GalCiv III: Expansion 1 talk

After seeing what's coming with improvements to AI, reduction of micromanagement and improvments to starbases I'd personally like to see the following 3 things addressed for an expansion:

• Fleet Combat
• Right now we've got a basically unbeatable combination with the armored escort ship roles acting as the damage absorbers while the other ships pound away.  It seems the other ship roles are sub optimal compared to this combination and it would be nice if not only other ship roles/behaviors could be added but also that the tank escort + super offense ships combination would get nerfed. 
• Also, you had mentioned something on the steam forums about commanders possibly opening up more tactical options for battles if/when they were implemented.  I know how you feel about tactical combat but I could see this really satisfying both camps to a degree.  From my experience with the game, most of my battles would be auto resolved anyway (if there was a "tactical" option) because most are fairly one-sided affairs.  The few battles that I would like to have more tacitcal control over are the real nail-biters that involve my large fleets that I would foresee having commanders in charge of them anyway.  Going with this approach would let us more tactical minded players  get our hands dirty a bit but with this level of detail limited to fleets with commanders it would prevent the player from feeling obligated to control every battle that comes their way.  Not sure what you've got planned for this anyway, just my 2 cents.
• Diplomacy
• More diplomatic options/treaties, etc but I'd also like to see diplomacy be less transparent.  Maybe I'm alone in this but it seems like diplomacy right now has a very formulaic approach.  I propose something, we haggle over a price and done.  It feels more like I'm solving a balancing equation than interacting with another empire.   I'd personally like for interactions to have a bit of randomness and a bit more obfuscation.  Not sure if I'm articulating this very well, maybe you guys can pick up what I'm laying down. 
• Invasion
• nuff said

Sorry if this is already a possibility via the Mega Events but:

Rebellion within the major races. Say you're at war with the Drengin. Time passes, things go either well or bad for you so (depending on the situation) you ask for peace or the Drengin do. Peace is agreed - except that there's a very aggressive group in the Drengin high command who split from the rest of their race. At that point you're fighting a break-off of the Drengin (as the Main Drengin) and also have to wage some kind of propaganda war to stop Drengin planets joining the breakaway group.

And I'd be fine if that happened in my race as well....It'd spice things up nicely.

I know there's the whole morale thing that happens at present but I'm not talking "Hey Drengin home world, we've had enough and we're going with the Zorgiborgians!" I'm talking "Hey Drengin home world, us planets in Ascension system and Bartdart system have decided we quit!! We're calling ourselves the Ezekiel Tribes now!!"

Whatever Firehawk153's thoughts are on Diplomacy - I think he's thinking what I am but who'd know - anyway, I'm keen on darker, murkier, more twisty-turnier, more back-stabbinger,  more "there's a change in our relationship BOO!" Dipolomacy too.

1) Map infrastructure and fleet gameplay:

currently space feels a bit empty. the only infrastructure you build are starbases with most of them being economic ones that just provide boring passive buffs. i would like to build infrastructure on the main map that changes gameplay, e.g.

1.1: Movement infrastructure: warp lanes (basically roads in space), warp gates (teleport from gate to gate), jump gates (accelerate ships to a destination point but they cannot change curse until arrival). maybe those could be unique for any race to make races more distinct

1.2: Internal Trade: currently you get space money by just building improvements, i would like to see a deeper system where i can setup internal trade routes, e.g. ferry food from agriculture worlds to wealth or industry worlds or manufactured goods to hive worlds or slaves from captured worlds to you core worlds and so on. I would particular like to see trade starbases, e.g. default internal trade routes can only be x hexes long so you have to build up a starbase network to make them possible within an large empire. on the same token, taking out key starbases will severely disrupt internal trade, i.e.  worlds will starve, people will riot, cats and dogs living together ...

1.3: I would like to give my fleets stances/orders, e.g. patrol will automatically intercept any hostile fleet that enters that fleet movement radius if detected, so i can have intercept fleets, or i need slow powerful breakthrough fleets when attacking enemy territory and once there is an opening i can send in fast fleets to take out vital infrastructure. Stealth could be implemented so the stealth module reduces the enemy intercept range, e.g. if you know that your opponent has stealth ships you need more fleets with overlapping intercept radii.

2) Race diversification and internal politics:

I really don't like that your empire consists of one race or if there are any other races in your empire you don't know it/they have no effect. I would like to have unstable empires where the drengin have a too large slave population that might uprise. Or the iconians build sentient robots again. Maybe tourism isn't so good if free earthlings visit your slave empire. This should also have a big effect on diplomacy, other races judge you based on how you deal with other races within your empire, particularly their own race.

Also the type of government should be a major factor, e.g. a decentralized feudal empire behaves a lot differently than a republic or an absolute monarchy. If the drengin leader is killed (maybe through espionage, maybe though other means) the whole drengin empire might face a slave revolt and disintegrate, whereas if the leader of a rebuplic is killed there are just re-elections and if you kill the king of a feudal empire the vassals will make civil war to fight for control over the crown.

A further possibility of race diversification could be simple things like the research order of extreme planet colonization, maybe the yor find it very easy to colonize high gravity or barren planets, but very hard to colonize aquatic planets whereas the opposite is true of the space squids.

3) War and diplomacy:

There should be different kind of wars: extermination, trade disputes, border disputes, conquest, show of force, religious wars and so on and each race should react differently to each type of war, e.g. drengin get approval bonuses when starting a war of conquest but loose reputation with other peaceful races. or peaceful races suffer upheaval from the own population when declaring war of extermination. Each type of war should have a war goal, e.g. a trade war might focus on the destruction of several trade star bases or trade routes and the war is won when the goal is achieved. based on the type of war you cannot do certain actions, e.g. if you go on a slave raid you cannot exterminate populations as those are mutually exclusive. Of course lesser wars could have risk of devolving into total wars and diplomacy should be a major factor determining this.

Currently if you wage a war and you are winning there is little reason to not go all they way and finish the job and i would like to change that. In scifi (and reality) wars do not end with extermination/occupation, but with specific deals or objectives that are wanted, e.g. wars between the federation and klingons did not end with one side totally exterminated (which is the only option in galciv3).

Well, can you indicate, what the expansion is gonna be about?

Just to not get with our ideas totally off the table

I very much like this idea. It will allow for smaller border skirmishes/raids that automatically end once the objective is gained but have a long lasting effect on diplomacy. Too much raiding will likely end in all-out war and also affect your standing with other races. This all depends on the AI being developed though, no declaring war then preparing for it 50 turns. It needs to be more of a "war of opportunity" type deal. You have a fleet near an undefended planet, you raid it (the AI coded to do this as well). This gives you an actual reason to build defense ships and buildings as well. As it stands now you don't need to build anything until you actually get declared on, then you just go all-out for a few turns and suddenly have an overwhelming defensive force. 

If the AI can raid a planet or two then take off with the spoils within a turn or two you need to actually concern yourself with defense. This also leaves room for more starbase options. Customs/Border Patrol can help negate raids in it's area of influence etc. Fleets of small fast moving interceptors become handy.

With the Dread Lords in Game I would love the Opportunity to play or get Arceans,Torians, and Dominon of Korx as Minor Races if they are not planned as Majors ,you could use the same Trick you did for the Dread Lords and give them one long forgotten Colony to explain their Return. 

Game play wise I have no Ideas @ the Moment as I spent more time in the Ship Designer 

I enjoy the ship designer as much as I enjoy playing the game, so I have a lot of little things that I would like to see added to the ship designer. Most of the things, like a better method to rotate the ship, have been requested by others so I am not going to submit a long list. Many of the changes will probably come in time.

The one thing I would most like to see, and I don't recall seeing in the forum, is to add the ability to change the default position of a completed design. When you start a design from scratch with the correctly sized "cube", by the time you have finished adding parts and save your design you find that the position or aspect of the ship is screwed up. The ship can be rotated and moved to where it looks fine but the default view is totally screwed. It may be too far to the left or right, or facing the wrong direction. There are a few things you can do to try to prevent this but sometimes the default view just comes out wrong. There should be some way that we can adjust the position of a completed design and press a button or key to set that position as default.

When you upload a ship to the Steam Workshop, you can adjust the image before uploading. This is great but afterward it returns to the default positioning. I want to permanently change the default position.

In the game they have added some nice sorting options, including fleets, etc. It seems that the list in now missing the information that was previously there regarding the ship being moving, stationed, idle, etc.  

I also hope that influence will be looked at and revised to make an influence victory reasonably possible on the larger maps.

I would like to be put into the hat to participate in the Beta.

I would like a possible return to 'Margarita night' Diplomacy responses. I know many here hated the non-immersive responses from some of the Civilizations but I would like to see more, (and snarky) comments and requests from the ai.

Please schedule a few nights with Paul his owner(the nice lady) and Brad and Adam and go eat some good Mexican food and order about 5 pitchers of Margaritas.

I'd like some comments and responses sent to you about what they are doing and how they are going to win in addition to them commenting on what they think you are going to do to win/conquer them. (I hope this statement makes sense.)

Make sure Adam has the means to capture some of your ideas!

Oh and enjoy what you are doing. If that is not happening then add more pitchers.

I would also like to see a more interactive invasion  process although I am at a loss on how to accomplish this without pulling away from the main game.

Larger Maps (Even though I've only completed one game on the largest map) :)  [Of course work on any performance hits]

More of the Races from Gal Civ II

Espionage and Commanders (as Paul has been hinting at since Alpha)

Slower Tech Tree/ Game Pacing (with out use of mods, built into game)  Based on number of planets in game.

Unstable Planet type that is in the game files but, not in the game.

Faster Turn time on larger games (I know this goes against the first point) However, right now this is my big hang up.  Not as bad as it once was but still not great.

Thanks for all your teams hard work.

Yes, oh yes.

I like everything I am hearing from Brad and Paul (except maybe threats to my precious cloud of constructors) and most of what is said in this thread.  I am especially stoked at the continuing AI work. Governors have promise.  So, I don't have any features to request.  But I do want to emphasize the continuing need for flavor and generous amounts of eye candy.  I would especially request more art assets of the quality of the colonization events.  Those give the game a whole different level of class and quality, like all the work put into planet and star visualization.  I know these things are not a priority over game mechanics, balance, and UI, but they are also supposedly independent of those other efforts.  So, I am asking/begging for the art assets team to give as much love, hours and attention to the game as they can to all parts of the game.  Thanks!

An espionage system would be nice. Not sure if spies should be real units on the map (as in CIV IV) or units which you can send on specific errants (as in CIV V/ CIV BE). But I liked CIV BE's spy level and city espionage thread system. The espionage thread could start low (sabotage buildings/starbase modules, steal credits/technology points) to more devastating measures (kill population, cause unrest/revolt). That way a player/AI has some time to react to espionage threads. If you also include some kind of internal governance politics (like the elections in Gal Civ II), it wold be nice if you could influence this via propaganda from spies/diplomats as well. A scenario could then be that you rig the election of a civilisation so that the peaceful party is replaced by a warmonger party and you bribe that party into war with another AI. 

The idea of war goals sounds intriguing.

I'd like to see espionage come back.  Not the annoying aspects of it, but I miss planting spies on worlds and slowly building up knowledge of what a race is doing.

All of this sounds wonderful and I really like most of the suggestions here. Don't really have much to add except make it happen soon! As always, I'll be happy to beta test whatever you guys throw our way.

I can't wait to see the return to the Arceans and the Toreans!

This was mentioned as a possibility a while back, but in addition to whatever Campiagn is released for the first expansion, being able to play the Campaigns from the first two Galactic Civilizations would be grand.  Being able to "start from the beginning" and go all the way through to wherever the story goes could be aces.

Even if it is a DLC along the first exspansion, something like this could be really great for the people who never played the Campaigns in the previous iterations of the game.

More diplomacy

Spys

More diplomacy

There are a lot of good suggestions , but  I  want to start by saying that I hope the x ml middling capabilities  improve with  match/inject capabilities  like some of us discuss herehttps://forums.galciv3.com/forum/1131 if that doesn't  happen  before  then. That thread  talks a lot abut reasons an d quality of  life for modders.  I'd love to be in beta too

• I too would  really like the economic   system to get  a lot more depth.
• Someone mentioned  spies, and I didn't much like them in gc2 & most 4x games, countries and  companies  spy  on countries  & companies/ research  within other countries all  the  time  for reasons other than cold war US/USSR type stuff get allowed . 
• But few games ever ever allow covert operatives  teaching the internal thorn of your rival  to be a bigger thorn like the US did in Afghanistan (similar with many other country combos in many places) against the soviets way back nor can you do stuff like fveyes (five  eyes) alliances  china's 50 cent party,  AIPAC and a host of other complex things thatshould be part  of  espionage  systems but rarely is.
• A third dimension in space.  With things liken hololens, this will be even  more  awesome . Even if it means insane  maps go from zillion  hex=z z*z zines maps to ummm .3z*.3z*.3z insane  maps
• High speed travel lanes (aka jump gates/ stable  wormholes.  Diplomacy is hugely  constrained through  the difficulty  of getting across  the galaxy  to more than your closest  neighbors. The fact thst getting  to your neighbors  can be a huge ordeal doesn't  help either . 
• Others have made great points about different  kinds of wars  than just generic   "war"
• 
  

Shouty.

Personally, I vote Diplomacy being THE major feature of any expansion. Why?

1) Its an area most games lack features, or, lack character. GC never lacks for character, but features? Yeah a little, there is nothing special here (or in the past iterations) at the moment.

2) I know part of your vision for the game is immersion and a little bit of role-play as it were. Your not building the most interesting spreadsheet game, your building an experience. Diplomacy can play a huge part of that. (Also espionage can be part of this too)

I don't want to be too specific on suggestions, but generally, I would like to see a less than obvious system when trading. I'd like to have a conversation with the alien in front of me, and if I pick the right responses in the right order, get rewarded. Some randomization is needed, and different technologies can open up better and better responses.

For example, the Drengin speak to the Altarians, no diplomacy tech, your choices are:

"Hello dinner, how are you?" (This is your best response, its not great and still incurs a penalty with someone like the Altarians)

"Ahhh, what do the weak wish from the strong?" (The Altarians definitely don't like this, but it will give you a small chance for trade during the conversation)

In the future, with some tech you may get to say...

"Wise Altarians, what can the earnest, if aggressive Drengin do for you today?" Neutral enough greeting, and gives a higher chance for trading.

I also believe trading "stuff" and making alliances, non-aggression pacts, open borders, should be split. I don't think diplomacy should be as nakedly materialistic. An alliance can't be bought with some short term stuff, it should be bought with tech treaties, and generally, by having a good solid relationship in the past. Splitting them, also means you can have empires very willing to sell you things, but incredibly resistant to commitments, which I imagine the Iridium would be.

I also agree that we need more conflict that isn't outright war. I really think that influence and "real borders" need to both exist, seperately. Influence represents your culture offensive, while some small real border around your planets could also exist. Conflict outside of your real borders does not trigger war, but obviously has a diplomatic penalty and a chance to trigger war. This will really spice up the game play. I'm sure you can do this in other ways, but it requires "neutral" space, which the current influence system eliminates pretty quickly.

That is the simplest implementation I can think, I'm sure you can come up with a great system.

OH and I really hope I don't have to wait for an expansion to get mod-support via Steam Workshop.    :()

I would like much more detailed economic management involving a private and a public sector, production capacity vs. optimal levels of production (and, as a consequence, employment/unemployment). In general the economy should auto-run itself for maximum profitability (optimization algorithm - easy for computers to do) but the player should be able to tax this at a percentage (high tax rates lead to low approval) in order to subsidize social, military, etc. that would be otherwise unprofitable provided that the productive capacity exists. The production wheels would disappear and in their places would go a tax rate and various sliders to allocate unused production to the field desired by the player.

I want squares, not hexes.

some more points:

4) de-emphasizing production: the officer core

i would like to see an officer core with number of officers and their quality. each ship uses a few of them and the better they are trained or gain combat experience the better they are. if you scuttle ships you get your officers back, if you loose it they are lost. if you have lot's of high production worlds that produce ship after ship, but lack a star-fleet academy in san francisco you can't man your ships and you would have to rely on makeshift crews who probably mess up in combat. this would basically function in a similar way to manpower in eu4, with the exception that quality of your officers also matters. if you just mass produce ships to throw them at the front lines you will see your fleet combat abilities drastically reduced. some races could see approval hits when their officer corps is depleted and their citizens are put in ships to die (earthlings), while other may ignore that mechanic (yor because robots) and other would not care so much (all drengin are bloodthirsty).

5) production of strategic resources:

just a small suggestion: instead of resource starbases giving you x resources per mine. the generate resources every x turns. the more mines and better resource extractions techs you have the faster they are mined, so if you focus heavily on mining you can build more ships with special modules, again favouring something else over raw manufacturing.

My big request: get rid of the global spending wheel.  I think it  hurts more than helps.

 I've had a hard time getting into GalCiv3 so far, though much of this is due to Sorcerer King.

Seconded.

With emphasis on this.

Make flavor text easily moddable. Even if it makes no difference I like having the ability to tell the AI to KMA and DIAF. Hint: they should act insulted if I do that.

And, for god sake give the AI something to say to humans other than "good to see you walking upright". It is a great line but it is used too often, and with all the custom human races it is less appropriate.