Please do not post in black: it makes things quite difficult for the rest of us!

paragraph 1: I would also like this, but one thing I learned in my modding experiments is that 3D modeling is HARD, and requires at least months of pretty heavy study! I suppose the devs could put in a simplistic internal editor, but the cost-benifit analysis is not that great, so it it most likely not going to be included.

P2: If by this you mean some type of sliding scale, it seems ineresting but you could get pretty much the same effect now just by adding more of the same component. Regrettebly, as much as I want an infinate tech tree, it would also require infinite development time and memory, so it will not be included in any game. Ever.

P3: They already have that. It's called the "library", and is available from the site's homepage.

P4: Everybody wants more models, but they take a while to make and time is money, so Stardock will draw the line somewhere... You may want to experiment with KHSM and other mods, they free you up tremendously!

Using pre-made parts is, IMHO, the way to go. It's very easy.

As Scoutdog points out, real 3D modelling is HARD unless it is your job or your favorite hobby. It's not certainly not something the casual gamer is going to want to do.

Maybe open file formats for whose who really want to do the big customization stuff, but for the casual gamer I vote keep the ability to create ships using pieces. Maybe extend it a bit, add more animation abilities, perhaps some color/texture customization? But certainly keep the basic premise of using pieces. Real 3D is hard if it's not a primary interest of yours.

. . . and you can already use as many pieces as you want for the extras, which are the pieces you use for the ship design. The functional items are, of course, limited by the capacity of the hull, which is determined by the size.

I don't think the size should be unlimited. The largest hulls are already capable of holding huge amounts of pretty much anything, and having some limits helps keep gameplay balanced.

I like the idea of being able to use the ship editor to edit stations and maybe some other non-ship items. But don't go overboard - I'd hate to see this a game become an extreme case of micromanagement.

Interesting idea. You can sorta do that currently as you always have access to previous techs, but consolidating them into one item with a few sliders might be easier than picking from a long list.

This is a good idea.

But lest we forget: Even though there is an editor and it's fun to create stuff, there is a game to play as well .

Agreed! Maybe he's posting somewhere else with a white background, but in the GalCiv 2 forums in a browser, the background is black, so I thought his post was empty.

He used Word, most likely.

What I want to see in GC3:

AI editing.

GOD YES.

He just got unlucky and landed on the 'black background post' instead of the dark grey one.

Oh man, would not that be the utter bomb. The Bomb of bombs. Even if they just included a text file that included hundreds of changable variables that the AI uses to make its decisions would be great. I'm assuming it would have to be something of that sort anyway, since the AI is usually integrated into the game, but for the new game Stardock is making, Elemental: War of Magic, they stated that there would be different AI opponents that you can play online, and that you would not know they are even AI (I'm assuming they are putting quite a bit more development into this new AI aspect). This way, people wanting to play online against others would not have to wait for others (of course they have the option not to play against AI opponents).

These opponents would be able to be downloaded to play against offline as well... Something of that sort at least. With all the new types of things Stardock seems to be doing, maybe that idea is not as farfetched as it initially sounds.

I would also like to see those little bonus tiles be editible. How hard can it be to put them in an XML?

No. From a reality standpoint, mines are a fundamentally bankrupt concept in space. It's simply too big to mine.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't use mines period, but you can't use them for territory denial. You can use them tactically, to damage enemy ships as they attack a particular location. In that case, I would suggest that the mining module simply cause damage to enemy ships in a fleet at the start of combat. It would effectively act like an attack on each ship, that gets pitted against the ship's defense(s).

Not necessarily. If they were in some way "smart", or simply had a really powerful magnet attached to them, they would be drawn to any ships that entered the area. Or you could just use a few million of them...

I have seen them though, with my own two eyes, so I do know that they are actually used. I saw them in Freelancer. Each mine would have to have a warp drive attached to it, to be able to actually 'catch' something. I'm sure a civ would rather just park a fleet there instead.

But seriously, that would also make things such as defense platforms, any stationary weapons platform for that matter no good. (Not that they are going to add those into GC3 anyways). Although from reality, half the game concepts could be cosidered bankrupt and impossible. Such as 'missles in space' <--- same as a mine.

Orbital bombardment

Tactical combat

Multiplayer

Cloaking Ships

Nebulas and of course mines.

This would be cool. And it would be awesome if you could use different AI modules for each race (i.e. C-Evo - http://c-evo.org/index.html). Even though I don't know the first thing about AI programming, it would be awesome to see what third-party modders develop and how it might change the game.

No, missiles are only deployed in "tactical" situations. Mines wait for someone to get close to them. That part is the problem.

They are used differently, yes, but the same problem applies: the mine/missile is too small and expendable to support any type od "stardrive", and any ship that fired one while traveling FTL would just run right into it. Still, if I can suspend my knowledge of physics long enough to fire a missile, I could do so long enough to lay a mine.

True, but in space, when a 'missle' is launched, it would be traveling at the speed relative to the ship that fired it (or slightly faster). In order for a missle to catch a ship, a HUGE amount of force and thrust would be required to quickly accelerate (or decelerate, depending on where the other ship is headed) and actually catch the ship. In most any actual situation, a missle is utterly worthless.

Now they have Photonic and Photon Torpedos classified as missles. But these are actually not missles. They are more similar to laser type weapons if anything. A Photon is essence could be considered light (or energy). So it's an high energy ball that's fired at extremely high speeds from the weapon to do similar damage as a laser weapon would do.

The only difference here is that to propel an 'energy ball' would not take near the energy to propel it (since it is more of a type of radiation, not much weight), as would a big alloy cased weapon of mass destruction would (which would require a propulsion system, guidance system, communications array, computers, fuel).

A minefield, to be effective, would have to be setup right. A ship would know it's entering a minefield, since it's sensors would detect thousands of the things floating around. A huge computer station with vast sensors would have to be coordinating all the mines. And the mines would need some type of cheap thrusters (say, a Twin Ion Drive.... TIE Mines). So that way when a ship shows on the sensor grid, they would automatically dispatch on an intercept trajectory.

Of course, even that in reality would not quite be worth the effort, and probably not very effective. Better off building whatever is that important right in the middle of a dense asteroid field.

That's not the problem with mines. The problem with mines is that space is big. When you're fighting tactically (assuming you're firing at ranges where you can see the targets. IE: relatively closely), missiles work because you know where the enemy is: right in front of you. Unless you scatter a minefield around a target that an enemy wants to attack (a fleet, a station, perhaps a planet if the planet itself builds a planetary defense network), there's no way to force an enemy to encounter a minefield.

It's not a question of making missiles/mines work with "stardrives" or whatever; it's simply a matter of getting the enemy ships close enough to the mine.

Says who? According to Star Trek, which is where Photon Torpedoes come from, they're just missiles coated in some kind of energy. They have guidance systems, propulsion systems, and track targets. They're not a "high energy ball".

Or the mine close enough to the ship. As I said, if they had really powerful magnets, they would latch onto you from a fair ways away.

No, they were actually missiles with an antimatter warhead aboard. They even had miniature drive coils to sustain a warp field if fired while at warp speed, although doing so ate into the antimatter from the warhead. Yes, I am a proud owner of the Star Trek Tech Manual, and remember details like that from when I read it years ago (\B):vulcan:(\B)

As to mines, the current idea of mines wouldn't work - if a ship needs to actually run into the mine, you'd need trillions of mines to cover even a modest area. The type of mine we would need would be a stand-off mine, where it detects a nearby ship and fires a beam or missile at it. Obviously these would be more expensive and more complicated, but would be able to defend more than the cubic meter they are actually in.

Who says that the mines would be that small? Take a 10-Meter or 50-Meter or -heaven forbid- a 1-Kilometer sized metal sphere. Fill it with some kind of explosive. Add a few super-strong magnets. Repeat several hundred times. There's a minefield.

Here's a completely different question:

The biggest, most ultimately fundamental problem with every TBS game is this: the Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer.

This doesn't quite happen in real life. Look at companies, for example. The larger the company, the more difficult it is for them to change strategies, react to market conditions, etc. Yes, they have a lot of power, but smaller companies can out-maneuver them as new technologies and advancements emerge. Why? Time pressure.

TBS games have no time pressure. You can command a 100+ planet economy and 400+ unit military just as effectively as you could a 10+ economy and 40+ military. RTS's, defined by having time pressure, can't do that. A player trying to manage 4 bases and 2 attack forces simply can't do it as well as a player managing 2 bases and 1 force. The player with the smaller force has an advantage, as he can get more out of his units than the larger force does. Also, distraction tactics work when time pressure exists, simply because the player is not temporally omniscient.

So, how do you go about solving that problem in a TBS game without introducing real-time components? Civ III was able to replicate some of the effects of this, but it went way overboard to the point where you simply couldn't manage an economy beyond a particular size.

Oddly enough, about the only linear factor in GalCiv2 are the frictional forces on your growth. Each planet costs X money, period. Each building costs Y money, period. So long as you can make your population+tax formula exceed the number of planets and buildings, bigger is better.

It would be good if the game made running a bigger empire cost more money per planet. Not too much more (not like CivIII, where they start stealing production and such), but enough that you cannot comfortably expand forever. Granted, there should also be ways to partially defray these costs, but these mechanisms should be time/resource expensive.

The goal is to provide bigger civilizations with certain advantages, but also speed-bump them so that they don't automatically become the tech leader, production leader, etc. Once the big civs build their time/resource expensive stuff, they should be able to take back the lead, but the time/resources invested in that can't go to things that the smaller civs did. So that should give them a time window to jump back to pairity with the big boys.

So, you're going to build ship-sized mines? Do you not see how silly that sounds? You may as well just build actual ships and leave them there.

Furthermore, magnetism is a 1/(r^2) force. That means it decreases with the square of the distance between the targets. To get magnetism to actually matter at ranges in outer space would require monsterous levels of power. Also, if you have a magnetic field strong enough to affect a ship from across a solar system (that's how big empty space is), then it would be affecting planets and stars nearby. That's the level of power it would take.

It would probably collapse in on itself when you switched it on.

Sounds good!   But I suppose you have a point... magnets probably wouldn't work all that well. Besides, it seems like the mines would repel each other, and since friction in space ≈ 0, they would just keep going, destroying the field. Oh, well... But just b/c they wouldn't work in reality doesn't mean you can't put them in the game...

Ok, per Star Trek, they are encased in a closing and usually consist of a warhead (photon, plasma, quantum, gravimetric, etc....). But they are not exactly guided, using some guidance system. Once fired, that's it, I have never seen in Star Trek Voyager, a photon torpedo track it's target all over the place with thrusters or impulse. And the photon torpedo is about the size of a person, which isn't quite big enough to fit all that other stuff in there (until they research ultimate miniaturization).

That's why Star Trek photon torpedo's often miss their target if the ship does some maneuver. In Star Trek as long as I've seen, torpedo's miss quite often. The only guidance system it may have may be something to make minor course corrections, that's probably about it (and why? because for a high-mass object takes ALOT of energy to re-direct that mass). It would probably be easier for the ship to redirect the thing with a tractor beam.

In the Old Star Trek episode, Spock modified one to track a ship or something, kind of like a heat seaking missle would track a jet, but that is the only episode I remember where a torpedo was actually tracking a target with a guidance system.

I always considered them more as an unguided bomb I suppose.

And Obi-Wan says:

That's no moon. It's a space mine.

Here's a way to make mines effective.........

You can have a stealth ship with a mine-laying module on it. And all you'd have to do is send that ship to an asteroid field/moon/whatever else that is smaller than a planet, but bigger than a 500 meter chunk of space dookie, and put your mines on that (asteroids would have to be worth alot more in order for any of this to acctually be logical in GalCiv2 or 3).

And so the next time a ship comes around   to upgrade/construct on/etc. in that asteroid field, they will find a 500 Megaton (atomic) surprise!!!

This in my opinion would be the only effective way to use mines.

Either that, or place them on a 0 PQ world (that has higher PQ worlds in that system), and when a colony/transport ship comes around to capture that planet, you will trigger a Planet Buster type warhead, causing a massive meteor shower, rendering any PQ 7 and lower worlds unhabitable, and all other worlds in that system ranging between PQ 3 and PQ 11 (depending on what it was to begin with, for example a PQ 26 world would become PQ 11 and no lower).

So because of this, you would have to research a tech that enables you to terraform uninhabitable worlds in order for them to become as usefull as they were before. But it would take a long time for the uninhabitable planets to become habitable (like 10-30 turns). This tech could also technically enable you to turn certain planets into PQ 72 (or whatever the max number of tiles will be in GalCiv3) worlds!!!

And here's something else.......

Planet Buster Nukes...........

Only missile to be able to support a Warp Drive. Cause something that can destroy a planet, would either have to be built on that planet, or would have to be really big. It would be like the Terran version of a Spore Ship.