General Impressions

What do you think?

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from GalCiv2 Forums

Over at Penny-Arcade Tycho mentioned he's wondering what people are thinking of the first beta of Galactic Civilizations II.

So our question is to you - what do you think? Overall. Obviously we have a long way to go and most of the game isn't there but, do you like what you see so far?

8,028 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yes.

It's shaping up to have a lot more potential than CG1 and that was good fun. Still a huge amount of work to do, especially when the game balancing and fun aspects kick in, but all the elements are there and the potential for a great game is already shining through.

What we can already see is that visually the new game will be beautiful, though admittedly I'll probably end up playing the entire game in tactical mode! Might be an idea to add an option to show battles at maximum zoom, so you can play at tactical mode but still see the beautiful graphics when a battle occurs. But the ability to have a visually stunning game is certainly there.

Another nice improvement is the planetary management. Gone are the fixed worlds and in are the new self built. Again there is lots to do over the next few months but the strategic aspects that this opens up are immense.


Paul.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I was so excited to load up the game the first day the beta came out. In fact I renewed TG.Net that day. My wife knew I was looking forward to it so she watched while I loaded it up. We were both blown away by the graphics. The rotating worlds, moons going around the planets *with* realistic shadows in relation to the sun. Amazing.

I really like the way the game starts out now in that I can see a couple closeby systems and already have planets that I can colonize. It feels much better then the "race" in GalCiv 1 in the fact I needed to find a yellow star. Maybe that will change in later beta's but I like it. Love the new planet system where you can colonize several in each system, even if it just has 2 usable squares. One thing that I would like to see is a way to check out the planetary tiles without colonizing it. So I can check out those 2 or 3 tiles and see if it's worth it to me. Kinda like a planetary survey.

The map manipulation with the zooms and stuff is great. Love it. I get very confused with the mini-map though. Even as I rotate my perspective on the main map, the mini-map doesn't. So now "up" isn't "up" on the mini-map. I can see this being very confusing if you go a couple days between game sessions and you don't remember which way up really is. Not sure what to do there but perhaps the mini-map can "flip" around on the 4 axis or perhaps a button near the mini-map to click to "reorient" the map (in other words as an option).

Ship design confuses me right now but I'll keep playing with it. The only game I've ever played before with ship design was SMAC. I'm from a Civ background, not a MOO one.

Research screen needs some work as you've stated. I've suggested something like Civ III where you can click on a far away tech and all the prereq's get auto selected. A recent suggestion was for a "research queue". I think this is a great idea in that you already have the queue mechanics in the game. Thus I can queue up research in any order I like (with prereq's in mind) and so forth. So if I click on "battleship tech" as my ultimate goal it would queue up all the techs needed to get there. I'll refer you to the other threads on research.

I'll post more if I think of stuff.

Keep up the good work!
Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The beta reliably crashes my computer (a dell Inspiron laptop). This occurs about the time the game map should be generated or first displayed. I had no troubles of this kind with Galciv I or the Altarian Prophecy expansion. I am sure I will have more interesting feedback when I can actually play the game!
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
This is an earlier stage than when I joined the GalCiv1 beta, but I've been having fun flying ships around!
Since the new update today I havn't had any crashes whatsoever!
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

tdhoufek: Unless you send us specific hardware info, we won't necessarily be able to know why it's crashing.

GalCiv II is a totally different engine than GalCiv I.

Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
tdhoufek, make sure you have the very latest video drivers for your card, as well as DirectX 9.0c. Also, only play the Humans. No other race is currently playable. Doing these thre things has fixed the majority of people that had crashes on New Game creation.

Brad... looks really good so far. The research screen needs lots of love. The ship design needs some attention to make it user easy, but overall... it's looking good. I think the planet screens have too many tile squares. Consider going to a smaller max. Would make those class 26 worlds look "very developed" instead of "mostly waste space".

Other then that...