Fun Factor

I am having tones of fun! I love the almost boardgame feel this game gives you! The only thing that still irks me is the fact that the races still seem to vote randomly in the UP...

As more crashes are fixed, the game becomes more playable. When I first downloaded beta 3, it was totally unplayable and would crash significantly almost every time. This was when I first bought the game. You guys then announced the windowed version on here and now a new release... the game is much more stable and that is a big factor in my opinion. This has alot to do with exploring the depth of the game.

I wasn't able to explore how deep/vast/interesting this game for awhile because of a number of factors:

1) Random crashes prevented me from getting further advanced in the game technologically

2) Sometimes I would have a fluke win at the very beginning of the game, other times I would lose very quickly (the loss in my opinion is acceptable for a good/challenging game however)

3) Some weird number problems where certain ships would get like 2393923923hp... I still havent figured out if this is a bug or because the ships have reached level 6.

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Other than that the game is good. You guys have been very diligent fixing the bugs which is something I am really pleased about. There are also some suggestions I would like to make:

1) It would be interesting to make the United Planets have more possibilities. I was impressed by it initially but it gets a bit repetetive later in the game.

2) You have hit something big with adding elections/Congress. Maybe add some more depth to the election process and party selection screen. What does each party stand for specifically? Could each planets election results be displayed and have a meaning? This is a little out there but I think it would be cool to see some more of that in the game. Its really lacking in other games.

4) There is still a bug if I am not mistaken (although I haven't tried it in the latest build) where if you can click on any planet, go to details, and click "Destroy Colony". Seems the game crashes right after you do that.

5) Right now each empire has a border based on the planets and star systems they control. Why not add border rights? This could become interesting... you could make an optional referendum in the United Planets to have mandatory open intergalactic borders. I'm aware that would require alot of coding but it would add alot more strategy to the game..

6) BIG ONE: Give an option for people to continue playing even after they win the game. I hate playing for a long period of time and then somehow win unexpectedly. The game would be so much better if you added this.

7) Zoom in/zoom out could be better, but I know there are probably big technical limitations to this. Would be useful though.

So far, I haven't been able to get into it -- and I've been trying. I can't quite put my finger on why. For comparison with other spacefaring exploration games, I'd say Spaceward Ho! is my Nirvana -- everything in it is just about perfect -- and MOO2 is the bottom of the barrel. MOO is somewhere in between. I never played the original GalCiv.

Things I like:
- the survey ships.
- the political system.
- the governor system (though it took me a while to understand)

Things I don't like so much:
- there's a general feeling of a lack of urgency. So you kinda bop along until suddenly you realize you're losing terribly. There's no 'baseline' to compare yourself against when you're not in contact with alien civs.
- It's not immediately obvious to me how a planet is 'supposed' to develop and grow. It's not clear at a glance how well it's doing. I mean, sure, there are morale numbers, etc., but compare that to Civilization, where you open the city screen and instantly know how 'big' your city is. Or the Spaceward Ho! method of showing how close a planet is to ideal, graphically. In other words, don't TELL me how the planet is doing, SHOW me.

Things I don't like at all:
- i gotta say, the UI leaves a lot to be desired for me. a great UI is understandable the first time you see it, yet leaves room for depth and exploration. Watch a new player play GalCiv. Does he or she press every button? Are they looking in the right places? Or do they just kinda flail randomly? Take a look at Alpha Centauri, which has a fairly complex management system. As you progress through the game, the UI itself offers to guide the user through various features. Scripted events early in the game offer a great excuse to force the user to examine a menu. You should make use of them. Likewise with the data reports / views of the map. If the user hasn't picked one, cycle through them so that s/he has some idea what they are. We're users. That means we're lazy. Like Bob the Angry Flower, we don't want to have to press TWO buttons.

I'd have to say, my fun factor is quickly killed by a few factors:

1) Inability to figure out what to build. I know a lot of the improvements tell me what they do, but what's _good_ to build? Civ/AC/MOO2 all give me some decent guidance what to build in what order. I see little of that.

1a) Actually, in general, a lot more guidance is needed in game. Perhaps a tutorial mode? Perhaps a series of small scenarios that teach you how to use parts of the games? I don't know, but something is needed.

2) Tech Overload - I end up having FAR more techs than I can ever exploit, even when I'm not playing the technologists.

3) I don't like specifically knowing who's who. It's be nicer if you could just set a difficulty level (easy, hard, etc) and just have the races appropriately set for me - like all idiots on simple, all genius on impossible, and some variation in between.

4) I have a hard time getting into the feel of things when there are typos all over the place. Like seeing "X eno Manipulation".

I _loved_ GalCiv 1 (hell, I bought OS/2 for it and it alone but I'm just not getting into the swing of things with GC2.

I bought the game about a week and a half ago, but it doesn't show up when I run the Drengin GM, and the tech people still haven't figured out why I'm unable to access GalCiv. So, I can't speak from experience yet.

However, let me echo something from the post above. I dislike choosing the exact number of opposing civilizations or setting their abilities at the beginning of the game. I'd rather make a more general choice, like "Few," "Average," and "Many" for the number of computer opponents, and "Easy," "Average," "Difficult," etc., for how challenging they will be as a group, with the computer assigning each civ a random level of inteligence influenced by my general choice. This would preserve some necessary uncertainty about what I might run into as the game progresses.

'However, let me echo something from the post above. I dislike choosing the exact number of opposing civilizations or setting their abilities at the beginning of the game'

The civs can be set to 'Random' morality and intelligence. All that's really needed is a button to randomize the number of AI.

I was about to say the same thing. There is a randomize feature. We could look at adding a randomize # of opponents too.

As an old time player of the OS/2 version and a tester since January, I am still having more and more fun with each build that comes out. Each added feature has improved the feel of the game.

Hmm

not a particularly positive start, but at least well thought out.

I like the game a lot. I have from the start. Strangely Beta3 seems to be slightly slower paced than 2, a slow burner. I prefer this. In beta 1 and 2 even on lower levels I could not get established. On the ropes from the start is absorbing and immersive but I do like to make progress - even win once in a while.

With the slower start I can now establish some infrastructure and a political and econonomic identity. In addition I can now start to seed some starbases, planetary and space defences and start to play with the more friendly races - a bit of political poker is now starting to emerge - which should be capatalised on - it is really potentially magmetic this aspect.

Following are bits and bobs I really feel would either magnify the aspects of the game I think are unique and engrossing. Also I list errors that though minor reduce my enjoyment through irritation.

Good things to emphasise:

Radar-
The search through space for enemy ships and stations (especially after cloaking tech?) reminds me of some of the great submarine hunter type movies and games - just a bit. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a tareget on autopilot just to see it frustratingly fade away - can you find it again? I use search patterns with multiple ships (if I have them) which is great fun. A little game within a game. What I thought would be nice was a trade of between moves for a turn and a big radar 'ping' expending allenergy for propulsion in order to scan a large area around the ship - but unable to move that turn.

It would be grat to have teritorial exclusions - spying AI players should risk starting wars if owners of sectors could issue 'keep out of my teritory' edicts

Irritations that should be resolved I think:

Ships guarding transports it is no fun limping acros the map with a starship protecting a transport when they move at different speeds - very labour intensive and manual. They need to be able to be set on guard and sit with each other.

I think Constructors are far too fast (7) they are big lumbering shings in my imagination and building great starbases should be a long slow strategic challenge

Espionage - what's this do? Is it to be developed in some way? At the moment I invest in it and get no clues as to benefits therefore little satisfaction

Starbases - I still don't fully understand what the upgrades do. Whilst I don't want this on a plate I think more could be done (perhaps graphically? colour coding for values: yellow bar- Influence; red bar-Industry; green bar-commerce etc)

slider control for allocating cash on the trade negotiations screen that retains the last value as you barter

Bugs-

Ship list in Beta3 disapears, you need to click on the scroll bar to bring it back

Details screen narratives on the planet constructions are not reporting right

'I think Constructors are far too fast (7) they are big lumbering shings in my imagination and building great starbases should be a long slow strategic challenge'

A constructor's starting speed is only 4, the same as a colony ship. Only two ships, that I can think of, are slower.

I agree though that constructors should probably be slower.

I tend to think though that the module upgrades on star bases are about as self-explanatory as you can get. I mean, they literally and specifically state what they do "increases your influence by 25% in this sector". Or "add +1 to your ship's attack ability in this sector." That's pretty specific and self-explanatory.

One thing I am personally quite concerned about is the on-going pulling in two directions. On the one hand, we want to have a game that has great depth, flexibility, and features. On the other hand, some people want the game to pretty much walk them through every minute piece of the game. I don't think we can do both. I think the best route is to try to find a happy medium.

I don't like scripted tutorials. There won't be one. I'd rather see the game fail than spend time on hand holding new players. The user manual's job will be to explain what things do. That said, I do think we need to add tehswe things:

1 A Galactic Encyclopedia in game that people can look up different things and get an explanation on them.

2) A yearly progress report (every 12 turns) that gives them an idea of what's going on with their civilization and evaluate how they stand in the galaxy in different and unique ways each report.

3) Context sensitive help. I.e. a [?] and a [E] link to an encyclopedia entry. For instance, when I click on a news network, I want there to b ea [?] in the descriptoin that when I click on will bring up a description in detail of it such as "News networks help make a newly colonized planet happy while at the same time allows us to get human-centric news information to them which can counter foreign influences."

4) The Espionage alert dialog that gives you an idea on your progress should also come with a button that takes you to the stats on an alien civilization. When you get to a certain point in espionage, you should start being able to steal their technologies.

5) Stacked ships need to be implemented. Move units onto a single square and on the right side where it lists the ships have a button that will stack the ships and allow you to move them as one units. These are NOT fleets, they're still individual units that are just moving together for easier UI reasons.

6) I want to get in much more minor races. While I agree that you shouldn't be fighting for your life right away, I want there to be plenty of minor races to act as early cannon fodder to help keep things lively. The reason we don't have more in already is lack of ship graphics (each race has their own style of ship).

Other observations:
I don't agree about the user interace being bad. I think it's pretty clean. You can click on pretty much everything you'd want to click on.

Keep in mind, this is a strategy game that has considerable depth to it. The user manual is important. A game I enjoy, Europa Universalis, is very hard to play without the manual for instance. But I don't want us to sacrifice depth to make it so that Joe gamer can sit down and master the game in 5 minutes. Our goal is to make sure that Joe Gamer can figure ou how to basically play the game quickly. I think we accomplish that.

Also, the game is not designed so that you can research all the techs. The idea is that you have to make tough choices in what direction you go in. We are specifically making it so that you won't realistically be able to get through all the techs.

That said, most of the things we're reading here we'll try to get into beta 2C which is due a week from this upcomiing Monday.

I also REALLY want to get mouse wheel support. Lack of mouse hweel support is driving me nuts.

If you check the ship definition files "Coreships.SHIP" and "starbase.ship" you will find the Colony ship has a BASE speed of 2 and the constructor has a base speed of 1. The constructor can get a speed of 6 when you research speed improvement techs "Impules Drive", "Warp Drive", "Hyperspace", "Hyper Warp", and "Controled Wormholes" (+1 each). Adding Trade Goods "Gravity Accelerators" (+2) gives a max constructor a speed of 8.

I think it's time to make a FAQ page, just a thought. I don't know how many times I have read Brad giving this speech.

It just seems weird when new player complain that this game is hard to get into, but seeing as I've been in the beta from the beginning, maybe it's easier for me? Personally, I don't find this game any harder to navigate than I found Master of Orion to be when I first played it back when I was 13...

And are we skipping beta 3b?

Frogboy, you're missing the point on some things here.

1) Adding a Randomize # feature is nice, but that neglects the aim of a "game level" choice.

If I randomize all the intelligence levels of my opponents, then I take the risk of having a nigh-impossible game of all Genius AI. Assuming a fixed 5 opponents, if I was to take a "Simple" game, it should populate that list with, for example, 3-4 Idiots and 1-2 Dumbs, while conversely, a "Very Hard" game might be 3-4 Geniuses and 1-2 Smarts. I think that's far better than what you're providing now.

2) If you don't want a tutorial mode, fine. I think you're very wrong here, but I'm only a customer, what do I know? How about a few pages in the manual and a pre-generated game save that provides the same thing? I know this much - telling is never as good as _showing_, and right now you're just telling.

3) Context sensitive help is a godsend. So is mousewheel support.

4) This one is a pipe-dream, but I think an interesting idea. Have you considered advisors? Not the slack-jawed morons of Civ2/3 fame, but one linked into your enemy AI model. Since your AI is effective without massive cheating, and learns, perhaps you could have an "average intelligence" AI advisor giving you hints on what the AI would if given the choice what to build/research/etc.


Finally, as for the game being hard to get into, I find it somewhat non-intuitive, coming from the games I played - MOO1/2, MOM, Civ 1/2/3, SMAC, "Insert theme here" General, etc...

Here are some of my observations on the AI:

1) In a galaxy with few habitable planets, the AI way overbulds colony ships. My last game had 5 good planets, not including starting locations. Each AI player had about 8 colony ships sitting around waiting to die.

2) Destablization works too well. There appears to be no way to counter destablization or even offset it. Destablizing all enemy AI's provides a hit to the budget but cripples the AI more than the cost of destablization.

To jpub..

1) So.. put a few on random, and if you want it easier put like 2 of them on idiot or dumb... or is laziness preventing you from doing this yourself?

2)I bet the WHOLE point of the manual will be teaching you how to play... hmm.

3)I agree.

4)If I want to sleep while I'm playing... I'll shut the game off and go to sleep.

At least that's how I feel.

jpub:

1) You make a convincing case on this. I see wher eyou're coming from in that you want there to be more surprise on this. You'd like to have to guess at whether the Drengin are smart or not. Wheras if you just set them to random you may end up with an easy game or a hard game. You'd rather have the option to set the game to a difficulty level and it take care of the rest. I'll see what we have time to do.

2) Regarding guided tuturial, it's not a matter of us not putting a tutorial so that we can sit around eating burgers. The question is more of a "Which feature that more people would probably like more should we cut out in order to have a tutorial?" How many random events should we take out of the game? Should we eliminate AI personalities? To implement any given feature, especially at this point, means not putting in some other feature.

That's something hopefully everyone will bear in mind. Putting in a decent tutorial would mean taking out some real features from the game. I am wary of doing this because for the most part, tutorials like that really appeal mainly to people who don't want to read the manual.

I think people take for granted how unintuitive Civilization's UI is. Go back to when you FIRST played it where you're trying to make heads or tales about food and happy/unhappy citizens. Or how to move units across the board without the keyboard (select unit, press G key, etc.). But we all managed through that. I am glad that they didn't step me through everything back then and instead focused on making a better game.

When MOO3 comes out, I'm perfectly happy for people to compare user interfaces of the two. If there is soemthing particularly agregious in the GalCiv UI, I'd rather see us fix that rather than sugar it up with a scripted tutorial.

Regarding 4) I dont' like advisors. For instance, when negotiating with the AI there is no "what do I need to give you for X?" option. Figuring out what is valuable and what is not valuable is part of the skill of the game. I believe in advisors and governors when it comes to removing tedium from the game but for telling you what to do, it's like those chess games that tell you where you should move your next pawn. Again, it's one of those things that if it didn't require removing dozens of random events or getting rid of AI personalities we could have a more serious discussion on the merits of that but I don't think most players would want to remove those kinds of features in order to hand hold users who dont' want to learn the game or read the manual.

BTW, none of this should be seen as a condemnation of players who like interactive walkthru's. There's a reason why many games have them. But there's also a reason why so many games are released buggy and missing features too.

Good points. Thanks for at least hearing me out, and considering what I had to say.

No problem. Everything you said makes definite sense.

Heck, if I had more resources, I'd like to have a multiplayer option or at least more virtual metaverse multiplayer options.

> That's something hopefully everyone will bear in mind.
> Putting in a decent tutorial would mean taking out some
> real features from the game. I am wary of doing this
> because for the most part, tutorials like that really
> appeal mainly to people who don't want to read the
> manual.

Absolutely. And I think you need to ask yourself "what percentage of your customers actually read the manual?

Hint: it's lower than you think. Basically, a feature not being comprehensible without recourse to a manual is a big fat sign that says "the GUI isn't good enough." I know that YOU don't think the GUI is bad, but c'mon, get some perspective. I'm giving you real life feedback here: I look at all of your buttons, sans tooltips, sans tutorial, etc., and say "What the hell does all this stuff do?" And if it's not apparently to -me-, someone who has played more or less every space-based exploration game on multiple platforms, then how apparent is it going to be to other users? If at any point your typical customer reaches the decision point "I guess I'm gonna have to go read the manual" then you are basically asking them to decide to play another game instead. And some percentage of them will. I know I probably would.

If this happens while they're playing your demo, you'll be very unhappy.

The manual is absolutely NOT a tool to make up for the shortcomings in your user interface. It should be a place for you to provide more depth and value-add for people who are ALREADY SO HOOKED on the game that they've got to learn more about it, sitting on the toilet reading your manual.

I'm sympathetic to the discussion "if we do X, then we won't have time for feature Y." I'm awake right now because I'm a software engineer working on a project, and we have to make those sorts of tradeoffs all the time. What I've learned over the years, though, is that as an engineer I'm sometimes -wrong- about what the tradeoff is. Sometimes you find that the user wants some feature that you think is stupid, or worse, that the user could care less about some neat thing that you spent lots of time and emotional effort coding up. When that happens, if you want to succeed, you swallow your pride and acknowledge that the final arbiters of 'better' are the users of the program.

Anyway, I'm not saying that a tutorial is the only solution, and some of the things you mention (the in-game encyclopedia, context-sensitive help) go a long way towards addressing you shortcomings.

you also say:
> I don't agree about the user interace being bad. I
> think it's pretty clean. You can click on pretty much
> everything you'd want to click on.

I respectfully disagree. I think the interface is totally opaque and gives very little information. And if you don't believe me, it would be easy enough to find someone that hasn't played your game, sit them down in front of it while you sit quietly nearby, not speaking, with a pencil and notepad, and watch them flail. remember, making them read a manual before trying your test qualifies as losing.

argh. "your shortcomings."

i kan't spel.

Sounds like your saying they should just dumb it down because people wont read a manual? Thank god he doesnt think like you
I think a new user in the example you give above would have an EASIER time than you figuring it out, maybe because he hasnt all these preconcieved ideas of what it should do/look like. I played GalCiv for the first time yesterday, without reading any docs etc I had the interface down cold within an hour. There are a lot of options but they are layed out logicaly and are very easy to figure out. My 13 yo even played some today and didnt seem to have any problems getting most of what she needed done, she is an avid gamer but my guess is if she can jump in and get things going then the average gamer shouldnt find it to hard.
Myros

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was an operating system called NetBSD. It's still around. When installing NetBSD, one of the things you had to do was calculate the size of the disk so it could lay out the partitions. Now, most of the information could be read from the disk, and NetBSD would dutifully read the number of cylinders, sectors, bytes per sector from the disk, and then print out a message, asking the user to type in the number of cylinders * sectors * bytes/sector.

When it was pointed out to the NetBSD team that their operating system was for a computer which could, y'know, COMPUTE things -- such as "cylinders * sectors * bytes/sector", they resisted for a really long time.

The argument they gave was that they didn't want to "dumb down" the setup procedure so that just anyone could do it.

Not too many people use NetBSD any more, comparatively speaking. Even though they've since fixed the install procedure.

Basically, I don't think "make the GUI do its job," is anything remotely like "dumbing down" a game. If anything, I think it's smartening up the game. The manual will still be there for those of us that want to dig beneath the surface and understand what's going on.

Manuals for games should not have to explain HOW to do things. They should explain WHY. It's the GUI's job to explain HOW.

I just don't see what is wrong with it... you click on the picture of the galaxy, boom, you're at the map. you click on the Terran insignia and you get your internal stuff... you click on the planet for the planet list and the ships for the ship list... what is so hard about that?