Some things I miss after playing a while

1. Technically those aren't borders but areas of influence. Think Atlantic Ocean. US has main influence there but Russia can still feel free to move around and play in it.

2. If you are playing Humans they have the Engineering skill which compliments that Ideology bonus to remove the decay completely. If not, then its a bug.

3. Not exactly but there is a notification (kind of hidden sadly, UI still needs work) system on the right of the screen that you can use to find all the ships in your are of influence.

4. Fixed in 1.1 (coming soon)

5. And very much needed

6. Planet Invasions are still goofy but they are still working it out. There should be some massive rework to it coming soon though.

1. Why then is there an open borders treaty? And when Russia begins mining ressources in US influence sphere then I don't want to know what will happen ...

2. I play humans, I didn't know that, thanks. Still in the campaign you also play humans and there the decay is not completely removed as far as I remember.

3. Ok, I found the notification (didn't click on that tab before). Better than nothing but still not exactly what I would like to have, because i. e. ships in sensor range of a survey ship outside your territory would not be shown by this mechanism.

4. Ok, good

6. Ok, I hope so (confirms my impression about a slightly unfinished game ...)

Thanks for the answers

The whole not a border thing is ridiculous. Every civ is angry when you build on it. Its effectively their 'territory'. If the AI considers is an aggressive warlike act when we do it, then the AI should know that its an act of war when they do it. No ai who is trying to be peaceful should do that ever. 

Side note. Drawn borders are a new concept. Before then influence really did define borders. If its in your influence, its your territory. If someone enters your territory, you kill them. The oceans today are the same way. No official borders means jack.

Yeah, the AI is a bit borked on that. They do apparently see it as their borders though technically it isn't.

Because of the way the AI sees things (see explanation above) and the United Planets thing can set the area of influence to borders and territory.

Oh it would be ugly. As it does in the game as well. Technically they can but they would piss off the person who "owns" the area of influence yet the person who "owns" the doesn't have a leg to stand on because they really don't own the area but they would feel threated because it was done in that area. And round and round it goes.

Thank God the american faction never builds into foreign ZOI, like their McDonald's econ buildings or Monsanto farming 

it's really just in the beginning phases. frequent updates are to come over the next decade with additional DLC, and because alot+the AI as well is datadriven, the modding capabilities are enormously. So it can - and will - get better if you just give it some time.

I really hope the game will get better before we have to pay for add-ons or - god forbid - DLCs. Because I expected more from a full price game at release. My anger is only suppressed by the hope that the community will make the game awesome in time. Nevertheless, I still have the feeling I payed too much, too early!

This always makes me snicker. Clearly this persons 'expectations' are not being met. As compared to what other game that did meet your expectations? Civ 5? Oh no the worst release for a 4x game in years. Endless Space? Uh, no not even close. Hmmm Distant Worlds? Again very crappy. I see people point to DW Universe and those folks forget that DW Universe is actually Distant Worlds with all the expacs and is the culmination of years of ex-pacs, patches and fixes.

There will never be a game that meets everyone's expectations at release. There will always be that person who felt that 'Espionage' was supposed to be in the base game or the Map editor was supposed to be free.

Keep in my we get free updates nearly ever 2 weeks that fix things people find, FREE... as in it gets fixed and installed. In 2002 if you purchased a game you would literally wait a year or more to fix a terrible game flaw and then you had to BUY the expansion on disc to get the update.

Happy Monday....

I never played a GC-game, I didn't play the beta of GC3 and this is my first contact with Stardock, so don't expect any rose-tinted glasses.

I can tell you many games that did meet my expectations at launch, but that won't stop you from trying to redicule my posts as you clearly are a fanboy and as we all know, fanboys don't think calmly, they tend to see everything with emotions and are deaf to reason. But just for the fun of it...I will tell you why I expected more from a released full-price game (I started a list for the tech-support at release until it got too long. I will just select a few points. The points are listed without any order):

- If you change the Minimap (zoom out etc.), it will reset to a unwanted standard value every new turn

- Description of some tiles is partly not readable, because there is too much text for the description window. Text is just stopping in the middle of a sentence

- If a free rushed structure is canceled (terran trait), the next structure built is not rushed and there is no way to rush it for free

- Planetary Defence says 0%, but the list under it says: Base 0%; Super Shark 20%...?!?

- There is no way to clear all notifications, you have to click 35 times per turn...bad design

- Ships with long names are not displayed correctly at the shipyard

- Six ships in a fleet: Five normal ships and one custom ship. All set to same ship role, all have the same weapons, only the design is different, but if you fight: Five ships are "out of range", flying next to the enemy and watching the custom ship die, THEN they decide to open fire.

- The build list in the planet window can be scrolled down to some extend, but not till the end. If you want to select Research, Cultural or Birthing Projects, you have to use the mouse and not the mouse-wheel. Even then, the list is overlapping with the UI. That wasn't clearly planned that way.

- Message "one of your agreements has expired" doesn't name the one that expired. Am I supposed to guess which one? - Bad design.

- I created a medium hull ship, but after building it had the HP of a tiny ship and a different picture in the ship building list. The custom name didn't change though.

- Message "load ship" with colonists doesn't tell you which ship, nor if it is a colonizer or a transporter...have to guess again.

- If you change values in the planet window (for example manufacturing from 50 to 100%), the time it take for projects to finish isn't updated in real time. You have to close and reopen the window to see the correct value.

- If you are asked for peace, you can only accept or reject it. There is no option to ask even for a single credit.

- Nearly crushed enemy asked for peace six times in a row, you reject, then you offer peace and they reject. On the next turn, they offer peace again?!

- Antializing setting doesn't get saved

- Not a single message narrated, no sound/video/event if you research something, you see always the same terran ship leaving a terran shipyard video even if you play Drengin or other major races. I have seldomly seen another game missing out on celebrating and displaying the difference of playable races

- Tutorial: Minimap has graphical bugs if you select a ship, if you enter a window, a loud sound rips your ears apart

- Tutorial just consists out of three tiny skirmish maps with a (sorry) boring AI. The Drengin fleets are just parked on a planet and wait for you to destroy them or place a small fleet next to them that raids every new built shipyard. Also, tech-research is carried over to the next mission...I could research everything on the first mission if it wouldn't be so time consuming/boring

- Iconian ships have almost the same color as pirates

- Loading times are long and there is almost no difference between HDD or SSD

- Tutorial: Iconians want to trade me technology that they gave me for free a few turns before...

The list could have gone on like that for a while but I lost interest in tracking. I admit, some things are fixed by now and some things are just a personal preference. But IMO the game shouldn't have been released in a state where everyone could see "obvious" problems with the overall quality. That said, I think that the game has a solid and working base construction. It just feels like it wasn't ready for release at the release date. And if you read the forum, you will see that new players are asking the same questions over and over again (AI, diplomacy options, starbases in influence zones etc.). Also the mod community already has tried to improve the AI, custom races, the amount of selectable traits for race creation etc. There is clearly the feeling in the room that the game is somewhat lacking. So snigger all you want, that doesn't make the game perfect out of a sudden. If the game met your expectation, fine. Congratulations! But I still think it is lacking in several aspects.

Games that met my expectations are for example:

X: Beyond the Frontier, Schleichfahrt (Archimedian Dynasty), Haegemonia, Homeworld, Jane's Combat Simulation F-15 E Strike Eagle, Tribes 1+2, Half-Life, Earth 2140, Gothic 2, Morrowind, Spellforce, Dark Project, Flying Corps, Fallen Haven, Tie-Fighter, X-Wing, X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter, HoMM3 and many other games which you could install without doubt at release. They were working, they had atmosphere, they were polished and didn't need updates to run (I don't say they never had updates, just that the release version was for example not spiked with problems as "other" games clearly have them).

Larsenex, just keep in mind, I am not cursing the game as a whole, all I want to say is that I hope that the Devs are not expecting me to pay more money for a full price game until it doesn't meet a certain level of finishing. If you are happy with less, go ahead, that is exclusively your right as an individuum. As it is my right to be a bit sceptical considering recent bad examples from other game developers. But I would not have bought the game if I didn't expect the players to make it better as players did it with many other modable games. As long as we don't have to pay for a map-editor or new ship-parts, I am looking forward and positive towards GC3's future.

Btw. nice try to compare my post to unrelated games just for the sake of giving it a negative note. That's a classic right there *applaud*

P.S.: Ceterum censeo Legend of Pegasus esse admonitum.

Great, the spoiler didn't work...sry!

Like others said there is a difference between ZOC (zone of control) and AOI (area of influence).  Unfortunately there is no clear indication of where ZOC is.  I feel this needs to just be eliminated and just make ZOC the same as AOI.  I understand why Stardock wants them to be different, however, it creates too much confusion on what is what and why can they build here...

To me if someone builds in your borders it should be an immediate act of war.

The engineering race trait used to give the faction no distance decay and the ability to link as many planets as one wanted to the ship yards even more than 5.  They have now reduced the penalty to making this 50% decay, and if you add the ideology to it that would make it 100% and could be what is causing your issue.

They keep saying that this might make its way back into the game, however, I'm more concerned just by the option to sort on the map list versus going into the separate window.

Yeah, they've said they have had this fixed several times now however, it's still way to easy for the invading faction to win as they win nearly 80% of the time in my games.  I could invade a planet with 3 pop against a 7 pop and win, then the AI turns around and invades with 3 pop against my now 2.8 pop and they win.  Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense being I can take down about 2:3 of their pop to 1 of mine when I invade however, they can take down 1:1 when they invade?  How does that work and both were 100% chance of success. 

Another point to this on a separate invasion I had 3 invading pop to their 18 defending and it gave me a 97% chance of success and they easily defended.  They had 6.7 pop left after I invade so it wasn't even close to winning so why did I have such a high chance of winning?  This should have been almost reverse of 3% chance of success...