Elyandarin

Will you include some sort of balancing tool for modders? I could imagine a bootstrap analysis where you have the computer simulate 50 games overnight, one after another, with different scenarios, delivering a result like: "Your custom race [Ghosts of Abbadon] won 15 of 50 games (above average). 20 scenarios were lost in early-game, 3 in mid-game, 12 lost in late game. Most common victory: Conquest. Preferred environment: lengthy games, big galaxies.

Probably useless to reply this late, but... specific features of diplomacy IMO, 4X diplomacy/spying is really too straightforward, compared to the shenanigans that (so even a mild history interest tells me) goes on in the real world. I haven't really enjoyed it in any game I've tried. Things I'd like to have to make diplomacy more interesting: *Cold War: These guys are the Enemy, but fighting straight on is to

I think having all of that is too ambitious. Some internal politics would be great, though. Depending on government type, you could have a couple of pseudo-players representing your internal politics. This would work especially well if you can research/build things in parallel. With a dictatorship</strong

Make different weapons types scale differently. Example: "Compared to Lasers I, Lasers II do 2x damage for 5x component cost, with same space taken. Plasma Cannons II do 0.9x the damage in 0.5x space taken. Mass drivers II do 3x damage for 1.5x space taken, compared to Mass Drivers I, but require a minimum ship size, since the component has to be longer, not wider, to do more damage."

I didn't see many of my ideas up there; here are some of them, with examples for clarity: More double-edged civ traits that can define your playstyle, Example: "+50% laser damage, but all weapons take up 25% more space". Enable cool interactions. Example: " EMP pulses damage robotic crews, but are ineffective against organic ships". Let miniaturization h

Together with another civilization, you could research a technology either couldn't alone, if there are multiple prerequisites for the tech and between the two of you, you cover them - especially if the prerequisite techs are in different racial tech trees, or the prerequisites are things like "researchers must have access to psychics" or "researchers must have 2 research stations that are [half the map] apart". This would also make contact with minor races more important. <p

I like it - in fact, I touched briefly on designing your homeworld back in this thread where I talked about having a cool civ editor. Designing the entire starting system makes sense. I think you should have more options for the planets than just type and level, though; you ought to be able to spend points to add strategic resources, alien ruins, special effects, etc. <span style

I like this idea. Also, you could get military bonuses when invading/defending a planet which is of your preferred type. Maybe you can also have a separate "favored terrain" attribute - plains, forests, mountains, etc - affecting how much use you get from the different continents on the planet. Again, this would affect planet defense. In the game Stars! , a planet has three environmental values - gravity, temperature, radiation - and at the start, you specify the range

I recently started playing Stars! again; I'd used it as an example of doing Species Editors right , and I felt nostalgic. Still a pretty good game :)

Interesting. If GNN were an actual entity you could interact with - sending spies, bribing, invading their office planet, etc - it would make for some cool scenarios...

[quote who="Tridus" reply="45" id="3410859"]Why would I want to do that? If I can get X, Y, and Z in 15 turns, it makes more sense to get X at turn 5, Y at 10, and Z at 15 than it does to split my research three ways and get all of them on turn 15. [/quote] That depends on the research game mechanics. If you get bonus research points for splitting up your research, you'd have a choice like "get X at turn 5, Y at 10, and Z at 15" vs "get X, Y and Z in 12 turns

Do the Yor have a defined personality, game-mechanically speaking? If I play a non-biological race, will the Yor be friendlier towards me than they otherwise would?

[quote who="Jedistinger" reply="12" id="3407738"] It's called counter espionage[/quote] ...OK, now we have a name. But I was really hoping for a description to go with it.

I really like the idea of an Espionage Victory - but how would it be implemented? I could see an Espionage Victory coming from a series of steps like, say: Subvert every singly spy agency in the galaxy. Fake the demise of your civilization. While remaining undetected, keep anyone else from achieving victory for 50 turns. In the end, the rest of the galaxy is convinced that <em style="font-siz

You could have the underlying game mechanics be a bit different for different civilizations, so that from a cost-effectiveness perspective, some species would naturally tend towards carriers & fighters, some would want to use as large ships as possible, some favor mixed fleets, etc. Some species might have a flock instinct, getting a bonus if the fleet size is 8-12 ships, and less if there are fewer or more than that. A hivemind species might not be able to

It would be cool if the espionage system was integrated enough that you could give spies specific, detailed missions: Blow up a specific planetary installation. Disable a specific planetary wonder for 10 turns. Sponsor pirate activity in Krynn space. Infiltrate enemy fleet #3 and be ready to perform a sabotage there on command. Shadow the Torian ambassador to Terra and report on their negotiations.

@ Chibiabos: Yeah, it was a shame about Supernova. I'm hoping that sooner or later there'll be a kickstarter or something to buy back the game art assets, or make new ones. I would contribute, assuming I heard of it. Evolution of a civilization over time is an interesting concept, especially since it doesn't have to be

In "Stars!", you had the concept of miniaturization - older tech cost less and less to make the more you exceeded its tech-level requirements, making it so using the newest tech was not always the best choice. I saw a suggestion on this forum that you could use this mechanic in GalCiv3, but have it be different for every civilization - one would make every component better armored over time, one would focus on increasing damage, another would decrease space requirements, etc.</p

Hmmm,.. I think maybe you could fix some of the problems by dividing tech into "discovery", "research" and "application" parts. "Discovery", you would get more or less automatically by interaction with another civilization. The more use a technology sees, the harder it is to keep it secret. "Wait, the Terrans use laser technology to make 3D pictures? "Research" is a bit harder, because even if you can buy a gizmo on the open market, the odds are it wo

You could have different approaches to research for different civilizations. For us humans, it would be suboptimal to force every scientist - historians, biologists, psychologists - into solving a specific physics problem. The best return on investments would be to research one Social Tech, one Physics tech and one Biology tech at a time. For a groupmind, though, focusing on a single issue might be the natural thing to do, and splitting attention would lead to penalties. Yet others might be i

I'm personally for more of a "gratuitous space battles" approach. (I still remember putting MOO2 on Auto in a big fight and checking up on the computer every five minutes or so to see how the battle was going...) That said, I'd like battles to have a bit more choice. I'd be cool if a typical mid-game fleet-to-fleet battle took two or three game turns, with different options available to me each turn: Hiring two pirate ships I spotted in the system as reinfor

I'm hoping for (but not expecting) a complex tech tree, where you can add conditions like: Tech can be discovered, but requires Strategic Resource X in order to be researched. Tech will only work for photosynthetic species. Tech can only be discovered by a species with a weapons bonus above 5. Tech grants extra benefit X to lithovores. Tech is discovered upon defeating wandering monster X. Tech

For me, the Species Editor is the first thing I look at in a game. ...Well, obviously; it's generally the first thing you see after the menu screen - but when I decide whether to buy a game or not, this part of the game is what I browse on wiki pages, because it tells me not only what kind of features the game has, but also how well they are integrated, the kind of balance testing that was done, etc. ...And it always really really annoys me how i