GalCiv II v1.1 Dev log

Friday night fun at the office

Published on March 18, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

The team is busily working on v1.1. I thought I'd show you some screenshots of what we've got done so far. Probably a beta of this will be made public next week.

March 18, 2006:

The 3 features here we think will make people happy. Still tweaking the wording.

But basically you'll have control over whether tech trading is allowed. Blind exploration means you don't get to see the influence of a civilization until you've explored sectors that they're in. And minor races control whether they're in the game or not.

A couple things new on the ship design screen. First, you can now rotate components on the fly in the X, Y, and Z axis. Pretty excited about that. You can even resize components after the fact once they're on. You can also rotate them after the fact.

What you can't see in the screenshot is that you can now pan with the left-click drag so managing much larger ships is much easier now. It should really free up how ships are made.

Sick of messing with what's in a given tile? The Fleet Manager is a whole new screen designed to let you organize what's in a particular tile. Still a work in progress.

Comments (Page 2)

BulenW

on Mar 18, 2006

Is that an option to turn jewelry off and show only certain types of components I see in the second screenshot? If so... I LOVE YOU (whoever did that). I love designing ships, and my ships gets really complicated really fast. It's just such a pain afterwards when you go to put the other stuff on, you know, the weapons/engines/etc... lol. *pray for the filter to make it in the patch*

edit: of course, when I said turn off, I meant in the list of items below the picture. (It occured to me some people would misread that as something else.)

I agree, a small button to hide all the jewelry icons could spare the players a lot of time searching through the list to upgrade some ships.
A little other idea, why not make some standard jewelry bits like "spheres", "cilindrics" etc, it would make add a lot to basic ship design to have some standard forms available, especially if you'd make them X-Y-Z scalable ... and ofcourse, multiple varieties of colony pods, life support etc would a nice little extra (btw, please make the colony pods somewhat ship-color dependant, they're ugly on non-blue or grayscale ship-

alienrider

on Mar 18, 2006

Hi Stardock and All,

As a relative newcomer to the "4X" Genre, I tried many but got bored because micro-management eventually overwhelmed those games and I was dubious about buying this one. However your unreal but extremely sensible attitude to copy protection, the competitive pricing and a developer who geniunely has an interest in player feedback based on constructive suggestions and in incorporating those suggestions, meant I virtually had to buy this game on principle. That it turned out to be the 4X game I have been wanting for so long and awesomely good and addictive fun has blown me away.

Now I (and the community) get real geniune improvements not just a couple of bug fixes after I have handed over my cash, has blown me away (again), I have a mate of mine desperately trying to order this and several more are due to follow.

What I am trying to say is thanks for these updates, you peeps are just shredding my expectations at every turn. Keep it up.

As my Tech Researchers on GNN would say "w00t" !

Alien Rider

Spartan

on Mar 18, 2006

In my opinion the best space 4X game would be a cross between Master of Orion I (MoO), Stars! II and Pax Imperia I Anyway, I see GS evolving in this direction

I assume everyone knows about MoO seeing how it is the 4x king (for now) however for those of you who do not know about Pax, the weapon and ship design features really were evolutionary at the time. Some info here:
Link

Furthermore the shear complexity of Stars! made it an awesome endeavor after a long and hard day at the office and a few beers. Some info here:
Link

Tilarium

on Mar 18, 2006

To tired to read all the replies so if it's already asked I'm sorry. Can we have options to give more life to the minor civs? To let them colonize, fight, invade and take over planets and even become galactic powers recongnized and admited into the United Planets? That would be so cool if it can happen, I'm really excited about the changes to the ship builder.

Kyle

marioflag

on Mar 18, 2006

Will population growth bonus fixed?I would like to play as Torians

unreal_ed

on Mar 18, 2006

V1.1 should have the ability to make ship switch styles more easily. To do that maybe hardpoints could be numbered so that when you create a ship the ship configuration file would know how to reproduce a ship in another style decently.

Example: I put an Ion drive on the back of my terran cargo hull, that hardpoint would be called "hardpoint #12" (not visible in the shipyard of course) and so when I load that ship design with a Drengin cargo hull ,the Ion Drive would be placed on the "hardpoint #12" for my new hull which would be on the back of my ship. That way, when loading ships from one style to another, ships would stay coherent (meaning they wouldn't have extras messed up on the hull).

The same principle could be used for extras

RichVR

on Mar 18, 2006

I wonder how the No Tech Trade option will affect the balance of the the different races. Seems to me that right now tech trading is a big part of the computer's strategy or at least they all use it a lot. There should definitely be a lot of testing to make sure that disabling that aspect of the computer's strategy won't unbalance the game.

I think it might be simple to automatically adjust the difficulty of the game down a notch if this choice is picked. (You are essentially making the game easier, are you not?) Thus if you wanted a certain difficulty you might have to increase the intelligence of the AI at the race screen to compensate?

Morden

on Mar 18, 2006

i still think it would be nice to be able to save a template of a ship. I.e a ship that has just the Hull + eye Candy with no components.

Saving these in a file where people can upload them onto the net and let other people use there templates would be pretty cool.

Taverius

on Mar 18, 2006

Resizing... Rotating... Panning... oooooooooooo

cant wait ^^"

bonscott

on Mar 18, 2006

This was added as an option simply because there were a few vocal people that complained about tech trading and wanted it disabled. It will of course change the dynamic of the whole game. But that's what those people wanted so Stardock delivered. There isn't a whole of things you can do to "balance" it.

bonscott

on Mar 18, 2006

I'll still lobby for an option to *not* wipe out all ship components on an upgrade. I really just want to swap out an engine for a better one, not rebuild the whole ship.

Zartax

on Mar 18, 2006

This looks great! If we now only could (yes, I know, I'm never content!

) choose where the attachment point of the part we are placing is it would be a major breakthrough. I mean, when you place a part, you always glue it to the ship at the same point. What if I would like to have that engine up side down? Rotating it around the x-axis would place it inside the ship or something like that. I hope you get my point. Anyone agree?

tuftyfella

on Mar 18, 2006

love the idea of the rotating ship building components as theres a few designs i would love to try out, cant wait

lord of ruin

on Mar 18, 2006

these new improvements are great but their is two things that i still think need fixing one that as a good civilization i once did a trade with one of the evil civilizations to obtain two of their unique technologys and through spying i was able to steal one of the neutral civs technology i think it should under any rules be impossible to trade for or steal unique techs. secondly the neutral civs still don't have any unique weapon techs (i think they should get the phasing tech from the orginal game as this is both an offensive and defesive tech and would work with the concept of neutrality).

e-stab

on Mar 18, 2006

Thanks for the three new scenario options! Will they be usable for metaverse games as well?

The fleet manager looks great too, seems like the cumbersome fleet management when lots of ships are in just one tile will soon be a thing of the past!

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!