torfbolt

Reply to With the new Crusade expansion, what would you consider to be the top abilities for a civilization? in Your Civilizations GalCiv3 Forums

Top ability? My vote goes to vigilant (+starbase radius, (all) starbase defense boni+modules, Star forge tree, Weather control zenith tree, and the very powerful arcean navigation centers tree). Basically it would be worth it for the Arcean navigation centers alone, which can make your ships easily the fastest of all races even without built-in engines (tip: watch for adjacency boni where you built the navigation buildings) I also like wealthy, for the +1 production bonus, which gives

Reply to Godlike is too easy. Some feedback for Stardock in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

Agree with all points, I'll add another few: The AI doesn't seem to understand the value of combining specialisations. My usual research strategy is: Let the AI research one or even two of the specialisations, then go ahead and research the remaining one. Trade the AI for the one it has, preferably without giving it valuable specialisations in return. I never accept a deal with the AI which give me a specialisation I haven't already researched, so I don't block out the option to resea

Reply to Access to Jihad tech??? in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

[quote who="Publius of NV" reply="5" id="3678190"] Keeping this on the topic of GalCiv 3, what makes you think that the Krynn are a "malevolent, aggressive civilization"? Surely they are just misunderstood. [/quote] Absolutely. Shocking, the Krynnophobia these days ;-)

Reply to Population in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

Wish I knew why Stardock raised the adjacency bonus of intimidation center to that level. Clearly broken, but so far nothing has been done to it yet...

Reply to DEV DIARY GalCiv III v2.0 preview in GalCiv III Dev Journals GalCiv3 Forums

[quote who="LongDeadFingers" reply="15" id="3663645"] Brad, although I like what I've read so far about the administrators and think it sounds like a step in the right direction, would you also consider changing how the bonuses from overlapping startbase zoc's stack? Please add a law of diminishing returns.... Please? I don't want to see the incentive to have overlapping SB's done away with outright, but the crazy, crazy high bonuses from several feel like a total cheese

Reply to Alert if you are about to bankrupt your faction in GalCiv III Future Ideas GalCiv3 Forums

Good idea... occurred to me several times as well after I used the "upgrade all" option. I always avoid this now without saving first. In my opinion, a good solution would be for the game to just upgrade as many ships as you have money for, and leave the rest unupgraded without putting you in debt.

Engine/life support redesign idea in GalCiv III Future Ideas GalCiv3 Forums

I'd like to suggest two changes to both engines and life support: 1. Both engines and life support modules should scale more with hull size, both in mass and in cost. Presently, you simply get a whole lot more "Bang for the buck" by using the largest hulls possible. I don't see any problem in scaling the mass of engines/life support directly with the hull's mass capacity, before miniaturisation modifier. This would make small and tiny hulls much more viable options in late

Reply to Some things that bothered me. in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

I also don't think coercion as it's implemented in 1.9 is ideal, especially as the penalty hits twice, in production and in morale, affecting raw production. The coercion as in 1.8 I thought was fine, because it still let you adjust the sliders to an extent without penalties. Since the basic idea of coercion was that economies don't work too well if people are assigned jobs they don't enjoy, maybe they could consider a solution where not wheel imbalances in general, bu

Reply to Upcoming 1.9 Change to map sizes in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

I have another comment about map size: Maybe you might also consider doing something to make the map "feel" larger subjectively, and that would be to rework engines, and reduce the speed you can design ships with. Right now, in my opinion there are several problems with engines. First, engine size and cost don't scale (enough) with hull size. It's simply way more efficient to use big hulls than small ones, because for many small ships you pay way more for engines and life supp

Reply to The real "suicidal" difficulty level - game pacing very slow in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

[quote] My thought: maybe game pacing could be a separate multiplier, as oppose to a linear one that can be cancelled by factories, or faction traits. [/quote] Absolutely correct... when I started playing GC3 first, it was my expectation that it would be implemented this way, but I was mistaken. Have never changed the setting from its default since, as it really only affects the early game, and I prefer long games. Game pacing + Tech speed NEED to be s

Reply to Major AI flaw in GalCiv III Future Ideas GalCiv3 Forums

That's not all of if by far. The AI has several flaws that cripple its effectiveness even at high difficulty levels: 1. Lack of farms: Limits raw production, granted. 2. Not enough economic starbases: While farms should take care of population and thus raw production, starbases are necessary to supply the manufacturing/research/economy multipliers for competitiveness. The AI just doesn't use these nearly enough 3. Insufficient engines on ships: The AI doesn&#39

Reply to Coercion: Is it going away, and how do you deal with it? in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

You deal with it by dealing with it, period. I have to admit that before the patch that introduced it, I (like everyone else) exploited the wheel to hell and back again, and could easily outperform AI players even on godlike with it. Now, this has simply become harder, but I have to admit that in retrospect the planets actually look nicer without being completely packed with just one type of building. How do you deal with it exactly? My answer is, you use a balanced wheel position (no more th

Reply to Neural networks in GC3 Game AI? in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

For the championship games, they run their neural network on a cluster, with over 1000 CPUs and and a couple hundred GPUs. Obviously this wouldn't be practicable for a computer game AI, however they do it mainly since they use several neural networks in conjunction with a tree search. A single neural net could be run with far fewer resources, including a regular desktop or even laptop computer, although training the network sufficiently to actually become strong would probably require a c

Neural networks in GC3 Game AI? in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

I was just wondering if anyone at Stardock is currently following the Google DeepMind Go challenge, where an AI from a Google research division is using deep neural networks to beat professional players at Go, something that was considered beyond a computer's ability until quite recently. They got published in the "Nature" journal for describing their approach to use self-learning software to potentially teach a program to solve any problem, and applied it to Go most recently. There is no

Reply to 1.3 MORALE STILL COMPLETELY BROKEN in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

I never had any problem with morale. The key, in my opinion, is to use economic starbases extensively, with their stackable +5 morale bonus, and also use the malevolent approval building/ideology generator while making as much use of adjacency boni as possible. Finally, don't forget to pick the two passive +4 boni in the tech tree.

Thalan Influence buildings - Colony unique not working in GalCiv III Support GalCiv3 Forums

When I upgrade my Xeno Anthropology Centers to Universal Outreach Centers, I notice that I am able to build another Xeno Anthropology Center.

Game pacing suggestion in Galactic Civilizations III GalCiv3 Forums

For the record, GC3 is a terrific game as of 1.01, and I have loads of fun playing it. There are still a few things that could be improved in my opinion, and I'll elobarate on a problem I see with game pacing currently. The manufacturing and research modifiers from the pacing options are applied additively to those from improvements, instead of multiplicatively as I intuitively thought they would be, and in my opinion should be. Example: At the start of the game, the -50% for very

Reply to Severe problem (Game Breaking) with Large Empire Penalty for both players and AI with conquest on insane map in GalCiv Beta Feedback GalCiv3 Forums

+1 to LEP scaling with map size and star/planet/habitable setting Still, I rather like that the penalty can turn severe on really large maps. However, the AI (and also players) should be able to react more constructively to morale problems: If I were a player who pursued conquest on a really large map, the solution for me would be to abandon all my low quality planets once I reach the point where morale can't be balanced anymore in another way. Similarly, AIs should always conside

Reply to I just won vs suicidal AI in GalCiv III Support GalCiv3 Forums

I can only presume that the power rating or some of its component ratings are affected by an integer overflow, when they exceed values the coding teams thought likely to ever occur... maybe using floats for such calculation would be safer

Reply to the illusion of gameplay dynamics and creative strategy in galciv 3 in Galactic Civilizations III Stardock Forums

Calling Galactic Civ 3 simplistic seems highly inaccurate to me. However, the assertion that players who game the economy to the maximum will be able to do exponential growth and always outclass the AI is probably true, however that can be said about almost any 4X strategy game. I would like to see two features in Galciv 3 to limit the player's ability to work the mechanics to the maximum: For one, it should be made harder for any faction to amass a significant tech lead, and for

Reply to Woman ordered to pay $1.92 million for pirating ... 24 songs in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

That kind of punishment is an example of the US justice system... it's way beyond what is appropriate, and the lawyers involved profit most from it. By the way, it is just causing further harm to the US economy: Since the little that she owns or earns can now be seized, she no longer has any motivation to work, but just to live on welfare, until such time as she decides to emigrate from the USA to a country that doesn't enforce this sentence.

Planetary governors - building updates? in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

In the last couple of days, I tried out the planetary governors. I like this new feature a lot, it does make it much less tedious to build up an empire of many planets. Some things about it could still be improved, however: - Easier access: I liked the suggestion of being able to select governors in the building list... it would be a lot less complicated than accessing them in the detail screen. If governors could be assigned to a planet list directly in the governor screen, that woul

Reply to Update next week in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]The research cost calculation is not a bug. Late in development, there were a number of posts complaining that researching late stage techs was too cheap and that it should be more epic. Therefore, we added that if the # of techs researched > N then cost = cost X Z where Z is a factor that slowly increases. It is working as designed, it's just that you guys (and us) don't like it. So we're changing it back to the way it was.[/quote] Actually, I for one DO like

Reply to Biosphere - planetquality 72 for everyone? in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I noticed that one as well, but wasn't going to mention it. I didn't want it to go away.[/quote] That kind of thinking is the reason some exploits take a long time until they get fixed. If something is a bug, it should be fixed, especially if it's exploitable like this one. Unfixed exploits screw up the metaverse and (in this case) the racial balance.

Reply to Biosphere - planetquality 72 for everyone? in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

I reported that as a bug a while ago in this thread: [link="https://forums.galciv2.com/311588"]WWW Link[/link] Hopefully they'll fix it in the June patch.