True, but galaxies are wide but thin (relatively speaking), our galaxy is about 100,000 LY (Light Years) in diameter but only about 3,000 LY thick around here.

This fact could be used to model a partially 3D galaxy say a few sectors thick but as deep & wide as you want. I suspect this would be a lot simpler to program and to design a suitable interface for.

Cosmological facts from "The Galaxy Song" by Monty Python http://www.wilken.freeserve.co.uk/Montypython/Songs/song18.htm

I don't see any major advantage to having it set this way? Besides realism, there is no real addition to gameplay (this is probably why all serious 4x game I've played use the tried and true, 2d interface)

Once you introduce 3d space, you make ship movement more complex, as your not just moving across a flat gameboard, but instead a 3d space and you have to move up, down, etc I would hate to try to use waypoints on even a piebox 3d map in a game like galciv.

True enough, my suggestion was to simplfy 3D into 2 or 3 2D planes as a way of mitigating the compexity you speak of. As to if gameplay would be enhanced or diminished, I am completely open, but would be interested in seeing if it could be done and the interface manageable.




Personally I would think the real reason is the potential complexity of an interface and the associated programming nightmares.

I'm back after my very long absence. You lot are doing a good job keeping this post going. On your 2D-3D argument, I'd imagine 3D strategic planning would give people a headache.

On the earlier battleships and fighters note, it does make sense that to begin with you wouldn't be able to produce huge ships beacause the civs are only starting to experiment with militery craft and hence wouldn't have created the industrial militery infrastructure yet.

I'd like to see the colony ships ability to carry unlimited colonists done away with, say each colony ship can only pull along 100million people at max.

This way you could establish a colony and build it's population up slowly in a more realistic manner.

How about an exanded U.P in which civs can submit issues to the U.P.

2D vs. 3D: I have played several 3x and 4x space strategy games that use a sort of 3D map, the latest being MoO3. I don’t think it adds to the fun-factor, but it sure makes time-estimates by sight impossible. IT can be quite entertaining to try to send a fleet to the nearest solar system only to discover that it is in fact a quarter of the way across the galaxy. (Luckily they use star-lanes for travel)

On the other hand, 3D combat is quite fun, but the actual battles and how they are fought are not an important part of GalCiv in my opinion. To me it's a matter of being able to outsmart the computer with strategic decisions. I don’t want to be piloting each of my ships I don’t even want to be admiral, I want to be president (read dictator) and master strategist.

What might be fun if correctly implemented are admirals. They gain experience just like ships, but they influence the whole fleet, in addition they have the ability of independent actions, based on your current diplomatic status, government etc. As to how you gain admirals I think each player should start of with a limited number, and gain more from promotions within the fleet, and in special cases from minor civs, and possibly from major civs as well. The alien admirals might have a lot of bonuses, but think of the consequences if an admiral betrays his fleet in battle.
And admirals should run the risk of being killed or injured in battle.

Question is when would you get admirals, at random would you always have a certain number ie as soon as an admiral dies a new one is promoted. Did you just say betraying his fleet? Does that mean loosing the battle or defecting to your enemy.

Realistic universe
Make a real-like universe, that has start from hundreds to thousands of stars, but planets within only a fraction of them.

Also make real model galaxies with contemporary scientifical accuracy; black hole in the middle, consentration of start near the core, the true function of stellar clouds; star classes and birth etc. Make galaxies with functional parts. Not just a general map with clouds as a graphical improvement. Actually, maintain the galaxy model in any kind of planetary set. Different model, different spreading and consentration in a supermodel of their galaxy.

Make colony building very difficult; very few planets with a biosphere (inhabitability) and make colonies on non-habitable planets very weak, so that they don't affect the gameplay with any need of management, expect terraforming, when a suitable technology is discovered. Now think about the relations; we see millions of stars from Earth, but only maybe one of them has a planet with biosphere. And the gas giants and rocky bodies are not a suitable choise for any future interstellar colonisation. So make galaxies with realistic diversity of stars and vast distances between colonies!!

Civilization III, Alpha Centaury, Master of Orion(s), Galactic Civilizations and every other colonizing strategy game is based on a simple idea of that the bigger the better. It causes too massive gameplay that kills the tactics.

On the other hand, one function of a computer game is to create a illusion of reality to the player. If the universe is unrealistic, this isn't achieved.

I think Galactic Civilizations has a graphical level from 8 years ago. When I played the demo, I got the same joy that I got from Master of Orion II years ago. This is not recommendable when creating a good modern game. Galactic Civilization has the brilliant gameplay, but it needs better details. Though the realistic universe should be the first priority in the creation of the sequel.

Edit: Think of Millennium 2.2 from Amiga. One of the things that made that game so interesting, was the actual model of the solar with actual moons and data of the system. As a point of reference, think of Tachyon, the space shooter. There where about 6 pictures of stellar clouds representing the star systems, and in them, there where starbases of Earth, Mercury, Saturn etc. The bases where situated randomly onto the picture of the stellar cloud, and that was suppose to be the solar system. This is the border example of how to avoid realism in a space game.
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When you choose your galaxy, choose "rare", it is more realistic in your definition.

Yes, I chose the rare factor right away when I started playing the demo. I urge you, Weyleader, to think again the relations between the actual number of stars and and actual number of planets in the Milky Way...

I understand the issue, but I suspect that to truly represent what we know about the Milky Way we would have very few, perhaps only one, planet for each AI, and even then that might be an over representation of planets. I think that in terms of a playable game, rare does a pretty good job of representing what we know.

This is not simply a question of what we know. Realism doesn't mean the facts. This is making Stardock to create a good illusion of reality. What you said about understating the number of planets is what we should stick to. The galaxies have a shit load of stars and virtually no habitable planets. Why make a game where you explore space and have colonies as many as you can build colony ships? Space colonisation is never an expansion competition. It is a challenge of technology and travel and in some societies a matter of wealth.

Also, as I already expressed, strategy itself becomes impossible when you have to consentrate of micromanagement. In a strategy game you never should be able to increase your expansion power. Only the inforcement power. In Millennium, there never was any problem of overgrowth, even though your mining strength grew. You had to find the good planets to build a base onto, and you also had only one construction facility. Old games were perhaps easier to make smart and efficient, because you couldn't program too many details. Now you need to figure out how to direct the growth of player's strength to the correct properties of the system.

To say this more simply, don't make Galciv2 like this. Don't make it like Simcity, where you simply build next to the previous. Then you miss the nature of space strategy gaming, which should be about exploration, science fiction, intellectuality and creativity.

Edit: In the consept of exploration belongs the idea of vast and rich galaxy with shit to discover and dangers to overcome. If you have colonies next to each other you discover nothing of space.
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You would start off with a few, their stats (bonuses) being randomly generated and not very good. Over time the number and quality of your admirals should change acording to the size of your fleet and the experience of captains and admirals. Lower level oficers should be promoted based on the need of the fleet and their experience. Think of it as the good captains of ships, being promoted to admirals and new ones taking their place. It should be up to the player to deside wether or not an available captain should be promoted to fill a vacansy, or he/she wants to wait to se if a better candidte comes along.


Yes I said betray the fleet, the result should be anything from the admiral being killed by his subordinates at the cost of fleet effectiveness, to the total loss of the fleet even when fighting an inferior opponent. Depending on the admirals stats it could even meen the defection of parts of the fleet he controls.

I have allways disliked the automatical avaialbility of trained militarry personell. I can accept that a crew is trained while a ship is built, but I'd like for a real navy perssonell part, so that the quality of the crew for a new ship would reflect the general quality of the navy.
Lets face desicions to mothball or scrapp older ships in order to creww the newly build ships.

And for ground troops, I think there should be two types of troops: militia and regular soldiers. If a planet is attacked a good number of the population should join the militia, but militia should be less effective than regular soldiers. And only real soldies should be available for attack forces.


Well who knows the actual number of stars with habitable planets. I don't! In fact it is an open question among stronomists. At pressent we are simply not able to detect earth type planets orbiting distant stars, we are able to detect gass giants, since they are so much larger than earth, but that's it. Take a look at the current list of extrasolar planets at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/cat1.html there are now 123 of them, the smallest being 0.12 Jupiter masses, as a comparrison Earth is only 0,0033 Jupiter masses. Some may say that it's proof that there are no earth-like planets in our neighbourhood, but it's just a case of detection abilities. Just like in GalCiv, at our we can't know for sure untill we go visit the stars. GIven better telescopes and better detection software that will change.

Here is a little funny thing that could add some additional fun to a game:

An idea for a new GCII game variant

Millennia before the Precursors lived in the Metaverse there already was another species, the Alcor. Most hints of their civilisation are gone, but something has outlasted the long time, “The White Gates” …

The player can chose a number of “galactic layers” each with an individual set of (randomised) stars, anomalies and so on.
The “Layers” are connected by the “White Gates”; each is a two way only (like a wormhole). So you would play on various maps at the same time.
At the beginning you can’t see or use the Gates, first one has to find an artefact (instruction from the Alcor) (that could pop up after a certain number of colonized planets), and research it. After that is done you can see the Gates, and can travel thru them to the other “layers” (Galaxies, Universes or whatever). The players can, but don’t need to be, placed on different “layers”. The Gates could offer, if correctly used, totally new strategies and game play experiences.

A special gimmick could be “The Final Gate” leading to one of the long lost Alcor worlds. There the player, who reaches it first, would have an unique choice: A number of (normally unresearchable) techs OR one of the Alcor ships. A powerful battleship capable of outgunning whole fleets on its own.

Nothing realistic about this game, note the use of the word "game". To be realistic there is the fact that nothing with mass can attain the speed of light, even less exceed it (it's all to do with mass, as an object increases in speed its mass does too, if an object could exceed light speed its mass would be a multiple of the square root of -1, which plainly is impossible).

So being realistic, a space ship in order to avoid awkward relativistic problems would be limited to about 80% of light speed (for trekkers this is impulse speed), if you accelerated at a constant 1G it would take about 9 months to attain that speed and the same at the other end to slow down again. So a trip to Barnards star at about 5LY away would take about 8 years, and that is very optimistic.

This of course disregards the possiblity that there may be some way "around" the speed of light which makes interstellar transport possible, but currently there is nothing in physics which suggests this is going to happen in our lifetimes. I really really wish it wasn't the case, but there you have it - sorry.

Also as Martin the Dane pointed out, nobody knows how may Earth like planets there are as the detection tecniques and suitable equipment does not yet exist, it could be that our solar system is unusual in only having one habitable planet (bloody unlikly, but possible - just). My personal opinion is that small rocky planets in the orbit zone where surface temperatures could be -10C to 70C are probably quite common, ones with a oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere are probably however quite rare.

A couple of comments....
1)Volcanic action releases simple compunds, mostly oxides (i.e. water, nitrous oxide, sulfuric acid). Friction of water vapour in this type of atmosphere produces lightning which breaks down these oxides to produce oxygen, nitrogen, etc) Hence any planet that has had any sort of volcanic past (which is highly likely)has a chance of producing the basics for an oxygen-nitrogen-carbon atmosphere. The addition of bio-life on our planet then set the ratios of each element in the air we know and love.

However, if GC2 adds non-carbon based races/lifeforms, then the probability that any planet could be useful goes way up, and the ratio of atmopspheric gases changes.

Finally, its the planet density in the galaxy that might be the stumbling block, as planets seems to be a rare stellar occurance.

2)For tactical battle in 3D a good set of games to reference is Sierra's Homeworld series. The extra dimension adds realism but the cost is definately in aspirin (for that headache one will develop). The added dimension makes the battle tactics exponentially more difficult (depends on how smart the AI is made). To move in 3D versus 2D, the player just presses SHIFT to let the interface know the move is to go above or below the current 2D-plane. Easy for coders to implement and players to learn. Very difficult to master, espeially in real-time combat.

3)Without going fully into 3D, the stunning visuals of a 3D ship creation process would be impressive. So when a player is building his ships, they can be viewed from all sorts of angles, zoomed in, literally taken apart rotated, and reasssembled in front of the player. Each ship component can be rendered in extreme detail. The final design would be as unique as the player wants to make it.

Then return to locked-3D or 2D for the battles.
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Cor, that's a new one on me, I always thought that lightning did the exact opposite, took atmospheric Oxygen and Nitrogen and made nitrogen oxides. There was a famous experiment where a soup of simple compounds were sealed and exposed to simulated lightning for a few months then analyzed and found to contain more complex compounds upto the precursors for amino acids.
Oxygen is a nasty dangerous corrosive gas and if it is not constantly replenished it will not remain as free gas in an atmosphere. If the percentage of Oxygen were to exceed about 25% there would be a risk of the planet catching fire.

I agree that the problems involved with a true 3D representation would far exceed any potential benefit to gameplay



Says who? Just because we can't see them (yet) certainly doesn't mean they're not there!

Strek, you are absolutely right about the effect of lightning on nitrogen and its ability to produce complex nitrates. Lightning has the effect of producing nitrogen "fertilizer" and even more complex molecules. Farmers observed long ago that their crops grew better after a lightning storm.

The way we "see" planets is via their effect on the stellar bodies they orbit. The planets make their suns "wobble". The vast majority of stars we observe do not wobble, but some do. Assuming this part of the galaxy is not too differenet from the rest, then the density of planets is rare.

Yes but a few years ago even less of them wobbled, as our instrumentation has improved our assumptions change.

Also wobble is generally appropriate for very large planets, smaller planets can be detected by a drop in brightness as the planet transits across the star, but if we are at right angles to the stars ecliptic the planets will never transit from our point of view.

Current theories regarding stellar formation from accretion discs suggest that almost all stars will at some point in their life have planets orbiting them.

Planets form around stars in much the same way as moons form around planets, see how many more moons there are in this solar system than we thought were there 50 years ago!

I emphasize my points.

1) The gaming experience, the illusion of reality, drops heavily towards a lower class if the game universe isn't realistic, even reasonably so!

2) In a game where the player manages levers, infrastructure, building choises and expansion, you can't have the things needing attention to grow in number. You don't have infinite number of new goverments during colonisations, so you shouldn't have infinite number of levers! That lowers the strategic value and the gameplay value, as you need to spend your motivation on countless levers.

Yeah, right. MOOIII solved my making AI to take care of your 100 colonies, which just kills the strategy.

All the contemporary strategy games have the problem of overgrowth, which I'm trying to make the Stardock Company see. They need to do these smart adjustements, that make the interface compact, not growing through the walls, and the universe a place that makes the players interested, enthuastic and relating.

Please notice my text about Millennium 2.2, which is a smart exception, one of the classics of the first desktop computer games.

Edit: I would have wanted to see the MOOIII world so that you need to travel a shit load of distances through the rotating 3d galaxy to discover countless of empty stars, thrilling secrets of space and then a good planet somewhere behind a 20 turns travel.

Mind also that making colonies sparse multiplies their strategic value towards the enemy. Build your inforcements of your new colony to be able to block enemies navigating through your territory. This could be called the space tactics. How naive is it to make lines of short-distance-colonies that the enemy takes one by one?
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Edit II: Take another example of this overgrowth, The Warcraft. Because of this problem the only course of the game is to make as massive number of the very best unit and then clash your army against the enemy. This was true atleast in Warcraft III and older. Starcraft is the same. Command and Conquer is the same. Etc, etc! They haven't got the wits, the problem of effective use of different special weapons.
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Edit III: Besides, you can have 100 colonies, if you are strong enough to control such a big portion of the big galaxy. Then you shouldn't have 100 contructors but way less. And this situation would be the utmost maximum, perhaps even bigger in the terms of "reasonable realism". Mind also that every colony should be entirely different from the others, that again emphasizes the strategic importance of every single colony. This is question of self-discipline, of being able to create a growing game without the obsession of making it mindless.
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I like to play on abundant beacause I think all the planets in a galciv galaxy are just the habitable planets. Plus it takes away the effect of much of the AI's colinisation cheating.

I think there should be moral decisions based around your actual actions as well as ongoing events and more event chains. Say for instance your troops have recently captured the Torian planet of Lasititus II from the evil Drengin empire and find they have all but enslaved the torian population running a brutal regime of blood and terror enforced by brutal "overseers". However this regime greatly improves the production and research ability of the planet.
Do you.....
good>Release the slaves and bring the overseers to account for there crimes, loose money, slave bonus but improve loyalty.
nuetral>Release the slaves but allow the overseers to leave the planet for a price, Gain flat cash payment, loose slave bonus
evil> These slaves shall learn to serve a new master....

Absolutely, I also think you shouldn't know the outcome until you have taken the action, this would prevent players being "good" where almost everything they do would be classified as "evil" or at least "quite nasty"

Admirals sound like fun, and might be a way to enforce stacking. The more ships stick, the more penalty an admiral has. Also, capital ships would require an admiral. Admirals would come randomly from battles, and warship construction. (none from colony ships, constructors, and sensor drones) Bigger the ship the higher the chance. also logistics and military academy project would increase odds.

I'm more in favor of admirals bieng promoted as required but gaining experiance from battles. So an experianced admiral could be transferred to a different (probably higher tech ship). However all admirals have a limited lifespan (and can die in battle) so you'll need to keep promoting new ones. I'd think the game should have a auto-promote and auto-assign feuture to take into account the fact it could be a pain in very large fleet. Also admirals should suffer experiance penalties if transferred to a ship size different to one they promoted to lead due to the need to learn new skills.