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GalCiv vs MOO2 (for GalCiv 2)

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GalCiv vs MOO2 (for GalCiv 2)

from Stardock Forums
Hi all,

I'm sure this has been gone over before, but I thought I'd put it up anyway.

This thread is NOT about which game is better. Both games stand head and shoulders above the rest, and they have very striking similarities. But some things are done better in GalCiv and other things in MOO2 - I'm hoping Stardock take some of this in mind when writing GalCiv 2!

Anyway, here are some of my rambling thoughts:

Macromanagement
GalCiv wins on this one, although certain things could certainly be done better. Managing the empire is as simple as shifting a few sliders.

Micromanagement
This is MOO2's crown, I feel. The word "micromanagement" scares some people, but it's not anywhere near as bad as it sounds. MOO2 definitely made micromanagement very easy with its consolidated planets screen. If you wanted to up research, you just went down and shifted population units. It took a bit longer than shifting the slider in GalCiv, but you could at ensure that your high production or frontline planets carried on doing what you needed them to do (build ships), and that you weren't wasting money. You didn't have to fine tune every last pop unit at all.

Ship Combat & Strategy
I think MOO2 wins on this. The possibilities that ship design brings is enormous, and adds a lot of strategy. A good ship design could, up to a point, compensate for a technological disadvantage. I remember when a Bulrathi (superior soldiers) fleet decimated my superior cruisers by tractor-beaming them and boarding!

Diplomacy & AI
GalCiv is far, far better at this. The AI actually makes some fairly rational decisions, like pausing a war to re-arm, not fighting on more than one front, making trades that you will actually ACCEPT and so on. The MOO2 AI would declare war, make peace the next turn and immediately declare war with the same race the turn after! OTOH, some situations remain the same - in MOO2, it was the Mrrshan demanding 1500BC from me, in GalCiv, it's the Drengin :)

Tech Tree
While the GalCiv tech tree is a lot larger MOO2's, I feel one goes to MOO2 - the tech in MOO2 has more personality. A lot of the tech in MOO2 allowed you to do stuff you couldn't do before you researched it. There are very few techs like that in GalCiv - most of it just improves existing abilities.

There's very little useless social tech in MOO2. While the combat tech does become obsolete, almost all of it has a use right the way through the game.

Challenge
GalCiv wins. Hands down. Even on Impossible now, I never, ever lose a game of MOO2. Given how hard I'm finding GalCiv on challenging, Masochistic just scares me :SURPRISED:

I've a few more thoughts, but that will do for now ;D
5,672 views 81 replies
Reply #26 from Stardock Forums Top

In fact, I've started work on a Java version of MOO1.
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That's funny...I've done somewhat the same thing. The game I'm working on isn't so much a version of MOO1, it's more an exercise in taking the best parts of a number of my favorite strategy games and combining them into one game. So I'm picking ideas from MOO1, MOO2, Stars!, GalCiv, CivIII and others, and trying to craft a game that has everything I want. Each of those games had (or has) lots of strong points, but isn't precisely what I want, so I'm going for it. I've been a programmer for more than 20 years, but I've never written a game more complicated than tic-tac-toe (in Ada, no less, as an extra-credit class exercise) so I'm sure going will be somewhat slow. I do, however, work in modeling and simulation, so hopefully some of that will rub off.

Good luck with your effort, Thongor.


~SDC~
Reply #27 from Stardock Forums Top

BTW, another thing we want to do is something I don't think MOO allows:

Custom SHIPS.  Not just custom classes, but the ability to have each ship be customized with what it's equipped with.

I was imaginging scenarios where once in a great while interstellar traders from other galaxies might travel through selling some advanced weapon or defense that you coudl buy and put on a single ship to give that ship some special advantages over others.

Kind of like in an RPG where one person in your party has that +4 sword.

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #28 from Stardock Forums Top

Kind of like in an RPG where one person in your party has that +4 sword.
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...or like in Star Wars where Darth Vader had his own personalized Super Star Destroyer.


~SDC~
Reply #29 from Stardock Forums Top
BTW, another thing we want to do is something I don't think MOO allows:
Custom SHIPS. Not just custom classes, but the ability to have each ship be customized with what it's equipped with.
I was imaginging scenarios where once in a great while interstellar traders from other galaxies might travel through selling some advanced weapon or defense that you coudl buy and put on a single ship to give that ship some special advantages over others.
Kind of like in an RPG where one person in your party has that +4 sword.
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Niiiiiice! :)

I really like the idea, but it sounds like it could get pretty complex in practice. Does this mean that ships could be continually upgraded after they were built, or only by means of special events? Would you have to put a ship back into the build queue and spend time/production upgrading it (ala MOO2), or would it be a quick 'pay x BC' kind of thing (ala SMAC)?

Are we creating a (limited?) number of MOO-style 'ship designs', that we can tweak after they're built, or does each ship have to be designed from scratch?

Also, how does the game deal with the fact that you've only got ONE super-ultra-death-ray-gun... would it require you to select an existing ship right away to put it on, or would you be able to stock up on these ship components?

I realize that's a lot of questions for something that's probably only in the concept phase... but you've gone and fired up my curiosity now! :HOT:
Reply #30 from Stardock Forums Top
Custom SHIPS. Not just custom classes, but the ability to have each ship be customized with what it's equipped with.
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Sweet!!!
Reply #31 from Stardock Forums Top

We plan to have a way to upgrade ships enmasse using a governors type interface.

I've never understood why game designers muck around with the issue of upgrading ships.

Players would simply go to a governor screen and say: All ships that have weapon type X should now upgrade to weapon type Y.

It would then tell you how much it would cost to do that (more ships, the higher the cost). And let the player decide.

In other words, games shouldn't focus on the SHIP CLASSES to upgrade, they should focus on the weapon/defense/propulsion system that needs to be upgraded since that's the whole point. I get Hyperdrive Mark IV I am really interested in upgrading my ships to be faster right?

Throw in a little extra UI to let people filter which ships would be affected and voila.

Reply #32 from Stardock Forums Top
I've recently started playing MOO1 via DosBox - I was a big MOO2 addict. There's a lot I like about MOO1, but my last three games (at high difficulty) have all ended abruptly, long before any decisive battles could take place and usually before I'd even made contact with all the other races. In every case, the humans were elected rulers of the galaxy - (fortunately, in two of these cases, I was playing as the humans). Why do all these aliens vote to lose? As long as games are going to end like this, 90% of the features are irrelevant. Or was I just lucky/unlucky each time? I imagine it's quite easy to jump to conclusions about these things.
What you like depends a lot on what flaws you're prepared to overlook.

~SDC~
Reply #33 from Stardock Forums Top
We plan to have a way to upgrade ships enmasse using a governors type interface.
...
Throw in a little extra UI to let people filter which ships would be affected and voila.
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Wow... so you're pretty deep into the 'conceptual phase' then...? ;)

Actually, it sounds really good, and my first instinct is always to look for the flaws. The more I think about it, the more elegant it sounds. Good job. :)

@Matthew Downie - MOO1 didn't have much use for the concept of 'race balance'. Some see this as a flaw, but personally I think it was a deliberate design choice. For me, it enhances the replay value of the game by allowing you to change the difficulty of the game depending on the race you choose.

Humans are by far the easiest to win with... too easy in fact, even on Impossible. They just get too many cumulative bonuses, and the voting system highly favours an early Human win.

If you want a real challenge, play a Medium, Impossible galaxy with maximum opponents (5?) as the Mrrshan. Don't ever let the Humans get to be one of the two largest empires.
Reply #34 from Stardock Forums Top
One of the few areas I can think of for improvement in a GC2 is navigating the tech tree. Its hard to see an end tech you want to head towards and research accordingly. It is much improved now that you can "click the links" to see what techs follow or precede the one you're interested in. However, a screen that laid out the research tree and enabled you to click on an end tech and have the prerequisites line up in a research queue would help (cp. CivIII).
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I actually think tech research should be blind a-la the option you could pick in Alpha-Centauri
You pick the categories to focus on, but you don't have a control over a specific tech research. Publish no tech tree. That's just not how research works. Or put it like Moo1 where you had a few limited picks at a time but not full control over the entire tech tree. No one says... Oh I know in 300 years we wan't this tech, so lets research this one and skip all these others. Part of the fun of a game is in the discovery.

MoO1 was a great game. I liked how they balanced out various things in the game. Such as small ships versus large ships. And how technology not only let you go farther out from colonies, but also opened up new kinds of worlds you could colonize. It gave the game the feeling that you were really opening up what you could do.
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Oh I loved that aspect of it. You absolutely had to have the planetology tech to colonize certain type worlds. And each game was different b/c you never knew where (or if) the silicoids were. Range and planetology were some early issues in that game and that made it challenging and fun. They took that away in Moo2 and I hated that. You could colonize anything right away. You just had to get the right tech's to terraform it and make it better. The reason they ended that is they couldn't balance the computer players to have a shot vs the Silicoids in Moo2 otherwise. As it was in the end, it still had serious balance problems. (Elerians always ended up with 1-2 systems and the weakest computer civ) for example.


"Fleet" roles never work. They are always neat to look at on the 3D tactical displays, but their never end up having any real meaning. Why? Because either the game doesn't have enough detail, or doesn't allow for a large enough fleet. Star Wars Rebellion had fleets, with ship roles and fleet tactics, for instance. And while they looked pretty, they didn't matter even 1% in the outcome of the fight. Same with MoO3 and every other game I've played with them.
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The only game where stacked units fighting as one really worked properly and with good balance was Call to Power. The Puter could end up murdering you with some good units on occasion. On most other games I've seen, that ended up as a mechanism to abuse the computer.

The fleet combats on Moo3 ended up as battle of the dots. If you zoomed in for a better view, you lost control of the fleet. Although Rarely does your intervention affect the outcome if at all anyway, so I guess that didn't matter too much. I liked the idea of some ships being system defenders only (and thus cheaper) but unable to move out of the syste.



Reply #35 from Stardock Forums Top
I liked the idea of some ships being system defenders only (and thus cheaper) but unable to move out of the syste.
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I actually had an idea a while ago for putting carriers into GalCiv, and then restricting fighter-type ships and missiles to a range of 0-2 (from a planet, starbase or carrier), for much the same effect. I'm not sure it would work quite the same way for GalCiv 2 though...
Reply #36 from Stardock Forums Top
BTW, another thing we want to do is something I don't think MOO allows:Custom SHIPS. Not just custom classes, but the ability to have each ship be customized with what it's equipped with.I was imaginging scenarios where once in a great while interstellar traders from other galaxies might travel through selling some advanced weapon or defense that you coudl buy and put on a single ship to give that ship some special advantages over others.Kind of like in an RPG where one person in your party has that +4 sword
End of quote


Moo2 had that ability to a big extent. You could pick your weapons and specials to put in it as well as engine class, and such. Some had point defense, others were heavy mount, streaming, etc. Each had a money and weight cost. You could also pick the number of each type subject to the size of the ship and your budget. Some weapons had point defense ability. Depending on your icon color you chose, they had 8 or so different shapes for your ship to look like for each size vessel to use. It was a two dimensional flat look though. Nothing spectacular. But it was really quite cool. The drawback was you were limited to only 5 different designs that you could build at a time. If you wanted a new one you had to go through a redesign and no longer produce one of your previous 5. Your old ships kept their original design and stuff and could be upgraded. Best part of the game. Unfortunately the ai didn't know how to use alot of the stuff and the rest of Moo2 wasn't up to snuff

But GC2 sounds cool. What minimum system specs are you planning (of course I won't hold you iron clad to them) for it to run on?




[Message Edited]
Reply #37 from Stardock Forums Top
I actually had an idea a while ago for putting carriers into GalCiv, and then restricting fighter-type ships and missiles to a range of 0-2 (from a planet, starbase or carrier), for much the same effect. I'm not sure it would work quite the same way for GalCiv 2 though...
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That would definitely be a great idea for Amm's and missiles. Give them very limited range say 1 sector or less even And of course tie it to a technology ie Missile Frigate requires missile racks (holds 2) Missile Cruiser Requires Fast missile racks (holds 3) Missile Crusador requires something else.(holds 5)

Also you could have lesser missiles sooner in the game.
And tech's to increase their effectiveness and stuff.
Reply #38 from Stardock Forums Top
Also you could have lesser missiles sooner in the game.
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Actually, I'm making a mod that includes those as well as a bunch of other stuff. :)
Reply #39 from Stardock Forums Top
That's funny...I've done somewhat the same thing.
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Oddly enough, I'm doing the same thing now too LOL The most complex games I ever wrote were two quite extensive Bard's Tale style RPGs, so not quite the same type of game, but hey, the first one was on a machine that had 20K (as in 20000 BYTES) of usable memory - with lots of heavy disc-swapping, I managed to squeeze a 400K game into it. Ah, the lengths we had to go to in those days...plus some pretty good (if I do say so myself) 4-colour graphics :)

I do remember writing "Space Observers" for my uni project - like Space Invaders, but the invaders didn't shoot back or move down the screen :D

Good luck with all your efforts.
Reply #40 from Stardock Forums Top
One thing that was great with MOO1, was the trade-off bewteen old technologies and new technologies when designing a ship: as you discover new technologies, the old ones became more efficient: using less space and less power. And it was true for everything: armor, weapon, defense, engine ...
It was really nice since you will choose to go to a few big weapons or a lot of small weapons depending on :
- what give the most damage WHEN all weapons fire
- what give the most damage against opponent shield (a laser that do 1-4 damage do nothing against a shield that protect up to 5 damage per firing weapon)
[Message Edited]
Reply #41 from Stardock Forums Top
The same thing happens in MOO2, plus there's also some technologies that reduce space taken up by equipment or increasing existing space in a ship. Late in the game I'd have a "Death Star" design that had about 4-5 Stellar Converters and every shield/armor enhancing system. And then of course I'd have a "Terror Star" design that had just one Stellar Converter but also Disruptor Cannons up the wazoo. As well as the usual orbital bombardment stuff and missiles.
Reply #42 from Stardock Forums Top
Very late in the game I'd have an "emergency defence" design - basically a battleship (not a titan) which mounted one stellar converter, maybe one or two other guns if I had the space and shield enhancing/repair techs. They were throwaway ships that I could rush-buy a load of because they were so cheap, in case I suddenly spotted an enemy attack fleet on its way.

They were my "Suicide Class" battleships :D
Reply #43 from Stardock Forums Top
My MOO2 games usually ended before I even got to Stellar Convertor. I'd take Orion with a weapon like Plasma Cannons (or a fleet with nothing but Gyro Destabilizers could be very effective, at least before the patch), and then I'd have a significant technological lead. With the free super-powered battleship, I could teleport up to any starbase, Death Ray it to kill off the marines, capture it, and then neutronium bomb the planet's defences into oblivion.

~SDC~
Reply #44 from Stardock Forums Top
i think that in Imperium Galactica 2 you can upgrade all ships by upgrading the design.
Reply #45 from Stardock Forums Top
I don't know if anyone has played it, and I don't say it was the best, but Earth 2150 and the Moon Project had an interesting vehicle design. You would research basic vehicle designs, and basic weapon research. Then, you would add weapons to mounts on the vehicles, and different vehicles and weapons would cost more or less. Just another game that could be considered.
Reply #46 from Stardock Forums Top
i liked moon project, but the game would get slow, especially just sitting thier mining and building tanks for the next mission. I never finished the game because of that. However builing the vehicles and watching them in acton was a great aspect of that game.
Reply #47 from Stardock Forums Top
Custom bits:
MoO2 allows for that. Capture an alien ship... you can tear it apart to try and learn about a few techs, or you can just refit it. No odd aliens popping up and going "We got a single Death Ray will will sell you for X BC" though.

Of course, I'd want to take it apart and learn how to make more of them. ;)
Reply #48 from Stardock Forums Top
Refits:

Frogboy, you mean, ala SMAC? Through SMAC's workshop UI, you can upgrade ALL members of a design to a more advanced design, or do it one off/manually, unit by unit if you did not want to upgrade all of the class at once.
Reply #49 from Stardock Forums Top
Captain Jack Sparrow, you said:
"I actually think tech research should be blind a-la the option you could pick in Alpha-Centauri
You pick the categories to focus on, but you don't have a control over a specific tech research. Publish no tech tree. That's just not how research works. Or put it like Moo1 where you had a few limited picks at a time but not full control over the entire tech tree. No one says... Oh I know in 300 years we wan't this tech, so lets research this one and skip all these others. Part of the fun of a game is in the discovery. "

Something to remember... after you've discovered the tree, not being able to see stuff is just a pain. That's why GalCiv now has the navigator.

The only way you can KEEP discovery around is to change the pre-requisites of the tech tree... every game. Otherwise, hardcore players will eventually map out the tree, and softcore players will just use that when the grogs make it available.

And keep in mind, even under SMAC's "blind" system, it allowed you to concentrate on what "general" things were of interest. That allowed players like me to turn on and off the "general" areas to easily guide research to the exact techs wanted, with only a minor speed bump of a different "random" tech along the way.

So, you can either randomize the tech tree, every game, or allow for the setting of "goals". Best options, as I see it, for the players. (You could compromise... allowing for a standard tree with goal ability for the grogs, and a random per game option which would of course have no "goals" option when engaged.) Problem from a design point of view... what do you do for the AI when the tech is random? Allowing a set path allows for what we have now... known AI tactics and research paths that fit those tactics. You lose intelligent opposition ability from the AI when it's all random...
Reply #50 from Stardock Forums Top
You lose intelligent opposition ability from the AI when it's all random...
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Ah but you gain an imprevisible AI. The most intelligent opposition is useless if it leads to a predictable AI. Once you have figured out how to defeat it, every game becomes pretty much the same.


~SDC~