Map Improvement Ideas, Low hanging fruit?

Ideas for making the map more varied and terrain-like

from GalCiv3 Forums

[GC3 is a great achievement, even as it stands now at v1.11. That said, the forum section title is "Future ideas," so I'll bury Caesar now.]

The map features as they exist now are not especially interesting; you basically have places you go, and all the nebulae, features, and cloud types which are avoided barring a handful of rare tactical reasons for entering them.

I think these might be low-hanging fruit:

-Cloud LOS delta: no matter your sensor range, nebulae hexes of [insert selected types here] block LOS. This would allow ships to hide inside nebulae, and create frustrating situations when a cloud functions as part of your border. (What are the Thalans doing over there? Should I send a ship to check?)

-Black hole speed delta: you can't fly next to the black hole features, but going anywhere near them should slow down your ships, with an increasing effect by proximity, to the point that ships below a certain speed would be captured and immobilized in the nearest navigable hexes, as they utilize all their thrust just staying out of the event horizon.

-By that same token, we could introduce some "slingshot" effect when ships navigate next to stars, adding an additional move when starting/ending their turn adjacent to a star.

Those are the basics. Apologies if someone's already posted these ideas. Best of luck.


KOU

7,429 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

On the clouds one can already. They just have to deal with the negative effects of doing so.

The black hole thing sounds nice but it was mentioned before and can not remember why it was not implemented.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

My guess would be because it causes a lot of problems with calculating the correct ship movement, which are not outweight by the benefits the feature brings to the game.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

because it causes a lot of problems with calculating the correct ship movement, which are not outweight by the benefits the feature brings to the game.

You are very right and I completely agree with you, but what if it was a once-per-game-easter-eggishy thing? :)

When I read this:

some "slingshot" effect when ships navigate next to stars

I immediately thought:

"By flying close around the star in one turn your ship has successfully executed the slingshot maneuver and been catapulted back in time. What does your crew decide to do?"

( ) "Meddling with the time line is dangerous. Evacuate the ship and scuttle it, then settle into nearest planet, fade into anonymity, and try not to change anything." (+10 Benevolent, The ship is lost, Game continues normally from present point)

( ) "We should tread carefully with temporal issues so we destroy the ship and keep silent about our technology but that doesn't mean we can't warn the people of this age about what's going to happen so they can at least plan for it." (+10 Pragmatic, The ship is lost, Game continues from the auto-save 10 turns earlier)

( ) "This is a great opportunity to do it over and this time to do it right! Give the ship to our scientists of this day and tell the government what the rest of the galaxy is up to so they can plan how to counter it." (+10 Malevolent, Recover 1 tech you got in the previous 10 turns, Game continues from the auto-save 10 turns earlier)

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I'd definitely like to see more LOS issues with nebula, especially if it results in a blind-spot.  They might need to make some of the nebula patches bigger and with larger impacts to transit times.  Maybe nebula should have varying densities per cell.

For the black-holes, I'd like to see the "slow ships" effect added.  So you'd have the central core of "no-pass" hexes, then a ring of -80%, then a ring of -60%, etc.  Some of the bigger black-holes might have really large areas of effect.

Another map feature that is sorely needed is some sort of "quick search", where you start typing into a box and it pulls up every thing that you can see which matches the name, giving you a drop-box so you can pick it.

Filtering is pretty important.  The ability to dim out things that you are not interested in so you can focus or find things that you are interested in.  Some sample queries might be:

  • Where are the vessels of empire X?
  • Where are the unclaimed planets?  Which ones do I have tech to colonize?
  • Show me all allied empire vessels.  
  • Now show me all vessels of empires that I am at war with.
  • Highlight my trade routes.
  • Show me resources which are not being harvested.
  • Show my military starbases, show hostile military starbases.
  • Hide all / show all.

For a more detailed example:  If I click on the "Planet" button in the filter, it displays all planets.  But there is a drop down for "barren", "colonizable", "uninhabited", "hostile", "neutral", "allied", "mine" picks.