Number of troops on Stealth/Zoom Transports

Jean-Claude,

You obviously joined us too late to see some of the discussion on the size of those transports. It was an interesting dialog to say the least. I guess the best advice I saw was to think of them as a "fleet" of transports, rather than just one humongus ship. And there may still be some discussion showing up again, now that you raised the question, so stand by and watch the fun.

Also, since you are talking about the AI doing this, note that the AI is still pretty primative. I think we are expecting a much improved AI for Beta 4. (Right, Brad?)

'I think it would implode under its own weight, much less actually move; or God forbid someone actually sneezed, the whole thing would probably spin out of control.'

Colony ships and transports are presumed to be fleets of ships, and someone has already suggested adding costs for the troops/colonists being loaded on to deal with the overmobilization bit you mentioned later on.

'Frankly, if the tech was available to move something that big, why don't you just start moving complete planets?'

<points to the Artifical Planets and Terror Star techs>

Lucky Jack/Arturus Magi:

Good points- thanks for the reply/clarification.

How about adding the word "Fleet" to the string? That would clarify a lot.

Re. mobilization, it's not just the AI, the HP is allowed or permitted to do this as well- actually forced to do this, since he is not taking on a distinct subset of the planets population, but the entire planet's population.

I mentioned earlier women, children, and men as all being available for combat, and I realize that Alien cultural structure's/mores/beliefs are not going to be always similar or even close to what we know here on Earth, but this begs the question: what percentage of the population is too young, too old, too infirm, too obese, too small or too underweight to even carry the equipment? At 50% and up, ship and drop rates, it would appear also that percentages of the criminal, the police, political leadership (at least all of their secretaries, concubines, sycophants), the incarcerated, new borns, and pregnant mothers, plus the very support structure needed for these soldiers (logistical train) are being shipped out for fun as well. Now short of a totally mechanized industry ala Total Annihilation (sp?), which maybe free's up 30% (less most likely), who's left to grow the food or distribute it? A good example or clarification of this, would again be Germany in WWII: for no matter how high or desperate their manpower demands became, the Reichsbahn and canal/river boat operators were essentially exempt from military call-up, for the raw materials, food, processed/finished goods, crop collection, military materiel still needed to moved around.

If a 'soldiering sub-set' could be implemented, this would eliminate the problems incurred by an entire planets population being wiped out, and then have this gaggle of winning troops being able to take over and successfully run an alien planets economy, industrial plant and within months be able to start producing space ships. I've seen conquered planets start producing Defenders within months... which I could deal with somewhat, but when I started to see the AI pump out BB's and other assorted high order combat ships, within two months or so, this became a bit much. If the entire planets population is wiped out, this is tantamount to Scorched Earth in the extremus; this was the Apocalypse for all intents and purposes, and exactly how much of the planets infrastructure would remain after these battles of annihilation? And how qualified would this indiscriminate gaggle of troops be in repairing this planet, much less running it? How much of the planet would the inhabitants even 'allow' to remain if they knew 'death' would be the result if they lost? Rough example: 12 billion soldiers remaining of 14 billion, with 9 billion inhabitants dead, that's 11 billion bodies laying all over the place, who cleans that mess up? How long would that process take, before one could even consider getting the planet operational again? You really need to implement structure destruction and other collateral damage to your combat model.

All the best,

Jean-Claude

Oh my god! Ive killed billions of people! This game is too immoral to play. Im deleting it right now.

Perhaps there should be a limit on the fraction of a system that can be launched on a transport or colony? Maybe only 50% are available? (like Master of Orion).

Paul.

Gee Behin, that was really constructive and contributory!!!

While I realize its just in Beta stage (believe me I have a lot experience with Beta's), is that not the very purpose of a "Beta Forum", to bring up, expose, question, seek answers to what we experience during the beta stage? NO?

Okay, here's another one for you: a newly settled AI planet with a population of 232 pumps out several Defenders in a row, then a Battle Cruiser all within 3 to 4 months span!?!?! Whilst my most productive planet with a pop of 3,357 is still mucking through month 57 of 75 to produce my first BC.

It's not about morality, its about the mechanics making sense! While I'm sure no one expects the physics to be a 100%; but at least the physicality should be there, and the progression towards that state is the purpose of a beta anyway!

All the best,

Jean-Claude

I tend to to agree with Jean-Claude's last post.

If you have the finances, there is nothing stopping you from creating the most expensive and time intensive ship on a planent that has just been colonized by using the purchase button.

Maybe a time limit before a planet is allowed to use the purchase button?

But the money doesn't come from the planet, it comes from the empire's treasury... so I see no reason why a new colony can't purchase things... I mean, the only time I purchase anything is on new colonies...

The use of money to purchase the ship is not the problem. The problem is a new colony would not have the ability/infastructure to create a large spaceship in one month.

I could understand purchasing a ship for the colony and it would be created on a colony that is well established, But then it would take a little time for the transport of the ship. Not one turn.

'I mentioned earlier women, children, and men as all being available for combat, and I realize that Alien cultural structure's/mores/beliefs are not going to be always similar or even close to what we know here on Earth, but this begs the question: what percentage of the population is too young, too old, too infirm, too obese, too small or too underweight to even carry the equipment?'

As far as some of the alien civilizations go, this would be largly irrelevant. The Yor are mechanical beings, presumably constructed much as a comuter is. The concept of age and most other health concerns are pretty much non-existant. The Alterians presumably have some form of parapsychic powers, which would eliminate some of the conditions from being significant, if even existant. The Drengin preportedly would be destroying the infirm and invalid (and likely most of the elderly, by way of one of those two conditions).

The necessary code to deal with the races individually concerning how much of the population could be mobilized would be a significantly complicated task.

In general, though, this has been brought up before.


As far as the construction deal goes, the system (and a number of the improvements) suggest a significant about of automation being involved, although some of the particulars do seem somewhat questionable.

Hi all:

Thanks for the replies. Maybe the 'Shipyard' should be a requirement before any ship building can occur; though this would not affect the money-purchase problem after a shipyard has been built.

Arturus:

Re. Aliens- while that makes more sense now, in that each race has defined parameters, then there should really be additional parameters with checks and balances for each race, i.e.
- if the Dregin kill the infirm, then they should have less of a pop base, and a reduced pop growth rate... but, do they ship out the young, the pregnant, etc.?
- If the Yor are mechanical then they should have a high resource requirement to reproduce, since self-propagation is obviously out of the question... and assuming that each one can do the others job equally well, they would have less of a penalty hit for pop reduction on remaining industry- so in essence, they have no limits... and we are back in the days of Imperium Galactum (yeah I know, I'm showing my age) were the challenge was strictly a matter of surviving long enough till one could hit the other guy with either a bigger stick or more sticks, then devolving to a walkover. On the other hand if the Yor, create specialized mech indviduals, then they should take a very 'severe' hit for moving everyone out and dumping them on an Alien world. And more resources would have to be allocated to replace those specialized individuals...
- The Alterians as 'parapsychic' should then have some limitations on the physical, and be less adept at implementation and use of the physical as well. It would appear that by their choice, or genetics, or simple evolvement they have removed themselves from the physical, and as being 'their' choice, then they would/should be aware of their limitations as well. Though they should get some extra bonuses in Research and certain other types of tech or para-tech, etc.

> The necessary code to deal with the races individually concerning how much of the population could be mobilized would be a significantly complicated task.

Implementing code for mobilization or soldiers, would be a matter of defining each industry or structure's requirement for the pop percentage required to operate +/- properly, and if less than, the productive rate goes down (essentially you already have some of this 'type' of code in place, in that, pop goes down dramatically and somewhat magically when Popularity is down); defining the percent of pop as being considered too young or newborn would be a function of the Growth rate of each race +/- their unique characteristics; percentage of eligible pop for Soldier's would be an array tied into each races politics, philosophy/credo, propensity towards aggression or peace, random factor's, bonuses, etc. It's numbers, and not neccessarily a lot of them for this case/instance (you're doing this in C++ no?).

In my eyes, GC is a special entity somewhat on the order of an Urban Myth- I read about it, heard about it, even bought GC and SY for OS/2, but never could get that beast (OS/2 that is) to run properly, and I've looked forward to this for almost a decade. But the world has come a long way as well, with Moo, Moo2, BoTF, AC, and Moo3 in the offing plus many others, and most if not all have had some type of soldiering system in place, with checks and balances, pro's-con's-penalties for one's actions... i.e. take a planet via invasion, you get the planet, with some/most/all of it's population (with varying levels of acceptance/happiness/agreement with this invasion or liberation, subjugation, etc.), and varying levels of damage or destruction to the planets infrastructure. With physics somewhat rearing it's head, in that weight, number/type of weapons, and other choices all had a bearing (Moo was a great example of this) on what your ships were or could be, etc.

So now you're telling me that it's all an exercise in linear brute/blunt force? Just keep building bigger and bigger ships, throw bodies around indiscriminately with no checks and balances? Then I'm disappointed! And unfortunately I've already paid my money... sigh.

> In general, though, this has been brought up before.

Now I'm not sure what to say.

All the best,

Jean-Claude

Regarding troops on transports. I'm pretty torn on whether there should be a cap (like 5 Billion or something) or whether being able to put all your eggs in one basket is funner.

Which way do you guys prefer?

Regarding aliens:

Well, that's kind of the challenge, do we hard code it that you're playing the Arceans or do we make it so that you can customize it?

There are pros and cons either way.

In a 1.x version we will allow you to modify the computer players. All of the thing you mention (Jean) are already in the game in the form of civilization abilities. But presently all races are out with them equal.

Regarding other concerns: Every constituency wants their particularly concern addressed. But if you addressed them all, you'd end up with a very confused mess of a game.

Some people want ship designing. Others want ground combat. Others want heroes. Others want spies and more in depth espionage. Others want per planet resource micro management. Others want sociological issues to impact invasions and political abilities. Others want multiplayer. Others want a walk through in game tutorial because the game's so complicated. Others feel the game is too simple. And so on.

It's not that these aren't good ideas. Actually yes, it is that these are good ideas. But which ones do you put in? There's only X amount of time to develop a game. Our job is to try to find a happy medium. Each feature mentioned here has a downside:

Consider:
1) Ship design. Well if you have ship design then you're going to want to see those ships in combat. And if you do that you're going to want to have it look cool and up to date which means you need a 3D engine. And pretty soon you're scuttling other major aspects of the game.

2) Population management - in terms of having soldiers being different than the population and therefore having the population being of various races. This is something I like too. But on the other hand, then you have to have user interfaces and features for dealing with this. This adds considerable complexity that needs to be handled in a good way. It also means the AI needs to be able to handle this too.

Now we try to answer your concerns as honestly as possible. We don't have NDAs, we don't play politics here. We try to be candid and reasonable.

We have not just the release of the game but a year of post-release development budgeted so that we can keep the game "Fresh" and evolving after release. So that features that customers want in the game can be added even after release.

So we'll see what consensus people come to. I realize that many people think that their particular opinion should be considered the end all be all view on how the game should be. But if you look at this message board, you'll realize that it would be impossible to put in so many features.

I'll remind those who think we don't take opinions seriously that the fact that STAR BASES are in teh game shows we do listen. That's a pretty major game mechanic that we added into the game and it was purely a beta tester request. It wasn't on our design document.

Similarly, minor races were not originally in the game design document but were added based on user request.

So I think it's safe to say that:

A) We listen.
We take action when we can.
C) We will continuet o take action when we can.

'Re. Aliens- while that makes more sense now, in that each race has defined parameters, then there should really be additional parameters with checks and balances for each race, i.e.'

Some of your comments here occured to me as well, shortly after I made that post. Especially re: the Yor pop. growth tying into production and Drengin pop growth being influenced by their more ruthless nature (presuming the default morality of evil).

The main concern here, with the player hardcoded as Terran in GC1, is the appearance of the AI 'cheating' via playing by different rules.



That said, some of the individual effects are in place in the form of the existing improvements, particularly ones which humanity could (or perhaps used to) avail themselves of.

The Drengin's tendency to destroy the invalid is at least partially represented by the tech The Dark Side, and the improvements that go along with it. They couldn't be started with them, though, because of how far down the tech tree they are.


'In a 1.x version we will allow you to modify the computer players. All of the thing you mention (Jean) are already in the game in the form of civilization abilities. But presently all races are out with them equal.'

Noting this, however, it would seem that parets of this conversation had already, at least partially, been forseen.

I've been on the beta since beta 2 and it's been a marvelous ride seeing the game progress. I've been keeping and eye on moo3 and homm and I think galciv is gonna be a contender for strategy game of the year.

are there things I'd like to see added? Yea. But I've seen Stardock in action with Object Desktop and have no doubt that this already excellent game will keep getting better and better.

Hell, let's face it. MOO3 is going to ship, it will come out with maybe 1 or 2 bug patches at best and that's it. I have no doubt that GalCiv is going to see dozens of meaningful updates after it's released. That's how they made Object Desktop so popular.

There have only been a few really major strategy games released this year. Heroes of Might and Magic completely stunk. The only strong strategy game I've played in 2002 is Total War. Civ: play the world is very disappointing, and there were a few forgettable HOMM clones that came out. And on the RTS frontier it's been more of the same.

GalCiv is pretty damn addicting even now. And the pace of improvement makes me confident that the final game is going to be a classic even before we talk about the goodies that are yet to come in the post release stage.

Oh we have a whole range of features that will go into the 1.x series. Alien customization, political cabinets, star system resource management (i.e. being able to make use of the resources from unused planets ina given star system in any way the local star system chooses). More political parties, more forms of government, more technologies, more UP issues, more star base modules, more major events, etc.

The reason why we're doing this is because often times, games are shipped and people start to feel they're "old" after only a few months. We can't afford for the game to come out and be seen as "old hat" soon after release since we're not likely to have the same level of exposure as bigger named games. So we've slowly put together features we want to add on so that we can do a GalCiv 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so forth.

As someone mentioned, this is how we do Object Desktop. It's worked very well in that regard for us and customers end up much better off too.

The goals for 1.0 is to make sure it's very solid, add a lot more events and UP issues, finish the diplomacy stuff, finish up the AI, get yearly status's, and try to get an integrated encyclopedia in.

Then we can look at putting in other things.

It's not too late to make decisions on whether we want transports to be limited in how many people they can carry (for example).

1) Lets bring back the os/2 transport limit of 1,500 troops per transport.
2) Convoys are a must, especially in huge or gigantic galaxies. Ships could be bunched together, a right click and the word 'convoy' appears. Left click on the destination and the all move as 1, at fast as the slowest ship in the convoy. When attacked, warships takes damage before transports. The same as in the os/2 version.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Brad,
I am a big fan of common sense. Infinite size transports for a smallish fixed price annoys me. Setting a transport size limit (possibly allowing bigger transports at higher techs) appeals to me.

The problem is allowing your limited size transport to invade a huge system with some chance of success. Having to send lots of small transports is micromanagement.

A solution is to treat the transport as a fixed number of trained soldiers (perhaps 1B) and add large soldiering bonuses to the invasion. Possibly a 1:10 ratio (1B transport troops could conquer a 10B planet assuming equal tech).

You could then have different transport ships (size, cost and efficiency) depending on tech

Paul.

Okay, so how about this:

Transport:
Requires: Impulse Drive
Capacity: 1 Billion
Air Superiority Advantage: 4 to 1

Combat Transport:
Requires: Large Scale Building
Capacity: 5 Billion
Air Superiority Advantage: 8 to 1
Additional: Has an attack value of 2 and much higher defense.

Dread Transport:
Requires: Avatar Technology
Capaity: 10 Billion
Air Superiority Bonus: 12 to 1
Additional: Has an attack value of 4 and and even higher defense.

In all cases transpors are actually fleets of transport ships.

Colony Ships would be limited to 100 million.

I think this is perfect!

Would it be possible to make the limit on Colony ships 200 million? I am finding that a better number for class 20+ planets.

Sounds good.

Paul.

One reason why I think this is a VERY good idea is that I have never loaded a colony ship with more than 200 million colonists. But I can't load a colony ship at all from some of my more populous planets because the minimum is too high. This change would require that the slider be changed to show percentages of the ship's maximum instead of percentages of the star's population. Have you ever tried to load 100 million from a system with 130 billion? It can't be done. The miinimum is 1.3 billion.

"One reason why I think this is a VERY good idea is that I have never loaded a colony ship with more than 200 million colonists. "

I would like to see the max. limit be higher, say 500 million. If there is a class 26 planet, I try to send a large number of colonists there since the starting morale is 100% at over 1 billion (IIRC). Since the population growth is a percentage of the current population, growth is much faster with a large initial population.