ComradebotLord of DinosaursHouston, TXRegistered Userregular
All of this love for other Sci Fi strategy games, and no one has mentioned the greatness that is GalCiv2 yet?
And a special shout out for Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. Buggy and poorly balanced, sure (Romulans can destroy Borg Cubes without losing a single ship! Ferengi are an unstoppable juggernaut because they'll just buy a new fleet the turn after the last got destroyed! The Klingons and Cardassians perpetually suck and die! Oh, and enjoying your game? Bad news: Borg Invasion, the AI is too busy going "derp derp derp" to help so you better hope you're strong enough to beat the Borg on your own or it's game over Alpha Quadrant). Indeed, it was a very mediocre and rushed game in the greater scheme of things. But, particularly with some modding (like the option to turn off the Borg but not ALL events, and adding extra ships to make up for the fact the Federation by default had a silly amount of variety to everyone else), it could be fun. It was what introduced me to space 4X goodness in a proper way.
Okay, fine, I played Pax Imperia 2 before BOTF. However, Pax is something that started off kinda fun, but after awhile games would slow to a painful crawl while you waited to develop the super weapons. Some fun customization, but yeah... late game just felt grindy, and in the end the different factions didn't actually feel all that much different from one another. At least BOTF had Warbirds.
All of this love for other Sci Fi strategy games, and no one has mentioned the greatness that is GalCiv2 yet?
And a special shout out for Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. Buggy and poorly balanced, sure (Romulans can destroy Borg Cubes without losing a single ship! Ferengi are an unstoppable juggernaut because they'll just buy a new fleet the turn after the last got destroyed! The Klingons and Cardassians perpetually suck and die! Oh, and enjoying your game? Bad news: Borg Invasion, the AI is too busy going "derp derp derp" to help so you better hope you're strong enough to beat the Borg on your own or it's game over Alpha Quadrant). Indeed, it was a very mediocre and rushed game in the greater scheme of things. But, particularly with some modding (like the option to turn off the Borg but not ALL events, and adding extra ships to make up for the fact the Federation by default had a silly amount of variety to everyone else), it could be fun. It was what introduced me to space 4X goodness in a proper way.
Okay, fine, I played Pax Imperia 2 before BOTF. However, Pax is something that started off kinda fun, but after awhile games would slow to a painful crawl while you waited to develop the super weapons. Some fun customization, but yeah... late game just felt grindy, and in the end the different factions didn't actually feel all that much different from one another. At least BOTF had Warbirds.
ST:BotF was amazing because of the cinematic combat. It was great to watch and the highlight of every time I played.
Endless Space is the best of the recent lot, in my opinion.
Sins of a Solar Empire is a more RTS-type take.
Just gotta remember to disable the pirates in Endless Space. They're thoroughly, completely and utterly broken.
It is not altogether uncommon to see pirate fleets (note: several fleets) which number more ships than the all the other factions put together. Several times over.
Eh, they usually aren't as bad as they look; Defense beats offence when it comes to ship battles in ES, and their completely lack of any defenses means even megafleets of pirates will crumble to a surprisingly small number of ships with even merely decent deflectors (or whatever counter you need for the weapons the pirate ships are using) absorb the damage you'd normally take.
No, you really do need to disable them. There isn't a timer on when pirate events can occur - you can literally have them spawn before you've even started building warships with shields, and at that point you've wasted 30 minutes on an un winnable game. One game I abandoned three pirate fleets spawned and each fleet had an attack rating higher than the rest of the galaxy *combined*. They just camped my home world and the one system I had manage to settle by that point,
Well, when you have horrible luck like that, yeah, pirates can be a problem, but I think I've had just one or two games in the dozens I've played where the RNG decided to fuck me over like that, and I don't believe even then it quite reached "Three fleets with more firepower than the entire rest of the galaxy, each" levels.
95% of the time I just build a fleet with about 1/3 the attack power and some defenses (usually just deflectors. Pretty sure shields only help with lasers, and most early pirates spawn with just kinetics) and watch as their fleet melts like butter and I lose maybe one ship.
If you've got like 120 bucks to drop on a video game, Distant Worlds is a decent sci-fi 4x game.
Just, you know, a pile of 40 dollar expansions that never goes on sale.
I read about that not terribly long ago - it's still not on steam, is it? Are any of the expansions worth getting / required?
Not on steam, and I grabbed them all at once, so I'm not terribly sure what each expansion brings to the party. Altho I know that the last one basically puts you just after some group swept through the galaxy and blew everyone back to the techno-stoneage. You can also play as a pirate faction, which is neat.
Just so long as they don't bring back unit stacks. I hate that concept with a passion, total deal breaker for me. I wish HOMM didn't use it, I so badly want to enjoy those games.
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The problem I had with Civ V is that, while I think it a better game mechanically (idiotic AI aside, though I always wavered on the merit of the lack of city Health and addition of the global Happiness resource), it never felt like more than a digital boardgame. Civ IV managed to capture a feeling of playing through mankind's history, shaping the face of civilisation and progressing through the eras of human achievement. Alpha Centauri's worldbuilding was necessary due to the fact that it had to create its own story (which it did marvellously). Civilization already has a story - the story of mankind's history.
It's difficult to nail down exactly why I never felt like Civ V felt that way. I think it was a lot of little things that seemed to be superficial individually, but added up to a collective problem. The uninteresting "You Won!" popup, wonders being simplistic still images in popup windows, narration that never had the gravitas of IV's, the distinctly modern art deco UI, and things like that. The game wasn't without its solid additions - the animated leaders were very cool, the used fonts were far more readable than IV's, and the whole game had a level of polish IV could only ever dream of.
It's just unfortunate that Civ V's studious polishing rubbed the charm right off. I hope that Beyond Earth doesn't make the same mistake.
Well Civ V has sold substantially more than civ 4 from what we have seen recently of the sales figures, so I think they will keep with that formula - personally I much prefer 5 as I detested the type of cheese you had to abuse to play at civ 4 higher levels. Both games require it, but I'm much happier needing to concentrate in battle and slaughter the enemy abusing the 1upt than chain whipping and chopping in a precise order whilst abusing the AIs diplomacy settings via religion.
Re Gal Civ 2, my issue with that game has always been that their economic model stinks. It's really bad, and unnecessarily complex for no added bonus. It feels like they wanted to make it deep so just added in layers of obfuscation and abstraction for no real reason. Thankfully in Galciv3 they seem to have completely abandoned it for a much more rational system.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Gal Civ2 had the issue that every game played it identically. There may have been decent AI but the game was too shallow for it.
I'm told the expansions fixed that but I didn't want to throw good money after bad
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Just so long as they don't bring back unit stacks. I hate that concept with a passion, total deal breaker for me. I wish HOMM didn't use it, I so badly want to enjoy those games.
Don't worry, they've already flat out said there won't be unit stacking.
Well Civ V has sold substantially more than civ 4 from what we have seen recently of the sales figures, so I think they will keep with that formula - personally I much prefer 5 as I detested the type of cheese you had to abuse to play at civ 4 higher levels. Both games require it, but I'm much happier needing to concentrate in battle and slaughter the enemy abusing the 1upt than chain whipping and chopping in a precise order whilst abusing the AIs diplomacy settings via religion.
Re Gal Civ 2, my issue with that game has always been that their economic model stinks. It's really bad, and unnecessarily complex for no added bonus. It feels like they wanted to make it deep so just added in layers of obfuscation and abstraction for no real reason. Thankfully in Galciv3 they seem to have completely abandoned it for a much more rational system.
playing against the AI definitely is more fun in Civ V than IV, but I don't think I've played an AI game of Civ IV in about a year. Multiplayer pitboss and pbem is where it is at.
Civ 4 was the culmination of concepts that started in 1. I agree that certain systems were more developed, but I think 5 has a much better foundation to build off. Just look at the quantum leaps from base to Gods & Kings, then from G&K to Brave New World. I think the civ team is mostly firing on all cylinders, so this should be an exciting addition.
Anyone mentioned Distant Worlds and its associated expansions yet?
Because they should.
2 or 3 times.
There's a thread about Distant Worlds but it's 4 years old. Worth bumping, or should we make a new one?
I recently picked it up and would love a thread to get some advice on it.
More relevant: Fuck yeah Alpha Centauri.
Was it worth the $90 or so bucks? Or did you just get the base game?
I have the the first two expansions. It seems worth it so far! It's definitely a massive game with a ton of depth. I've played through and died three or four times and I finally have a game going where I feel like I'm doing alright. There's a learning curve but you can ease it by gradually turning off automation as you learn. It helps to keep everything automated to start and pick the systems you want to focus on, because once it's all manual there's a lot of stuff going on.
Plus I'm playing a race of hyper intelligent isolationist space frogs.
Well Civ V has sold substantially more than civ 4 from what we have seen recently of the sales figures, so I think they will keep with that formula - personally I much prefer 5 as I detested the type of cheese you had to abuse to play at civ 4 higher levels. Both games require it, but I'm much happier needing to concentrate in battle and slaughter the enemy abusing the 1upt than chain whipping and chopping in a precise order whilst abusing the AIs diplomacy settings via religion.
Re Gal Civ 2, my issue with that game has always been that their economic model stinks. It's really bad, and unnecessarily complex for no added bonus. It feels like they wanted to make it deep so just added in layers of obfuscation and abstraction for no real reason. Thankfully in Galciv3 they seem to have completely abandoned it for a much more rational system.
playing against the AI definitely is more fun in Civ V than IV, but I don't think I've played an AI game of Civ IV in about a year. Multiplayer pitboss and pbem is where it is at.
Have you tried playing with one of the more regular competitive groups? Both 4 and 5? I would be curious to see your thoughts after comparing those experiences. My experience has been quite the opposite. As someone mentioned Civ4 tells a much better story then 5, but 5 plays a lot more like a board game. I would rather play a board game with friends then read stories. Same goes in reverse.
Just so long as they don't bring back unit stacks. I hate that concept with a passion, total deal breaker for me. I wish HOMM didn't use it, I so badly want to enjoy those games.
I often hear how unit stacks were a deal breaker for people.
What was the deal breaker for me with Civ V was the inability for units to path along a road properly due to no-unit-stacking. If you tried to move units along a road the game would always try to move the back unit first, see that the road was blocked, and then move off the road wasting two turns. This forced me to move every single unit individually every single turn.
civ's greatest problem for me are always the early years. I get that they don't want vast swaths of warriors and scouts roaming the landscape but having to spend 3-7 turns to build a scout when each turn is 20 years just seems silly. I think they need to allow for making those early years more interesting by reducing the clock or decreasing the requirement for low tech/level units early on, rather than the game just being a race to later years.
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
edited April 2014
Yeah, 4X and Civ games especially have a lot of abstractions going on. It's best not to get too literal about these games. If you want literal stuff you won't find it in 4X games, you need to go to wargaming for that.
a city also doesn't get conquered by like 20 dudes with swords, but whatever
anyway every successive civ game has the problem of being compared to its complete predecessor; this new thing will probably feel fairly limited in comparison to brave new world at first (although alleviated somewhat by the fact that they're not trying to model earth history again.)
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Just so long as they don't bring back unit stacks. I hate that concept with a passion, total deal breaker for me. I wish HOMM didn't use it, I so badly want to enjoy those games.
I often hear how unit stacks were a deal breaker for people.
What was the deal breaker for me with Civ V was the inability for units to path along a road properly due to no-unit-stacking. If you tried to move units along a road the game would always try to move the back unit first, see that the road was blocked, and then move off the road wasting two turns. This forced me to move every single unit individually every single turn.
That's not enjoyable gaming, that's shit.
It only "wastes" one turn (moving onto a road is cheaper than moving off it), but you're going to run into that problem anyway if you're sending a large number of units via roads. Eventually the guy in front runs out of movement, and unless everybody has the same movement and is already in formation, stack ups / wasted movement is going to happen.
I would like some sort of concept of formation movement, though. To be able to flag one or more neighboring units as a "buddy" to have those units move in tandem. Would be nice.
The pathfinding in Civ 5 was never very good. If the destination tile got occupied, even briefly, a unit ordered to go there would stop - even if there was no reason to think the tile would still be occupied when it finally got there. This made long distance missionaries a pain.
One of the changes I'd make for Civ 6 is the *only* kind of unit I'd put on the actual map would be Armies, Settlers, and Fleets, and you had a pretty stiff restriction of how many of those you could build, and they would all be important. Workers would be placed from the city screen, and act like fishing boats - permanent allocation of population to that section. Missionaries, Great People, Spies, etc, would work like Caravans do - assigned from a city and then their routes are automatic.
So amusing anecdote re: Civ and SMAC. Went to buy a copy of SMAC off GOG since it's on sale, and my card was denied. Then discovered I can't buy anything online including pay my DSL bill. Oooohkay, card's locked, whatever.
According to my bank, GOG is located in Cypress and they have flagged that as being so fraudulent that they auto-lock any card that they see charging stuff to that country. So if I ever want to buy from GOG, well, I had better call and ask permission first.
Ditto Matrix Games, apparently, although they're located in California. (As an aside: Apparently Distant Worlds is getting a bundle, called Distant Worlds: Universe, so it might be worth holding off on getting it. Oh, and the same publisher recently released a SMAC clone through a different dev team, called Pandora: First Contact.)
Anyone mentioned Distant Worlds and its associated expansions yet?
Because they should.
2 or 3 times.
There's a thread about Distant Worlds but it's 4 years old. Worth bumping, or should we make a new one?
I recently picked it up and would love a thread to get some advice on it.
More relevant: Fuck yeah Alpha Centauri.
Was it worth the $90 or so bucks? Or did you just get the base game?
I feel I've gotten $[Matrix Games price tag] worth of entertainment out of DW so far. I love the colossal scale of it; you almost never see that in space 4Xes.
It's also kind of fun to turn on automation for everything except for one little part of the setting and play a part of it instead of the whole empire; you can do something like have a hundred-planet empire with thousands of ships chugging along on its own while you personally micromanage a single ship or task force.
Anyone mentioned Distant Worlds and its associated expansions yet?
Because they should.
2 or 3 times.
There's a thread about Distant Worlds but it's 4 years old. Worth bumping, or should we make a new one?
I recently picked it up and would love a thread to get some advice on it.
More relevant: Fuck yeah Alpha Centauri.
Was it worth the $90 or so bucks? Or did you just get the base game?
I feel I've gotten $[Matrix Games price tag] worth of entertainment out of DW so far. I love the colossal scale of it; you almost never see that in space 4Xes.
It's also kind of fun to turn on automation for everything except for one little part of the setting and play a part of it instead of the whole empire; you can do something like have a hundred-planet empire with thousands of ships chugging along on its own while you personally micromanage a single ship or task force.
I'm definitely going to want to try it, but apparently the Universe collection (Distant Worlds: Universe) will include the base game + all expansions in one discounted set. And it's supposedly out in a few weeks, to boot.
Edit: Nevermind, the discount only applies if you already bought the game, heh. It'll be $100 otherwise. Wow.
Lord, with cheap SMAC, this new Pandora: First Contact game, Distant Worlds, and Civ: Beyond Earth, this is turning out to be the year of the 4x. Didn't expect that, but not complaining, either.
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And a special shout out for Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. Buggy and poorly balanced, sure (Romulans can destroy Borg Cubes without losing a single ship! Ferengi are an unstoppable juggernaut because they'll just buy a new fleet the turn after the last got destroyed! The Klingons and Cardassians perpetually suck and die! Oh, and enjoying your game? Bad news: Borg Invasion, the AI is too busy going "derp derp derp" to help so you better hope you're strong enough to beat the Borg on your own or it's game over Alpha Quadrant). Indeed, it was a very mediocre and rushed game in the greater scheme of things. But, particularly with some modding (like the option to turn off the Borg but not ALL events, and adding extra ships to make up for the fact the Federation by default had a silly amount of variety to everyone else), it could be fun. It was what introduced me to space 4X goodness in a proper way.
Okay, fine, I played Pax Imperia 2 before BOTF. However, Pax is something that started off kinda fun, but after awhile games would slow to a painful crawl while you waited to develop the super weapons. Some fun customization, but yeah... late game just felt grindy, and in the end the different factions didn't actually feel all that much different from one another. At least BOTF had Warbirds.
ST:BotF was amazing because of the cinematic combat. It was great to watch and the highlight of every time I played.
The Hive Consumes All
You could always vow to wait for the GotY edition.
...
...
Haha, I'm so funny. I crack myself up.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Well, when you have horrible luck like that, yeah, pirates can be a problem, but I think I've had just one or two games in the dozens I've played where the RNG decided to fuck me over like that, and I don't believe even then it quite reached "Three fleets with more firepower than the entire rest of the galaxy, each" levels.
95% of the time I just build a fleet with about 1/3 the attack power and some defenses (usually just deflectors. Pretty sure shields only help with lasers, and most early pirates spawn with just kinetics) and watch as their fleet melts like butter and I lose maybe one ship.
He mentioned that one to start off, I thought.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Because they should.
Not on steam, and I grabbed them all at once, so I'm not terribly sure what each expansion brings to the party. Altho I know that the last one basically puts you just after some group swept through the galaxy and blew everyone back to the techno-stoneage. You can also play as a pirate faction, which is neat.
It's difficult to nail down exactly why I never felt like Civ V felt that way. I think it was a lot of little things that seemed to be superficial individually, but added up to a collective problem. The uninteresting "You Won!" popup, wonders being simplistic still images in popup windows, narration that never had the gravitas of IV's, the distinctly modern art deco UI, and things like that. The game wasn't without its solid additions - the animated leaders were very cool, the used fonts were far more readable than IV's, and the whole game had a level of polish IV could only ever dream of.
It's just unfortunate that Civ V's studious polishing rubbed the charm right off. I hope that Beyond Earth doesn't make the same mistake.
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Really? Personally, the stacks alone make me incapable of playing IV after playing V. Only thing I miss is the per-city happiness.
I like the stacks and the way Civ IV handles them. There is a time to spread your army and a time to clump it.
Re Gal Civ 2, my issue with that game has always been that their economic model stinks. It's really bad, and unnecessarily complex for no added bonus. It feels like they wanted to make it deep so just added in layers of obfuscation and abstraction for no real reason. Thankfully in Galciv3 they seem to have completely abandoned it for a much more rational system.
I'm told the expansions fixed that but I didn't want to throw good money after bad
Don't worry, they've already flat out said there won't be unit stacking.
2 or 3 times.
There's a thread about Distant Worlds but it's 4 years old. Worth bumping, or should we make a new one?
playing against the AI definitely is more fun in Civ V than IV, but I don't think I've played an AI game of Civ IV in about a year. Multiplayer pitboss and pbem is where it is at.
I recently picked it up and would love a thread to get some advice on it.
More relevant: Fuck yeah Alpha Centauri.
Was it worth the $90 or so bucks? Or did you just get the base game?
I have the the first two expansions. It seems worth it so far! It's definitely a massive game with a ton of depth. I've played through and died three or four times and I finally have a game going where I feel like I'm doing alright. There's a learning curve but you can ease it by gradually turning off automation as you learn. It helps to keep everything automated to start and pick the systems you want to focus on, because once it's all manual there's a lot of stuff going on.
Plus I'm playing a race of hyper intelligent isolationist space frogs.
Have you tried playing with one of the more regular competitive groups? Both 4 and 5? I would be curious to see your thoughts after comparing those experiences. My experience has been quite the opposite. As someone mentioned Civ4 tells a much better story then 5, but 5 plays a lot more like a board game. I would rather play a board game with friends then read stories. Same goes in reverse.
I often hear how unit stacks were a deal breaker for people.
What was the deal breaker for me with Civ V was the inability for units to path along a road properly due to no-unit-stacking. If you tried to move units along a road the game would always try to move the back unit first, see that the road was blocked, and then move off the road wasting two turns. This forced me to move every single unit individually every single turn.
That's not enjoyable gaming, that's shit.
I could be playing wrong though...
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GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
anyway every successive civ game has the problem of being compared to its complete predecessor; this new thing will probably feel fairly limited in comparison to brave new world at first (although alleviated somewhat by the fact that they're not trying to model earth history again.)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I would like some sort of concept of formation movement, though. To be able to flag one or more neighboring units as a "buddy" to have those units move in tandem. Would be nice.
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One of the changes I'd make for Civ 6 is the *only* kind of unit I'd put on the actual map would be Armies, Settlers, and Fleets, and you had a pretty stiff restriction of how many of those you could build, and they would all be important. Workers would be placed from the city screen, and act like fishing boats - permanent allocation of population to that section. Missionaries, Great People, Spies, etc, would work like Caravans do - assigned from a city and then their routes are automatic.
According to my bank, GOG is located in Cypress and they have flagged that as being so fraudulent that they auto-lock any card that they see charging stuff to that country. So if I ever want to buy from GOG, well, I had better call and ask permission first.
Ditto Matrix Games, apparently, although they're located in California. (As an aside: Apparently Distant Worlds is getting a bundle, called Distant Worlds: Universe, so it might be worth holding off on getting it. Oh, and the same publisher recently released a SMAC clone through a different dev team, called Pandora: First Contact.)
I feel I've gotten $[Matrix Games price tag] worth of entertainment out of DW so far. I love the colossal scale of it; you almost never see that in space 4Xes.
It's also kind of fun to turn on automation for everything except for one little part of the setting and play a part of it instead of the whole empire; you can do something like have a hundred-planet empire with thousands of ships chugging along on its own while you personally micromanage a single ship or task force.
I'm definitely going to want to try it, but apparently the Universe collection (Distant Worlds: Universe) will include the base game + all expansions in one discounted set. And it's supposedly out in a few weeks, to boot.
Edit: Nevermind, the discount only applies if you already bought the game, heh. It'll be $100 otherwise. Wow.
Lord, with cheap SMAC, this new Pandora: First Contact game, Distant Worlds, and Civ: Beyond Earth, this is turning out to be the year of the 4x. Didn't expect that, but not complaining, either.