[1.5] Feedback and bugs

from GalCiv3 Forums

So after numerous attempts I finally stopped my laptop from overheating and now I can play GC3 again. This game was started after 1.5 went live, it's on the 4th largest map with 9 major civilizations and minors set to abundant.

Economy

- coercion could use a boost, right now it's way too easy to keep it at 0

- approval is also easy to maintain now

Planetary improvements

- the strategic resource requiring improvements need a buff, as they are now aren't worth building, with the exception of the Elirium Shield

- I think the projects could use a boost

- the adjacency bonus for Omega Research Center is rather low, +4% at level 4, compared to +30% for normal research improvements

- the adjacency bonus to the various Hyperion improvements, and maybe wonders in general, are OP, or rather can be OP. Below is an example with Hyperion Supply System. I propose either they don't get an adjacency bonus with a higher bonus to adjacent improvements, or replace their bonus with one to ship manufacturing

- the Temple of Enlightenment should be classified as a research improvement, not approval

Starbases

- the approval modules for economic starbases should be changed to multipliers

- the Interceptors module causes the shield icon to appear over starbases, this makes it very difficult to see which starbase has a defending fleet in the main map. Also I think the shield icon should be displayed closer to starbases and shipyards

Ships

- I think construction and colony modules could use an increase in manufacturing cost, or cargo holds could use one

Diplomacy

- relations between civs ping-pongs between positive and negative too fast, in one turn the Drengin liked me, in the next they hate me

- you can offer another Research Treaty, and I suspect the others as well, even if you already have one ongoing. I don't know if they have any affect either, they certainly aren't listed in the tool-tip I also think they should be reduced to 10% or 15% and AI opponents should value them less since they go both ways now 

- I would suggest that treaties, including Open Border, Exploration, Alliance, etc, should last indefinitely with the option to renegotiate it or rescind it after a certain number of turns, I think 25 or 50 would be good choices

- the power ranking number should be less based on military power

- for the Diplomacy screen it would be nice if we could select to only show certain relations, like show only war or trades

- I think we need a page that shows the relations between the civs like in GC2, how close they are, etc.

UP

- I think it would be better if a session to hold a leader would be held immediately after the old ones term finished

- I have all the UP resolutions techs, yet I only have 5 resolutions to choose from

Technology

- linked to the above point about approval the research specializations that give +4 to approval need to be reduced, I think a +30% would be better

- the Alliance Focus specializations don't unlock any new forms of alliance

- in the Research screen the research per turn number isn't displayed correctly, see above

Ideology

- the ideology points generating projects should return, it is very hard to obtain ideology points after all the planets have been colonized

- the flip all planets and starbases in zoi and make all colonies culture flip immune traits should be reworked to increase speed at which opponent colonies culture flip, respectively decrease the speed at which your own colonies would culture flip

- again I request for somewhere to be displayed how many ideology points are being generated per turn

Influence

- I know there were complaints that culture flipping was too easy, but now I think it is extremely slow. I think it's 20 times easier to just build a troop transport and capture a planet than to culture flip it.

AI

- after about turn 200 or so the AI opponents seem to have stopped researching, while I continued to advance at a very fast pace

- I've noticed all the AI opponents select the top specialization to research most of the time, it should be a little more varied

- I've seen the Krynn build the Bureau of Labor on their planets, since they already have the coercion trait they don't need it

UI

- I have some trouble when telling a fleet at a rally point to move, I select it and right click but nothing happens. It works when clicking idle ship

Precursor worlds

- while I think the planets are fairly balanced, the population penalty is rather brutal. Perhaps if it was reduced as you research the precursor studies branch would be a good fix

- I echo the sentiment that the anomalies are too OP, reduce their frequency, bump their defenders, make the AI go after them. I had 11 medium ships and a survey ship in a fleet set to auto-survey and it ignored precursor anomalies completely

Performance

- after 250 turns I noticed the game slowing down drastically and had to shut off sound to get some improvement, this may have more to do with my machine tough

Bugs

- mentioned this one in it's own thread, but what your final treasury number will be is listed at Treaty Revenue

- I had this colony that was under Krynn influence, but after it fell under my influence it is still listed as under danger of culture fipping

- the Supportive Population specializations are colored gray 

- the Benevolent trait Admirable should only be applied to the homeworld, it's also applied to the first colony

Requests/Suggestions

- hotseat multiplayer, I'd really like this, both to play with friends and family. And to control multiple civs at the same time

- assimilation treaties, mostly because culture flipping is so slow

- non-culture flip treaties, like the UP resolution but in treaty form. I'd like to use it after reducing a civilization to 1 planet and keeping them around like a pseudo-minor

- civilization specific technology being tradable

- ingame encyclopedia, I've mentioned this before. What I liked in GC2 were some of technology descriptions take enriched the lore of the GC universe, like the story between the Altarians and Drath, or that the Drenging don't like fictional stories and feel pleasure when sensing pain in other, or the Yor and their spark. I realize most didn't belong in the tech tree and appreciate that the tech descriptions are more consistent, as in GC2 some were entire paragraphs while others a single sentence. That's why I think and ingame encyclopedia would be the best place to add them, there could profiles on the leaders, explanation on how some technologies work, history of the civilizations, etc.

- I'd love an option to show real time ingame

That's it for now, I'll update this as I continue playing.

23,365 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The bugs keep on coming:

- Drengin's 2nd approval building (the one after Fighting Pits) has missing art

- had a galactic event, the option I took was supposed to give a 10% boost to all ship capacities, but didn't.

Things that suck (just the things I remember from most recent game, and just the tip of the iceberg):

- I tried to give a civ some money to improve relations. Instead I got a minus to relations because I was "taking pity" on them. Can't we get some indication of how our diplomacy actions/trade is going to affect relations before we actually do them?

- I've used the new diplomacy options four times. All 4 times my actions were rejected. Wow, so much fun.

- I turn off auto-upgrade on every planet because I've found I need to closely manage maintenance costs. Please give me a global option for the default setting.

- In the planet list, the population number is essentially useless to me because it doesn't indicate how close I am to max pop. Show me current/max, and not in a tool tip.

- Why can we not click the appropriate cell in the Colonies grid to specify a planet's focus, like we could in GalCiv 2? For that matter it should be trivial to do this in the right colonies panel too.

- cannot sort starbases in the right panel.

- expanding/contracting fleets in the right panel causes that panel to jump to the top.

- The default build template for trade ships is to max support modules. I'm talking 1 trade module and 15 support modules, which would go way beyond the map. What about engines?

- it takes 7 clicks to create a rally point and set a shipyard to that rally point. What about selecting a shipyard then right-clicking somewhere on the map?

- Pirates. They serve no purpose but annoyance. And if you want to avoid losing ships to them early game you have to micromanage your movements, as in one tile at a time.

- Durantium is the most abundant resource. It's as if you want everyone be using mass drivers.

- I want to cycle through all the civs trade screens. Nope, cycling brings you to the main diplomacy screen where you have to move your cursor from the top of the screen to near the bottom.

- I want to cycle through the Report screen for all civs. Nope, have been to back out, select, then click the report button

- Since making specialization techs mutually exclusive we've begged you to show us which techs in the trade screen would preclude us from researching other specializations If we obtained them through trade. Still nothing in 1.5.

I'm making myself mad writing this up, so I'm going to stop now even though I could easily keep going. UI is making this game really tough to enjoy.

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Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I came up with another one, a real pet peeve. Stardock you need to do something about the ship list in the shipyard. Your "All", "Core", "User" categories are close to the bare minimum that you could do. The list expands as you unlock new techs, making it time consuming to find the ships you actually want. The "obsolete" process sucks because you do one at a time and each time you do the list scrolls back up to the top. There is no sorting, no categorizing. It's an alpha-quality interface.

And then your template building seems bugged or broken. I unlock small hulls and the shipyard doesn't include any new small hull ships. Unlock weapons and sometimes no new templates show up. I played the beta and the template system seemed to produce much more variety with weapon/defense load outs. What happened?

Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Updated the first post.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

6 months and we're still in beta.

 

Sigh.

 

 

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I agree with Eviator. the Ship list needs serious help. If I want to Flipping DELETE FOREVER a design I have to go into the design yard and it STILL shows up in a new game.

Also to add to this list can we PLEASE GET A CLEAR ALL ON THE NOTIFICATION TAB?

 

Paul thinks (incorrectly) that if you hit the clear button it clears all but it only clears ONE notification at a time. Lets clear em all please. 

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

There is a notifications tab? lol

 

Allot of the issues are easy to overlook, however i did notice how much culture flipping is a one way street in favor of the AI.... even though i try to understand what they are trying to do,,, it is too much of an 'in your face' insult to your intelligence.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Looking at the map settings for Precursor planets I noticed something about the rules governing their spawning.  The two rules are a minimum number, which changes per map size, and a percentage of habitable planets that can be Precursor, which is set to 5% for all maps.  With the exception of Insane (it sits at 5.something%), all the map sizes have a minimum number that easily exceeds 5% of the maximum number of habitable planets that can be in that galaxy size (which means in reality it is even bigger as most games you wouldn't have the max habitable planets possible).  This means the percentage variable does absolutely nothing because the min is always overriding it.

One thing I'd like to add is that they haven't added Coercion to the approval tooltip, which will be very confusing for some players when their see their approval dropping for seemingly no reason and with no explanation.

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Ha, the primary approval readout has no tooltip, period.

 

As informative as staring into a crystal ball.

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Thought I mentioned it above, but Coercion also isn't in the Raw Production Tooltip.  Even more confusing is that the Raw Production number on that planet doesn't change outside the flow on from any drop in approval from coercion.  You do take the additional hit though as the production split numbers don't add up to raw production when you have a Coercion penalty.  So it works, it just appears that coercion has a very minimal impact (to no impact if your morale is significantly higher than your pop) on raw production, which needless to say is misleading.

 

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Some map generation bugs or issues:

1) Elerium does not generate when resource abundance set to "rare" or "uncommon." Not sure if this has been mentioned elsewhere recently, but it seems that there is still a problem with Elerium generation. IIRC, this has been a known issue at least since release... it would be nice to see this fixed.

(Some background for #1: I often play on insane maps, and the number of Durantium is obnoxious if resource abundance is set too high, but if you want Elerium, resource abundance has to be set at least to occasional...)

2) Antimatter generates as long as there are black holes, even if resource abundance is set to "none." As above, this has been a longtime known issue that would be nice to have fixed.

3) Pirate Bases always still present. At least on insane, even with pirate bases set to "none," I've always had at least one.

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I had a little time to check into causes/specifics regarding my above post:

1) It seems that for whatever reason, if the MinableNebulaRate is set to 25 or higher in the MapSetupDefs.xml document, no Elerium will be generated.

2) If the "Count" attribute under the MinableBlackholeChance attribute is set to zero under the "None" group in MapSetupDefs.xml, Antimatter will no longer be generated when the "none" frequency is selected for resources.

Another note: there is no difference (in the xml) that I can discern between the frequencies "uncommon" through "abundant" for the weight and count of Antimatter--the chances for Antimatter to be generated is weighted 50 for 1 Antimatter, 40 for 2, and 10 for 3.

This also means that at the "uncommon" frequency, every black hole will have at least one Antimatter.

3) The "PirateBases" attribute is set to zero in the "None" group, and so I'm not sure why pirate bases are present when the frequency is set to none.

I realize these aren't game breaking, but they are obviously bugs.

The Antimatter generation at "none" is an extremely easy fix (changing three integers in the xml), and I see no reason this cannot be done.

The Elerium generation may be more complicated, but even setting the MinableNebulaRate for "rare" to 24 so some Elerium is generated would be better than what is currently the case--and again, this is an easy xml fix ("uncommon" would need to be set to something lower too, like 22).

The Pirate Base generation issue may be even more complex, but I imagine it is something simple, like a minimum threshold defined at 1.

Hope that is helpful!

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Updated with a few more observations.

I think the problem with why I feel influence is going slowly is because I have the number of planets set to occasional and the turns feel very long because of the hassle with constructors.

Reply #13 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Reading this thread--not necessarily the first post, but the whole thread, made me realize this game still has a lot of functionality and UI problems.

Such is life.

It also appears that my medium missile ships and other prototype / resource using ships still aren't showing up. I haven't tested things, but it could be because I'm using an old custom race with a pirate ship template. That's silly.

Reply #14 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


Performance

- after 250 turns I noticed the game slowing down drastically and had to shut off sound to get some improvement, this may have more to do with my machine tough

Not just you, I have it on my machine too,  The problem is it takes 1 minute for me to make my moves, than I have to wait for another 3 plus minutes for my turn to process.  Overall it's taking me 3 times longer to play the game than it could.  Mind you a minute turn time would be acceptable 3 is sad :(.