and so on....

The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that larger galaxy sizes should only be done if they come with an increased capacity for the AI to pose a challenge on large maps. In my experience it was definitely at its best on Medium and smaller maps in GalCiv II, and as someone who personally prefers the big galaxies, I always found this a little frustrating.

That might be even worse than expanding galaxies. Bear in mind that the nearest galaxy to our own, Andromeda, is millions of light-years away. In order to traverse the immense void between them in such a fashion your starships would need to have FTL engines so fast that they could instantaneously travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other, going outside the galaxy even at these tremendous speeds is very dangerous - what if you happen across a rogue star, satellite galaxy or other such object? You'd be ripped apart.

The only race in GalCiv with anywhere close to such technology is the Precursors... and they're not exactly around to hand us all Ultra-Mega-Super-Hyperdrives.

You seem to be forgetting two things:

1. The pocket universe, where the Dread Lords were trapped in. A Terran fleet spent the last few years in there, studying the Precursor artifacts left behind by the Dread Lords.

 

2. The Stellar Folder engine from the Terran tech tree. Given enough energy, it allows you to move instantaneously to any point in the universe.

Ah yes, I did forget that. The Stellar Folding technology could, in theory, allow this. But it would take astronomical amounts of energy to do it, and unless the humans in the pocket universe have found a way to reverse-engineer some Precursor power cores... I mean, I guess they can get some advances out of it but it wouldn't be enough to allow all that; there would be entire fields of science that would be needed to be developed for some of the stuff this tech is supposed to do.

Long story short? It's technically possible if we believe that humans are special enough to skip a few thousand years of technological advancement in order to understand the mechanics and therefore replicate Precursor energy technologies on such a scale as would be required.

Once again this is a game and even though in reality the nearest galaxy is Andromeda at 2.2 million light years away, doesn't mean that this has to be the case.  Let's assume the galaxy is only 1,040 light years wide (in fact our galaxy is 100,000 - 120,000 light years wide) and the nearst galaxy is 10,400 light years away.  Now assume in game we're able to cross the galaxy in 104 turns (which in galciv2 would mean it takes 2 years to cross at approx 502 times the speed of light).  So now we try to cross the void (which does have other stellar objects orbiting galaxies here or there) to the nearest galaxy, that would take another 1,040 turns, you know that's far to long so you need to research other technologies to narrow this down...

Mind you this is all a game not reality using real numbers for everything would through the interface off, having sun's size match reality (which I was off on one of my previous posts as I was putting in volume not diameter) here are some numbers to think of.

1. The sun is 109 times the size of Earth or 10 times the size of Jupiter.
2. The solar system to the edge of the planet is about 10 light hours across, to the edge of the Ort Cloud is approx 2-4 light years.  
3. The Milky Way Galaxy is between 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter.  
4. The nearest galaxy is Adromeda at 2.2 million light years away (which is about 19 times wider than the galaxy) and moving closer to the Milky Way at a slow speed (in relative to galactic terms) of 670,000 miles per hour.

Yes, I believe it could be in confines of the game, anything is possible as Stardock and the designers of the game have all the creative flexibility that they need creating a fictional game

My issue in GC2 with the galaxy size was: Even on immense (sparse stars, tight clusters of stars), you could reach 1/2 the galaxy with the default colony ship. This nullified any semblance of "terrain" or having to build stepping stones to get to the next star cluster to expand your empire.  It provides another early-mid game challenge where you either have to build starbases or outfit your ships with range modules (and provides an interesting choice of which is better).

MOO2 had a similar problem.  By late-game, distance was meaningless and there was no concept of "border" worlds because the enemy fleet could strike deep within your territory.  Nor was there a way to interdict those fleets along the frontier.

Were there x,y,z co-ordinates in GC2?  Was (0,0,0) at any specific location or was all movement just relative to other objects?

I'm pretty sure there were, the sectors were arranged via a coordinate system and I assume the objects inside the sectors must have had coordinates too, but I never really paid attention to them.

So the sectors were inside a cube or scattered around as if on a table top?

 

GC2 was table-top.  I would assume that GC3 will also be table-top style.

(As much as I would like 3D galaxies, it is *really* hard to pull off from a UI standpoint.  Unless you go with a "mostly flat" style where the vertical dimension is maybe 1-5% of the horizontal dimensions.)

No, there are only x and y co-ordinates in GC2. Co-ordinate 0,0 was at one corner. The co-ordinates were of sectors, not tiles. Sometimes I had trouble getting the co-ordinates to show accurately which sector I was looking at, but there is a co-ordinate display on the main map. I think it moved from GC1 to GC2, and from release to release.

 

 

I think if Homeworld could do it over 10 years ago, it shouldn't be a big ask for a game on 64-bit.  Rotating the camera is the only way to properly perceive the depth, and I accept that when you have a galaxy full of detailed objects, you'd probably need a monstrously powerful computer...

However, the galaxy is just not a table-top and with the introduction of hexes it becomes even easier to make a wall of battleships which is a bit of joke in space.  So a simple compromise is to show a vertical line below a ship if it is one plane above the projected plane, and a vertical line above a ship if it is one plane below.  At least then each planet is surrounded by hexes and the length of the vertical line shows how many planes above or below each ship is from the projected plane.  If you played X2 & X3, it would be like the mini-map, but less crowded because you wouldn't have very long lines.  

We only need a handful of planes, even 'Civ2: Test of Time' and it's parent 'Alpha Centauri' had 4 if you had the required tech?

64 bit has nothing to do with the UI being problematic. Rotating cameras around and that nonsense is going to get tedious as hell when you're trying to look at dozens of planets and hundreds of ships, as opposed to the smaller numbers in an RTS like Homeworld.

I hate to be a bearer of bad news here guys but bigger is not better. Why did this discussion even derailed to "make it bigger! SO MUCH BIGGER THAT IT'S INFINITE!"

Wouldn't it get ridiculously over-complicated? Wouldn't it get boring? Even now most of the 4x games have that feeling where you already dominate everyone but you still need to destroy all those last ships and planets. I would be much happier if they made the game more challenging than just plainly bigger.

Not to mention the problem that someone already pointed out - bigger does not mean better when you don't feel the bigger. You just have more space.

For those who enjoy long drawn out games, bigger is better, I normally start cleaning out garbage shortly after I go to war, so by the end of the game the garbage (alien ships) is usually only around their area of influence or there planets not spread to the all corners of space.

As a long time player of all 4x games I need to say, I would KILL for an "option" to directly mod the scripts and size options for creating maps. It seems that the map sizes and/or scripts for building the maps are always hard coded.

What happens is that 2, (ect) years after the game is released the next generation gamming system comes out that is 2-4x more powerful then the previous, yet you have no option to actually take advantage of that extra boost in computing and graphical power. From my point of view, it should be possible to make this a player moddiable function so if you have a 16 CPU core SSD system, with 128GB of RAM and 8gig 4x SLI  GPU, you can max that out with a map so big you will never reach the other side if you so feel like it. Considering the replay value of this series, this is something I would like to se seriously considered.

I would also LOVE an "observer mode". For example. I can set up a game with 16 AI players, assign each a core and a block of ram and just let the game run and see what happens, just for the fun of it. Again, it seems like something that should be relatively "simple" to program as an option and would love to see.

 

And so do I. But rather than big I would go barren. Because big is easy and gets easier as the game continues. Don't tell me you never felt "well from now on it's going to be a cakewalk".

Then why is the UI for 3D freedom-of-motion problematic?  I'm assuming that dozens of planets and hundreds of ships is at the extreme end of what the system would display.  If it's beyond a certain distance, just don't display it.  

But no one has commented on my main point of having a small number of available planes, but crucially, more than one.  Perhaps there already is... have patience (he says!)

What do we gain by going to full 3D? What is wrong with a tabletop map?

In case you aren't aware, the map doesn't represent actual distance. It represents travel time. Because mass slows down hyperdrive, mass is essentially the same as distance. This effect is so immense that one tile could represent 100 light year distance, yet another would be part of the distance within a solar system (which would be a fraction of a light year). The map is already heavily warped and twisted when compared to what it would normally represent. When you go "left" around a solar system, you might really be going above or below it because the actual left might have enough mass that it isn't worth while actually going there.

Since the map is already warped and twisted, I don't see why we need to go realistically 3D. To protray things realistically, you would need to do a lot of work to actually mark where the hyperdrive will go faster, where it will go slower, and where it might as well not exist. The in game civilizations might have already tried this and found it drove them nuts to develop it, and to use it. They might have found that tabletop maps might be the only way these people stay sane. Only the navigators and navigation computers really need to know these details and where everything is, so the tabletop map works well enough.

The Arcean Navigators are actually using this method, sending the ship on a zig-zag course to the target destination. The other races, however, use the brute force method: flying in a straight line. So, while the Arcean engines are technically weaker (they're stuck at Hyperdrive, while the others can get Impulse, Warp, or Hyper-Warp), their ships are still capable of keeping up with the other races.

Yup. The Arceans do try to navigate around the mass, trying to find the path of least resistance. However, I doubt giving us the same information the Arcean navigators use would do us any good.

Hasn't been anything to suggest there is, so I wouldn't be confident.

It's not something I care about. The tabletop method of doing things on one plane is proven and works really well for this kind of game. I don't think adding more of them gives me a lot of stuff except making it harder to defend or blockade an area (as there's now a lot more approaches).

It does work in Age of Wonders, but those are also very different terrains with specific entry/exit points, so you can deal with them. People can't just go underneath your army and appear on the other side willy nilly.

I am too much of an idealist.  We know that evade is going to be a factor in combat, so I predict that fast ships will be immune to blockade by big, slow ships that don't have massive range and accuracy (which I think are also combat parameters).  I am sorry if I've come across as overbearing.  Navigation is indeed about displaying the information as clearly as possible, so I concede and am actually glad the copy of my above post was deleted from the Founders' forum!

The argument about mass affecting hyperdrive is quite convincing... it's just that that freedom to attack an enemy from any angle would be nice.  Maybe something magic happens when you zoom in real close.  They do keep saying they have some cool stuff up their sleeve...