stevezar

[quote who="Gaunathor" reply="9" id="3625199"] Quoting Seilore, reply 8 Brad will be able to answer this question once and for all, however, there is no documentation out there that the base game included custom factions and there is a whole lot of documentation out there that DA added this option to the game. I reme

Actually I turn tech brokering off for the opposite reason..so I dont outplay the AI so easily! It feels like cheat mode. I think no tech brokering is a good middle ground for the game, trading is still important, but you cant just go and grab all the technologies with no effort.

I think for a game like this its honestly overrated, because game length can be in the hundreds of turns. Each turn wont take very long, and often very little to do in a turn. Imagine waiting on a friend to complete his turn, and his turn consists of "next turn" button. It was useful in a game like AoW III, because very often a turn there could take up to 30 minutes to complete, so it made a lot more sense in that environment. I think you could get a lot more mi

[quote who="LongDeadFingers" reply="39" id="3622553"] It's this issue, along with the stuff that's been so thoughtfully laid out in Icemania's guide and elsewhere, that's kept me from getting deeply into GC3, quite honestly. I've asked about the crazy ranges time and time again and have seen it mentioned a lot over the months, even once or twice by Brad himself (he apparently doesn't like it either). If it isn't going to be chan

You are complaining about "spamming" out sensor ships with your fleets...but you are spamming out fleets then, right? Yous fleet should have escorts, capital ships, and sensor ships (among other things). Thats the nature of the game. If its tedium to be "spamming" capital ships, escorts, etc, then again maybe you should be playing a smaller map where you can get by with far fewer fleets of ships. No one will be complaining about ships with "overloaded" weapons because we have that rig

[quote who="BuckGodot" reply="30" id="3622325"] Quoting stevezar, reply 29 Exactly...thats the choice you make with an insane map. Its going to look and feel big and its going to take a long, long time! There's a difference between "epic" and "tedium", for one. For t

[quote who="Surge72" reply="27" id="3622287"] Quoting Taslios, reply 12 The thing of it is that on the really really big maps if you do not have sensor stacking or engine stacking it becomes almost impossible to explore and then conduct any sort of real war that does not take a mass number of turns higher than my boredom l

[quote who="Taslios" reply="24" id="3622208"] Quoting stevezar, reply 22 I fail to see whats fun about ships that can blast through 22 star systems to get to someones homeworld in one turn, or sensor ships that can see then entire galaxy from the homeport. All I see is it ruining the game. How is the 200 radius sensor ship

I fail to see whats fun about ships that can blast through 22 star systems to get to someones homeworld in one turn, or sensor ships that can see then entire galaxy from the homeport. All I see is it ruining the game. How is the 200 radius sensor ship "fun"? Do you bother to build extended sensor range on your starbases? But at least now I see who has muscled in this idea...people who start insane sized maps and then lack the patience to actually play on those sca

I was in the same place as you, and almost gave up on the game. Then I watched this video by Brad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiMTibbm8lE Which put the whole game in context for me. I think the tutorial is horrible for first time players, almost turned me away and did turn away one of my friends. But if you stick with it, its a very engaging game. I have over 300 hours now. &nb

[quote who="a0152570" reply="6" id="3621795"] This was previously discussed in great depth. Personally i see no problem with diminishing returns. Note it is not terribly unbalanced as the AI will use your sensor boat designs in future games unless you delete them (several precluding factors not withstanding). I stopped using them a long time ago but truth be told i modded starbase sensor range a bit [/quote] Yeah I am not worried that i

[quote who="Taslios" reply="3" id="3621732"] Let them stack... but also build techs that counter them... Cloaking.. Sensor jammers etc if a cloaked ship can only be seen if it is "triangulated" by several ships... or if it can only be seen if it is within x many hexes of the sensor ship.. that VASTLY limits the effectiveness of having sensor boats with all the sensors while leaving sensors off normal

One common complaint I have seen through the forums has to do with things like "sensor Stacking" and "engine stacking". I have even seen a MP game advertised as "no cargo sensor ships"; I dont think anyone believes this type of thing is actually good for the game. This seems to me to be a relatively straightforward problem to patch. I think it should be possible to just have diminishing returns on sensor boats; each sensor after the first drops dramatically

I have played for an extremely limited time with mercenaries, and I do like what I see. In particular, most of the mercs cost a resource to use, which is great because prior to mercs any resource I acquired early game I would happily trade away to someone for a tech (since I wont use the resource on the tiny ships that are available to me early). But now? Trading away a resource not only deprives me of buying a nice ship early game, but it enables my trading partner to buy one. Now I think I

I think the base value currently is number of weeks of research, which is a pretty good metric.

Not a founder, but I agree with the OP, I was especially hoping for some improved planetary invasion mechanic, since planets are really the main prize of a war so it was always a little deflating to just read "victory" after an invasion (fleet battles are less consequential but far more thought goes into them for the player, and they can be fun to watch). I will buy the expansion. But I really hope focus after that goes to some of the items addressed in this thread. I don't mind p

[quote who="markmid" reply="40" id="3619920"] Well there are several things that could be done to improve tech trading, which to me makes more sense that doing away with a core mechanic, somewhat down to a race's personality perhaps 1) The player should get strongly labelled for trading techs to a race's opponents, it should carry a significant diplomatic malus for a fair period of time, making you pick and choose who you trade with carefully, meaning

[quote who="leiavoia" reply="35" id="3619859"] Quoting MacsenLP, reply 33 Quoting stevezar, reply 31 I don't think w

[quote who="MacsenLP" reply="28" id="3619836"] I don't know much about AI or Go for that matter but programming the Gal Civ AI to beat the best Gal Civ human players with no bonuses, or any starting advantages over the player without cheating in anyway (a fair start basically like go players have) seems like a much tougher task to me as it's vastly more complex than a 19x1

[quote who="MacsenLP" reply="20" id="3619801"] Quoting Seilore, reply 17 Why would you restrict one players game, when the option already exists at the start of the game to turn off both tech trading and tech brokering? It's not about taking something away from people it's about having

I would like to see the AI become a little smarter about trading so they arent so easy to exploit. There are many ways to do this. For example, if the AI has only a little cash, like say 500, it should be very stingy about offering cash for techs because this will leave it crippled. On the other hand, if the AI is awash in cash, it should be happy to trade cash for techs. If I am about to go to war with an Ai that has 500, I can trade it a useless diplomacy tech (it wont influence me!) for sa

Ive checked them twice.

Some of the things I saw: 1. Changing my faction was not always permanent. Sometimes it would flip back to Terran. In particular, one time I had changed to a custom civ, then I did a chat, and as soon as I chatted it reverted my civ back to Terran. 2. Players would occassionaly dissapear from view of one or more of the other players. This happened to me several times after I clicked ready, Seilore said he couldt see me anymore so I left the lobby

I was one of the (attempted) players. (Stormwind) Everyone involved was very patient, we tried for exactly an hour to start the game. It is dissapointing to me to see an expansion coming out in a couple of weeks with MP still a complete disaster. I like this game, and stardock impressed me with releasing patches on gal civ II 8 years after release. But I am not playing II, I am playing III, and this leaves me with a very bad impression overcoming my previous goo

[quote who="admiralWillyWilber" reply="7" id="3618663"] The only thing i can think of is in the initial window there is an option to continue research along same path stop selecting that. [/quote] Well I dont even know what that is...what initial window are you talking about? Anyway I dont think I am selecting it, I cant even find it. Ok, so....really? For everyone else while you are researching something, if you open up the technology w