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Ray K
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Allen, TX
Nov 1999
time: 23:27
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quote:
Starting with more colony ships is a major advantage in GalCiv, since it allows the AI to bogart more stars----- which is basically the entirety of early game strategy. In addition the AI apparently knows where all the good stars are, which greatly contributes to its bogarting ability. |
The AI knows where yellow stars are at, but it does not start with extra colony ships.
Click that 'purchase' button on Turn 1 and you'll figure out how they do it.
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Vanguard
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Monster Island
Apr 1999
time: 05:27
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Actually that is a distinctly sub-optimal way to do it. When you do it the optimal way you can have twenty colony ships produced in the first 15 turns or so.
But this brings up the other problem with GalCiv strategy: the game is usually either won or lost in the first 200 turns. After that you can still lose of course, if you get careless. But with sufficient protection the game becomes merely an endurance contest.
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Pyrkaige
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quote:
Originally posted by Vanguard
But this brings up the other problem with GalCiv strategy: the game is usually either won or lost in the first 200 turns. After that you can still lose of course, if you get careless. But with sufficient protection the game becomes merely an endurance contest. |
Ah yes, those horribly simple games that are won or lost in the first 200 moves... chess, anyone?
If a) you really know how to play the game, and b) play it at the higher difficulty levels, most of your points (including the one made above) are significantly negated or plain false; the reasons why have been listed in many posts in this thread already. If you think that GalCiv is just horrid compared to the wonders of SMAC, that's quite alright. But posting such nonsense is silly unless you actually have facts to back it up with, and know what you're actually comparing.
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Vanguard
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Monster Island
Apr 1999
time: 05:27
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Chess only has 200 moves. In GalCiv 200 moves is just the mid game. Actually victory is probably decided in the first 50 moves, but I wanted to leave some room for wonder building. Even allowing for that, I am probably grossly overestimating it.
And, yeah, I can defeat this game on hard settings. It is just a matter of exploiting the rather ridiculous economic system, which allows you to freely manipulate government spending so that non-money expenditures have grossly more value than paying cash for production. Just eliminate all expenditures except military and ramp up government expenditure to max and you can crank out ten times as many colony ships as you would if you paid for them.
Idiotic. But in all fairness to Galciv it is a staple dynamic of 4X games. SMAC is almost the same, iirc, although in SMAC there is at least the excuse that the governments are small factions trying to survive on a hostile planet.
And in SMAC there are other interesting things to do after you rabbit all over the map. In GalCiv, grabbing star systems early is the entire game. The entire power of your civilization flows from that. The only other important "strategy" comes before the game even begins, when you choose the populations bonus. But I assumed that that went without saying.
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bonscott
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West Michigan
Nov 2001
time: 00:27
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Vanguard,
The AI does *NOT* get any bonus colony ships to start. I can out-produce and out-colonize the AI almost everytime I've played so far.
In the bag in the first 200 turns? Yea right. My game before this one I thought I was doing awesome. Was in the center of a huge galaxy, had over 25 colonies and quite a large number of sectors under my control. I was quickly ramping up my influence and going for a tech victory. However, I kept choosing those dang PQ bonuses and ended up being evil (demonic some might say). Well, for the first time in many games, all the goody-goody AI's decided to form an alliance and wipe out my evil bad self (even in previous evil games they hadn't done that). Let's just say after being #1 in just about everything by mid-game and even having both the Yor and Drengn help me by giving me ships all the time and coming to my aid, the Goody Two-Shoes Crusade pounded me into the ground. It was a humbling first. And here I thought I had it "in the bag".
My current game is quite different. Again in the center of the galaxy on Large map. I got a good number of colonies but not a huge amount. Torians and Arceans very close to the right, Alterians way to the south, Drengin and Yor in the upper left. I somehow maintained great relations with everyone and have kept my trade routes open. Kinda funny being best buddies with both the Yor and the Torians at the same time. I pushed hard toward range and speed techs and made resources my priority. The only open systems were on the Alterian border but I somehow beat them to many of those good systems.
Drengin got a Draginol event and my adviser said we should wipe them out (I'm almost good in this game too). The Torians and Arceans contacted me a few turns later saying that we should all band together and wipe out the Drengin before they get too powerful. Pretty cool. I said sure and got some tech for my troubles (that was the last time I was behind in tech). I had the highest production so I pumped out transports and frigates and started heading the long way to the Drengin systems. By the time I got there my destabalization efforts paid off. I was totally suprised when just before I attached the Dregin gave up and gave me all their worlds. Wow, interesting.
In the meantime the Alterians were giving me crap so I turned around all transports and headed toward their systems. It took me a while but I pounded them into the ground. Now I'm back on top in tech and military. I have the highest culture but the Arceans are now making inroads in that department. Gotta keep an eye on them. So I'll ring their area with sensor drones and fortify the systems between us with starbases in case they get cranky (and yes, you *can* funnel their fleet into a killing zone if you perform hit and run tactics just right) and I'll run for beyond human. But, if some new random event gives them a ton of rangers or something, back to a military victory it will be. 
Even though I am in total control, I *know* I can still lose due to a random event or something I just wasn't counting on. Unlike Civ 3 or SMAC where there was no way you couldn't lose once you got a tech lead and controlled half the world. Now I love Civ 3 and SMAC, but GalCiv isn't even close to the same game as those.
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Draginol
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Vanguard:
The game is not won in the first 200 moves. Not in my experience. Long term strategies from the AI often take many hundreds of turns to bear fruition.
And players often come from behind to win or blow a large lead because of changing circumstances in the game. Trade in GalCiv is so powerful and can dramatically alter the balance.
The Drengin may seem to have a given game won, for instance, only to lose because the Arceans and Torians, who were their major trading partners, killed off their trade routes and send them to someone else.
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Vanguard
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Monster Island
Apr 1999
time: 05:27
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quote:
People who exaggerate wildly and talk smack without any proof should stick to the off-topic board. Not that anyone here is doing that, of course. |
I'll post here if I want to. If you don't friggin mind. Are you a moderator or something? No. I didn't think so.
If you don't like my posts then all you have to do is stop reading them. In fact, If you are such a sensitive fellow that you can't stand to hear people voice opinions that aren't your own then I suggest you stop reading now, because I am about to voice some.
First of all, I will admit that the AI does not start with more stuff than the player------ I read this on-line as something attributed to the dev and assumed it was authoritative. But apparently it was simply someone saying something that wasn't so. I apologize for repeating this misinformation. This does not mean, however, that I admit GalCiv is a great game or that its AI is good. In my opinion, neither is true.
Secondly, if you like the game I am happy for you. Enjoy. For me it is already "shelfware", to use the term employed here. I think it is simplistic and dull. Opinions differ of course, and you are entitled to yours. But I, for one, have no more desire to bash dreadnought after dreadnought for hour after hour.
As for whether the AI is especially good or not, I will say again that I have yet to see the AI do anything especially clever in movement or combat. And nothing I have seen here or in these forums leads me to believe that my experience is unusual.
The AI's main strategy consists of building dreadnoughts early and sending them into your territory. This does a very nice job on your defenses and leaves you open to invasion. But it only works because dreadnoughts are ludicrously overpowered compared to anything else in the early game except a fully built starbase or another dreadnought.
The AI does know that dreadnoughts are overpowered and it does build them quickly. Call this "great AI" if you like. I call it "making dreadnoughts ludicrously overpowered and teaching the AI to build them quickly".
Since there is really no way for the player to counter this strategy early, it, in fact, tends to work regardless of the AI's rather weak fleet tactics (spread out all over the map).
This sort of trick is not good AI. What it is is building a Golden Road into the game system for the AI and then telling them to follow it. It works, but only because the game system doesn't provide any method for you to counter it.
Like Civ3, GalCiv is not a strategy game. It is an anti-strategy game. The designer knows he can't design an AI that provides a good match for good human players----- it's impossible. So he designs the game so that the human player can't use his superior intelligence and learning ability in truly strategic ways. Strategic play is basically limited to the build queues, which is something the designer can anticipate and design the AI to handle. The rest of the game for the human player basically consists of tediously doing the same thing over and over again, something computers are basically better at than humans.
Draginol:
I beg to differ. I don't mean to be too hard on your game, which was fairly enjoyable all in all, for a while.
But in my experience early control of star systems is overly critical to success in this game. Each system you take is one more for you and one less for them. In addition it frequently allows you to box one or more civilizations into a corner, which marginalizes them and turns them from a potential enemy into a likely ally. Huge expansion also makes it much easier to exploit resources, to grab uber worlds and gives you more chances to "improve your luck" in the random colonial pop-ups and better control over alignment. All in all, huge early expansion greatly reduces the random factor in the game and gives you much more control over every aspect of later play.
Sure, random events can certainly play a major role in the game. But so what? They're random. And their effect is almost never better if you are smaller, unless you are the absolute smallest and then their effect is nowhere near enough.
It may be true that the AI has strategies that won't come to fruition for hundreds of years. But again, so what? The only real strategy you have to worry about is the one where they send dreadnoughts through your star systems with transports behind them. You can't do anything about any of their other strategies, so how does it figure into the strategy of the game? I mean, about the best you could do to counter any strategy on their part is to launch a massive invasion to knock out a key planet. But in my experience this is simply unrealistic at painful or above, and not worthwhile below that.
Trade warfare is, I admit, worthwhile and interesting. But frankly it is a hell of a lot of work and, as in the previous point, is hardly likely to cripple him at the harder levels and is basically unnecessary at the easier ones.
Last edited by Vanguard on 10-05-2003 at 05:38
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:27
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quote:
Originally posted by vee4473
I've been thinking about this, and come to the conclusion that graphics are only slightly less important than gameplay.
Because, if ONLY gameplay was the relevant factor, then why bother with anything more than a grid with colored dots representing the different ships and planets. (and maybe some would like that)
The best gameplay with only dots on a grid will bore, while at the same time full motion 3d rendered ships and weapons with no fun gameplay will die as well...
So, i gotta say that graphics and gameplay do indeed go hand in hand. One cannot really do well without the other...at least for me. |
Gameplay is a whole bunch of factors - UI, AI, replayability and configurability, game skill levels to match up to human players' capabilities, bugs and stability, and the underlying game design - what units, tech trees, etc. AI and beta testing are only small parts of that development budget.
With SMAC as an extreme example, the development team decided for no particular good reason to do a proprietary graphics rendering engine from scratch for the static graphics. The net result (not talking color palletes or unit pictures, but the engine itself) was nothing great, but a lot of time and development budget expended. You don't have to cut much from the graphics budget, or simplify much, to have a lot of additional resources to put into critical portions of your development budget.
It's not like you have a choice of all or nothing.
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Lemmy
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Bubblewrap
Dec 2000
time: 06:27
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quote:
Vanguard, how about you post a few scores on the Metaverse showing us all how you can beat it on the higher levels? Might add defense to your....erm... credibility issue.... at the moment. |
I'd like to see that too. From everything i've read so far, i'd say harlde played the game, and not even on the higher difficulty settings.
quote:
It may be true that the AI has strategies that won't come to fruition for hundreds of years. But again, so what? The only real strategy you have to worry about is the one where they send dreadnoughts through your star systems with transports behind them. You can't do anything about any of their other strategies, so how does it figure into the strategy of the game? I mean, about the best you could do to counter any strategy on their part is to launch a massive invasion to knock out a key planet. But in my experience this is simply unrealistic at painful or above, and not worthwhile below that. |
Wait, do you mean you lose your games against an inferior AI?
You don't have to go to war with those empires with Dreadnoughts you know. There is actual diplomacy involved in GalCiv, diplomacy that can help you avoid wars.
quote:
Like Civ3, GalCiv is not a strategy game. It is an anti-strategy game. The designer knows he can't design an AI that provides a good match for good human players----- it's impossible. So he designs the game so that the human player can't use his superior intelligence and learning ability in truly strategic ways. Strategic play is basically limited to the build queues, which is something the designer can anticipate and design the AI to handle. The rest of the game for the human player basically consists of tediously doing the same thing over and over again, something computers are basically better at than humans. |
Replace "strategy" with "tactical micromanagement" and you'rea bit closer to the truth.
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Lemmy
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Bubblewrap
Dec 2000
time: 06:27
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quote:
It also had far better AI. I know people believe, for some reason, that Galactic Civilizations has great AI, but as far as I can tell it doesn't. The reason it can beat you is because it starts with loads more stuff in a game where you can't do anything that the AI doesn't do as well (or, in some cases, better. It would be nice if they would explain what some of the stuff in GC does). |
Now let's really compare this to AC.
The AC AI on the highest setting gets huge production bonusses, and the player gets penalties. right?
The GalCiv AI on the highest setting only gets production bonusses, but i believe it's smaller as in AC, something like 50% bonus.
So with an even AI you'd say that AC is more difficult.
Yet beating the AC AI on the highest setting is, well, easy really. You can use the same strategy over and over again.
So far i haven't seen any proof that the GC AI is as easy to beat on the highest setting as the AC AI. There is even plenty of proof that the AI is actually hard to beat on the highest setting.
Except for some vague ingame examples, which noone here can verify, you haven't provided any convincing arguments that the GC AI really is as bad as you say
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vee4473
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New Jersey
Feb 2000
time: 00:27
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Gameplay is a whole bunch of factors - UI, AI, replayability and configurability, game skill levels to match up to human players' capabilities, bugs and stability, and the underlying game design - what units, tech trees, etc. AI and beta testing are only small parts of that development budget.
With SMAC as an extreme example, the development team decided for no particular good reason to do a proprietary graphics rendering engine from scratch for the static graphics. The net result (not talking color palletes or unit pictures, but the engine itself) was nothing great, but a lot of time and development budget expended. You don't have to cut much from the graphics budget, or simplify much, to have a lot of additional resources to put into critical portions of your development budget.
It's not like you have a choice of all or nothing. |
I think AC's 3D terrain WAS great for the type of game. Better than the same mountain/hill/desert etc... tiles scattered across the map in civ.
Maybe i'm alone.
And i really wasn't trying to break down gameplay into all of it's elements.
I just never understood how some people say that all they care about is gameplay.
I just wanted to voice my opinion that graphics are more important than alot of people think. Because graphics have the same power to increase or decrease "fun factor" (depending on how good it is) that gameplay has.
Of course, if you had to choose between good graphics/bad game or bad graphics/good game, you would most likely choose the latter.
Having said that, I still value graphics just as much and I don't think that if someone says that they think the graphics for a game could be better, then that means they don't value gameplay as much as the rest.
Because I have seen many posts criticizing Galciv's graphics (i'm not among them) answered with "i care more about gameplay". As if the guy posting the graphics opinion doesn't.
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Ellestar
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Russian Federation, Moscow
Feb 2003
time: 08:27
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1) Game design in GalCiv was really made simple to make AI a better opponent. But still in SMAC there is even less options IMHO because AI can't do anything at all.
2) Sometimes simple graphics makes gameplay even better. If someone remembers Dune 2, in-game graphics was bad of course, but everyone can see good pictures of units/buildings in Mentat menu, and picture of the new unit/building showed before every mission - so everyone was able to imagine *real* units. This is example of the outstanding game design IMHO.
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salamander
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Yea galcivs extremely bland in the feel department, just nothing to make you feel that you're not simply moving around cardboard counters. Diplomacy is very good, but the whole game concept makes it very easy to build an AI for as its really not very ambitious to begin with; no terrain, ships all the same, planets very generic. I really can't see how this game has gotten good ratings, but then I disagree with most reviewers and the crap (like this game) I've bought based on good reviews lately.
Alpha Centauri on the other hand was a great game and also got good ratings, anyone who appreciates science fiction and strat games would love it. Just played a game a few nights ago and it still holds up well. The story evolves with the techs in a cool abstract way so that every game was different in a sense but you were driven to see the conclusion anyway.
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Simpleton
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Edmonton, Canada
Nov 2000
time: 22:27
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Doom III is about as relevant to a 4x TBS discussion as is playing chess at Starbucks. 
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quote:
The question is, would the MoO3 gamers prefer more glitz and the same AI, or more challenging AI and the same glitz?
Stars! was positively early 90's VB in it's graphic envioronment, but it developed a very devoted following nonetheless, because the replayability rocked and the AI was solid. |
I agree that gameplay is the primary concern of all TBS'ers. However, graphics must have some significant importance. I recall when SMAC came out and people were harping on the dark graphics set. CIV3 also had/has its graphical critics. I submit that graphics are an important part of any TBS game and deserve attention.
For myself, the graphics of CIV3 are just right. They aren't flashy but they tell me what's happening. They're functional and pretty so the programmers struck a balance between gameplay and graphics. I would say that gameplay and graphics go together hand-in-hand. If this wasn't the case, why not just have numbers,symbols to represent the map/units and put all the effort into AI?
As far as those poor souls who play MOO3: Is there any glitz even there? The game seems like a travesty. Infogrames must be wondering where the money they gave quicksilver (or whoever designed the game) was spent. The graphics suck, the gameplay sucks, the AI sucks. Someone obviously let this project get out of hand rather than placing limits early on.
From the sounds of it, I don't think a patch or patch(s) can save the game.
However, to answer your question. Definitely, MOO3 players (those poor sots) would prefer gameplay over glitz. That being said, if the gameplay was awesome but the graphics totally ugly you would have heard many foul cries from those same players who say they prioritize gameplay, myself included.
Last edited by Simpleton on 14-05-2003 at 04:00
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Vanguard
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Monster Island
Apr 1999
time: 05:27
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Okay, as per the advice of Yin et alia, I have played quite a bit more GalCiv and I have also reinstalled SMAC and played some more of it.
Having done that I see no reason to change my original assessment. GalCiv is a decent 4X game which manages to leverage random events and an alignment system into a mildly interesting rehash of the Empire genre.
It is not the greatest TBS game of all time. That honor still resides with SMAC, which outclasses it in every way except, possibly, in build AI.
On that question, I will say that Galciv's build AI is very good at exploiting the intricacies of the tech tree and the weakness of the economic model. This is fine, I guess, although it is a little annoying not being able to know what tech does what.
I will point out, however, that this is not really so much "artificial intelligence" as it is just a script of what to research and what to build. It just looks intelligent because of the exceptionally arcane game system.
Other than that, the AI in GalCiv is nothing special. The military AI is dunderheaded, cheerfully willing to send an endless stream of capital ships to destroy themselves against a well defended starbase (like throwing eggs against a wall, to use a memorable phrase). The diplomatic AI is fine, but doesn't do things much differently than SMAC or Civ3. Additionally the effect of "diplomatic advantage" results in some extremely bizarre effects that heavily corrupts the entire diplomatic system.
Despite the claims put forth here that the AI is a more intelligent or realistic negotiator than SMAC, I have seen only a couple of instances where the AI is more amenable to negotiation. Just this morning I tried to negotiate a peace with the Drengins, with whom I had no particular quarral or ideological difference. I offered them an increasing set of inducements for peace with no luck, until, just to find out what it would take, I finally offered them all my money, all my trade goods, all my star systems and all my technology. That's right------ unconditional surrender of the leading power in the galaxy. Their response? "That doesn't sound like a very good deal to us." This is the AI touted to be superior to SMAC?
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04-05-2003 05:49
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