Icemaniaa

Charon If "tactical combat" implies the need to send specific orders to specific ships in combat then as Martok has said this is micro-management. With 64-bit we should have much larger galaxies and fleets ... in this context I would not consider tactical combat fun. If "strategic combat" implies the simplistic combat of Galactic Civilizations 2 ... I find it boring. I wouldn't define this as "strategic combat", just "combat". I'd

[quote who="Martok" reply="339" id="3419844"] That article isn't stating there won't be tactical combat in GalCiv3; it's just saying the combat won't be like that in the MOO series. That's fine with me, as I have little desire to micro-manage battles. You can still have tactical combat without needing to give commands to every single unit, however. Birth of the Federation and Armada 2526 are both examples of this, as are the Total War games (to

Michael, you can choose to automate Distant Worlds research. The AI isn't strong so there are huge benefits to manual control. Both games could learn from each other. If Galactic Civilizations 3 applied a living galaxy similar to what Distant Worlds has, while Distant Worlds applied an AI similar to what Galactic Civilizations has, both games would be improved immensely.

[quote] I don't plan to have the AI design ships in GalCiv III in the sense it did in GalCiv II. I will give it a bit of a try but the ships have a lot more sophistication to them this time (very easy for a human but much harder for a computer, traveling salesmen problem here). Instead, I am planning to have the AI look at every ship design any player has ever designed and do evaluation on that and pick from that. So the better players get at designing ships, the

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="2" id="3419903"] One of the biggest changes you'll see in the AI is data mining. Simply put, player ship designs and tactics are going to be stored on the cloud so that the AI can do data mining on it. I don't plan to actually design the ships this time around but instead look at the stats of the global player force and pick from that. So the top Drengin player won't be the hard coded AI player I put in but more like the top

I completely agree with the OP and those that mentioned Distant Worlds as an example where this was done well. One of the problems in Distant Worlds is that the AI is not capable enough to take advantage of those events (nor does the AI explore well enough) e.g. the AI finds super lasers but hardly uses them as ship construction size research is not given sufficient priority and also the AI builds far too many small ships etc. However, if the GalCiv 3

[quote who="satoru1" reply="3" id="3411925"] GalCiv2 already did that with the metaverse. It looked at build orders and such and correlated new strategies for the AI depending on what 'worked' and what didn't.[/quote] Just reading up on that now, it's been a long time since playing GalCiv 2, and I didn't play Metaverse. How did it go in practice? Were the improvements in AI visible? I see in GalCiv 2 that Stardock openly published

I agree pre-knowledge should be limited where possible, also that computational complexity needs to be carefully managed, and some degree of cheating will be needed on the highest difficulties. In some cases AI implementation by using expert systems based on watching human players can deliver interesting AI gameplay while remaining algorithmically manageable. It's obviously limited in scope but Multiplayer is a real opportunity here. Stardock c

In the meantime I've played a couple of hundred hours of Distant Worlds Shadows, great fun, but the AI is weak Otherwise, it's really just bits and pieces of old favourites, such as Civ V or Shogun 2

Awesome news! Like Darkspire I've been playing Distant Worlds and hanging out for a good new 4X game with decent AI. ... and multiplayer!