1.02 opt in, abundant stars. So where are the stars?

Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2394

Good feedback guys.

We're planning on updating the opt-in tonight where these values are data driven.

The number of stars will probably go back up to where it was before (by default) and the # of habitable planets will be about 3X what is in 1.02. We'll see how perf is at that point.

The values will be moddable for people who want insaneR numbers than what we choose.

It's a non-trivial thing because people are a lot more sensitive to turn times and memory. I do know in the future we will be increasing the minimum requirements. 4GB really is just not enough and we have people with 8GB who are running integrated video cards (which means that 8GB is shared). And that's a big issue.

+2

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Quoting naselus,

reply 50

Quoting BuckGodot,

reply 48

Interesting. The number of minors didn't change things as noted by naselus on Immense. It was 208 + number of other factions present.

Yup, seems like faction and minor race homeworlds are added after the galaxy is laid out - probably converted from dead worlds. Tried the same thing withjust me and one other race, no minors - and actually came out with less planets, only 203. This was still consistent at both least and most abundant habitable planets.

That's quite handy - colonize all automatically tells us the exact number of habitable planets that spawned, rather than not.

The one thing the apparent hard cap doesn't explain, however, is the drop off seen as one hits Large. It looks like map generation is more or less the same for Tiny, Small, and Medium. It's then cut almost in half when the map size jumps to Large. Then cut again at Huge. And one more time at Gigantic (which is the first time one can start to run into caps). Makes me think the "hard cap" isn't anything approaching 2000.

EDIT::: Never mind with this post. Bossman himself made it kinda moot. That's what I get for taking so long to type out my screeds.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 51

The values will be moddable for people who want insaneR numbers than what we choose.

That's the best solution, tbh - you stick to the sys reqs because the modder's don't have to A well-made mod balanced around insane maps will help. Would it be possible to make the Large Empire Penalty modifier available for modders too?

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It might also help if the number of dead worlds was reduced. Doesn't the game generate habitable worlds based on the star/systems that are generated?

I would really like to see either fewer dead worlds or technology to terraform those planets into some useable form (even if it's poor/barren or extreme). Like how in MoO2 you could transform an asteroid field or gas giant into a barren would and improve it from there.

I cringe to think of starting another insane map with such a smaller number of habitable worlds to choose from. I also like the idea that's been thrown around of having an 'advanced' tab for more precisely choosing the amount of habitable worlds/stars/resources/etc, and I would add to that the option to choose/determine how many dead worlds spawn.

It would be nice to have options for 'creating' planets other than the "Outreach" line of the Benevolent Ideology (Outreach 2: class 10 planet, Outreach 5: Class 16 planet.

I think this would help alleviate having to regenerate maps if your starting point doesn't have many habitable worlds near it, but does have asteroid fields and dead worlds/gas giants: you could eventually create more through technology.

EDIT: That's what I get for spending more than half an hour forming a post.

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Gaunathor

Join Date 04/2006

+170

Quoting naselus,

reply 53

Would it be possible to make the Large Empire Penalty modifier available for modders too?

We already have access to it. It's the first entry for GoodsAndServices in the GalCiv3GlobalDefs.xml.

+1

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Quoting Gaunathor,

reply 55

Quoting naselus,

reply 53

Would it be possible to make the Large Empire Penalty modifier available for modders too?

We already have access to it. It's the first entry for GoodsAndServices in the GalCiv3GlobalDefs.xml.

awesome, that makes life easier.

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When I do an insane map with abundant stars and rare planets I am getting about 75 so the difference between rare and abundant is 75 -> 208

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Franco fx

Join Date 04/2003

+59

Well I am glad to see it will be revised and I hope that will include a proportional increase in resources and relics as well.

I like playing on a thinned out map that doesn't look like a pizza when you zoom out but 1.02 seems to have broken the maps one way or another for all of us.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Okay so it's a little better now, still not the Thousands of planets promised, however, it's around 600 planets now which I still feel is too low.

On another note the game is now crashing when revealing fow and colonizing all , since the new update updating planet generation. Please still review this to give us the thousands of planets promised pre-release...

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 51

Good feedback guys.

We're planning on updating the opt-in tonight where these values are data driven.

The number of stars will probably go back up to where it was before (by default) and the # of habitable planets will be about 3X what is in 1.02. We'll see how perf is at that point.

The values will be moddable for people who want insaneR numbers than what we choose.

It's a non-trivial thing because people are a lot more sensitive to turn times and memory. I do know in the future we will be increasing the minimum requirements. 4GB really is just not enough and we have people with 8GB who are running integrated video cards (which means that 8GB is shared). And that's a big issue.

Good stuff, thanks chief

. Do we have a *guestimate* on some immense non-modded numbers? Still going to be bigger than GC2 right? I'm looking forward to starting another immense map with a decent star and planet count.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Quoting RavenX,

reply 60

Good stuff, thanks chief . Do we have a *guestimate* on some immense non-modded numbers? Still going to be bigger than GC2 right? I'm looking forward to starting another immense map with a decent star and planet count.

Right now if my figures are right Gal Civ III is bigger currently than Gal Civ II by the following...

Largest map 4 times the size (maybe more)

Abundant planets 600 compared to 400 in Gal Civ II (50 %) more. [by far more empty space galaxy is not as full ]

Like Frogboy stated still doing balancing getting everything figured out. I would imagine this would go higher, however, what I would like to see if Gal Civ II map was 1/4 the size and had 400 planets to colonize than, Gal Civ III should have be able to have 1200 planets?? Am I wrong to assume this? What is the purpose of having such large maps if we can't fill it up (by default) without modding, similar to what Gal Civ II was?

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Quoting Seilore,

reply 61

Like Frogboy stated still doing balancing getting everything figured out. I would imagine this would go higher, however, what I would like to see if Gal Civ II map was 1/4 the size and had 400 planets to colonize than, Gal Civ III should have be able to have 1200 planets?? Am I wrong to assume this? What is the purpose of having such large maps if we can't fill it up (by default) without modding, similar to what Gal Civ II was?

To sell the most copies every potato on the planet needs to run it, which is fine. If you have a moldy potato though you shouldn't expect to be able to run massive maps. They cut planets and stars to see if it helped performance on some people's machines. It's punishing the rest of us though. To me it's the same as people complaining they can't run Farcry 4 on Ultra settings on their laptop so they complain so much that Ubisoft makes Farcry 4 run on their laptop....and then the game looks like crap for Everybody.

I thought the majority of this "balancing" was done in beta. I'm thinking now the chief told me to hold off on buying in so he wouldn't have to hear me complain on the forums..lol.

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Testing with updated patch:

1 opponent, no minors, scattered map

Relics, Black Holes, Asteroids, Nebulae, Anomalies, Pirates all turned off

Abundant Stars, Abundant Planets, Abundant Habitable Planets, Rare Extreme Worlds

All Counts do NOT include opponent's homeworld (unlike my last series of charts)

Tiny: 11, 19, 13, 13

Small: 23, 21, 27, 16

Medium: 42, 42, 38, 47

Large: 78, 61, 65, 67

Huge: 91, 114, 127, 120

Gigantic: 187, 178, 175, 203

Immense: 254, 303, 265, 303

Excessive: 390, 391, 362, 385

Insane: 563, 536, 596, 571

=====

So it looks like the (unintentional) cap was dealt with, but I'm not sure what else. Part of the difference in the charts is due to the realization that the number of opponents changes the number of planets that are available to be colonized since faction home systems apparently get generated after everything else. Thus I made them all 1 on 1 maps to cut down on the variables and focus strictly on non-faction planet generation. I suppose I could whittle down even further to isolate out Mars, Earth and Kona, but I think the above chart shows things well enough.

The upshot is, while the cap was dealt with, Insane maps are still around 40% the size they once were.

HOWEVER, Frogboy DID say this was moddable. So as long as we can isolate what changes what and perfect it, it's not that big of a deal.

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OK so hot fix went out!!!

<MapSize>
<InternalName>Insane</InternalName>
<HexSectorRadius>0</HexSectorRadius>
<HexSectorSize>380</HexSectorSize>
<Base>1200</Base>
<MaxHabitablePlanets>600</MaxHabitablePlanets>
<RiftAppearanceChance>0.00</RiftAppearanceChance>
<StarboxDef>DefaultStarbox</StarboxDef>
<MinCameraZoom>100.0</MinCameraZoom>
<MaxCameraZoom>18200.0</MaxCameraZoom>
<MinMapBoundOffsetY>-2000</MinMapBoundOffsetY>
<MapGenSectorSize>16</MapGenSectorSize>
<NumAscensionPointsForVictory>10000</NumAscensionPointsForVictory>
<GlobalCombatMods>
<EffectType>ShipRange</EffectType>
<Target>
<TargetType>Ship</TargetType>
</Target>
<BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
<Value>1.1</Value>
</GlobalCombatMods>
<MiniMapIconScaleZoomedIn>0.6</MiniMapIconScaleZoomedIn>
<MiniMapIconScaleZoomedOut>6.5</MiniMapIconScaleZoomedOut>
<MiniMapIconScaleCurveToe>0.0</MiniMapIconScaleCurveToe>
<MiniMapIconScaleCurveShoulder>0.0</MiniMapIconScaleCurveShoulder>
<MiniMapIconScaleCurveInflection>0.688</MiniMapIconScaleCurveInflection>
<MiniMapIconScaleCurveMin>0.036</MiniMapIconScaleCurveMin>
<MiniMapIconScaleCurveMax>0.905</MiniMapIconScaleCurveMax>
<MiniMapZoomLevels>220</MiniMapZoomLevels>
</MapSize >

OK for those that don`t know the base has been change again it went from 1600 to 600 up to 1200 also they the dev`s have added a MaxHabitablePanets of 600 that was not there before so if you had modded your MapSizeDefs You`ll have to update it when you optin or when 1.02 goes live!!!! so guess will see how this works!!

So If that a Max total of planets for every one that still not many planets!!!!

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2394

Quoting Seilore,

reply 59

Okay so it's a little better now, still not the Thousands of planets promised, however, it's around 600 planets now which I still feel is too low.

On another note the game is now crashing when revealing fow and colonizing all , since the new update updating planet generation. Please still review this to give us the thousands of planets promised pre-release...

You can modify the XML and make it infinite planets if you'd like. We want to make sure we're not chopping off players who want to play the largest galaxies but don't have the memory to do thousands of planets and there are a lot more of them than the number of people who actually want to play with thousands of habitable planets.

BTW, there are thousands of planets, just not thousands of habitable planets.

I'm sure someone will provide a mod that will make it tens of thousands at some point.

On our end, as we watch the Steam statistics on who is playing what we can adjust as time goes on.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2394

Quoting RavenX,

reply 62

To sell the most copies every potato on the planet needs to run it, which is fine. If you have a moldy potato though you shouldn't expect to be able to run massive maps. They cut planets and stars to see if it helped performance on some people's machines. It's punishing the rest of us though. To me it's the same as people complaining they can't run Farcry 4 on Ultra settings on their laptop so they complain so much that Ubisoft makes Farcry 4 run on their laptop....and then the game looks like crap for Everybody.

We balanced the numbers in beta based on what beta testers had. And the founders had substantially better systems than most people.

The actual values on planets is in the XML, anyone can change it. So if you want to have 25,000 habitable planet on a map size 20X bigger than insane, you can do that.

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ScrivenerOfLight

Join Date 02/2007

+34

Up late, Frogboy--thanks for the update tonight. Wish I had more time to play it.

You guys rock!

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 66

We balanced the numbers in beta based on what beta testers had. And the founders had substantially better systems than most people.

The actual values on planets is in the XML, anyone can change it. So if you want to have 25,000 habitable planet on a map size 20X bigger than insane, you can do that.

Indeed. I'd say the majority of the customer base for this game has what you and I would at least call a "decent" rig for this game. Please don't cater too much to the low end of the spectrum and always fall back on the "mod it" approach. You'll be alienating a sizable chunk of your hard core players for the sake of casual customers. Try to keep in mind not all of your hard core players are hard core modders as well. Changing more than one or two lines of a xml is beyond me. That's why I do art and not coding

. It just seemed like a good sweet spot at launch though 25K habitable planets does seem a tad excessive. This specific issue on size wasn't brought up by anyone during any of the betas? I know I can mod it, just having to do so seems like a bit of a let down after the way it was at launch. Basic size stuff would have been something I pointed out in beta 1 had I been around. I appreciate the info though.

What I'd appreciate even more is if you could host that version 1.0 of the specific xml I need

. I liked it that way very much and most likely I'll mess it up trying to put it back the way it was. You know me and my non-existent xml skills. Not to mention whatever other variables that might have changed.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 65

Quoting Seilore,

reply 59

Okay so it's a little better now, still not the Thousands of planets promised, however, it's around 600 planets now which I still feel is too low.

On another note the game is now crashing when revealing fow and colonizing all , since the new update updating planet generation. Please still review this to give us the thousands of planets promised pre-release...

You can modify the XML and make it infinite planets if you'd like. We want to make sure we're not chopping off players who want to play the largest galaxies but don't have the memory to do thousands of planets and there are a lot more of them than the number of people who actually want to play with thousands of habitable planets.

BTW, there are thousands of planets, just not thousands of habitable planets.

I'm sure someone will provide a mod that will make it tens of thousands at some point.

On our end, as we watch the Steam statistics on who is playing what we can adjust as time goes on.

Don't take this the wrong way Frog Boy But dumbing down the content of a game so those with the bare minimum can play "larger Maps" is the same as what the largest map is called - Insane! I asked Derek when he did his 100 player game what his comp specs were so I could buy a new comp for GC3 so I could play at that level eg 1600 stars on Insane maps with upto 100 opponents and now its being nerfed so players with comps that have barely a quarter of my rigs power can play above medium maps?.When I played GC2 I couldn't play immemse maps with more than 5 AI but I put up with it because I enjoyed the game at that time with my old rig.

If the lower end players want to play the larger sized maps why don't they use the game setup menu and put the star's or planets amount down before they launch the game start?

Also I cant mod for toffee and as I stated in another thread - why should I have to mod back in what was there in the 1st place? please put it back to what it originally was and amended the system requirements on steam or put something in the game makeup screens that tells the lower spec owners what size maps with the amount of stars/planets/habitable planets etc they can have?

As to map size if I can have 400+ planets on GC2 on a immense map and the insane map is 4 times bigger shouldn't it have 4 times the planets? 600 is only 1.5x the size of GC2's immense,1200 is only 3 times the size?

Edit: as to the carriers correct me if I'm wrong but weren't they originally supposed to have 5 fighters in them? when it got reduced to 3 but they were small hulls instead of tinys I thought that was fair enough but now their only carring 2 small hulls with a minimum of 5 logistics for the carrier it'll make more sense to drop the carrier and have a frigate or corvette instead? May I suggest 5 tiny hulls such as the guardian or snipers? or go back to the 3 small hulls?

Sorry if this sounds like a rant

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Gaunathor

Join Date 04/2006

+170

I ran a couple tests in GalCiv 2 to get some comparison values.

Settings: two major races, no minors, abundant stars/planets/habitable planets, occasional extreme planets, scattered stars, max map-size for the respective versions (Gigantic for DA, Immense for TotA)

Here are the numbers of habitable planets:

DA: 740, 746, 743, 738

TotA: 485, 549, 497, 533

As you can see, GalCiv 3 has currently less habitable planets on an Insane map, than what Dark Avatar had on a Gigantic one. Though it is at least more than what TotA had. Still, I'm not exactly happy with the current values.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Quoting RavenX,

reply 68

Indeed. I'd say the majority of the customer base for this game has what you and I would at least call a "decent" rig for this game. Please don't cater too much to the low end of the spectrum and always fall back on the "mod it" approach. You'll be alienating a sizable chunk of your hard core players for the sake of casual customers. Try to keep in mind not all of your hard core players are hard core modders as well. Changing more than one or two lines of a xml is beyond me. That's why I do art and not coding . It just seemed like a good sweet spot at launch though 25K habitable planets does seem a tad excessive. This specific issue on size wasn't brought up by anyone during any of the betas? I know I can mod it, just having to do so seems like a bit of a let down after the way it was at launch. Basic size stuff would have been something I pointed out in beta 1 had I been around. I appreciate the info though.

What I'd appreciate even more is if you could host that version 1.0 of the specific xml I need . I liked it that way very much and most likely I'll mess it up trying to put it back the way it was. You know me and my non-existent xml skills. Not to mention whatever other variables that might have changed.

Basic size was argued several times in the beta process and even though I always want more I felt it was reasonable at the end of the beta process and for release.

Quoting Echillion,

reply 69

Don't take this the wrong way Frog Boy But dumbing down the content of a game so those with the bare minimum can play "larger Maps" is the same as what the largest map is called - Insane! I asked Derek when he did his 100 player game what his comp specs were so I could buy a new comp for GC3 so I could play at that level eg 1600 stars on Insane maps with upto 100 opponents and now its being nerfed so players with comps that have barely a quarter of my rigs power can play above medium maps?.When I played GC2 I couldn't play immemse maps with more than 5 AI but I put up with it because I enjoyed the game at that time with my old rig.

If the lower end players want to play the larger sized maps why don't they use the game setup menu and put the star's or planets amount down before they launch the game start?

I agree with both of you, why is Stardock dumbing down the game for the low end players. (Was I seeing a slow down of 3-5 minutes per turn and complaining about it after 150-200 turns, yes and I don't have a low end machine.) If High-Mid range machines can't handle 1200-1600 habitable planets then there may be something else that needs to be done.

Either way why not put in a system test when playing a game, If machine is deemed to poor to play 1200 planets than cap it similar to the hard caps on galaxy size. So for instance if I have 6 GB shared on my system limit my game to maximum 500 planets, if I have a 16 GB system with 2-4 GB GPU then, limit me to 1500 planets or whatever it should be.

As far as Echillion lol, I didn't even realize my math issue, thanks for pointing out 1200 is only 3 times the number from Gal Civ II, you're right I feel it should be around 1600, 4 times the size should be 4 times the planets.

Thanks for listening.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 66

We balanced the numbers in beta based on what beta testers had. And the founders had substantially better systems than most people.

The actual values on planets is in the XML, anyone can change it. So if you want to have 25,000 habitable planet on a map size 20X bigger than insane, you can do that.

Are the only values to change in the map size xml?

<MapSize>
<InternalName>Insane</InternalName>
<HexSectorRadius>0</HexSectorRadius>
<HexSectorSize>380</HexSectorSize>
<Base>1200</Base>
<MaxHabitablePlanets>600</MaxHabitablePlanets>

I. e., changing the base value back to 1600 and set the new MaxHabitablePlanets to some very high value?

Thank you!

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Quoting Thorrbert,

reply 72

Are the only values to change in the map size xml?

<MapSize>
<InternalName>Insane</InternalName>
<HexSectorRadius>0</HexSectorRadius>
<HexSectorSize>380</HexSectorSize>
<Base>1200</Base>
<MaxHabitablePlanets>600</MaxHabitablePlanets>

I. e., changing the base value back to 1600 and set the new MaxHabitablePlanets to some very high value?

Thank you!

You might also want to tweak the habitable planet value in mapsetupdefs.xml too. Resetting the base to 1600 and increasing the maximum habitables to 2000, I still ended up with only ~900 or so (200-odd less than under 1.01); I then increased the habitable change under Abundant in mapsetupdefs to 0.60 and it went up to ~1400. That also reduced the stretches of 'dead' space.

+1

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 65

Quoting Seilore,

reply 59

Okay so it's a little better now, still not the Thousands of planets promised, however, it's around 600 planets now which I still feel is too low.

On another note the game is now crashing when revealing fow and colonizing all , since the new update updating planet generation. Please still review this to give us the thousands of planets promised pre-release...

You can modify the XML and make it infinite planets if you'd like. We want to make sure we're not chopping off players who want to play the largest galaxies but don't have the memory to do thousands of planets and there are a lot more of them than the number of people who actually want to play with thousands of habitable planets.

BTW, there are thousands of planets, just not thousands of habitable planets.

I'm sure someone will provide a mod that will make it tens of thousands at some point.

On our end, as we watch the Steam statistics on who is playing what we can adjust as time goes on.

Would you mind giving us a quick rundown of what mapsetupdefs.xml modifies. I don't mean like what it modifies but rather how it modifies planets. For example on abundant it has 1.0 stars which I assume to mean it has no modification of the base number of stars for the map. However what number are the other modifiers operating off of. For habitable planets it is .4 while planet frequency is .5.

Curious so that those of us who want finer tuned control of the larger map sizes can tune the maps more tightly.

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wpkelley41

Join Date 09/2012

+11

Question...I'm set up to automatically receive opt-ins. Each time, I've turned on the game and my version has simply changed. My current version is indeed 1.02. Can I assume it is the "new" corrected version this thread has mentioned? How can I tell if I received the update/fix in the middle of the night if all I have to go by is a number? Thanks.

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