A few screenshots from tonight..

Very cool! BTW, I loved it when I got the upper hand in my first 5C game and 3 other races gave me tribute unsolicited. LOL

Very cool. I like the Battleship screen.

I loved the battleship screen - please add more graphjics like that - then can be "stills" but one for like the corvetees, frigates, or avatars - would be awesome!

Jerry

The battleship one is animated actually. There is also an animated one for anomalies, freighters destroyed, and more.

very cool , I justgot the soryy but we must kill you now one..The game is getting way cool

Isn't it strange that the Torians went from "close" to "at war" so quickly? Or wasn't it so quick?

The Torians went to war because they were allied with the Altarians. They had to declare war. That's why their message was apologetic.

I kinda figured that. I just didn't want to spell it out like "isn't it strange that the Torians (who had 'close' relationship with you) accepted the alliance with the Altarians (who were 'at war' with you)?"

"They declared war, because they had to declare war".

Somebody tell that to Belgium, France and Germany

Asmodean

"Somebody tell that to Belgium, France and Germany"

Well, OK guys, you don't need to mimic reality *that* closely!

But if a 'close' rating, which, judging by the slider position, is probably the second best you can have, doesn't prevent the AI from allying with your enemies, then I have to wonder what that Relations slider is good for at all.

The Altarians probably gave them an inducement.

It's not like they just randomly ally or something. The AI does look at the political relationships. But like real life, relationships have a price.

10 Hours later and a win in Beta 5c. Cultural Infuence.
Last of the Altariians revolted and came over to Terran Side. Working on Beyond Humanity when it ended.

Game was shown as Cakewalk, but when started it showed Tough? Is there a corelation between these or is there still a probelm with the end score and diffuculty level?

"The Altarians probably gave them an inducement."

I would be curious to know what it was. In another thread you mentioned that there is a debug.err that shows the AI-AI transactions. Will this be part of the release version? It would improve my confidence in the AI a lot if I knew for sure that it doesn't sell me out for peanuts.

What would be also cool if in such a situation the relationship would get colder and colder gradually, and perhaps the player was notified about this (as opposed to go from 'close' to 'at war' in 1 turn). I realize that this is unlikely to be incorporated before March 25, so just for future reference.

In real life, things can change rapidly.

In May 1941, Soviet Russia thought that it was friends with the Germans. Yet the Germans did a sneak attack only a month later.

When you have close relations with someone, you can try to ally and it will see whether it wants to ally with you or not and take various things into account.

The fact that I had close relations with the Torians but did not ally with them and then turned around and got the Arceans to go to war against the Altarians decreased the cost that the Torians would need to be paid to become an ally. And bear in mind, they didn't declare war immediately, there were several turns where if I had been on the ball I would have negotiated an alliance treaty also (not sure if I had the tech to do that though).

The Altarians were clearly coming to dominate the galaxy though the Arceans were the other major contender. The Torians needed to join one side or the other. They chose the Altarians since apparently the Altarians provided the best deal.

If you put enough $$ in espionage there is a chance you will get more info on what is happening. But don't expect to get a nice pop up telling you what's going on for free like that.

My goal is not to make sure that I will be able to beat the crap out of the AI, rather to make sure that the AI is indeed better than usual. So I don't expect a free popup at all. I would like some proof that the AI is reasonable, and I think an event log like the debug.err file would help a lot in this regard.

I read somewhere else that you plan to improve the AI based on games submitted to Metaverse, so assume something like that log is already there, it's just a question of dumping it. Of course it might be such a bad spoiler for the player that this alone outweighs the advantages. So in summary, do whatever you see fit...

Providing information through espionage is a good idea, although I think it's a bit different than what I am looking for (immediate warning as opposed to post-mortem explanation).

As for Germany vs. Russia, I think it is dangerous to get into such historical examples because we have really no idea what Stalin and his advisors thought about Hitler. Let's suffice to say that I doubt they honestly thought the relationship was 'close'.

Since you have this goodevil system in the game though, let me ask you this: does their act make the Torians more evil? Like the way we think about Nazi Germany today?

There won't be a debug.err in the final version since it's just for debugging.

As for Stalin and his advisors, we most definitely know what Stalin thought of Hitler. Those archives are now opened. Stailin trusted Hitler.

The Torians didn't do anything evil. They made a geopolitical decision.

"Stalin trusted Hitler."

I suspect that my interpretation of the word "trust" is slightly different than yours. Anyway, I made a mental note that the Russan-German relations in May 1941 is good example of a "close" relationship and I will handle the AI accordingly...

You're still using billions for ground troops?

?

Invading a star system would involve billions of people.

It would require hundreds of thousands of ships (if not more) to carry billions of soldiers. I haven't played any betas, so I'm not sure how the game is though.


What kind of human population are we looking at? I don't see birth rates being able to produce hundreds of billions of humans in such a short period of time. Just isn't realistic. Now, I'm a science fiction fan, read comics, etc, so I can get over it. Just voicing a concern/opinion.

'What kind of human population are we looking at? I don't see birth rates being able to produce hundreds of billions of humans in such a short period of time.'

Well, in the game Earth is, on average, a class 19 planet, and it can support around 60 billion once all the morale improvements are in place. In reality Gaia is already running into problems supporting 7 billion, so we're on a nearly 10/1 scale as far as that goes.

Planets can start as high as class 26, terriformed to 195% of their base class with the right events and wonders, and there are two events that change the base class of a planet (one to 35, and the other is a +10% to uncolonized planets).

The average global birth rate is around 2% per annum, but it's not always been that way. India, until just recently, had a birth rate of around 7% per annum. At the exaggerated population scale GalCiv uses that could account for nearly 10 billion/year on a class 20 planet, and that's assuming no exaggeration on birth rates. On one of those 35s you can get from events, you can account for well over a billion a month without exaggerating birth rates.

1B soldiers isn't that inconcievable, especially if you manage to get a system with five inhabitable planets.

Population increases in GalCiv, as mentioned in the yearly status, aren't purely birth.

For instance, when the game starts, Earth has a population of around 2 billion. But by the 22nd century it would likely be at around 20 billion. So what's the deal?

It has to do with the number of citizens being reported. Only a fraction of the Earth's population would be counted as a tax payer citizen. The rest would still be too poor to pay taxes.

Let's look at Earth today:
Population 6 billion.

Population of NA and Europe: 800 million roughly.

China has about a billion, India nearly a billion. How many of them have an income high enough to count on a global scale? What about Africa?

I know that might sound "Elitist", it's not meant to. The issue is that in GalCiv, your taxes collected are based on citizens and so we count those who are rich enough to do so.

If you raise your taxes, you'll eventually find your population lowering. Are they dying? No. They are simply becoming too poor (unemployed, whatever) to pay taxes.

In planetary invasions, the full population gets counted via planetary defense bonuses. That is what many of the soldiering bonuses and such really mean - arming the non-reporting population in the event of an invasion.

I am quite impressed by this model (even though it does sound "Elitist" ). I think it would be a good idea to add your explanation, along with a description of how the diplomacy is action and not conversation based, to the user guide. It would improve the perceived depth of the game.

I'm wondering:
1 billion invaders vs. 3.32 billion defenders
no difference in attack/defense
tech difference 0.14 in Torians favor

Intuitively seems like a pretty even battle to me, still the odds are 7 to 1?

What am I missing?

One has air superiority.