Galactic Civilzations II: 21 Feb

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-03-02 09:12am

Ace Pace wrote:My thoughts, it's very weird to me that a backward place(technicly) like Israel has apprently far better cellular and internet services.

Australia doesn't have many high-speed links off the continent, IIRC (expensive to lay that much fibre on the ocean bed) so Aussies get screwed.

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2006-03-02 09:17am

phongn wrote:
Ace Pace wrote:My thoughts, it's very weird to me that a backward place(technicly) like Israel has apprently far better cellular and internet services.
Australia doesn't have many high-speed links off the continent, IIRC (expensive to lay that much fibre on the ocean bed) so Aussies get screwed.

Waaayyyy off topic but is there a technology in the future that will allow internet access (and telephone) via satellites so we can leave cables behind altogether?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-03-02 09:23am

Stravo wrote:Waaayyyy off topic but is there a technology in the future that will allow internet access (and telephone) via satellites so we can leave cables behind altogether?

You can get internet access and telephony via satellites (DIRECWAY and Iridium, respectively). However, all satellite communications are inherently high-latency, generally somewhat limited in bandwidth and somewhat expensive.

Oberleutnant · Post by **Oberleutnant** » 2006-03-02 10:06am

Are there any Nordic forumers who have spotted the game at a local store? Or is the delivery chain between the European publisher and Nordic distributor PAN Vision mismanaged? Or is it just us and our retailers, who are oblivious to the needs of eager 4X gamers? Sure, go ahead and order the shelves full of some shitty console games based on the latest movie, but forget all about Galactic Civilizations II. Who plays those awfully boring turn-based games anyway . . . ?

Funny thing about gamers. They can patiently wait for a game's release for years, but when the release date comes - and goes without any sign of the game - they will do anything to get their hands on the product right away, even going as far as selling their girlfriends as crack whores. All that matters is getting to play the game ASAP. I'm so going to get drunk and have fun tomorrow in the so called real world, if there's no GalCiv II disc installing in my DVD player by afternoon.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-03-02 10:27am

phongn wrote:
Ace Pace wrote:My thoughts, it's very weird to me that a backward place(technicly) like Israel has apprently far better cellular and internet services.
Australia doesn't have many high-speed links off the continent, IIRC (expensive to lay that much fibre on the ocean bed) so Aussies get screwed.

There is vast amount of international bandwidth, it is just priced through the stratosphere. Just like there is plenty of bandwidth internally, but due to the natural monopoly Telstra has on the physical wiring (both on the fiber and copper wiring) it is locked up.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-03-02 10:30am

Faram wrote:Ick, 10gigs! I can D/L that in a day easely, and I have done so before.

I'm on a 20gb peak(8am-mightnight) & 20gb offpeak(mightnight-8am) plan with a 5-7mbps DL conn(powerline too close to the phone cabling is causing induction). I can blow my entire quota away in under a day.

And have.

About the only upside is my upload is ~1mbps and completely unmetred with no restrictions on what services I run on it.

Can't you get a unlimited plan or somthing?

Not even on the market.

You cant even get it on a buisness grade connection, even after paying to have a fiber optic link custom layed.

wautd · Post by **wautd** » 2006-03-02 01:35pm

Played it for a while and I have to say it's pretty good. I really liked the massive options for designing ships. I think I can waste a lot of time with this

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2006-03-02 02:36pm

Oberleutnant wrote:Are there any Nordic forumers who have spotted the game at a local store? Or is the delivery chain between the European publisher and Nordic distributor PAN Vision mismanaged? Or is it just us and our retailers, who are oblivious to the needs of eager 4X gamers? Sure, go ahead and order the shelves full of some shitty console games based on the latest movie, but forget all about Galactic Civilizations II. Who plays those awfully boring turn-based games anyway . . . ?

Funny thing about gamers. They can patiently wait for a game's release for years, but when the release date comes - and goes without any sign of the game - they will do anything to get their hands on the product right away, even going as far as selling their girlfriends as crack whores. All that matters is getting to play the game ASAP. I'm so going to get drunk and have fun tomorrow in the so called real world, if there's no GalCiv II disc installing in my DVD player by afternoon.

EBGames (Tradition) in Globen Sth has it.

Oberleutnant · Post by **Oberleutnant** » 2006-03-02 04:10pm

Thanks for the quick reply. Finland, as always, lags behind Sweden.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2006-03-04 03:03am

I just purchased my copy online...

KrauserKrauser · Post by **KrauserKrauser** » 2006-03-04 08:28am

Got my copy from Circuit City. Best Buy didn't have it in the store.

Research takes forever. Will adjust it up in the future.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-03-04 12:24pm

The online version seems like the best best. Sure, it's slightly more expensive, but it counts as the collector's edition and has more jewelry for ship construction.

Anarchist Bunny · Post by **Anarchist Bunny** » 2006-03-04 01:15pm

Picked up the collectors edition at walmart for the same price I saw the regular edition everywhere else.

Got home installed it, 6 hours later I realize that I'm hungry and I really really need to go to the bathroom. Eventually nabbed a influence victory thanks to early mining of a influence resource, and an early border dispute resulting in several tricked out influence stations.

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-04 02:50pm

Little bit of a large post, but I felt like showing the sheer scale of the ground combat (if one treats the "1000 Troops" as "1000 Legions" or something) involved and the nescessity of at least 1 defense point in the enemy's weapon.

Played a 1 vs 1 on a Tiny map with both powers starting at war. I was the Cosmos S.S.R., a power geared for Military Production, Weapons, and Hitpoints. Against me was the burgoisie Terran Alliance.

I managed to win because I had armor to counter their hugely researched mass driver advantage over my tiny, 1-damage lasers that took up a shitload of room. My tiny fighters, in groups of 3 or 5, would shred a larger, more powerful and expensive Terran ship at the cost of maybe 1 casualty because 1 layer of armor would protect them unless I was unlucky.

The key was my planet Leningrad, blockaded by fighters. It was my main manufacturing planet, and was also about 30 parsecs closer to the front than Nova Karelia. [A bit too close, the Terrans had a planet 4 parsecs away!]. There was a troop transport inbound that I barely picked off, it likely would have broken the planet's back. Then they would have gone to Stalingrad, my research colony. Then Nova Karelia, my homeworld. End.

But it wasn't, as the troop transport was blown up. Armored fighters were able to clear out all ships interdicting my Leningrad around Terran Mardell III as I researched the Planetary Invasion techs. Then, after 2 failed attempts to invasion, I said "screw it", and gassed half the planet in order to suceed. The planet, amazingly, survived quite well and still was as verdant as Earth. Mars' huge manufacturing rate was cowed with pure numbers and a single invasion ship beat them.

Then to Earth. F-4 Gunships, with their dual laser cannons, and F-3 Mockingbirds with their light armor managed to clear out Earth. A troop ship landed. 2 Billion people died on Terra. Then another. And so forth, for 6 transports, each filled with 1000 Legions of Red Marine Corps.

Earth's population started at 12 Billion. By the time the great storming of the planet was over, it stood at 1.9 Billion but still proudly Terran.

Their leader, however, couldn't stomach the death. I planned to explode the core of the planet or orbitally bombard it if it didn't give in, mostly out of spite. He surrendered just turns before I was going to make half the surface into molten wreckage.

Victory for the Space Communists.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-03-04 02:56pm

Questions: How is space combat handled? Screenshots are hard to understand.

How is planet manegment handled? How much Micro?

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2006-03-04 02:56pm

Ah, awesome to see you can BDZ in this game.

But you can explode the core too? Sweeeeet.

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-04 02:59pm

Shinova wrote:Ah, awesome to see you can BDZ in this game.

But you can explode the core too? Sweeeeet.

BDZ or Orbital Bombardment is actually an Asteroid Bombardment according to the text you see, but you can call it whatever you want. I've never seen it make anything uninhabitable, but it does bad, bad things to the biosphere. If you were to Orbitally Bombard Earth and take it, Mars would probably be richer in life.

Exploding Core, strangely enough, doesn't seem to destroy a planet. It still does bad, bad things, but one would assume that it would do worse. The core being a rather integral part of a planet.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2006-03-04 03:05pm

nah they just use a nuke to restart it....

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-04 03:08pm

Ace Pace wrote:Questions: How is space combat handled? Screenshots are hard to understand.

Without movies, it's Civ style. Walk a unit up, little lasers and missiles fly back and forth, and one of them explodes.

With combat movies, you can watch the ships fight it out but don't get to control at all. It still looks rather cool. I'm glad they didn't do tactical combat. Rome: Total War was much too easy because of bad tactical AI in a strategic level game.

You can group units into Fleets according to logistics points [larger hulls = more logistics = smaller fleets]. Fleets = Awesome, obviously, since your stat lines are basically combined in the under-the-hood combat math.

On a combat related note, there are 3 weapons types and 3 defense types.

Beams are countered by Shields.
Missiles are countered by ECM or Chaff [same tech, different part of tree].
Mass Drivers are countered by Armor.

If you have the wrong defense, your defense is the square root of your rating, so it's quite useful to try to adapt and counter enemy units weapons.

How is planet manegment handled? How much Micro?

It seems to be made to allow Micro if you want or are playing a smaller map, but you can cut a lot of it out.

There are [PlanetClass] tiles on a planet. Usually this is somewhere between 8 and 14. You can build 1 building on each. Terraforming will give you maybe 3 more. If you don't obsessively look at a planet and then decide the new building each time it makes one like me, you can cue up all the buildings at once.

With a starport you can build ships. You can tell all planets building X [and it shows on the minimap where they are] to build new ship Y and such. This is a godsend for when you create a new military ship and don't want to go to each planet and reselect it. [And invariably forget where one is and end up with it still making Mk I Shitty Fighters for months until you notice a new one built]

Each planet makes a certain rating for Military Production [ships], Social Production [buildings], and Research [money to your research budget]. You can specialize a planet in each of these or stay general, and can swap specials at any time if you really need your research colony to build a Wonder quickly or something. I haven't found a way to do that without opening up the planet screen itself.

To reduce Micro, you also can set a Rally Point for each ship made by a planet to go to a place you select. It lets you form stacks of ships automatically without having to select each and every ship that is build and click the same spot.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2006-03-04 06:28pm

http://img500.imageshack.us/img500/7034/hdh1wi.jpg

Pure sex. Not mines.

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-04 07:02pm

Better than his, and built without modded components, too.

Not mine either.

Cool
Cooler
Smaller Ships
Awesomeness
Even more awesomeness
Ridiculous amounts of awesomeness

If you don't see them all, at least see "Awesomeness" and "Ridiculous Amounts of Awesomeness"

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-03-04 07:13pm

No tactical combat is a turn-off. MOO2 computer was intelligent at combat, and a decent challenge provided they had a comparable ship. They even shield-rotated to allow missiles to splash harmlessly against aft quarters, while maintaining a heavy frontal shield to eat your beam fire. That's evil.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-05 01:37am

GalCiv is neat. It's still got some MoO-inspired wierdness, and it's still got some wierd bugs, but it's the best space 4X I've played since MoO2.

The lack of tactical combat is a damning comment on Civ4: in Civ I *hate* the lack of tactical, because the results seems so random or uncontrollable. In Galciv, I never get the 'wtf hax' feeling you get in Civ when some lowtech moron kills your MG in a fortress and takes no damage. And the movies look neat: I like that they don't bother showing the full free-camera, maneuvering battle stuff when it's 4v1. Frankly, I think there *is* a tactical game: there are definate limits to fleet size, and so combining and controlling large battles involves a great deal of thought, and the AI is very good at it. The AI is very quick to adapt: my exclusive use of railguns bought about a galaxy-wide revolution in armour technology.

The way tech is handled is still broken from MoO2: I conquered a capital world, and had the enemy surrender to me, seceding all of their worlds and starships. I got *one* tech. My tech sucked, since I was all about influence, and I got *one* tech. Due to never researching missiles, all the diplo AIs kept thinking 'w00t he must really want missile theory (lowest missile tech) so I'll try to trade it for something really useful'. I've had dozens of requests to trade such ignored low-end techs for useful stuff, because the AI apparently thinks you want to advance along all techlines, which I usually don't.

I've seen some interesting bugs (for instance, I think that civ surrendered since after I conquered their capital the pop jumped to 420,000,000 billion for a single turn, raising my 'power rating' by thousands of times) but nothing show-stopping. The ship designer is the best shit ever (neons and fins oh my) and the very open nature of the formats used mean models can just be dropped in: I've seen FS2 and ST stuff already. The devs are very friendly and helpful, and I'm trying to provide them with data to help solve the issues I've mentioned. My only real complaint is about the dip game, which is still broken and you still can't call someone up to say 'I hate those guys' or 'get your fucking starbases out of my face' or 'I will rule your trade ships if you don't pay me'. It's all very basic 'trade tech for money' or 'trade money for peace' etc.

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-05 12:45pm

Ah, the "AI Takes Over The Map" bug. Sometimes the AI gets it and its influence covers the entire map until the planet starves. I call it the Coruscant bug, just for kicks, though I haven't seen it myself.

You're right, there needs to be a "WTF are your starbases doing on my land?" option. Fucking Altarians have like five military and mining ones near my homeworld and secondary factory planet.

Although you can use the Demand Starbase thing to demand they surrender bases. That sort of works.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-03-05 01:10pm

There's also the occasional United Planets vote to tax anyone who has starbases in territory they don't control. Same with colonies.