Immersion

Sounds like a good DLC idea.

Sounds pretty cool, but I'd also agree that it should be more of a DLC thing. I would rather they focus on the things that affect gameplay first.

I.M.H.O.  immersion into a game comes from good game play mechanics not from pretty shiny stuff for the sake of pretty shiny stuff.

Immersion comes from liberal doses of gameplay and eye candy and lore and who knows what else.  Yes, you can get immersed in a good game of chess.  It is even better when the pieces wake up and hack at each other with laser swords, or if the pieces all have your opponents face on them.

We must agree to disagree Erischild, the thrill is beating an opponent not gazing at eye-candy.

Agreed!

I really like that concept, but I agree with other people that it should be a post-release patch or DLC. Not at the expense of gameplay, and since it's not something people would expect from the game, not at the expense of pushing the release date back

I also almost want it to be a part of the game, looking out the bridge of a starship would be amazing, but it would be a good DLC.

I too like the concept, but it enormously increases scope for the developers particularly in terms of art assets, always expensive and time consuming probably beyond the scope of DLC and into expansion territory but expansions normally significantly impact actual gameplay so I think there would  have to be some elements that actually impacted gameplay built into it to make an expansion worthwhile.

should make it community driven. Let everybody design their own "look" for their civ, then share em by steamcloud. That way you can get a unique/different view of each planet/civilization instead of a few dozen pre-canned ones. In addition people like to show off, goes well with ship design for people who want to make their truly own civ.

not entirely sure what it could add besides eye candy tho. which for a feature of this size is kinda important or else it's never gonna happen.

The good thing about artwork though is once they get into the late Beta stage, is usually when the art team is basically done and the coders are busy bug-fixing and the designers rebalancing game elements.  So this could be an example of a late add-on to the game or an early DLC, although I don't want too much talk about DLC since I don't want Stardock getting the wrong idea that we tolerate DLC 

I fundamentally agree with econundrum on this. It sounds cool, but for me the opportunity cost is too high. Whatever time and assets would be devoted to developing this I would prefer be spent on a dozen other things. That said, at one point Paul was on a sci-fi game podcast (can't find the link right now) where the hosts were not particular fans of GalCiv II, and their big complaint is that they thought it felt sterile. I don't happen to agree with them, but some small touches like advisers or something might help some people feel more enveloped by universe.

I not only tolerate DLC, I encourage it, at least the way Stardock does it. I don't like when a company completes a game, then pulls a chunk out of it to sell as DLC at release; however, when a company uses DLC to provide continuing support for a game after its release, as Stardock has done with FE/LH, I think its a great thing.

I've never especially liked the concept of paid DLC, but if it's for single player games and the content isn't going to happen otherwise, then that makes a lot of difference. But when DLC results in a financially-tiered multilayer community where people without particular DLC can't access significant numbers of multilayer games/servers, that's unacceptable regardless

Of course, that's probably a non-issue with something like this, I doubt it would even be available in multiplayer

Do you mean this one?

My idea was for a spore like species editor allowing players to easily create their own race visuals for custom races and allowing them to easily include advisors from your race on all sorts of advisor and information screens but again maybe in the expansions as I admit the up front outlay on assets and programimg would be high.

Yes, thank you.

This would be pretty awesome. Spore creature generation was so cool, too bad the rest of the game was so uninteresting.

I liked the cell stage in spore the game quickly went downhill from there especially the phallus creator mode

Hey! I loved the phallus creator!

My mighty fleet of dick-shaped warships piloted by mighty dick-shaped gentlemen once single-handedly defeated the Grox! For shame!

For the benefit of Erischild amongst others, I have changed my view somewhat on the Eye-candy factor.  To wit, quoting my own "My Feedback" thread :

I was very unimpressed with the planetary combat viewer when you invaded in "Twilight".  If anything needs better visuals and graphics where you're a part of the action, this is it.  I want to be a trooper landing on the planet, making tactical decisions that your troops can carry out, e.g. capturing the Spaceport as well as the Capital city with a Ground-based viewpoint [not quite "Far Cry" but very much along those lines of which I've only seen trailers, a game of just combat RTS/RPG/FPS mixture just isn't my cup of Coffee]. 

And can we please separate the Civilian population from the Military on the invaded planet that you conquer, rather than having to commit mass genocide before you've conquered it.

End-Quote.  Nuff said ?

What would be really cool is if there was some steam workshop stuff where people could share ships, civ's, content, game models, etc. Like someone could make that for the game, and then it would be a workshop thing.

They'll have full workshop support by release :3

Yeah, the game portraying planetary conquest as automatically entailing the wholesale slaughter of the existing population is something that's always bothered me about Galciv games. It's one thing if you're just playing, then you can suspend disbelief... Less so if you're roleplaying (unless of course you're roleplaying the equivalent of Hernan Cortez or Andrew Jackson, anyway). And yeah, I'd like more involvement in the tactical aspect of planetary invasions too, although that's less of a priority for me than the other thing

I also found it strange at first, but I like the gameplay consequences. Conquering planets consumes a lot of your population, so you must be really prepared for it if you want to gobble up another empire's planets after wiping out its navy.

That's true. Maybe Civ 5's method is better? (conquered cities give negative happiness until you build a courthouse - which can't be done until the city leaves a "resistance" phase even if you have the funds to just buy it in every city, about 4-5 turns on average - and an overall negative happiness makes population growth slow to a crawl as well as giving other fairly significant disadvantages)