Gilmoy

Because today is Thursday? :)

Of course. New Beta, start new game. It's Always Been That Way. Your Beta 3 Ideology high-water marks don't even fit into the Beta 4 Ideology grid. Also, costs were changed, and tech Ages were simplified. Map generation was changed, so an old map might not even make sense using the new data structures. It Is Just Not Compatible.

[quote who="androshalforc" reply="43" id="3517649"]this is what i get from the mapsizedefs tiny 30 small 40 a tiny map is 31 tiles to a side and a small map is 41 tiles to a side [/quote] And since a hexagon = 6 equilateral triangles whose base is one hexagon side, the area of a hexagon must be 6 * (1/2 n^2) = 3n^2. Edit: The above is correct for geometric hexagons on the plane, but inaccurate for discrete hexes. Any area will ob

At the end of today's Wed Jan 21 SK Dev Stream, [edit] the stream host leaked the news that GC3 Beta 4 ships tomorrow Thu Jan 22 [e digicons]8(|[/e] Yaay! And much productivity shall be lost this Friday.

[quote who="Bamdorf" reply="24" id="3517219"]I remember a LONG time ago there was a tabletop game in which travel by warp was initiated, and the ship(s) then could not be given orders until they appeared at the target destination X turns later.[/quote] Metagaming's Stellar Conquest (later acquired by Avalon Hill) had this mechanism. You can order a fleet to jump to any star you've already explored (only a scout can jump to an unexplored star, which explo

A nice idea for GC4+. Probably beyond the scope of the GC3 AI. This could be the First Compromise in (new) 4X game design: How do we make it tractable for the AI? Hex connectivity with adjacency bonuses is already an interesting and challenging problem, and I'd like to see Stardock solve that first, and then use that new expertise to branch out into other hex-map games. Me, I would love irregular region boundaries ... bec

[quote quoting="post"]Some get the balance right between pacing, tension, story, and pretty, and others don't. ... Then I played it, and I was left feeling like I'd wasted my time. I of course understand that this is Beta, but if this is where Beta is then I'm afraid it's failed.[/quote] Not really; it's right on schedule. Stardock is wrapping up the phase in which they pour 100% of effort into implementing new game mechanisms, which means 1-5% toward playabl

[quote who="erischild" reply="12" id="3516755"]Maybe a cable TV channel. Think of the cable channel as a 24 hour battle viewer of fleets you can't control.[/quote] In South Korea, there are pro leagues of video games such as Starcraft and probably WoW. Every week, two local champions advance to the televised final, where they sit facing each other on a stage wearing headphones, and there's a complete pbp crew of 3 persons who give a full pre-game show, in-game comm

[quote who="peregrine23" reply="2" id="3516757"]Ships are currently targeting defensive ships before they target what those ships are protecting. Maybe this should be reversed so interceptors are targeting the support ships and the guardians are trying to wipe them out before they can destroy the support. This seems more interesting to me than the interceptors having to eliminate the guardians before moving on to what should be their primary target.[/quote] There is historical precede

[quote who="Ashbery76" reply="10" id="3516641"]I am seeing no interaction at all in the battle viewer.[/quote] Correct. GC3 Combat Viewer is pause-only. The battle itself is deterministic; there is absolutely zero for the player to control. Hence the result can be computed within a few milliseconds, and the rest is just a nice display using quasi-3D models. You can rewind, replay, pause, choose different cameras, and otherwise treat it as a frozen movie sequenc

You can beeline up to an Age boundary, but then you must research something else until you actually finish the previous age. In Beta 3 and earlier, it takes 22 AoE techs to enter AoW. You can beeline the 3 techs along the way to Planetary Invasion, but then you must research 19 others elsewhere in AoE before you can actually take PI in Age of War. Other tech-braking mechanisms include: Multiple prerequisite techs, creating a complex web or graph. (

Ages prevent beelining. There are other mechanisms that could also do it, but they're also tougher for the AI to handle. It's a compromise.

Yow. I'm about 7 years behind the C++ standard, with autos and stuff. Might clean up some of my old code :D Do function delegates work now? e.g. to put a class member function directly into a map ? The problem used to be that you could not define the type of the most-general pointer-to-member, because different classes are distinct scopes, and there's no common pointer-to-member-function type that works across 2+ disjoint classes.&nbsp

[quote who="satoru1" reply="3" id="3516167"] The game will auto-spam messages on Twitter and Facebook about your performance. The AI will mock you on social media in new and innovative ways. [/quote] I would pay money to subscribe to this!

You don't use C++ template meta-programming to encode behaviors as template base classes, and then compose them at compile-time as a list of behaviors? That's just about the most beautiful (and insanely powerful) usage of C++. It's the one thing C++ can do that Java/C# can't. The interface programming is promising. Does this mean you'll eventually allow pluggable modules, say from 3rd-party developers, as long as they adhere to your published inte

Known problem (since Alpha 0.31!). Probably it's the same as the free rush-buy from the shipyard Quick Build pop-up window. You can abuse it as much as you like if it helps you to test other things (e.g. ship combats in Beta 4 :)) This is Beta with the debug console, so you could just pop open the console window and type in a million bc for yourself to achieve the same effect. For Beta testing, it's all good.

[quote who=" iboto1 "] 1. ... text doesn't fit properly ... 2. [Influence] ... steal five planets ... and take *no* diplomatic penalty whatsoever. 3. The age system seems a bit contrived. ... It seems somewhat arbitrary. Perhaps some level of interdependencies between techs ... 4. Can we please

[quote quoting="post"]Well, yesterday I finally bought it and played a game.[/quote] Glad you could join us! We've been here for about six months. [quote quoting="post"]I have probably been spoiled by some other games* that pretty much did every aspect of GalCiv III better ...[/quote] Pretty much every (valid) complaint you've raised here has already been stated in these Forums in greater depth and detail by other t

[quote who="Soronarr" reply="13" id="3515782"] 1. There are plenty of games that did research better. 2. In GCII the battles didn't even look interesting and so far GCIII looks exactly the same. 3. Since when are deep civ[ili]zation/strategic layer and a great tactical layer mutually exclusive? 4. Which is why every warship, airplane or tank in the world looks the same? Oh, they don't! [e digicons]B)[/e] [/quote] 1. Welcome to Stardock&#3

i.e. a slice :) or region/area. Could merge this thread into the existing region/area thread. This concept seems to emerge in any large-enough game, across all genres. That suggests that it should be the atomic UI primitive.

Whenever a game gives me choices with replay value, I eventually challenge/amuse myself by exploring the lower bound of wimpiness, roughly: How weak can I be and still win? This takes various forms, depending on the game genre. eCCG. There are power cards, uber-strategies, dominant decks. I go the other way: I like to assemble C/U decks of crap commons & uncommons, 2-3 ultra-crap rares, and no very rares, take on t

Actually, this has nothing to do with rally points. You could move the short-range ship directly there at any time. (So rally points follow a very simple rule: "anywhere your ship could go".) The game rule is: You can always click (to set a ship's destination) within your own ZOC. Any ship, regardless of range, can go to anywhere in your (disjoint) ZOCs. They can cross any void to do it (but you're at the mercy of the path generator). You lose fin

A game is an app. Any app has a reasonably fixed memory demand. Games tend to dominate your UI (mouse, screen) and attention, so you can't realistically run multiple games at a time (or even a game + anything else productive). In research or some work environments, you can tackle (or be stiff-armed by) problems that just scale up without bound. (You can twist this into a good thing; it lets you justify serious hardware for, um, your work. Yup yup.) <ul

[quote quoting="post"] 1. ... ships, fleets and starbases don[']t have any personality. They are just stats and numbers. I want them to evolve into the champions and heroes that inspire hope and fear into the universe. 2. 1. Will ships level with experience? How much will this experience affect combat. 2.2. Will there be a way to auto name ships. [/quote] 1.&