Wormholes/Stargates

icitly stated that GC2 won't have wormholes. I just cannot find it at the moment ... if I do, I'll edit the link in here.

The only thing I would like about wormholes would be the possibilty of a random event where you find another galaxy where the Founders are located and you obtain an automatic victory.

omewhere is the risk you take when you enter one.

What does everyone else think about this?

ploration. I'm not sure about fluctuating stability though, I'd rather have a definite safe/not safe status after I've risked my scout the first time.

I didn't play BOTF much; did the AI use the wormholes efficiently there?

MoO2 had wormholes, but the AI never seemed to use them. I wonder if another game has improved on this.

I don't really care either way about wormholes. My opinion: If they would complicate the AI in any significant way, don't bother.

e the only way the two of you can get to each other.

es that t doesn't fully use dilutes the AI quality imo a little.

would often be obsolete by the time they got to the other side of the galaxy. Poor AI.

Double post.

Psyringe, your argument is that the makers won't be able to improve the AI enough to handle a feature that other players enjoy. Instead, you should let the programmers determine if they can, as they would know that better. Instead we should look at whether or not such a feature is fun. Trust me, they might surprise you and just make an AI that can fully handle the strategic importance of a wormhole.

Personally though, I find wormholes to be both fun and annoying, fun when I can spread quickly, and annoying when I have too many and have too many fronts with different enemies. However, I do think the option in the start-up options to turn them off would be great, as I could turn them off when I get annoyed with them in another game. After all, it does get irritating when your empire is scattered in 8 disconnected parts all surrounded by your enemies. You end up with way too much battlefront to defend, and no clue where the next attack is coming from. (Another strategic issue that an AI would have to handle)

As I said in the other thread, BOTF really didn't utilize them. Note his explanation. The AI pathing would use them, if it could reach you in the first place. But it didn't leaverage them. Made them just another exploit for the player. The best decision the makers of BOTF made concerning wormholes was having them as an option. Turn the option off, get a better game.

Thought occurs, maybe include them with the on/off option so those of us who love them get them, and the die hards can turn them off. Also, they could make for a great feature to include in the possible multi player expansion.

I never really noticed that the AI in BOTF failed to use wormholes properly, but the fact it used them at all suggests that its possible for an AI to get it right. GC reputedly had one of the very best AI's in the genre, so reason suggests Stardock are the ones to make it happen if it can be done.

Yep Wormholes are a nice feature - but they shouldn't occure too often - makes them too important .
And as already stated by Zippo342 it is no fun to manage a civilisation broken up in little pieces all over the galaxy. So an on/off option or better a slider would be very nice so everyone could adjust the feature to their liking.

Btw i agree BOTF did a better job than anyone else handling this feature.

Well, this is my first post, but after reading everything, I'm impressed with the input. I personally like the idea of wormholes and stargates, but can understand the difficulty implementing them. Perhaps, to get the best of both worlds, we could do the MOO2 approach, where a segment of the game covers pre-FTL flight, then (like the opening cinema of GalCiv 1 states) FTL makes them obsolete.

One thing I never figured out though.... if Hyperdrive made stargates obsolete by allowing for instaneous travel between any two points, how come ships still take more than one turn to get from point A to point B? That is an awful lot of babystepping...

indeed, michael. but it also said that the stargates were costly and inefficient to use for colonization and exploration. Costly in the end. Hyperdrive is less costly and offers much opportunity for colonization and prosperity

Hyperdrive didn't allow for actual instaneous travel. It allowed for travel between any 2 points, at 10x the speed of stargates, for much much cheaper then building 2 star gates (one at your start point, one at your end point). Plus the convienence that you could just go, and not have to wait on the end point gate being built before you could travel there.

That's what the backstory clarifies.

My point exactly, Pilot

Star gates must be built at both the origin and the destination of a course between two points of travel. This, and their size, makes them expensive to build and maintain and contributes to their inefficiency. The reason hyperdrive made star gates obsolete is that it allows one to get to places in the galaxy that are not serviced by star gates at less expense (the hardware is smaller than the ship, goes with the ship, and is much simpler and easier to maintain).

Travel with hyperdrive is not as instantanious as star gates, but much more of the galaxy is available for exploitation.

On the other hand, if your empire is somewhat spread out, it would be nice to have instantanious travel between points that could be considered major hubs. Star gates or artificial worm holes would work nicely for this, but IMHO they would have to be quite expensive in order to maintain any real balance in the game.

Travel with hyperdrive is not as instantanious as star gates, but much more of the galaxy is available for exploitation

Brad has stated, repeatily, time and time again, that hyperdrive is TEN TIMES FASTER then star gate travel.

Clue in for instant teleporter fans: the original star gates are much, much slower then a ship traveling with hyperdrives.

So, if it takes a hyperdrive ship 1 week to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri, it would take a gate traveller 10 weeks to make the same trip, if there were star gates at both ends.

THAT"S why everyone tore down their star gates. Not that it was inconvinent and limited your destinations. Having instaneous travel between the well established worlds would have been enough for them to keep them, considering how much distance was between some Gates. They were taken apart because the first hyperdrive equipped ships could make the same travel in 1/10th of the time!

I can understand people wanting intant teleportation between two points (especially your main worlds). Please remember, the starting star gates did not provdide that functionality. It provided extremely slow transport between select points, and was only used because they had no faster alternatives. It took them years and years and years to travel between the more distant gates. Forget about star gate tech, and start focusing on something else. Like the multi-dimensional tech which can open unstable portals between locations...

I can understand people wanting intant teleportation between two points (especially your main worlds). Please remember, the starting star gates did not provdide that functionality. It provided extremely slow transport between select points, and was only used because they had no faster alternatives. It took them years and years and years to travel between the more distant gates. Forget about star gate tech, and start focusing on something else. Like the multi-dimensional tech which can open unstable portals between locations...

You really love your back story stuff don't you? I'm not at all bothered what the rapid transport 'gate' thing is called, I just want something that takes on that role. Call it a quantum catapult for all I care, I'm interested in an option to create galactic shortcuts as I hate ordering ships to embark on galactic marathons across my empire in the late stages of the game.

I'm still keen on the idea of being able to exploit natural wormholes in the form of a resource which you could use to create the start and end points of the shortcut. I think that should cut down on the players ability to use the tech to unbalance the game (as the AI will never be quite as good as a human at situating its routes), and will force the player to make the best use of the map's layout they can. The map would influence the player's tactics rather than allowing them to simply reshape the world to their whim.

i agree, ugleb.

One thing that bothers me is that in galciv 1, you can exploit quantum mechanics and use that for speed of your ships. would that not enable instantaneous travel if you folded space and punctured it? Sure, my ships have 230 or so parsecs to travel, but quantum jumps are instantaneous. We should have a technology that enables you to chose a point anywhere in the galaxy to 'jump' to. Just like artificial wormholes and quantumspace. thoughts?

The bug bear is people saying "STAR GATE". We have that term established as the super slow thing in GC that gets replaced. That term seems to get people aggravated, because they start with Star Gates tech. GC Star Gates are not instant teleporters, and that invariable gets the conversation sidetracked because people think it should (it is in the movies and TV, after all). It's not a matter of back story to me, it's a matter of keeping the convo focused on gaining instant travel technology at some point in the game, and what ways that could be implemented to make GC more fun to play.

Quantum Catapults are nice term. They put into my mind the image of a ship going from the QC facility, to some square within a set distance of tiles. You know, a "toss". I suppose if you gained a larger throwing range in steps as your tech advances, that would make it worthwhile on the bigger maps. You could then have a few stations scattered out through your empire, to max toss your ships. Not instant teleport anywhere, but certainly something that you can build up. I wonder what category of Star Base types a QC base would fall into?

Oh Bother!!! This discussion is getting very convoluted.

I found the statement from Brad that travel using hyperdrive was 10x faster than star gates, but the idea that you could take a hyper drive trip from the vicinity of one star gate to another star gate faster than traveling the same route using the star gates just seems to be beyond my sense of what is credible.

That is to say:
It seems to me that any theory that applied to hyper drives would also have to apply to star gates. That is, the theory of how to fold space. It also seems that THE ONE major factor in the speed of hyperspace travel, whether by ships or by star gates, is the power available to accomplish the folding of space to produce that speed. That is, the more power you use to fold space, the closer together you could move two points in space. Since star gates are so much larger than ships (and would naturally have so much more in the way of power generation capacity) it would seem that the advantage would go to the star gates (only when considering a route serviced by a pair of star gates).

Oh Bother!!!! Here we go again.

For a neat web site about hyperspace theory, take a look at http://www.deoxy.org/hs_phys.htm But be careful about using the link directly from here. This forum doesn't seem to construct the link correctly.