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Any decent and recent (like within the last 18 months) offerings in this genre that anyone is aware of?

Must be turn based!

Gold standard: http://www.galciv.com/  (GalCiv 2 is due out soon, as well - buy now and get beta) Good but kinda sterile. Excellent AI.

http://www.malfador.com/ - follow SE IV link. Not as polished as GalCiv but heavily moddable.

http://www.kerberos-productions.com/sots.shtml - Sword and the Stars - not out yet but probably will be the one that finally dethrones MoO 2.

FreeOrion 0.3? (http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1235) It's a long way from complete, but if you like that sort of game, maybe you can give some feedback to them.

GalCiv is really the best out there that I know of. GalCiv 2 should be a lot of fun.

Galciv is what you're looking for.

If you're willing to wave the 18 month requirement MOO2 was probably by far the star of the genre, but you probably already know that.

Yes, I played a lot of it.  I even liked MOO 3 a little bit even if that does make me a heathen.  I have gotten into Eve since I posted this and although it's not a 4x it's filling my cravings atm.  I will probably pick up the new Galciv once I am bored with Eve, I read a few of the dev diary things and it sounds cool.

The one warning I'd give about galciv, and this probably doesn't apply to galciv 2 as much, is that it feels a bit generic.  You can only play as humans, the enemy civs aren't very different from each other (they act different from each other in the same way that civ4 civs act different from each other, but they pretty much are the same as humans as far as ships, mechanics, etc).  Also the ships are just standard ships, you can't customize them or anything.  Planets are purely based on quality rating rather than having terrain types, etc.

Galciv is solid and fun but it doesn't really push the sci-fi setting a lot, you kind of get the impression that you could replace the planets with tiles and ships with ground units and it'd pretty much be the same game.

From reading around about GC2, this seems to be one of the main things they're trying to address, so hopefully it'll be a bit better in that regard.

Stardock couldn't afford to put anything else in GalCiv. There's a pretty interesting article by Brad Wardell on Apolyton talking about GalCiv and MOO3 and the plans for GalCiv II.

http://galciv2.net/4/166/292/

If you thought GalCiv was generic, well he agrees with you:

"In my opinion, it was a dry, soulless, generic strategy game in many respects"  :hello_kitty:

Anyway, looks like all the things that he wanted to put in GalCiv but couldn't due to budget will now be in GalCiv II.


Random related strategy game news: Paradox is going to make Europa Universalis III to be released in Q1 2007. Something to look forward to.
http://www.paradoxplaza.com/news.asp?ArticleID=272&Page=News

That makes sense - hopefully Galciv 2 will ride the Civ4 wave and do pretty well this time around.  It seems like as good a time as any to put out a strategy game right now.

EU3?  That's good news (I'd rather see victoria 2 but that has 0 chance of happening unfortunately, maybe they'll lengthen the timeframe a bit).

I think I read they're starting EUIII in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople and ending it around Napoleon's time.

Victoria 2 would be great but I'd give it even less than a 0 chance of it happening if that's possible.... Have you tried the VIP (victoria improvement project) mods? Good stuff, changes a lot of POP rules, adds more events, etc.

It's not really a classical 4X spacegame, but Empire at war is rebellion made by command and conquer. A fun space strat game with pretty good space combat. Try the demo, it shows the gameplay quite well.

Galciv2 comes out next fortnight. Check www.galciv2.com and read some of the dev articales from the last month, particaly the one posted yesterday.

Empire at War is very fun, unfortunately, it's more RTS than what he's looking for.

I can't think of any recent offerings that I like. The only two I play semi-regularly still are MOO2 and Alpha Centauri. (Civ in space)

Galciv 2 is actually up for download right now as we speak.  If you haven't preloaded it now's probably not the best time to try the download version, but for those that preordered from stardock check your stardock central.

Fuck all MMOGs for a few weeks, that thing is sweet! Thats what MOO3 should have been.

Did you download it?  These are my absolute favorite type of games, but after MOO3 touched me in a bad place, I'm scared to love again.  Waiting for the reviews.

It seems good so far.  I still think the races are a bit generic, but oh well.  I remember reading somewhere that you could freely add minor races, so hopefully modders will get to work on that.

Otherwise it's fun.  The ship design is pretty much straight from moo2, the planet development is actually fairly innovative, the tech tree seems improved.  I can't really tell that much about it in an hour, but the signs are good.

What's this game about?

MrHat, it is a classic space empire building game. Start with one planet, colonize the galaxy, rule the galaxy.

Downloaded it and fooled around way too long into the night with it.

The races are a bit generic. They are just different in speech patterns and the picture you are shown about them. You can customize the race boni of the race you choose (10 points to pick, but no disadvantages and the advantages are all percentage boni and no fancy stuff. You can also choose the style of your spaceships. And which political party your leader belongs to. That gives Boni as well, as long as you don't lose elections. Basically the same as in Galciv 1.

The planet buildup has vastly improved. You still have planets of variable quality, but all habitable planets now have a finite number of tiles you can build on. Some of those tiles give boni to certain buildings, so Galciv2 asks for specialization. No more building everything everywhere. Soil Enhancement and Habitat Improvement still exist, but instead of raising overall quality of the planet they give you additional tiles to build on.

Spaceship building has also improved by leaps and bounds. You can either take the standard templates or build new designs from the scratch, starting with the hulls you already have developed up to engines and weapons. You have numerous mount points where you can put all those things, together with flair pieces like fins and wings that have no value except making your ships look the way you want. You can really go crazy there. The non-flair pieces are limited by payload. You have three offensive technology and three defensive technologies and you have to choose. So if you go all beam defensive and your enemies decide they go rockets, be prepared to pay dearly if fights break out. I don't know how standard designs compare, I had too much fun building my own ships. Strategic value and eyecandy in one. You can also put fleets together. The better your logistic value, the larger the fleets. Small ships need less logistic points than large ships, naturally.

Space Stations have to be specialized now as well. You can go either military, mining or cultural influence. The days of do-it all spacestations in every sector are over.

Ground combat is still simplistic. Your armies on the one side. enemy armies on the other side. Choose between straight ground combat, chemical warfare or informatin combat. Random number assigned to both, see who is standing last.

There are various victory conditions. Allied Victories, nuking everybody else into oblivion, or letting everybody crave your hamburgers enough that they willingly submit themself to your rule (Cultural influence victory). And my personal favourite, the transcending to a higher plane of existence (technological victory).

Since I went for militaristic games last night to test out the ship designs and ship-to-ship combat I don't have much to say on the diplomatic front, but things like the United Nation of Planets are still in the game if you research them, the backstabbing and selling useless obsolete spaceships to the losing side of a conflict between other races to keep everybody occupied is still there.

GalCiv eh? TIME TO GET SOME.

This is somewhat tangential but the story of MOO3 is basically the ultimate game-dev fuckup story. It's like a grand MMORPG fuck-up only not in a MMORPG.

Short version: Game is designed by MOO enthusiast who creates reams of design docs. (Kids: More isn't always better) Game is delayed a few times. Then, a few weeks from release someone says "wait, this game isn't fun AT ALL!" All the fun that was supposed to magically appear in the last 2 weeks of development just didn't appear. Designer gets fired (long overdue) and forum kiddies complain that he was the 'vision' and without him the game was doomed. Game comes out, it sucks.

It's a great story for illustrating tons of mistakes:

Guy in charge who had no clue.
Tons and tons of useless design docs - wrong scope and detail level.
Instead of thinking the core game should be fun from day 1 they had no expectation of when if ever it should be fun. (And it never was)

Hmm, that sounds somewhat interesting...got any links that go into detail?


I'm still waiting for a Simtype game where you make video games.

Official Homepage (http://www.galciv2.com/)

Somebody could use that fancy frontpage here to post something about it in the next few days. I would but I'm a cowardly non-native speaker.

The plural of bonus is not boni, boner.

Its how I learned latin declinations in school. If you don't like them the way they are, I suggest you discuss that with my Latin teacher.

Edit: Yes I know, English bastardized that word and gave it a different plural. I go with the Latin original. I suggest you live with it, I'm a fucking elitist.

Your fucking boni make my head hurt.  I got news for you, english = alive, latin = dead.  I could write shit in here in other languages too, just because I USED A LANGUAGE OTHER THAN ENGLISH to write it and write it correctly in that other language doesn't make it proper english.  Prick.

I suggest you don't read my postings if they hurt you. My head hurts when I read bonuses, but I don't cry about it. Get a grip or run to your mommy you sissy!

sorry to interupt the flamewar guys, but I'm curious. Is the Metaverse just a place to keep score or is it GalCiv's multiplayer component? This game looks good but I'm wondering if it has any multiplayer options. So far it looks like the answer is mostly no.

Writing in another language doesn't mean you are smart or more correct.  It only means you are writing in another language.  It's not a difficult concept.  Latin != English, regardless of where the root word came from 1600 years ago.

The worst thing about MOO3 is that I could see there was the nucleus of a fun, interesting game in there, hidden very deep under huge layers of unremovable, soul destroying spreadsheets.

I'll probably pick up GCII soon, once I hear something about the late game/high difficulty settings.

I see, you think I want to seem smart to you guys and therefore you start a flamewar. The fucking day I want to look smart for you guys is the day I reached my personal low point. Sorry to disappoint you. My first language is German, where its Bonus-Boni, the original latin is Bonus-Boni, and I would have had no problem whatsoever admitting it was a honest mistake purely because I am used to writing Boni and never ever looked up if English changed that mold. But I really don't like your attitude in this matter. Me taking the time after a short night giving my impressions about this game for you guys, and your only comment (as the one originally asking the question) is flaming me because you don't like a plural I use? Sincerely, fuck you. I wouldn't press that point with everybody else, I'm the nonconfrontational type. But at the slight hope you are really pissed off by this:

Bonus - Bona - Bonum - Boni - Bonae - Bona


Sorry Riggswolfe, seems to be single player only.

Wow, Tebonas became an elitist asshole for a minute there.

PS: you're typing in english

I went to the store to get GalCiv2 today and they told me it was having issues being shipped to various retailers and might not be in store for a day or two.

Man. I hate downloading games too.

Anyone else playing this?  Bought and downloaded this yesterday - went for the nice 'mail-a-box-and-cd-to-me-anyway' option because my hard drive gets formatted every so often.

So far it seems to almost exactly what people expected MoO3 to be, and some parts are ripped straight from MoO2, such as the ground battle screen and tech process, and even many of the star system names are the same. 

I wasn't in the beta and I haven't gotten to the endgame, but I feel the urge to make some bullet points.
~ Diplomacy is fairly standard but well done, although it does suffer from the Civ issue of the AI trading techs much more fairly between themselves than with you. 
~ Planets now have a limited number of build spots - so you can't just build every improvement on every planet.
~ Custom ship design is simple and effective.  There's a rock/paper/scissors thing for weapons and defense, so you have to pay attention to what your opponent is building.
~ No multiplayer.  Boo.
~ The alien races are extremely lackluster, with pretty much all of them looking like humans in rubber masks.  Except the Altarans - they look exactly like humans.  There is a big amount of customizing that can be done with the races stats - I almost think its too much, as none of the races seem too different than each except for the 'good at research/good at diplomacy/good at whatever' things.  Even the robot race has to grow food exactly like everyone else (which is explained with one lame sentence in the backstory). 
~ On medium or smaller maps, it doesn't really feel like a space game.  The stars are spread out over a flat grid, and sometimes the distance between a star and its planet and a star and the next star isn't nearly as big as you'd expect.  Larger maps feel a lot more 'spacy' to me. 

I'm enjoying it a lot so far.  Will post more once I complete a game or two.   

Yea, the multiplayer is what kept me from immediate purchase. Or should I say, the lack of multiplayer.

Still playing it. The negative points you make are pretty similar to my own discoveries, but it still is incredibly fun to play. I really like how differently you playstyle can vary from one game to the next and how they are still valiable winning strategies if you do it right. One day i wanna kick the crap out of all those xenofuckers with rockets up their ass, the next I sit in my delicately woven web of diplomatic alliances and crippling of evil races by United Planets gaggle rules.

I'm really enjoying this now too, the only things I have noticed are mainly due to my lack of knowledge rather than faults with the game, but I wish they were better explained:

1. I'm not sure how exactly to guage influence yet, I haven't noticed my inf. starbases or embassies really having much of an effect.
2. I'm not sure what the benefit of having high pop is other than taxes, it seems to only effect that and not production.  So there are basically 2 types of planets I build: 

Production/research:  1 Farm, all others manufacturing or labs based on need

Cash cow:  3+ farms, econ buildings, morale buildings

3.  Is there any point in not just spamming colony buildings like crazy in the first few turns with your starting cash?  I had a really hard time with normal or better AI until I figured out to do this.  It sort of seems lame to just send out random colony ships with no escorts in the early game.

4.  There seems to be a point where I build all the buildings I want and social production is wasted, if I could just automatically kill all social producion on a planet at that point it would be nice.  I can focus research or military but usually I just want to kill social and have the other two functioning.

You need income to convert your manufacturing and research capacity into usable "points" (1 BC -> 1 MP/RP) so it doesn't help to build lots of manufacturing and research buildings if you don't have the income to "power" them.

That's pretty much the standard strategy in these 4x games (including games like Civilization) -- colonize as many planets as you can afford to and reasonably defend as quickly as possible. Getting a head start over your opponents gives you a big advantage throughout the rest of the game.

If you aren't building any social buildings it's supposed to not spend any BC converting your social manfacturing capacity into social points on that planet (as documented in the manual) but the planet overview doesn't show your social points in parens like it does your military points if you aren't building any ships. I'm not sure if that's just a display bug or if it's actually wasting your BCs. Unfortunately Stardock has the obnoxious requirement that you have to create an account just to download patches and their stupid account creation system won't send me an account verfiy email even though I tried three different email accounts so I can't test out the patch to see if that fixes this bug.

Well even though it's not taking BC it's still taking production capacity isn't it?  I could be using those on research or military instead if I have plenty of money? Basically what I've been doing is just putting the social slider to 0 when all my planets are full, but I'd like to be able to do this more on a planet by pllanet basis so my first 2 or 3 don't have industrial capacity going to waste while the others are developing.


Or am I just misunderstanding things and the sliders on the screen just affect how much money goes into things rather than industrial capacity devoted to those things?   If I'm at 100% funding does that mean that everything is fully funded and the bottom 3 sliders don't matter, or do the bottom 3 refer to industrial capacity and so putting 100% funding and 100% to research means my whole civ production capacity iis completely dedicated to research?

What you can do on per planet basis is to devote the planets resources mainly to research by highlighting it on the colony screen. Research goes up. Social and Military production both go down.

And yes, the way you described it is how the slider works. 100% research on the slider means no more social and military production galaxywide (I regulary put it at 98%/1%/1% in the research victory endgame).

Spamming colony ships is pretty much the beginning strategy to go. Everybody is still in exploration mode and usually the AI doesn't crank up Troop transports to attack your colonies. Grab all you can and consolidate the borders.

The later which is totally counter-intutitive given the upper funding bar. You would think at 100% funding all your manfacturing and researching points were being "spent" but they aren't. It's also extremely counter-intutitive that the research funding slider affects the military and social sliders/spending amounts since the research points come from a completely separate pool. Not one of the better designed features, IMO.

Hmm, am I missing something here?

Tax rate: How much of your citizens money is given to you.

Second slider: How much of that money is used to channel into Social/Military/Research. The rest is given to you as cold hard cash.

Subsliders: How those funds are distributed among those three areas.


Where is the counterintuivity?

Because the vast majority of your research points come from entirely seperate structures than military/social points (structures like your capital being the rare exceptions). If you max out the research slider that means all your manufacturing structures are idle which makes absolutely no sense when you have a separate funding slider. Why can't I increase the funding slider to max out both my manufacturing and research buildings (and then split the manufacturing between military and social)? In other words at any given time you always have excess capacity that you can't use even with the Industry funding at 100% which is a stupid way to build an economy.

No those are independent as it states in the manual:
If you are funding your Industry at 100% that doesn't mean you are spending all your tax as Industry. The 100% means you are spending some fraction (not 100%!!!) of your total Industry on manufacturing and research points.

Never read the manual up to now, I'm afraid you might be right. Thats really counterintuitive then.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about for those of you at home scratching your heads wondering what we're blithering about.

This is what my starting planet summary looks like at the beginning of second scenarino in the campaign: Planet Summary (http://www.pandadesigns.com/games/galciv2/galciv2_planet_sum.jpg)
Notice how my Industry at the bottom is at 24 mp or 24 manufacturing points and my Research is at 24 tp or 24 technology points. It costs 1 BC (billion credits) to convert an mp or tp into something usable. Also note that I'm not building any ships or building any social strutures at the moment (though you can't see that in this screen) since it's the start of the scenario.

Here's what the default Domestic Policy screen looks like: Domestic Policy (http://www.pandadesigns.com/games/galciv2/galciv2_policy_default.jpg)
My Industry spending is set to 50% and my allocation between military (used to build ships), social (used to build planet structures) and research are each at 1/3. If you look at the Expenses in the upper right you can see that 4 BC is being put into Research which means that planet (since it's the only one I own at the moment) is converting 4 technology points into usable research. How does it know to spend 4 BC on research? That's a very good question which unforunately also reveals that there is a serious bug in the game. Oops. Let's move on to the next example and I'll come back and explain these numbers.

Here's what the Domestic Policy screen looks like with Industry Spending at 100% and Research at 100%: Domestic Policy, Research 100% (http://www.pandadesigns.com/games/galciv2/galciv2_policy_research_100.jpg)
As we can see we've maxed our tp production (research production) by spending 24 BC (plus 1 BC for structure maintenance) which sort of makes sense except of course that we now have 24 mp sitting idle even though our Industry Spending bar is maxed. Those of you paying really really close attention may have noticed that in the Planet Summary screen the mps are listed under the "Industry" category so 100% of Industrial spending = 24 mp which is clearly why it's capped 24 BC! (+1 for maintenance) except we're talking about research and tps here not mps so why is the slider called Industrial spending and how come I can't max both?

Here's what the Domestic Policy screen looks like with Industry Spending at 100%, Research at 50% and Military at 50%: Domestic Policy, Military 50%, Research 50% (http://www.pandadesigns.com/games/galciv2/galciv2_policy_military_50.jpg)
Hmm...why did our total Industry spending drop down to 13 BC even though the slider is still at 100%? That's because we aren't building any ships so anything we've allocated to Military doesn't get spent converting mp into usable military production (as documented in the manual).

Here's what the Domestic Policy screen looks like with Industry Spending at 100%, Social at 50% and Military at 50%: Domestic Policy, Social 50%, Research 50% (http://www.pandadesigns.com/games/galciv2/galciv2_policy_social_50.jpg)
Okay now our Industry spending is back up to 25 BC and is evenly split between Social and Research except...we aren't building any Social buildings. That's a bug (or at least it contradicts the manual).

So going back to the default Policy screen the 8 BC in Industry spending is from the max BC it can spend at 100% (which is 25 BC in this case) divided by 2 (since it's at 50%) times 2/3rds since no BC is being spent on Military which gives us the 8 BC. Make sense?

Finally note how in the domestic policies the amount I'm spending on my Industry at 100% does not match what I'm generating as Income. That's because as I said in my previous post they are not linked even though the placement of the controls in the UI sort of suggests that they are.

Edit: I did a quick test to try and clarify what the Industry capacity spending slider is based on. I built a Basic Lab on my otherwise default starting planet to add 5 tp (+24 tp from capital = 29 tp total). Now if I crank the Industrial spending slider to 100% and set research to 100% it'll spend 30 BC (29 BC for the 29 tp +1 BC for Maintenance). If I split the spending 50% Social, 50 % Research then it'll allocate 12 BC to Social (50% of the max Industry of 24 mp), 14 BC to Research (50% of the max Research rounded down), +1 for Maintenance.

So then am I right in that there's no way (say if I'm just drowning in money) to fully fund all of my research and industrial capacity to 100%?

That's very strange.


Edit - I just said it a strange way too, what I mean is that I would think there would be a seperate slider for research spending from 0 to 100%, then the bottom two industry sliders would choose between social and military.

AFAIK that is correct. I haven't played all that much yet so maybe there's something way down the tech tree that changes this behavior but I doubt it.

Yes, yes it is.

I'm assuming they did it this way for some currently unexplained gameplay reasons but yeah the way I would setup the UI would be to have one slider set the funding for your mps, one slider set the funding for your tps and one slider to split the mps between military and social. That would reduce the number of sliders from 4 to 3 and it would be less confusing in general.