Another interesting read. Thanks for posting.

"Events have always been one of my favorite aspects of the game. You will be playing along thinking you have the game wrapped up and wham, “the Jagged Knife” pops up and half the galaxy is suddenly at war with you. Events of all kinds – simple to crazy and game-changing – are some of the most fun elements of Galactic Civilizations to design."

That is the sole reason I cannot play with random events, because it creates a huge empire with the collective technology of everyone, and that means the soldering bonuses making the jagged knife the most bull shit event in the whole game, no warning, to choices to make to smart strategic thinking behind dealing with them.

No,this was not fun.

I will admit the "Mega Events" in GC2 could be quite a kick in the head. Which is one of the reasons we had an option to turn them off. 

Events are something players love and hate, sometimes both at the same time. We have some ideas on how to push that more to the love side in GC3. 

Thanks for the feedback. 

Love the work so far and it looks like its going to be better.

Put me down as someone who considers Jagged Knife a not-fun event.  I will live with everything else that happens, but Jagged Knife is a guaranteed reload.  I guess that is one way to individually mod out that one event.

on topic content for this forum....

Galciv 3 is coming!   Just let the Jagged Knife try to stop that! 

aacckk .... the idea behind Jagged Knife was fine - I get it in a way. The problem was its implementation. The final straw for me was when several hundred - I kid you not - several hundred orange blobs hit the screen all over the freeking place. It was like a measles rash just came out of hyper space.

That was it - I canned the game and started another, I couldn't be   Ar$%d picking my way through several hundred orange blobs one by one - it was just pointless.

Now ..... if that lot consolidated, and became a surprise attack in force from one side or corner of the "known Universe" as a surprise incursion .... hey different ball game, provided I had at least a fighting chance.....

But an attack of what amounted to "instant measles" on screen - leaving more measles than screen after the initial "high guys" incursion - no way, it was crazy.

Dunno I kinda liked a lot of those events.  I find that if I'm 'trying out' a new strategy or civ I'll turn those off. But once I've got a 'groove' going, I like turning them on and seeing what nonsense the game throws at me. Keeps me on my toes and sometimes I learn stuff I wouldn't have otherwise.

I recall Sid Meier gave a GDC talk about how Civ was supposted to at one point have a double hump type of empire building. In that you'd build it up, then something woudl happen that would kick you down, then you'd build back up better than before. Conceptually it was interesting but he said that players rarely fought through to the second hump to get that euphoric feeling.

So I get that many players don't generally like getting kicked in the nuts unless they expect it to a certain degree. Shogun2 had this with "Realm Divide" as a mechanic which was designed to counter the inevitable late game 'steam rolling' effect since most strategy games don't have any real 'rubberbanding' mechanic.

Recently installed and played GalCiv II again, and have to say that the Jagged Knife in my last game represented not so much a disaster, as an opportunity to greatly expand, since you could not only retake previously owned worlds, but also those formerly occupied by your neighbours.

You need the tech to send out troop transports of course. But that's about it. Only three to four worlds, had a single fighter to stop an invasion!

I would still like such an enormous opportunity available, for the most selfish of reasons!

This. The Jagged Knife is a painful kick in the butt to move forward.