things in GalCiv that are wasting my time!

All great requests. Especially the third one.

What needs to happen is that the player selects a term, then the game autocompletes the max tribute the AI will accept.

olaf

The only one I'm concerned with is #3, as #2 is currently being assessed and #1 isn't all that big a deal, although if I played on "gigantic" it might be.

I agree with the first request. If you click on a colony ship, the system it is heading to is highlighted, but you have to look around for it. Alternately, you can bring up 'autopilot' routes (zoom in for easier viewing), centernig on your colony ship first. That is actually a quicker way to find out where it is going. It would be a bit quicker to say, right click on it to show its destination though. I've requested that in the official 'suggestions' thread. And not just for colony ships, but right clicking to show the destination for ALL ships. Also nice would be right clicking on a destination (perhaps holding down the ctrl key) to cycle through all ships enroute to that destination (to see how many ships you have heading towards that dreadnought, or see if you accidently sent 2 constructors to the same resource, etc).

The second one has a stickied thread near the top. It is being discussed in detail how to handle the 'extra' production. Feel free to chime in!

I don't agree with the third one. Brad (Frogboy) also indicated this was done on purpose.. it is no accident you can't simply get the 'best deal'. He said they wanted it to be that the most skilled players LEARN what races will trade for.. what is worth the most to each other race. Just like real bartering, start high. If you offer to little, of course they are going to accept! I always thought that was a stupid feature in games. Why would they purposely screw themselves? That should stay as it is. Learn how much you can take advantage of each race. Your techs will help improve how much advantage you can take. I think figuring it out is a very cool thing (I enjoy the learning process).

fleabitfox

When you are selling something for cash, there is NO skill involved in getting the cash you want.

First you pick the term. Then you do a manual, timeconsuming binary search on the amount to get to the exact amount the AI will accept. You learn nothing. Well, I take that back, I did learn that I can hit the Insert key so I can overtype the money amount instead of having to hit Del Del Del, then typing it.

The strategy with trading is if you wanted to trade for other things besides money. But whenver the user clicks the Money button, they should just get to pick the Term and have the AI supply the amount, based on all the things in the trade so far. I spend as much time on this as I do on the rest of the game.

~SDC~

There is actually some skill in getting the best trade, and knowing which race will give how much. It's not just a straight, "this is worth X amount to everyone" sort of aspect that you see in most games of this type. Some races give a lot more via long term leases, some pay more up front, some refuse to buy just about anything.

There are multiple factors that go into trading; at the higher skill levels, at least, you find great variability between the races.

yep, but for any given race, at any given lease term, there is no skill in getting the exact $ amount at which it goes from yellow to green. It is just repetitive punching in of values. I don't want to get rid of the skill and differences of races and terms, I just want to get rid of the tediousness of finding the $ amount once you decide on the other things. It slows down gameplay. And I find myself thinking I have to do it, afterall the computer players are doing it to each other.

~SDC~

There is skill involved in the tech/trade good/ship aspects of trading and in knowing which races value which trade items. But the poster is exactly right in saying there is no skill involved in "topping off" the cash amount (or trading for cash alone) once those other questions are settled. It's merely a matter of typing in different cash amounts until you get a green light. It is very time consuming if you want to wring the last possible credit out of your trade.

The "max cash" option would be one way to eliminate the tedium. In essence the computer would spare you the number typing and just do it for you.

Another option which would put some skill into it would be to have the AI decrease the maximum amount of cash it would fork over by 5% or so every time you made a new offer involving cash, or maybe 10% on every offer after the third. (Pretend that the negotiator was getting progressively more annoyed with you trying to nickel and dime him to death.) That way you'd have to have a good idea what your offer was worth. You could try to wring more cash from him but you may end up with a worse deal than if you had just accepted the first offer.

Another way to do it would be to have a small chance on any offer after the third that the computer would just say, "Screw you. No deal. Come back later."

Of course then you'd have to have a safeguard where you couldn't make offers to the same race within a six-month period to prevent people from just resetting and starting the whole trade over. You'd also have to have a formal "offer deal" button instead of the current green/yellow system, so maybe that would just add more tedium...

Another solution would be to have a real-time time limit on deal-making along with the six-month moratorium on negotiations. That could be annoying too though.

(sigh) It looks like it's "max cash" or no change. You'd want to do it for influence points too.

It really is just a waste of the player's time, hunting for that boundary. And since Brad says you are supposed to squeeze the AI for every credit, it seems this would be an UI enhancement that would improve the gaming fun. Those that want the computer to do the number crunching, could have their computer do so at the press of the button. Those that don't can do it by hand.

What would make it more interesting is if the green light wasn't infallible, especially if it tied into your level of espionage on the other race. Then, you would be taking a calculated risk in maxing out the green. I'd make it that the green range only represents, say, 80% or better likelihood of the offer being accepted. I agree that right now, there is no skill as such in maxing out the green.

However, you're forgetting one aspect. Not all trades are for money. There's tech trades, trade goods, and ships. There's no way that I can see an automation of trading in those nonmonetary items. That still needs to be trial and error.

~SDC~

aweill,
I agree about the non-monetary aspects of the trade. Those should be determined by hand. It's the final effort of "how much cash can I get thrown in before the deal turns yellow?"

This is a big time-waster and there's no strategy or fun involved in the process. It's just tedious.

Yog Sloth,
I agree that #1 is a bigger deal on larger maps. However, it's also a problem if you make habitable planets 'abundant'.

This is a feature that was in MOO1, fer chrissakes!

"This is a feature that was in MOO1, fer chrissakes"

Yes, and your point is?

This is NOT moo4, this is NOT civ4, this is not anything but GalCiv. Plain and simple.

re: #1

It would be a very useful feature to have. Save many of us time in the tedium of clicking through stars looking for that world we wanted to colonize next. And it would be especially useful on the larger galaxies.

Not that GalCiv isn't a wonderful game. These are just suggestions on reducing certain chokepoints of tedious time so that we players may have even more time with the more fun/strategic/challenging aspects.

mavx psqx

Yes, but MOO1 is what, ten years old? That is the poster's point. NOT that he wanted MOO4. You made that assumption yourself.

The concept is called "The idea was developed years ago...use it."

M

#1 isn't much of a big deal for me I generally just make a list of stars I mean to grab on paper.

#2 This I would like. At the least wont make it feel wasted the rare times i am not building anything in a planet.

#3 I don't like this one. I like the difficulty in figureing out what will work with each deal. Makes it a bit more of a challenge.

~SDC~

I do think that as you pump in money that it should keep updating the AI status. It's kind of tedious to have to go and enter in a dollar value, hit enter, see if it's okay and repeat. I'm going to see about us making it so that it updates as you change the $$.

~SDC~

Sounds good, Frogboy That would make diplomacy more streamlined!

Azog, the max the green for cash deal, as proposed, wouldn't stop you from doing that. Just don't hit the 'auto-max cash' button.

Item #1 has been posted, by us, for quite awhile as being one of the things we plan for the expansion pack. So it will be taken care of.

As for item #2, I don't think that'll be in GalCiv 1.x. It would require an immense amoutn of play testing, rebalancing, and AI work. The OS/2 version of GalCiv actually had this and it created all sorts of problems which is why we changed it here. I would like to see some solution to this but I haven't seen anything that doesn't drastically alter the game and make the economics far more confusing.

Right now, it's kind of nice that the global spend rate works fairly simply. A user who is $10 in the black isn't going to suddenly find themselves $500 in the red by changing what they're doing on planets. It wasn't an oversight that we did things the way we did. In late game, you might have planets putting out 400 shields. So suddenly a player that thought they were doing pretty well economically could quickly switch to losing thousands per turn.

The route we took is much like we did in the Corporate Machine. Simply because you're not currently building a battleship doesn't mean all those workers are fired.

What we've been playing with is the idea of a "Warm up" and "cool down" where you would begin laying off workers and such but it would be gradual over many turns and not related to whether you're building something or not. That would be a pretty big UI change so it would probably be in some sequel or something unless someone imagines a fairly straight forward way of doing it that does't involve competely redoing the UI.

~SDC~

Frogboy,
I saw another suggested for unused production: increased morale (from workers getting more leisure time). Maybe that's a good way to deal with #2?

With regards to #3, your solution would not prevent the mindless binary search algorithm of finding the max dollars needed to remain green with an "automatic acceptance". This is a real mind-numbing chore that the AI does not have to endure!

I agree that once a deal gets into the yellow, the players should use trial & error.

Frogboy, I'd think a Capitilization and LocalLuxeries would be a simple way to utilize that 'lost' production. Capitilization would simply dump that production into user goods. Militarily, your shipyards are turning out local ships, such as yatch and what nots for local commerce. Socially, they'd be turning out GalCiv5000 DVDs and other simple consumer goods. Each X of whatever production turns into Money Units.

Local Luxeries would just be dumping the production into Morale increasing activities. Local sponsored block parties, youth activities, orbital star gazing, free anti-aging drugs, etc.

Seems very simple. Just pick or add two techs to provide this abilitity. Could even shift the number of shields into results with better techs.

Star Pilot, no, it's not that simple. Sure, programmatically it would be. But it would cause all kinds of balance issues.

As for morale - same sort of thing. Picture this: You ahve a planet with morale of say 50% that's grown to where it is because people haven't had to work (idle factories or whatever). THen you start to build things and your morale drops to 30% or something. It would cause all kinds of morale problems for users. It is a good idea, the challenge is finding ways to implement ideas that don't cause other problems.

~SDC~

Frogboy... that sounds like part of the GAME STRATEGY to me. You go to change that planet, see you are running it in LocalLuxuryGoods mode. Whoopsie! Should I do it and lose the morale bonus or not? You guys are adding in 'See the details of where your bonuses/mods are coming from' right? So then, you would get an idea of what that hit of swapping off it would amount to. Right? I could see it being a real issue for the AI, but the players?

Ultimately, the player would have to decide. Strategy.

Just a suggestion, of course.

I just don't think the game needs 'Morale tweaking'. Rather, active morale massaging via a choice between improving your social structure (or making ships), and keeping a colony happy.

Of course, I'm just a silly user. You are the Lead, and it's your team's baby.

I think the simplest solution to the build queue empty problem is to add more stuff to the game such that you'd never WANT your build queue to be empty, and will also never run out of stuff to build.

Frogboy, on the Capitalization issue, I can see what you are saying about a player being confused when thier economy "collapses" because they switched thier build queues to something other than idle. But I think that arguement only holds water if the queue is really blank. If you had an actual money producing queue item (ala Moo2 and civ2) then the connection b/w build queue and economy would be clear to the user. It's like: "If I remove the money++ queue item from my major colony, my income is going to drop".