Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

More ramblings and how I fixed being able to play Immense maps.

So after re installing the visual studio I was still not able to create Immense maps. Frustrated I kept looking at the windows pop up and remembered what someone here said. They manually raised the virtual memory limit. Ah that old trick from Windows 98! So I went into my performance settings an raised it from 2 gigs to 6.

Bam, game started and off we go!

I played All of Friday night. All day Saturday ( I mean all damn day) and Saturday night. I am 400 or so turns into the game and I only crashed or 'hung' once. Sound is good. Performance is good. I must say good job. Now onto some observations!

My settings: Immense Map, Uncommon Habitability, Common Resources, Abundant Anomalies (galaxies are messy), Common Extreme, Tight Clusters.

Tight clusters seems to give nice islands of areas for you or AI to start on. Its a crap shoot if you get enough planets to get a good foothold. I got 7 the Drengin got 3. On Immense the void space between the next group of stars is so vast you need to chain star bases to get to them and/or get some life support techs as well.

The ai is making Mining Stations and getting the rares. It is not that I can see getting the Archeology ones. I snap those up like candy.

I noticed that we have in place ways for the AI to declare war. It does not like me trading with him but likes my ideology, Kudos to Paul.

I pulled ahead with aggressive expansion so I had a lead in planets, and production. When I started meeting my first AI (Yor) I quickly caught up in tech by trading+cash what I had for his. Giving the AI so many early techs can make upper lvls of challenge seem 'challenging'..heh.

Accuracy and Jamming. These Very large modules do wonders but, I fear they only work on the ship mounted on them. If they were benefits that were 'fleet-wide' I would create a support destroyer just for that role with defenses and Jamming/Targeting gear. However its just easier to use the 35 point space these take up and 'hammer' your way to victory. I also feel that these come late in the game and not much use. Seems like we can use these a bit earlier and make their effects 'fleet wide' and maybe tone their strength down a bit.

Carriers. Carriers are clearly way over powered. PERIOD. Once you get the Carrier Module, You will never again build a battleship. The Point to Logistics value in a battle is gone and the fighters get replenished. One carrier can spawn like 15 fighters each with the latest weaponry tech. No opposing fleet can survive unless it also has Carriers. We need ideas to make this a bit (less) overpowered. I was thinking of having the damage the fighters do cut by 2/3rds so that battleships have a slightly longer life span in battles. That would entice you to have a better mix of ships in your fleets. I don't know if this is even possible now.

I want an option to drag, coerce, or bribe another AI into going to war or sanctioning another AI. I want to tell the Altarians ( I was Terran), Hey come join me in this war against the Yor, OR hey how about you attack the Drengin? More options in manipulating the Ai on Wars.

Also, I still cannot tell WHO Is at WAR with WHO. It is very hard to figure out. Please do something to the UI so I can at a glance see that the Krynn are at War with the Yor. I simply cannot tell. When you pull up the diplomo screen and go to 'relations' it is completely devoid of any information, at all! A screen like the mod used in Civ 5 (info-addict) where you had your AI and you in an large circle with lines connecting who is who in that circle would be nice. The lines indicate, trade, war, alliances, or like/dislike really helps. Obviously you cant show AI that you have not met.

Edit to add: I know there is talk about production and research overflow. What would be nice is to be able to 'control+click" on 2, 3, or 4 techs to 'cue them up' thus the game will know what I am working for next and can dump research over flow there. I usually will not pick the Benevolent Research bonus boosts until I start a NEW tech in fear that Ill lose those 150 or 500 points. If we could cue em up and dump excess into the next one in cue that would be a Quality of Life improvement to the game.

Great game.

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Out of curiosity, how much physical RAM do you have?

Also, it can sometimes be useful to install high-use game files on an SD card if there seems to be a bottleneck with HDD throughput (since the SD card slot on laptops and the like don't use the SATA chain). This was something people were doing to get Diablo 3 to be less laggy (which worked with varying degrees of success). Unsure if GC3 is ammenible to performance improvements with this type of strategy. Using SD cards as swap drives (ie "virtual RAM") is also a workaround that people have used for games in the past as well...

Of course, this really only makes sense on a laptop where one is generally locked-in hardware wise. If you're playing on a desktop simply buying more RAM or a small SSD does magical things. I never cared much for SSDs until I started owning them - now I would never go back - having the C drive and installing all your crap on an SSD is mandatory these days IMHO - and just using a spinner to hold all of your mp3s or hawt vids...

cheers,

-tid242

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Gilmoy

Join Date 12/2009

+41

Quoting ,

quoting post

I usually will not pick the Benevolent Research bonus boosts until I start a NEW tech in fear that Ill lose those 150 or 500 points.

The placeholder UI for Ideology rp grants actually works fine; it's just clunky and utterly non-informative. Summary: You don't(*) lose any rps. (c.f. baseball has an arcane rule governing a baserunner who homers but tears an ACL while rounding a base. To simplify, just remember: "it is benevolent", you don't lose the homer to which you're entitled. Then you easily and permanently remember that this rule entitles you to sub in a pinch-runner, who resumes the HR trot from that spot. Ideology RPs are benevolent that way.)

[Beta 3 and before] Any Benevolent +rp grant iterates quietly. It finishes your current tech (so exiting Ideology takes you directly to the tech newsbot), and you pick a new tech. It applies all remaining +rps to that tech. If it finishes that new tech, exiting the tech tree or newsbot loops you back to the newsbot. Repeat until you pick a tech that soaks off all remaining rps in your grant. It promptly fills in that last tech's partial progress bar. You can finish two techs in the middle of a turn this way. (In fact, in Beta 3 and earlier, it was normal to finish 2, because Breakthrough gave +300 rp instead of the "+150 rp" in its text, and many techs were cheaper than that.)
[Beta 4+]: I have no data (yet). But if the devs simply left it the way it was, then it would still iterate quietly, and you'll get your full rps.

Quantum Leap's +500 rps might let you finish 3 techs in the middle of a turn. This might really matter, e.g. you have 2 colony ships with unused movement points, manually move 1 to colonize, take Quantum Leap, take 2-3 free techs, and ... one of them reveals a new empty planet right next to your 2nd colony ship which you promptly colonize. All in the same turn. Could happen, perfectly fair. (Meta-lesson: Move your colonizers manually, one at a time.)

This UI will surely be improved when they get to it. You can kind of tell that it's only a stopgap written by a C++ dude, i.e. a for-loop.

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

The carrier issue is a hard issue to fix. Which is why Paul was initially against them. I think AA elements need to be added to the ships in some way to help out. Say a battleship with a bunch of weapons and a special module that allows for multi-targeting and increased accuracy for anything at tiny and small.

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Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

I agree Ryat. Or the attack value of these ships needs to be devalued somehow. Instead make it 10 ants cumulatively being as effective as adding 35 space points of weapons?

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+136

I wrote a thread on how carriers are over powered:
https://forums.galciv3.com/460722/page/1/#3518121

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I suggest making the Carrier the only ship that has to have downtime between battles. For example, you attack the Drengin with a Carrier in Turn 5. Your Carrier wins. But for the next, say, 6 turns, that Carrier cannot launch it's ships. To avoid the Carrier being a sitting duck between times, obviously it's other weapons are usable for defence/attack, but there's nothing special about a Carrier's weapons over any other ships.

I realise Tohron's suggested something similar in Divine Wrath's thread about this, but what I'm suggesting is downtime even if there's no repair/replacement/upgrading of the ships that belong to the Carrier/Carriers that took part in the battle.

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I've been noticing a lot of crashes on the immense maps. I had a similar problem at certain points in GC2, but starting at my last autosave would generally correct it; this has not been the case with GC3. I have 8gb of ram and a 3.4 ghz quad core. I'm not sure what to change about my set up to keep it from crashing.

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