adamb1011

Played a game on the new Feb 5th update. Immense map, about 16 races, normal difficulty. Its worth noting that in Vanillla and base Crusade I play vs gifted with ease. I havent played in a few months and decided to give it a try. The new AI is a BIG improvement, especially earlygame. They are definitely much better at producing fleets, pressuring the player, etc. I felt like normal AI now was slightly better than the old gifted AI. Huge improvement. However, like befor

I never rush buy either. That money could buy asteroids and mercs. Some of the mercs are still ridiculous for exploration

Broadly, I feel like benevolent bonuses on planet colonisation should be more long term focused, where malevolent should be short term gain. It's already like this to some extent. The pragmatic events could sometimes use improvement - they sometimes just feel like a halfway choice between benevolent and malevolent and it would be good to see them get some character of their own

Anyways, this is hardly a surprise. Google, like Facebook, use their enormous market dominance to squash any competition, and regularly advertise their own products ahead of the competition. When the company itself is clearly guilty of biasing search results in its own self-interest, its not surprising its employees' join in the fun. The fish rots from the head.

I kinda disagree with the idea that population and production don't scale together. They definitely do! Possibly in a better-than-linear way. Assuming the population lives at a roughly equivalent level of wealth and technological sophistication. Real world example is Australia and USA. Roughly equivalent standard of living and economies, but much higher USA population = much higher gdp. Which raises a point - maybe in the po

Alpha centauri was a masterpiece for its time, and possibly one of the greatest games ever created. It was polished - although not balanced. That said, did firaxis ever make a profit? Who knows... I do think that one cheap way to add polish and depth is to hire a dedicated content writer or two. They are not expensive and add loads - just check out all that juicy flavour text in SMAC that really makes the game

It's that or allow the community to sell each other ship designs and take a clip - but then you better have a big base of players and artists. DLC has the same problem as selling the base game. People don't pay for polish.

The reality is that polish takes developers, designers, etc and these people expect to be paid monthly salaries. If you are too cheap to support the game ($7 is like 2 pints of decent beer a month) and the people who make it, thats fine - but I don't ever want to see you whine about polish, quality, etc. Because without subscription models, the frog is exactly correct - people pay for half finished features, not a polished balanced game.

Just how terrible are missiles? I would argue that to be balanced, they need to be mathematically worse than the other weapons, because they get the first strike (highest range). And that first strike can significantly deplete an enemies fleet before they start firing if you have enough firepower

Another option is to become like dota2 - try and build an artist driven model. Let us sell ship designs to each other and take a clip

To be clear - I would happily pay a recurring fee if it meant the game regularly got new content balancing polish and features

Interesting article. Why don't you try offering a subscription model for a game? Ie pay an initial cost ($40), then subscribe $5/mon in exchange for regular new development and polishing etc. That way you can scale up or down team size based on game popularity. For example if galciv has 20000 paying subscribers, at $5 per month, then you would have maybe 50k per month to spend on salaries to build galciv. This could then be scaled up or down

Link doesn't work for me. My username is adambyr

So what's the chances of a founders beta over the weekend? :)

I hate to rain on your parade, but I highly doubt that a space battle would be in any way similar to a ww2 naval battle. The whole concept of broadsides etc only make sense in a close quarters naval battle. Even today's naval battles are fought by aircraft and over the horizon missile cruisers. The distances involved in any realistic space battle would be immense. A big advantage of missiles is that they have no firing arc, while a ship with energy or kinetic weapon

Research living ships first It is probably the single best tech in the game:)

There's actually a really easy way to fix this problem. The primary issue is that wide is better than tall in almost every part of the game. This is caused from the fact that population growth is independent of current population. Fundamentally, your economic strength is a linear function of your population. And your population grows at a static rate - on each planey that you control. <

One of the things civ6 did very right is give each civ a "personality". Make sure you design the gal civ ai accordingly!!

I'm actually really excited for these changes. Especially the starbase changes. The worst part about the game right now is spamming economic starbases. It's so tedious, yet necessary at the higher difficulty levels to build a high end economy.

Yeah its not the worst tree, but its nowhere near the iconian / thalan trees in terms of amazingness. Torians and Arceans are probably better too.

This honestly is nowhere near as big a bonus as you think lategame. Its nice earlygame though. But sadly the Drengin tech tree is generally outclassed by many other races

So I played a couple of games of the alpha/beta over the past few days. Some initial thoughts: The game is visually stunning with an awesome soundtrack. The politics system is awesome, and really affects your gameplay. Although I feel like I have trouble guiding / influencing it as the player. I especially like the way you can absorb minors into your faction, but at the cost of more complex politics. I know Frog has mentioned that GalCiv is getting

Send me a private message, I work for a business that can easily save you many thousands on translations (among other things)

Iconian replicator has awesome early game potential with +3 adjacency for tech farms and factories But not as good as thalan. But then thalan lacks living ships

Honestly living ships alone makes them a late game powerhouse