tetleytea

I write this even as I'm vacationing domestically right now and am paying exorbitant resort taxes to my own government.

Actually, it makes sense to me that influence, money, and tourism would scale linearly with population, but not production.

My experience: I waited for a sale, not so much to save the money, but because when I buy, I am risking both money and (more expensively) leisure time on a game that might not work out. Even the regular Civilization has a history of being buggy and frustrating when it first comes out. So I wait until that all shakes out, first. But it really didn't. I guess I timed it with the Crusade launch. Now it's like the game is just enough totally awesome in

Hard to complain about AI handicapping when the AI doesn't even play all the hand it's got.

I think the morale penalties should do all the work, and not the declining exponential power of the population.

I took it on my plate to number-crunch all this. At a base of 10 production, a -20% productivity hit due to morale will reduce you by 2, which nullifies what you get for having a 16 population instead of 4. And you can't measure it as a straight -20%: you have to measure from whatever positive morale modifier you would have had at 4 population vs. what you get at 13. And since a city basically costs you three tiles (if you don't mod or cheat:

If I was playing MP I would be totally using this feature.

Agreed. That hyperdrive is ridiculous, and out of place for that tech (which is none).

I picked up Galciv3 gold, and here I am.

I've experienced the same thing, but I think it is more of an AI issue. Genius AI isn't even putting up a fight. It may be a recon issue: a human looks at the mini-map, sees yellow stars, and thinks, "there is probably a planet there.". The AI could be scouting randomly with auto-scout, and if he doesn't see a planet, he doesn't send a ship.

I totally second adding a Food tab to govern screen. Also, under the Uncolonized Planets section, can we add all the asteroid field hexes now within our influence but with no asteroid mine built? I spend an awful lot of time checking that manually.

I'm not a fan of square rooting the population, but I understand the point of diminishing returns as population goes up. I think taxes and influence should stay linear with population, but apply diminishing returns to productivity; the idea being that benevolent ideologies are marked by high approvals, and ungodly high populations which do most of the work. They exude money and influence. Malevolent races just slash-and-burn, produce military, and they have to get their popu

This might be a game of words and connotations. "Polish" would seem to imply obsessing over details that don't matter, like a pretty splash screen or better voice acting. But with this game, I think of it more in terms of finishing the job. Like doing a first-class job developing the game, but neglecting to sell it. Or coming up with an intriguing, highly-interlocking game mechanic but failing to balance it. Or train for a marathon, but sleep in on race day.&nbs

Interesting insight with the space elevator. Surround a building so it will receive bonuses. I've been surrounding buildings which give good bonuses--not receive them.

Thanks, I got it. It is square root.

When I played the tutorial, I didn't face any Drengin legions. Then again, the AI didn't do much of anything at all. I'm not sure, maybe I should have played on Genius. Didn't occur to me that maybe I should be playing on high difficulty setting--for the tutorial.

Having dedicated food planets seems a given, since clustering farms around +population bonus tiles (and around each other) boosts farm output.

I'm hovering my mouse, and it says my population is producing 5.1 base output, and I have no asteroids. The square root of 13.7 is much less than 5.1. What else is going on?

It impacts your base output, although I cannot tell you the exact formula. Your planetary improvements, for the most part, multiply this base output by a percentage. Also your planet approval goes down as population goes up, which causes negative % modifiers to that base--which works against that base that just went up. We need a good plot of planetary output vs. population, adjusted for baseline approval modifiers. Unfortunately I

I'm a Galciv3 noob to all of this, but...I have 13.7 population, which makes my base output 5.1. Why?

Market the summer sale to the Phoenix market. It's not like there's a whole world of better things to do in the great outdoors than play games. :)

How about this: a new game. Develop an RPG game (a la Freelancer) where you are the captain of the starting survey ship. Your commander gave you the mission to auto-survey, which for you means to boldly go where no man has gone before, to explore anomalies, to run from Dread Lords, all that. It's time that the average Galciv3 player sees all the drama and life-risking that goes into that simple auto-survey command that gives them a few free credits. They think

A lot of polish is more about temperament than money. For example, Paradise tiles: the website says it gives an approval bonus, the (Crusade) game says it gives a Population bonus. It takes 2 minutes to update the website. But--do people care? That's what really keeps it from being updated. Whatever monetary investment it takes to get people to care, it's probably worth it for more reasons than just polish. I can hire a team of two custodians

Totally. Granting ideology would be great. Coming up with diplomacy and tourism bonuses would not be too difficult--even Civ5 does that with archaeological sites.

Galciv4 will probably be VR.