HUGE Step in the Right Direction

Is the day 0 patch out now? What version are you at?

Just excited to see if all will be ready when I get home from work in 3 hours

The day0 patch isn't out yet.

Oops, didn't know that I wasn't at Day 0. 

Anyway, the performance boost from whatever patch that was is enough for me to be very pleased. So I am. 

Um... there's only been one patch -- 1.00 to 1.01.  Today the 2nd patch will be released and that's the one that contains the performance improvements, so whatever's going on with your system, it wasn't the patch.

Ok,

I consider maybe to buy Elemental?

I have not played master of magic. I need another analogy. How about Heroes of Might and Magic?

Day 0 update is today (day 0).

Major updates in that based on the past couple weeks of work.

Can't wait, figuratively speaking.

There is no direct analogy, not Master of Magic either.

There are similarities to Heroes of Might and Magic, Age of Wonders and Civilization. If you like these three but want something with slightly more complexity and some original ideas, I recommend buying Elemental. If you will get angry when some things are very different from Heroes of Might and Magic (and other games), don't buy Elemental.

Hopefully that patch fixes a lot because I am disappointed in this game at the moment. It starts with a whole lot of crashes, loading games is chancy and random crashes occur frequently. I found the campaign to be dull, poorly explained, but workable. I quit when the banished showed up. A unit that can deal 10 damage to every unit in my army automatically before I can touch it, and is found in the basic mobs. No thank you. Especially when it takes 12 turns of boring travel to heal.

Maps are horrible at the moment. Resources being out in the world is a nice idea, but they are horribly spread out. my main city gets 8 resources and the rest of my territory gets 4 total. I buy a 4x game to build up. I dont need 30 cities but more than 2 useful ones would be nice. The problem could be I research the adventure techs that reveal resources too soon, because they never appear outside my influence. That would be a horrible bug but would give me hope. The maps have no space either with barely room for a city before running into foes. I play on a medium map with one opponent removed from the default suggested for a small map. They are also unbalanced. My biggest war being aggainst an empire with space for 10 cities when I had enough resources to support 4 sites; one of which was so pathetic I didnt even build it. Most of my territory was useless, except for quests and loot. None of which was more interesting than the loot in Gal civ 2.

My war against that empire made me dread combat. EVERY unit in their army except for the personal retinue of their emperor, one ogre and a single party of three adventurers, was a basic infantryman just found in bigger and bigger stacks. These stacks were so easy to annhilate taking advantage of my equipment and combat speed. That was even though ranged combat is broken. My archers miss 80% of the time and my uber powerful channler hero does less damage with a 5th level spell than a sword thrust. When he even hits which he usually doesn't. This makes Summoning magic 10 times as powerful as any other. Which makes shards pretty useless.  So every battle was the same thing. I cant even autoresolve the battles because I lose a third of my army to battles I dont take a scratch on when fought personally. Diplomacy is basic and pretty weak. After taking 6 of my opponents cities and slaughtering him in every engagement I saw that I had a 123 value for a peace treaty and he a 2000+. Really my complete slaughter of everything he holds dear puts me at a disadvantage. He offered peace when he had one pathetic outpost of a town left with the ONE army of doom I had taken his great empire down with outside the walls.

At this point I wish I could "return" the game (Ah the price of online distribution), and check back in six months. Being a big fan of Gal Civ 2 I trust in stardock to patch this game, and maybe make it into something epic. right now i'll wait for the much vaunted day 0 patch and hope for the best.

Whennnnnnnnnn?

Ok, I'm confused now. Why do you think you need resources to expand? I keep expanding everywhere, whether there are resources there or not. It allows me to build more workshops, merchants and the like, which are simply free resources, and eventually my cities grow and I can use them to train soldiers.

Something must be done with city spam. It's the best strategy, and the most boring strategy.... that doesent combine well for gameplay. We need huge founding costs for new cities indeed.

I agree. I read that the plan was to make city spamming not be the only viable strategy and that adventuring a bit before settling, or making few and good cities would be viable. I'm hoping that this is the case on the day 0 patch.

If you think city spam is the best strategy, you don't know how to play. Honestly, I just wooped the AI in a large map with all opponents on challenging using just 3 cities. Two of the cities had access to food by the time they reached level 2. One of the cities had access to one ancient library by level 2 and another by level 4. By level 5, it had access to 3 iron mines, a marble pit, 2 libraries, 2 gold resources, a crystal resource, and one food resource. The second city I founded had access to 1 food at level 2 and one gold mine at level 2. By level 4, it had 1 earth shard, 2 gold mines, 2 food resources, a spider nest for hiring spiders, a drath lair for recruiting drath, a marble quary, a crystal resource, and 2 of those settlement things that are supposed to increase your population but did not actually work for some reason. The third city I founded had access to a fire shard, an earth shard, and a crystal when I founded it. By level 3, it had access to another gold mine and a shrill nest for recruiting shrill.

Meanwhile, the AI closest to me had about 15 cities when I started attacking it. I steamrolled them all. None of the cities were very well built up or very heavily defended while my 3 cities were each heavily defended. Their city-spamming strategy simply brought their economy to a crawl. Most of their resources were not built upon because they did not have the money to build them and many were not covered by their area of influence because their cities had not grown large enough. My three streamlined cities were pumping out about 50 gold per turn (after accounting for my army maintenance), 30 research per turn, 8 arcane per turn, 6 iron per turn, 3 crystal per turn, 1 diplomatic resource per turn, and around 15 building resources per turn.

City spamming is no longer an issue. If you think it's a good strategy, you will get steamrolled by more experienced players. I believe the game is perfect right now for discouraging city spamming. You can still do it if you think it helps you play, but it is definitely not the most effective way to play.

When?

My super special Stardock crystal ball of insight tells me that the patch will be here the moment it arrives, not a moment before however.  So be prepared! 

Would be great to be able to set a customizable variable for this feature (as well as others) In other words, instead of the boilerplate difficulty settings, have a "Custom" option, which would allow you to fiddle with the numbers.

That's what 'modding' is for. If you want different numbers so that city spamming is a viable strategy or so that it is even less so, then you can simply make your own mod that does that. Most players don't want that kind of control over their game, wouldn't know how to use it or balance the figures, or even care to fiddle with it. Further, having it as a part of any standard control option for making a new game would make multiplayer pretty much a no-go, since you could never be certain how the game was going to behave. 

Unfortunately this doesn't tell me much. From other reports and from what I've seen myself, the AI is horribly lobotomized at 1.01, even on hardest difficulty.

And now a 1.05 patch in an hour or so. Hopefully the AI will perform better.

Not much point to singleplayer if its a cakewalk. And multiplayer won't be till next week or something.

The patch notes explicitly state the AI will be improved in 1.05, and it won't be the "final" AI, either. More to come!

I'm going to start strongly recommending the game to friends because I'm really enjoying it, but depending on 1.05 I may also recommend they wait for a month first. I know we won't see anything for the next week while the team goes through Code Red detox, but I'd be surprised if we didn't see another update before October.

I for one absolutely loved gal civ 2 bought all of the games and expension.

I am a big lover of MOM and I remember that game came out it crashed and you could never finish a game because it was horrible. The AI was bad and I mean BAD!

So now when I see this game to me it's a normal process. I prefer to have it now and be able to play and see how it turns out after they patch it. I trust Stardock after everything they did with galactic civ.

So lets try and see the positive stuff too not just the bad stuff.

Everything will come with time.

Keep up the good work Stardock team.