trims2u

We're talked about Tactical Combat before here. There's a couple of major drawbacks: (1) Assuming that it's a turn-based Tactical Combat (e.g. "chess with spaceships!"), resolving a single combat can be VERY time consuming. So time-consuming, in fact, that it's worthless for multiplayer. All multiplayer games will have to have auto-resolve turned on, and bypass TBTC completely. (2) A basic TBTC setup isn't terribly hard to implement, but that's

[quote who="AuraBoy" reply="16" id="3463534"] Quoting trims2u, reply 14Take a good look at the rotating solid sphere above, and the soccerball next to it. Notice that all the faces are differently oriented, even those of the same shape. Which means that both the pixmap that shows the terrain, and the buildings themselves, will face different directions (unless, you want the devs to have to make DIFFERENT pixmaps for use in different orientations). It will look ridiculous. Whi

[quote who="AuraBoy" reply="16" id="3463534"] Quoting trims2u, reply 14 Also, as noted above, there is no way to make a globe out of a single regular polygon beyond 20 faces (a regular icosahedron), which is smaller than the game maximum. In addition, there is no way to make a globe out of even IRREGULAR polygons of the same shape in a sufficiently large size. You're always going to be stuck with the Soccerball problem - inserting a couple of different-shaped

Also, as noted above, there is no way to make a globe out of a single regular polygon beyond 20 faces (a regular icosahedron), which is smaller than the game maximum. In addition, there is no way to make a globe out of even IRREGULAR polygons of the same shape in a sufficiently large size. You're always going to be stuck with the Soccerball problem - inserting a couple of different-shaped polygons amidst the others. It's not an insurmountable problem, of course, but, onc

But that's not helping matters, because it makes it more difficult to assess the planet as a whole. A globe, while realistic, isn't a really good interface for displaying the information we, as "God-like Emperor" want; we want to be able to quickly look at all the assets a planet has (which include assessing unimproved areas) to see both what's current, and what's possible. Since a globe inherently prevents me from looking at the entire picture at once, it&#3

Morale/happiness already is tied to taxes: more taxes = more unhappiness. So, in essence, getting more happiness means you can tax higher. Happiness of planets should probably NEVER impact ships. Overall happiness of the empire, yeah, maybe, but it would a PITA to try and compute happiness of ships that weren't in a specific planet's orbit. And, logically, why should the happiness of a planet I'm within influence radius of have any bearing on whethe

I have no problem with chain reaction flips. That's the price you pay for not watching influence. Rather than the old 4.0 threshold that was set for planet flips, maybe it should be something like 6.0 for starbases, which should be inherently harder to flip, due to being staffed by "professionals" from your space. Also, you can just as easily build influence starbases around if you've got a bunch of critical encon/military/etc. ones in a cluster. Note that we'r

I'd prefer if you could flip military and economic star bases via influence, but not invasion. And have influence starbases non-flippable or invadable. One of the more annoying things in GC2 would be going over and conquering a star system, and be left with a half-dozen of the enemy's old starbases that just littered the area. I would have to destroy them just to get my space back, and that seems like a total waste.

Just to be clear, I think what's planned (and, I'm totally possibly wrong here) is that a Technology can more than one precursor technology, and satisfying ANY of the precursor technologies allows you to research the tech. I'm not sure if there's going to be techs with multiple precursor techs that require ALL of them to be completed before it becomes available. But that would be nice, too. In any case, implementing either of

I think it was pointed out above that there should be no technical reason to not allow a large number of humans. Certainly, it should be constrained only by the performance of the least-capable system attached, primarily in terms of memory available. It looks to be only of a User Experience challenge. And, speaking as someone who has access to some pretty ridiculously high powered systems, it would be really nice if we could run everything

[quote who="sleepyx732" reply="7" id="3459611"] The game can't support simultaneous turns because.. why? That is the one plus of a lack of tactical battles.[/quote] Because then it wouldn't be a TURN-based game. Not being snide, but once you get out of the lockstep idea of having only one side be allowed to perform an action, you start to introduce all sorts of problems of synchronization and "who gets to do what first" issues. That doesn't eve

I'd want it to go to sleep - which is defined as not requiring any further input that turn, but awake for new input the next turn, while still retaining all remaining movement if selected again this turn. Both Guard and Sentry have additional behaviors that you don't necessarily want to enable, without explicitly having the user select them.

I realize these aren't yet available, but before they do get implemented, I'd like to make a suggestion: DON'T HAVE THEM. At least, not in the same sense that GC2 had extreme planets. That is, in GC2, all races colonized the same basic type, and "Extreme" was the same for all of them, the ability to colonize depending only on access to certain techs. And the Terraforming techs applied to ALL planet types. Rather, I'd p

[quote who="Honethite" reply="22" id="3456154"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 2 Personally, I could imagine 100+ civs in a large enough galaxy. That blew my mind. I cannot wait to play these large, LARGE games! [/quote] As we've talked about in another thread, one of the benefits of a 64-bit OS and fully 64-bit aware application is that there are no effective limits. You're limited only by how much RAM you can stuff

Burba - that's interesting, but that's an entirely different model for a game than GC3. At some time in the (far) future, Game Developers are going to come together and form a consortium that handles combining different game types, so you can have something like a 4X with RTS combat, Spore-like planetary evolution, "spy" missions that play like Thief, etc. All in a persistent universe like Eve Online. But I'm not holding my breath, bec

It's annoying, but it's temporary. They're re-using artwork as placeholders for now. I do have to say that the *absolutely* need to do away with the "inherent" bonuses from certain terrain. Either it's a terrain type with no bonuses, or it has an Icon which denotes the type of bonus(es). It's just annoyingly confusing otherwise, because you have to constantly re-survey everything looking for "hidden" terrain bonuses. Also, I'd like

Since I thing the issue of galaxy size and Virtual Memory is pretty well settled, I presume what you'd really like is a configuration file somewhere that lets you tweak all sorts of various parameters. My presumption is that this would reside in the Game directory itself, as one or more XML/INI - style files that were sourced upon launch by GC3. To a certain extent, I would hope that something like this is documented in a Modder's Guide or similar, that

Jeremy - Exactly what would the purpose be of this scratch area, that disk-based swap wouldn't already cover? Virtual Memory subsystems are extreme efficient about caching data and deciding which will be used when, and that includes lots of memory-mapped files. If you're ever going to be using a file more than once, then letting the VM subsystem handle where to keep it is far more efficient than trying to have the program know when it makes sense to pull in or

I realize the icons for the planetary tile bonuses are being recycled from GC2 at this point. However, I just compared them from a game of GC2 to the new GC3 planet tile view. The icons (whatever they are) need to be about twice (maybe even 3x) as big in GC3 as they currently are. It's night and day in terms of ease-of-recognition. Particularly now that the backgrounds are more interesting, and the buildings themselves will be more detailed, it's *

After reading both, I'm pretty happy with the SY100 concept and agree with most of the above. As mentioned above, I would think that maybe a planet-borne starport should have the ability to build *any* unarmed ship. Though, frankly, there's a loophole there: you can build a battleship hull, stripped of all weaponry/etc, launch it, then upgrade it for a price to get your weapons loadout. I wouldn't worry about that too much, because, if the upgrade fees are close to wha

I'm 99% sure that if you buy it through StarDock, they get more of the money than if you do through Steam. Buying it through StarDock gets you a generated email link to go log in to the StarDock site, where they'll generate a Steam key for you. You can then manually activate the Alpha in Steam using that key. In both cases, you WILL ALWAYS have to use Steam to actually install the game itself. It's a comparable experience to going to a physical store and bu

I'm using a puny GTX 650 Ti 1GB graphics card, but, then again, I only do 4X games, so that's more than sufficient. But, hey, the *rest* of the box is leftover OEM parts from our Intel Beta program. I *seriously* doubt anyone is going to be gaming on something like this anytime soon: (2) Xeon X5660 chips - 6 cores/2.8Ghz/12MB cache each 48GB of PC-1333 registered RAM mirrored enterprise-level SSDs. SAS 6G RAID controller, wi

On this note about Life Support, I'd like to suggest the following: 1) New LS tech DOESN'T increase any ship range. It merely gives access to new ship components, which are what determine range. 2) LS components should start out LARGE (in terms of space), but cheap. Improvements should reduce the first slowly, but increase the second quickly. E.g. "Basic" LS should be size 10, cost 5. Reduce size by 2 per new tech, but double the cost. 3) Range sho

It's a space-sim. There IS no significant terrain in space. In fact, the overriding restriction is distance. Both in terms of the time it takes to travel, and the maximum range of your ships. I *do* thing GC3 should pay more attention to range. In particular, Range should SOLELY be a function of distance to the nearest supply starbase or planet and the Range Components on the ship. I *really* didn't like that researching a new Life Support t

There are definitely times when you want the "older" version, and not have your Build Queue touched. Tade Centers vs Banks, and Research Academies vs Neutrality Learning Centers are classic cases. The lower-tech versions are FAR faster to build, and you get the (substantial) benefits much earlier. I'd often build a bunch of Trade Centers, then wait to upgrade them to Stock Exchanges, and forgo Banks entirely, because they (banks) were simply too expensive in terms of