tetleytea

About the lack of decision-making searching anomalies--I have to disagree. Huge game-start decision you have to make: whether to build a second surveyor. And if so, how do you design it? Second, you are not just scouting for anomalies: you are scouting for planets and resources. I don't auto-survey until mid-game, minimum. Third, you have to deal with rivals--some of them steal that anomaly you just spent 3 turns travelling for, and other

The problem with polishing Galciv3 is that the games take so looooooooong. Finding and reproducing problems would be so much quicker if it was one of these games that was over in 2 minutes. Not an insurmountable problem, though--if you have good, motivated QA people to do it. You have to pay them to get that. And foster a good culture where QA people are respected (as in, not respected any less than the architects). <

[quote]Also, this is not the first time I have seen Stardock pilloried for Steam's decisions. [/quote] Actually, I see no issue with that. Stardock was highly anti-DRM way back around the Galciv2 vanilla days, and then they changed face and went to Steam. That was entirely of their own choosing. Anyway, I had a good time playing the tutorial.

I finally bit and bought the Galciv3 gold package for $30. I've been a Galciv1 and Galciv2 fanatic over the years, but just now going through the Galciv3 tutorial. Did I miss part of the conversation?

My perspective as one who has NOT bought Galciv3 yet, but played the tar out I and II: [quote]1. What specific features of diplomacy do you traditionally like the most? I want you to be as specific as you can be. Which parts of diplomacy from any game do you like the most? What parts do you remember long after playing the most?[/quote] CONGRESS. Hands down. Lots of potential resolutions that can be passed, ways to garner votes. </

I never complained about the $100, I just didn't do it. But such is life: you put something on the store shelf, some people buy it, some don't.

And it could be that's exactly what is meant by "magic is not fair." When you're a developer, coding magic is a lot of fun. You dream up all these spells that can do anything. And for the most part, balancing them is perceived to be a simple matter of changing the level or the mana of the spell. But then the AI guy along, and he has to abstract all this stuff out to a directed a cyclic graph. You explode the number of states the AI guy has to deal with e

I felt exactly as Borg did when I read that about beta testing. I beta tested Galciv2. Stardock called it beta, we bought it while it was beta, we played it while it was beta, we posted our feedback on galciv2.com while it was beta. Whatever you call it now, Stardock freely admitted it was paying to beta test at the time. This is nothing new. What is new, though, is moving it even further back in schedule to where you're trying to crowd-source your game archi

Speaking of Darca and humanoid races: Cylons. The 1980 BG Cylons look like metallic men wearing black dresses.

I can go along with points 1-3, but not the last line. In fact, I would also add Tic-Tac-Toe as evidence; that's as easy an AI as you're going to get. At the end of the day, there is really only one limitation to artificial intelligence: human intelligence. One need only turn on the TV to see that clearly we have a dearth of resources on that front.

Don't you love how all the life forms In the movies look just like humans with just a mark on their necks or whatever, and that makes them aliens? As for a major non-humanoid race, here's my answer: Gonzo the Great, from "Muppets from Space." When all his alien friends contacted him through his breakfast cereal, that was a pivotal moment in scifi literature. As it says in Wikipedia, "Gonzo is the only character other than Kermit the frog to fe

We'll have to agree to disagree there, Biz. AI is a very hard problem. I would in fact argue that the conspicuous lack of good AI in complicated games is due to the fact that AI doesn't get enough respect. AI is what powers things like facial recognition on Facebook or musical recognition on Shazam (...which, incidentally, runs on smartphones). Look at all the manpower thrown at a chess AI, and chess is a far simpler game than pretty much any

Agreed, but I guess I don't understand what exactly Frogboy is saying, and he has a successful track record creating AI, stories, and entire worlds. I guess it's that the game community already has a software library of cookie-cutter 4X strategy games, with source code for cookie-cutter AI for it. But once you introduce magic, how much can you reuse your cookie cutters? You're not making cookies anymore.

[quote] Magic isn’t fair[/quote] When I first read this, my initial reaction was to discount it. There is nothing unfair about magic: you only have to balance it, like everything else. But to do so is to discount the years of Frogboy's proven track record. So it's got me to thinking what he is really trying to say, or what perspective it is he is coming from. I remember an earlier analysis of magic way back ev

I would argue the IAU should in fact do the exact opposite: they should embrace the idea and support the naming of stars in their own registry, for profit. Since one of the major goals of the IAU is, in fact, to get the public more interested in astronomy--and the major goal of getting the public more interested in astronomy is, in fact, to secure more funding for the astronomers. I liken this to the central DNS registry (managed by ICANN), where it is easier for everybody t

The legality of it hasn't been challenged in court. Mostly because...who's going to sue over this? Really?

Just putting this out there. No doubt Stardock got this idea of naming your own star because there are companies out there who claim you can name your own real star. Check out: Http://iau.org/public/themes/buying_star_names vs. Http://starnamer.net The official registry of names for real celestial bodies is maintained by an international scientific body calle

[quote] We also recently brought Richard Gibbs on board to begin composing themes (Battlestar Galactica).[/quote] Richard Gibbs did the theme for the new BG. I like the new BG's theme music, but I absolutely love the original.

Oh, cool. That was on my Galciv2 wish list, too. I think it rocks because it makes you think about how to build your colony. Location matters. And not just for what you build: the bonus tiles' locations matter, too. Just when it got me to thinking about the proximity-to-other-colony bonuses.... :) I was thinking maybe ship-building bonuses for each neighboring alien planet, and improvement-building bonuses for each

[quote] Also, something like this would make balance a little hard to achieve.[/quote] No argument there. I saw this in the Warlords/Warlords Battlecry series: tons of cool features, not always balanced. But still fun, because of all the features. I just like the idea of each planet having its own distinct personality. i.e. I don't want some vanilla build order I always do for all class-10 planet

[quote] Who was that guy on GC3 development team who sat during one of brainstorming sessions and said "Colony building adjacency bonuses!". Big props to that guy and to the rest of the team who went with it, this is something i envisioned for the game and really wanted to happen.[/quote] The problem I have is that it implies the opposite: colony non-adjacency penalties. It encourages a boring, grow-your-empire-norma

It's serious. And most languages do not so much have native XML support as they have classes, packages, libraries, or includes--say, downloadable from SourceForge--where somebody coded support for it. HTML5 I would consider to have "native" XML support, but that is another markup language; not a programming language. Although I do like how you can invoke another programming language from the markup language; not the other way around, as most do it. I just d

[quote] The only thing I agree with is more variations of asteroids. Not all asteroids are created equal. But the rest of the last post is not very important to me for game purposes.[/quote] You don't see the impact on the game if you have all kinds of different tiles? Or is it more a matter of me not doing Founder Elite? It changes the game: like you might always use Lasers game after game; but because of this one plane

I posted in my own Galciv2 wish lists multiple times that I wanted LOTS more specialized planets. Or more specifically, lots more specialized tiles, and more importantly lots more different KINDS of bonuses. i.e. instead of just the vanilla +100%/+300% research/manufacturing/farming, you would have continuous scales of bonuses (e.g. +74%), and things like +% planetary defense tiles, or +40% mass drivers, +%ship-production-only, +53% armor, +10% asteroid production, +1.5% populati

Stardock team, Wishing you all the best in your Galciv3 undertaking. This Founders thing is an innovative idea: THEY pay YOU to architect your game and do QA for you. Evidently you saw all the overwhelming numbers of wish lists in Galciv2, and...well...supply and demand.... Lots of wish lists, not a lot of devs. It will be interesting to see how crowd-sourcing your game architecture (which is effectively what this is) works out. </