Crusade thoughts: campaign

from Stardock Forums

About the campaign

I've been building toward Crusade for over 20 years from a story point of view.

While Galactic Civilizations is a sandbox game -- you create your own stories -- I came from the world of Sid Meier's Civilization where civilizations had a history that helped provide a context for them.  I didn't want to have generic, randomly generated civilizations.  So when it came time to design Galactic Civilizations, I drew on a sci-fi universe I had been working on for many years known loosely as "Tales of the Terran Alliance".

The stories were titled:

  1. The Terran Alliance
  2. The Defender
  3. Revenge of the Defender
  4. Twilight of the Morning Star
  5. The Yor
  6. Corruption of the Shard

Now, in terms of the game and its campaign, the order has been swapped a little bit. 

The link above will take you to a blog I wrote 11 years ago about Galactic Civilizations II.

Corruption of the Shard

The premise of the Tales of the Terran Alliance was that the humans really were trying hard to put their warlike ways in the past and become diplomats.  In essence, United Earth was literally trying to model itself on the Federation from Star Trek (i.e. Star Trek, the TV show, exists in this universe and had a substantial influence in popular culture's idea of how human's should behave in the interstellar club).

Unfortunately, humans in real life aren't as ideal as the ones in Star Trek.  And when the humans found their good will betrayed by the Drengin Empire at the end of Galactic Civilizations II, they were savagely angry. 

The Drengin had suspected that the humans were more dangerous than the diplomatic facade they provided. But they really had no idea what they were dealing with.

At the end of Galactic Civilizations II (which came out 11 years ago) the main human fleet had escaped to a pocket universe where the Dread Lords had come from and Earth was imprisoned behind an impenetrable shield to keep everyone else out but also the humans in.

When GalCiv III was released we dealt with the humans coming out of the pocket universe with a bunch of ancient artifacts including an orb known as Curgen's Bane (or just "the bane").   With this artifact they were able to demolish the Drengin fleet surrounding earth and bring down the shield around Earth.

As it turns out, the humans on Earth weren't idle.  They had built a massive fleet during the time the shield was up and revenge was on their minds.  Now, add to that a Terran fleet armed with powerful weapons from the pocket universe and the galaxy was about to see a different side of humanity...a crusade.

29,127 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

....   reminds me some of the Man-kzin wars...

 

can't wait.

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Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Drool! Bring it on!!!

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Amazing, I am eagerly anticipating the expansion. 

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

back stories are always fun.  Thanks

 

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

So as some of you know, I removed the campaign from the Crusade expansion.  

There were two primary reasons:

1. It was very important to re-emphasize that GalCiv is a sandbox game and NOT a story based game.

2. I would prefer to see the story only given out at the end of the GalCiv III lifespan and Crusade isn't going to be the last expansion.

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Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Bummer. I do enjoy a campaign. And the sandbox as well.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Nah, I really only care about the sandbox, so I have no problem with this decision to drop the campaign.  My only caveat to this is that having some sort of tutorial-type campaign would really be a boon to new players (although I myself would never use this feature).

On a related note, this reminds me somewhat of the Rebellion iteration of Sins, whereby the factions splinter each driven by ideological pursuit and differences.  It's difficult to do in a 4x game, where the main emphasis is usually on balance, rather than differences, in this mindset the richer flavors of the game dealing with culture or ideology tend to get de-emphasized - sort of by default.  

All and all I think that GC has done a pretty good job of making the races 'different enough' even in pre-Arnor versions where they all had the same tech trees.  I think that most of this was accomplished by having the various factions pursue completely alternative paths to victory as opposed to the flat militarized-conquest-centric mechanics of most other 4x games.  The only one of these that I personally didn't like being Ascension (which I always turn off).  But I've won far more games by culture flipping than I ever have by conquest, which is a really nice change of pace than most other 4x's (I think for this reason I just haven't played that many hours on your competitors).

A lot of the types of features that people ask for tend to sort of exist along this line of thought: ability to add custom faction music, ships that cloak, etc.

Looking fwd to playing crusade - it's been looking really good on the streams.

-tid242

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 5

So as some of you know, I removed the campaign from the Crusade expansion.  

There were two primary reasons:

1. It was very important to re-emphasize that GalCiv is a sandbox game and NOT a story based game.

2. I would prefer to see the story only given out at the end of the GalCiv III lifespan and Crusade isn't going to be the last expansion.

That's disappointing, but I understand your reasoning. Thanks for the explanation.

Still, it does fell a bit odd that the biggest thing missing in Crusade is going to be the crusade.o_O