Alstein

Well, when userbases expand, the level of play usually increases. I think this is pretty much what Brad is seeing/suffering from. It's hard to keep a competitive edge up if you have other IRL obligartion, and as you get older naturally (execution/micro can cover some sins) I see this myself with my own personal e-sport (Fighting games) I think a lot of the old-heads considered SF4 at first a "scrub game" because they didn't understand thi

I was planning to hold off on DLing this for a while, but AOW3 is a week away. How big is the Alpha DL going to be?

The whole $20 DLC pre-order thing for what should be $5 at most (and really should just be a pre-order bonus) combined with previews calling it an expansion pack have turned me off of the game. It went from will buy, to maybe 75% off if ever AOW3 coming out makes this a lot easier.

[quote who="EvilMaxWar" reply="7" id="3450277"] MOBAs brings the worst out of gamers. But still, the Dota 2 numbers are quite... impressive. What else is impressive is that Banished, that little city building game made by a single dude is in the Steam top 25 [/quote] FG's compete well with MOBAs in this regard- just ask Sanford Kelly's stick. ^_^ I hope GalCiv3 gets into Civ or TW territory.

Is there anything you actually do like?

[quote who="Achronous" reply="51" id="3448479"] As long as it's not gonna make PCs explode or overheat, I'm... willing to give it a try [/quote] I think the last time Stardock patched a game and it caused overheating was GalCiv I.

the AI is super-aggro in LH if it thinks it can stomp you,

Stardock has gone on record saying they plan to put out $60+ worth of future content in terms of XPs and DLCs, so if you're 100% convinced this will be great, it's worth it. If you're not, you can wait.

benevolent civs should have a problem being able to DOW against other benevolent civs. I'm ok with in-game activities like invasion tactics also influencing ideology. Planetbusting in invasions should be considered the equivalent of a war crime.

Right now Ideology looks to be a cross between GalCiv2's good/evil, and Civ 5 Ideology. That's not as different as I invisioned. What I'd like to see: have the random events have a chance of random consequences. (at least in SP) Choices become more unpredictable, I&#

I think your guess is right for initial races- except no Drath- I think we're just getting 8 at launch I suspect Arceans and Torians will be expansion civs.

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="77" id="3447261"] Quoting rahal, reply 76Aren't "The Dead" getting AI attention in the next patch? It doesn't mention any AI stuff in the 1.6 changelog, or anywhere else as far as I know. Besides even if they do it just proves my point, you need to at least tweak C++ in order to make a good new faction. [/quote] It's unlikely the AI gets much attention for this point on. Brad's busy on GalCiv III,

I think people want two things: a) A way for the AI or player to "sneak-win" and go around the main crush my enemies victory condition. Brad talked about having that constantly in the Elemental games, but it never materialized also b) When the game is over, the mop-up phase is quick. Here AI's that know how and when to surrender is best. (if you've committed atrocities against the AI race, having a

I'm referring to the latter, which is a common problem with the AI in Stardock games (maybe new things in GC3 will help solve that)

My big concern isn't cakewalk at the highest difficulty, but mop-up in TBS games in general, Stardock games in particular, tends to be very tedious.

[quote who="Borg999" reply="146" id="3445965"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 143 Gods can die. Source? Gods are immortal. [/quote] Ask Klingons.

High-quality small ships could work if the logistics were low enough, or as defenders, or if larger hulls had a high enough cost.

I suspect this idea would hurt the AI, it could be rejected on this alone and I'd understand. One thing I didn't like about GalCiv II (and this applies to SD games in general) is the sheer amount of crappy units the AI tends to generate, which serve as nothing more then speedbumps. Would giving planets auto-garrison ships and making hyperdrive-capable ships really expensive to maintain cut down on this- also maybe have logistics determine

The $99 - I paid it because I knew this game would be good given everything going for it at the time. I doubt many of my ideas would get implemented- my theory is to fire off as many shots as possible, and let the devs figure out what works. I wonder if this was the idea behind Planetary Annihilation - though I haven't messed with that much (and promising expansions/DLCs for free for the $99 folks was a great way to do it bet

BC might end up being called bitcoins instead of billion credits ^_^

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="8" id="3443233"] Regarding fluff numbers. I would rather that the fluff be in a tooltip while keeping the numbers on the screen just numbers. For example, I would LOVE to have a system where we are free to have the population of a planet be given the number 9 and have that correspond to say 12.3 billion as "fluff". THEN we could have our own sci-fi scale on things like that (for instance, 1 could be 25,000, 2 could be 1 million, 3 could be 40

Local involvement is great, but the states block the municipalities from doing something about it. We need the feds to make sure the states can't do that. When TWC tried to cap internet at 5GB in parts of NC in 2008, it was stopped by the cities involved threatening to do municipal broadband. After that, AFP (Koch Bros) , AT&T, TWC lobbied hard to put such onerous rules on municipalities wanting to do this to make it impossible. In 2010, it passed the legisla

I have to say the in-game text/humor is one of my fav parts of the series, though I felt it was a bit better in GalCiv I than II (good in both, just a bit more memorable in the first game, though that might likely be due to the circumstances I played each game)

They're also trying in Kansas due to Google FIber kicking their asses and forcing them to gasp- improve their service. I really wish the companies that relied heavily on broadband, like Stardock, put some muscle into this fight- it affects them as much as us.

Does this mean no sandbox? I could see an asymmetric sandbox working, but might be a real design challenge.