GalCiv II v1.1 Dev log

Friday night fun at the office

from JoeUser Forums

The team is busily working on v1.1.  I thought I'd show you some screenshots of what we've got done so far.  Probably a beta of this will be made public next week.

March 18, 2006:

The 3 features here we think will make people happy. Still tweaking the wording.

But basically you'll have control over whether tech trading is allowed. Blind exploration means you don't get to see the influence of a civilization until you've explored sectors that they're in. And minor races control whether they're in the game or not.

 

A couple things new on the ship design screen. First, you can now rotate components on the fly in the X, Y, and Z axis.  Pretty excited about that. You can even resize components after the fact once they're on. You can also rotate them after the fact.

What you can't see in the screenshot is that you can now pan with the left-click drag so managing much larger ships is much easier now. It should really free up how ships are made.

Sick of messing with what's in a given tile? The Fleet Manager is a whole new screen designed to let you organize what's in a particular tile. Still a work in progress. ;)

98,449 views 84 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
May every deity yet thought of bless you
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
These changes look amazing! I love the option for blind exploration, the new ship builder improvements will be heavenly, and the fleet manager is a godsend. I can't wait to get my hands on the beta version! Good job, Stardock!!
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Well, I just drooled on my keyboard. Thanks.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Wow, and to think this is only part of the update

Where will we need to look for the beta?
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Can you make jewellry assemblies and save them for later use as a jewellry piece ?
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Is that an option to turn jewelry off and show only certain types of components I see in the second screenshot? If so... I LOVE YOU (whoever did that). I love designing ships, and my ships gets really complicated really fast. It's just such a pain afterwards when you go to put the other stuff on, you know, the weapons/engines/etc... lol. *pray for the filter to make it in the patch*

edit: of course, when I said turn off, I meant in the list of items below the picture. (It occured to me some people would misread that as something else.)
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yay! Melike!!
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
As a suggestion, the three new setup options should offered in the same way. Either disable tech/limit knowledge/disable minors, or enable tech/enable/knowledge/enable minors. I'd lean towards /enable, simply because it fits with the victory conditions. Thus it's an offering of six options, where you pick the ones you want to have.

Coming up with a brief way of saying 'knowledge of the influence areas of other groups that is hidden by the fog of war' will be a bit tricky though. 'Show influence' doesn't fit... I guess you'll have to put something ambiguous like 'influence display' and explain it more in a tooltip.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I wonder how the No Tech Trade option will affect the balance of the the different races. Seems to me that right now tech trading is a big part of the computer's strategy or at least they all use it a lot. There should definitely be a lot of testing to make sure that disabling that aspect of the computer's strategy won't unbalance the game.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i just made a mess in my pants...

Seriously, i think you've adressed the chief two gameplay complaints with the Tech Trading and Blind Exploration options, and I personally can't wait for the shipbuilder changes....

So the only question is... who do we have to kill and/or sleep with to get at a beta version of the patch?
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Coming up with a brief way of saying 'knowledge of the influence areas of other groups that is hidden by the fog of war' will be a bit tricky though. 'Show influence' doesn't fit... I guess you'll have to put something ambiguous like 'influence display' and explain it more in a tooltip.


"Known Influences", "Known Nations/Empires", etc, etc. The tooltip doesn't have to be perfect, just get the rough idea across. With something like this, clicking it on and off will explain any misunderstanding. This is a minor thing though.
Reply #12 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Nice... I love it.. now we need more ship styles.. not just those 5... every race needs to be unique... the minors need to be able to expand.... they need unique AI.. more planet variety... etc... But damn.. I LOVE THIS GAME. Every other game I own, even on the PS2 have been put away and collecting dust for weeks now.
Reply #14 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Sweet! Iam especially waiting for the new fleet management. Basicly you can´t go wrong since the initial version of fleet management was quite poor. Go SD

PS. Brad have you considered about adding some more info on starbases when you double click em. It would nice to know what components can be added to a star base. Informing us how many empty slots they have was a start, but consider perfecting it
Reply #15 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The structural integrity of that ship looks questionable, other than that looks fantastic.
Reply #16 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Is that an option to turn jewelry off and show only certain types of components I see in the second screenshot? If so... I LOVE YOU (whoever did that). I love designing ships, and my ships gets really complicated really fast. It's just such a pain afterwards when you go to put the other stuff on, you know, the weapons/engines/etc... lol. *pray for the filter to make it in the patch*

edit: of course, when I said turn off, I meant in the list of items below the picture. (It occured to me some people would misread that as something else.)
I agree, a small button to hide all the jewelry icons could spare the players a lot of time searching through the list to upgrade some ships.
A little other idea, why not make some standard jewelry bits like "spheres", "cilindrics" etc, it would make add a lot to basic ship design to have some standard forms available, especially if you'd make them X-Y-Z scalable ... and ofcourse, multiple varieties of colony pods, life support etc would a nice little extra (btw, please make the colony pods somewhat ship-color dependant, they're ugly on non-blue or grayscale ship-
Reply #17 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hi Stardock and All,

As a relative newcomer to the "4X" Genre, I tried many but got bored because micro-management eventually overwhelmed those games and I was dubious about buying this one. However your unreal but extremely sensible attitude to copy protection, the competitive pricing and a developer who geniunely has an interest in player feedback based on constructive suggestions and in incorporating those suggestions, meant I virtually had to buy this game on principle. That it turned out to be the 4X game I have been wanting for so long and awesomely good and addictive fun has blown me away.

Now I (and the community) get real geniune improvements not just a couple of bug fixes after I have handed over my cash, has blown me away (again), I have a mate of mine desperately trying to order this and several more are due to follow.

What I am trying to say is thanks for these updates, you peeps are just shredding my expectations at every turn. Keep it up.



As my Tech Researchers on GNN would say "w00t" !

Alien Rider
Reply #18 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In my opinion the best space 4X game would be a cross between Master of Orion I (MoO), Stars! II and Pax Imperia I Anyway, I see GS evolving in this direction

I assume everyone knows about MoO seeing how it is the 4x king (for now) however for those of you who do not know about Pax, the weapon and ship design features really were evolutionary at the time. Some info here:
Link

Furthermore the shear complexity of Stars! made it an awesome endeavor after a long and hard day at the office and a few beers. Some info here:
Link
Reply #19 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
To tired to read all the replies so if it's already asked I'm sorry. Can we have options to give more life to the minor civs? To let them colonize, fight, invade and take over planets and even become galactic powers recongnized and admited into the United Planets? That would be so cool if it can happen, I'm really excited about the changes to the ship builder.

Kyle
Reply #20 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Will population growth bonus fixed?I would like to play as Torians
Reply #21 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
V1.1 should have the ability to make ship switch styles more easily. To do that maybe hardpoints could be numbered so that when you create a ship the ship configuration file would know how to reproduce a ship in another style decently.

Example: I put an Ion drive on the back of my terran cargo hull, that hardpoint would be called "hardpoint #12" (not visible in the shipyard of course) and so when I load that ship design with a Drengin cargo hull ,the Ion Drive would be placed on the "hardpoint #12" for my new hull which would be on the back of my ship. That way, when loading ships from one style to another, ships would stay coherent (meaning they wouldn't have extras messed up on the hull).

The same principle could be used for extras
Reply #22 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I wonder how the No Tech Trade option will affect the balance of the the different races. Seems to me that right now tech trading is a big part of the computer's strategy or at least they all use it a lot. There should definitely be a lot of testing to make sure that disabling that aspect of the computer's strategy won't unbalance the game.


I think it might be simple to automatically adjust the difficulty of the game down a notch if this choice is picked. (You are essentially making the game easier, are you not?) Thus if you wanted a certain difficulty you might have to increase the intelligence of the AI at the race screen to compensate?
Reply #23 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i still think it would be nice to be able to save a template of a ship. I.e a ship that has just the Hull + eye Candy with no components.

Saving these in a file where people can upload them onto the net and let other people use there templates would be pretty cool.
Reply #24 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Resizing... Rotating... Panning... oooooooooooo

cant wait ^^"
Reply #25 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I wonder how the No Tech Trade option will affect the balance of the the different races. Seems to me that right now tech trading is a big part of the computer's strategy or at least they all use it a lot. There should definitely be a lot of testing to make sure that disabling that aspect of the computer's strategy won't unbalance the game.


This was added as an option simply because there were a few vocal people that complained about tech trading and wanted it disabled. It will of course change the dynamic of the whole game. But that's what those people wanted so Stardock delivered. There isn't a whole of things you can do to "balance" it.