GalCiv II: Dark Avatar delayed

[Yegolev]

Seems like I am now on some sort of secret Stardock mailing list.  No idea why, except maybe the CGW guys told them how important I am to the gaming industry.  Or they send it to anyone that bought something from them.

## Dark Avatar Delayed ##

First the bad news, we have delayed the release of the expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II until this upcoming February (the one-year anniversary of the release).

The good news is that the reason we've delayed it is because we decided to add additional features.

We will be having a public beta in November for everyone who has pre-ordered the game.

You can find out more here:
http://www.galciv2.com/darkavatar

[Sky]

Ah, I gotta get GalCiv2.

I think NASA needs to drop space exploration and figure out a way to move our planet deeper into space without reducing the amount of sunlight we gather. An extra four hours a day, minimum imo.

[Yegolev]

Are you off work today, or are there no smoke detectors in the restrooms?

[sinij]

I love GalCiv2, only beef I have is overly simplistic tech tree and lack of ship toys a-la-MoO2.

[Yegolev]

An improvement mentioned in the notes is a greater variety of things to put on ships.  I suspect these will be decorative, but one can always hope.

[Trippy]

Ah, I gotta get GalCiv2.

I think NASA needs to drop space exploration and figure out a way to move our planet deeper into space without reducing the amount of sunlight we gather. An extra four hours a day, minimum imo.

Somebody wrote about this once but I can't remember who. It was one of those "thought experiments" about what to do when our sun starts to die. Since the moon and sun just so happen to be about the same relative size when viewed from the Earth the idea was to turn the moon into a new light source and somehow push the Earth out of orbit from the sun (thereby avoiding getting destroyed when the sun expands) and it would be free to travel about the galaxy.

[Jain Zar]

I bought Galciv 2 but haven't installed it.  I thought it had actual tactical ship combat.  Instead its just construction.

Is it so wrong for someone to basically remake Moo2?

That's all I want.  Tactical TURNBASED capship combat with some Civ elements in between getting my Captain Gloval on.

Sheet, just upgrade Moo2 with higher rez and make it XP compatible. 

[Daeven]

Stellar Empires V is comming. Bigger tech tree, tactical combat, lots and lots of star systems....

GalCiv2's shelf life is approaching its expiration date.

[sinij]

Linky? Also why do you think it will not be bugy suck choke-full of broken promises at release?

[Sky]

Linky?

http://www.google.com/

 

edit: Of course, it would have helped if Daeven had gotten the name right :P

[Daeven]

Linky? Also why do you think it will not be bugy suck choke-full of broken promises at release?

Because SE IV was a thing of beauty? Unlike the hematoma that was MOO 4?

edit: Space Empires 5. My bad. And it's out now. Time to burn some discretionary income.

http://www.malfador.com/

[sinij]

Linky?

http://www.google.com/

 

edit: Of course, it would have helped if Daeven had gotten the name right :P

For being mean I volunteer you to take one for the team and buy it.

[Jain Zar]

I looked at that Space Empires 5 site.  It says REAL TIME COMBAT.

NO.  TURN BASED OR FUCK OFF THANKS.

[Yegolev]

NO.  TURN BASED OR FUCK OFF THANKS.

What he said.

[Daeven]

Of course, you didn't download the demo. Y'all just read three words and wrote it off.

Go go indy dev houses!

Twits.

*points at the big 'stop' and 'play' buttons and ponders the implications*

Daeven, who may get off his ass and write a review sometime this weekend.

[Yegolev]

I am one of those weirdos that doesn't count pausable-real-time as turn-based.  You might as well try arguing religion with me.

[sinij]

There is no god!

[Yegolev]

Yes, there is.  He's just waiting for you to use all of your AP and click END TURN.

[Jain Zar]

Of course, you didn't download the demo. Y'all just read three words and wrote it off.

Go go indy dev houses!

Twits.

*points at the big 'stop' and 'play' buttons and ponders the implications*

Daeven, who may get off his ass and write a review sometime this weekend.

Oh you mean like the shitty combat in the Baldur's Gate games which hampered, not improved what could have been a fantastic RPG series, but instead was merely pretty good?

Pausable real time is still shit.  Its just shit where you get time to see what the fuck is going on, yet slowing the game down to turn based in any fight you aren't guaranteed to win anyhow cept with more micromanagement.

At least in Advance Wars and Super Robot Taisen OG (turn based games) when I tell unit X to move to point A and shoot enemy B IT FUCKING DOES WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO.

[Stephen Zepp]

Using the 30 day free trial of Torque Game Builder, any halfway decent programmer willing to spend some time learning TorqueScript could re-implement much of MOO 2 sans flashy graphics (and if you get an artist with a lot of free time, you may even get bling).

And that's for free (until trial period is over), so get crackin!

PS: Sorry to be self-promoting so much recently--but honestly the tools are there, go use them!

[Yegolev]

I would give it a shot, except I have made pathetic progress in every mod I have attempted.  Implementing a full game is something I will do upon retirement.

[Tebonas]

Played the demo, still like Galciv2 better. In fact, I preordered Dark Avatar after playing this demo.

[bhodi]

GalCiv2 is pretty good, I have a few complaints that I wish they'd fix.

There is no "autobuild, best parts, tiny w/ lasers" type of ship --- either you take the exact same tech path every game and build the same (saved) ship blueprints, or you make a blueprint for every single two laser scout ship depending on your fastest engine. If you just researched warp drive, guess what, you need to design a ship with it. This becomes annoying very quickly. You'll have a transport and colony ship blueprint for every type of engine you own.

There's no 'autobalance' for tax versus happiness. Since the people *love* you at 100% (you get extra bonuses, double population growth IIRC) and only think you're pretty good at 99%, you end up micromanaging every turn to keep it there. It'd be nice to have it automatically ramp up or ramp down your tax rate to keep it there.

It's still centered around he who settles more planets wins. If you get 2 and your opponent gets 3, he will win. Not as bad as the first game, but still bad.

Single player campaign gimps parts of the tech tree. It's annoying if you prefer economy wins, for example, because trade routes are disabled.

The way they lump and divide in civic management are obnoxious. You have a galaxy wide % slider for cash invested, % are divided among military (ship building) civic (planet improvements) and research. This means that it's much more efficient to have all your planets doing one thing; all to planet improvements, then ships, then full research. You can 'override' this at the planet level, but you burn a large percentage of your output doing so. Bah.

Tech trees need work.

Tactical combat. It'd be nice :(

No Multiplayer. It'd be nice :(


As for the turn based versus realtime argument, I can't believe no one has trotted out Fallout Tactics yet...

[sinij]

I liked Fallout Tactics, wish F2 had tanks, but I like story component of Fallout universe more.

[Strazos]

Oh you mean like the shitty combat in the Baldur's Gate games which hampered, not improved what could have been a fantastic RPG series, but instead was merely pretty good?

Pausable real time is still shit.  Its just shit where you get time to see what the fuck is going on, yet slowing the game down to turn based in any fight you aren't guaranteed to win anyhow cept with more micromanagement.

You are mistaken, on multiple levels.

[Merusk]

Oh you mean like the shitty combat in the Baldur's Gate games which hampered, not improved what could have been a fantastic RPG series, but instead was merely pretty good?

Pausable real time is still shit.  Its just shit where you get time to see what the fuck is going on, yet slowing the game down to turn based in any fight you aren't guaranteed to win anyhow cept with more micromanagement.

You are mistaken, on multiple levels.

For those of us who can't stand Real-Time combat, no he's not.

TOEE - buggy piece of shit that it was, had superior combat to BG1 (arrow cheese of doom!) and BG2 (let me just run in here and watch - literally watch - my Demigod hero chew the shit out of everything..)   For me,  Combat in the Infinity Engine games was passable, but as entertaining and engaging as Dungeon Siege.

 I played 'em for the stories - which were fantastic - but was bored to death by the engine.  Icewind Dale should have proved to you how lousy the combat was, because the story was yawn-tastic.

[Strazos]

I had no big problems with the IE combat mechanics, in any of the games that used it. Sure, the arrow cheese stuff in BG1 got annoying occassionaly. Heck, I usually didn't even use much ranged combat in that game.

And your BG2 example? That only happened to me only a handful of times. Most of the other fights allowed other party members to become involved. Also, I don't play munchkin crap.

Underneath it all, the mechanics were still based on turns, but without the hassle of combat being held up constantly and forcing the player to reassign orders - that's what the space bar was for. Heck, I believe you could even set up the game to actually pause after every turn if you were so inclined.

I don't even get J-Z's second point about not being guaranteed to win - why should victory be assured?

[Yegolev]

If the opponent can keep taking turns without you mashing the PAUSE button, it's not turn based.  Not to me, anyway.  Pretty simple.  Some pauseable games are less tolerable than others.  I don't hate all of those games, but the combat systems are not the same thing.

If you are going to call pausable real-time games turn-based, you might as well call everything turn-based.  I choose to call "I go, you go" games turn-based, electronic or otherwise.  If the other guy takes a turn when I go to make a sandwich, it's not turn-based.

[Sky]

Wow. It's good to know I'm not the most rabidly anti-RTS person in the crowd. If I can pause and give orders, it's good enough for me. Most recently played the newest Freedom Force game which works that way.

I liked Fallout Tactics alot, but I could never get far in it because trying to play it fully turn-based made it extremely tedious because of the size of the maps. There's one map I think I kept getting stuck on, where you got to drive a truck through it.

If the other guy takes a turn when I go to make a sandwich, it's not turn-based.

He's not - game is paused ;)

[Yegolev]

That is probably why I never made much headway with Fallout Tactics.  Great game, but the maps were huge and I was playing it wrong, I guess.

I'll counter you with: if I have to tie up the guy I am playing with so that he doesn't move his pieces around while I am in the kitchen, it's not a turn-based game.  Unpausing a game means that both players are acting at once, which is not turn-based; it's "real time".  Baldur's Gate is not turn-based.  KotOR is not turn-based.  Jade Empire is not turn-based.  If you say it is, you need to count Dead or Alive and Tekken as turn-based since you can pause that shit and walk off.

[Strazos]

If the opponent can keep taking turns without you mashing the PAUSE button, it's not turn based.  Not to me, anyway.  Pretty simple.  Some pauseable games are less tolerable than others.  I don't hate all of those games, but the combat systems are not the same thing.

If you are going to call pausable real-time games turn-based, you might as well call everything turn-based.  I choose to call "I go, you go" games turn-based, electronic or otherwise.  If the other guy takes a turn when I go to make a sandwich, it's not turn-based.

For the love of god....



EDIT: Anyone else having a problem lately with viewing imbedded images in posts?

[Trippy]

EDIT: Anyone else having a problem lately with viewing imbedded images in posts?

Give me an example.

[Strazos]

Like, my own post above. At first the image did not load, until I went to quote myself, just to see if the correct code got stuck into my post.

A few other instances as of late. After I hit quote to view the full post, it usually works. Sometimes I have to pull the image url out and put it into a browser myself for it to work.

Probably something popping up on my end all of a sudden.

[Trippy]

Probably something popping up on my end all of a sudden.

Probably. May want to try clearing your browser cache just for fun.

[Jain Zar]

If the opponent can keep taking turns without you mashing the PAUSE button, it's not turn based.  Not to me, anyway.  Pretty simple.  Some pauseable games are less tolerable than others.  I don't hate all of those games, but the combat systems are not the same thing.

If you are going to call pausable real-time games turn-based, you might as well call everything turn-based.  I choose to call "I go, you go" games turn-based, electronic or otherwise.  If the other guy takes a turn when I go to make a sandwich, it's not turn-based.

For the love of god....



EDIT: Anyone else having a problem lately with viewing imbedded images in posts?

That's the fucking point.  If you need all that shit, it might as well be turn based so I can reasonably input orders in some sensible relaxed manner.
Which would be FASTER, especially given the piles of Magic User multispell cheese many BG 2 fights devolved into.  (Well that and Infinity Engine's usual die reload die reload throw fireballs where the enemy is located but you haven't seen yet or prebuff spell the party..)

Outside of easy fights where the party AI is vaguely capable of leading itself to a target and whacking it till its dead, BG combat was a slow tedious constantly interrupted micromanagement mess.
Which would have been smoother and easier to control as a turn based solution.  Shit, Nippon Ichi has made their entire company around giving the people turn based RPGs. 
You would figure an RPG based around TURN BASED GAMEPLAY would do the same.  Instead it pretty much shows why real time combat in any form of strategy game is pretty shit, espcially given the utter lack of any form of workable AI in most games.

Note Dawn of War is about the only real time strategy game I actually enjoy, and that's mostly because its 40K and I can kill Space Marines.  Ok, its more like "spam Chaos Predators and drop Bloodthirsters on their asses", but complaining about how RTS games have very little actual strategy and are more like arcade games without direct control over anything would take a while to explain.  (And let's face it, that genre is designed around not only how fast you can micromange dumb AI, but how fast your build/resource orders are.  Maybe Mech Commander, and the Total War Engine titles aren't like that.)

Of course the worst part of real time strategic combat is that its just not satisfying, but that is personal preference naturally.