Wait! I didn't 'click' on who had started this thread! Now I feel (appriopriately) like a real idiot.

(For those who don't know, 'Draginol' is another on-line alias of Brad Wardell, GalCiv's creator.)

drrider

LOL so it is. trying to get us to do your job for you, Brad?

or perhaps this is some kind of teaser for that elusive second expansion that i haven't been able to learn anything about...

Well, i still want all of my people to scale.

Please, no The Sims: GalCiv Edition!

Ah, yes, a game of conquering the galaxy where you have to worry about the dating lives of all ten trillion of your citizens. Maybe by the time there are ten trillion humans your descendants might be able to finish a game. That sounds like fun....Not!

And why isn't the game in 3D either? Not only are the planets not to scale, but they all fall along the same axial plane. There's no Y-axis! I'm freaking out...

I also think that each planet you colonize should play out like a game of civilization, or Simworld or something. And every invasion should be an entire first person shooter campain.

Actually, I thought the great compromise renamed it TOOFKAP (The Orbiting Object Formerly Known As Pluto!)

Ya got me there, but it could be constructed out in space far away from earth.



I have also wanted galciv to be more tactical. Form up ranks and personally play a role in the battlefield. No more fighting from a billion light years away.

"The Orbiting Object Formerly Known As Pluto!"

The name is still Pluto - it's just not considered a planet. I think they recategorized it as a "dwarf planet" or something odd like that.

It's because they found a new object larger than Pluto that would classify as a planet.

And for some strange reason which I cannot phantom, they don't want any more new planets in our solar system.

Seriously, what happened to the coolness of discovering new planets? Now it seems something to be avoided .

Anyways, back on topic:

Yeah, most games have to deal with scale at some point or another. A realistic scale usually just isn't any fun.

I remember playing Transport Tycoon, and you had to deal with ships vs road vehicles vs aircraft - if it were completely realistic, the differences in speed would make the game practically unplayable. Think about it: The distance an aircraft can cover in mere hours takes a road vehicle days or a ship weeks. The speeds were therefore fudged - enough, in fact, that a fast but subsonic train was actually faster than a supersonic aircraft, lol.

When talking about a space based game in Galactic Civilizations, we're talking vast differences in scale. Not just the size of the various objects, but the distance between them as well.Distances in our galaxy are vast.

So, yeah, it's a tradeoff of realism vs playability. Make the scale too realistic, and it's just not going to be fun anymore.

And an off-topic note about image quality - what in the world happened to those pics? It looks like somebody converted the file between several different lossy file formats before they finally saved it .

That's not Draginol's fault, though - looks like they were that way to begin with. I couldn't find the original images.

Pluto is indeed now classified as a dwarf planet, but it's not because they found something bigger. the something bigger is Eris, btw.

the distinction between a planet and a dwarf planet is based on whether or not the celestial body has 'cleared its neighborhood' of other celesial bodies (except for stable satellites). the orbits of both Pluto and Eris take them into the Kupier belt, which is littered with thousands or possibly millions of small, icy bodies. it's sort of like the difference between a house and a condo: is there anyone else living nearby?

the only other body formally recognized as a dwarf planet is Ceres, in the asteroid belt, but there are several other candidates including 2005 FY9, Sedna, Orcus, Quaoar, and Varuna (all TNOs) as well as Pallas and Vesta (asteroids). i think it'll ultimately depend on how rough they're willing to accept when they say 'roughly spherical'. Ceres, for example, is ellipsoid and over 60kM longer than her circular diameter.

yes but by this def. jupiter has to be reclassified as a dwarf planet. at least that is what they are saying at the nine/eight planets sight.

it depends on how tightly you define 'clearing the neighborhood.' if you think it means that there's absolutely nothing nearby, then not only Jupiter, but Neptune, Mars, and the Earth wouldn't be planets.

ahem:

source: WWW Link

i personal think dwarf should be used the same gas, and rocky. ie dwarf planets, rocky planets, gas planets. thus meaning we would have two new planets not one less.

At that scale, I would call the mapsize "Silly"




What's with these weird planet definitions, everybody knows that a celestial object is a planet if it's invadable.