First game feedback/comments, gripes, wishes and bugs
Hi all ! Been playing for 2 weeks now on builds 0.77a and 0.77b mainly. Got a lot to say, didn’t know if I should split my comments in 3-4 posts or bundle them up in one very big post, but I think I read somewhere that the latter is preferred. Sorry if the length annoys some ;-(
So I’ll start with general feedback and comments on gameplay:
Being a veteran Galciv 2 and 3 player, I must say that my first impressions on iteration 4 of the game are extremely positive. I’ve played a lot of the prior versions, but honestly never really got the full “one more turn” feeling that had me play over 2500 hours on both Civ 5 and Civ 6. This one really does have me going for just one more, and it’s a GREAT feeling 😉
I think that the graphic quality is excellent, close to fantastic. I love the zoom in zoom out feeling, even if it took me a while to get used to it, am now totally on board with it, and also with the multiple sector move. I tend to play large maps, dividing it into sectors feels really better.
I love the fact that an action by your ships/fleet now ends your move or take more than one turn, like attacking another ship/fleet, attacking a planet, surveying anomalies. It made absolutely no sense to me in Galciv 3 to be able to conquer 3 planets on the same turn with the same fleet, or to be able to survey 3 anomalies with the same surveyor. Great, great move for immersion.
I’m also very excited about the new Ideologies. Having only three got old really fast and led to very similar games with no flavor. There are now a LOT of different Ideologies, and that’s great. But… I feel that at the moment, there’s a huge opportunity wasted here. You have paired the Ideologies, creating 6 pairs. But there’s no impact to choosing one side over the other. In my mind, you should be able to chose from both sides at anytime in the game for awareness increases, but it should be an either/or when choosing to spend an actual culture point. As it is at the moment, there are no consequences tied to choosing one side or the other, you can freely pick whatever you want as long as you have awareness. I feel that this kills immersion, I would much more appreciate this system if my choices had significant consequences.
As far as research goes, I’m fine with it, but I’d like to point out that a LOT of events, missions and even executive orders offers you a research bonus that is numerical in value. The problem is that there simply no way to easily figure out what that bonus of +20, +30, +50 or whatever is really worth because the whole research systems is based on number of turns until finishing a research, and offers you no numerical value to any specific tech. This is also very present in the Innovation Ideology tree; You just can’t tell how good a choice will be, and using a culture point on it blindly is very difficult.
Finally, is shipyard support being limited to only one core planet something that is planned and wanted ? seems weird to me.
So keep up the great work, this really feels like an AAA game already. Impressive
On to wishes:
I wish there was way to review all the game setup chosen when starting a game AFTER said game was started. Games are long and may take many weeks in real time to finish, I rarely remember all the details of what I chose when I started the game. A mouseover on save files giving you many of those information would be great.
I feel that there should be an empire viewer page that list you ALL the infos on your planets on one screens and allows you to sort them by anything you wish to. That has always been available in previous iterations, and I often used it. The current planet tab in the Summary box of the HUD is nice but a lot of info is unavailable unless you mouse over your planets one by one (ex: pollution level, number or citizens…etc)
The technology Library is fine, but I would really like to have way more sort options: Sort by tech acquisition turn (to more easily find the recent ones you’ve researched), sort by main categories (related to upper left logo on tech cards)
I would love to have an executive order or an artifact that would guarantee that the next research offering will include an uncommon or rare tech
I feel that there should be more reward to exploring other sectors. I understand that meeting other species is the main reward, but… It’s a lot of work and micro-management to get that part of the game done, I feel there should be some in-built rewards to doing it… I don’t really have ideas to how that might be articulated though
And now… Gripes:
Now, please bear in mind that this list is exhaustive, but in no way reflects a dislike for the game on my part. It’s all meant as constructive criticism with the specific goal of trying to help make the game experience better
As mentioned before, I really love the changes to Ideology, but… There’s now an awful lot of them, and I DON’T play games in order to have to memorize tons of useless stuff. Most, if not all of the decisions related to ideology awareness increases has to be made blindly because we cannot escape the choice box when they are offered. This is very bad design in my mind. You must find a way to allow players to go study the ideology trees when prompting for those choices in order to allow them to make informed decisions. At the very least, mousing over the ideology name for which the awareness increase is offered should allow you to see THAT ideology complete tree, instead of just the general text description
I feel that the cost of the Manufacturing Capital improvement is way too high (1000)… or that the one for Technical capital is way too low (400). The former feels more the case to me.
I love the tech navigator, and that thing really has to stay. But it is VERY annoying that using it can and will sometimes change the research choice I’ve made, and that it is very hard to realize it has been changed. I should have a way to navigate in that tree from branch to branch and see all there is to see, not just the ones I’ve had research offers on, and I should be able to do it without unknowingly changing my choice.
It took me a full week of play, wondering why in hell I wasn’t able to build districts and the AI was, before reading in a random post in the forums here that you had to left click on a planet tile to have options to build them. It feels REALLY unintuitive to have two different mechanisms on the planet screen. I feel that the available/researched districts should be listed on the left side pane like the improvements, so that players know that they are there. I now don’t mind having to click on the tiles themselves anymore, but was quite mad about this when I realized it.
The manufacturing queues in the shipyards and planets screens are very annoying (restraining myself to use the word nightmare) to reorder when you want to do it. It should be easy to decide that you want something else now before what you were previously building and just adding it and making it first priority, but I don’t know how many times I’ve had to add TWO items in order to successfully be able to downgrade to current top one, and then deleting the 2nd added item. Please makes this a better experience
There are quite a few executive orders that have negative effects to go along with the positive one, but the length of the negative effect is not given and should be (ex: Forced Overtime, Print money…etc). Also, Exhort Governor tells you that you’ll have a -25 loyalty hit but gives no hint as to what is coming back as a reward (you know it’s money of course, but not how much or even a vague %)
On that same subject, I just realized today that in order to see all exec orders when you have more than 8 you have to mouseover the box then wheel left and right. Please put some arrows on left and right of the box to let us know we can browse it
On the “Precious Metal” event, choosing the 2nd option (Give the engineer the money and….) will award you a random free tech. This is a HUGE thing, but all you get is a small entry in the top left HUD event list. 1) This event should be officially announced with a specific event screen and 2) mousovering the tech name in the event list should show you detail of what the tech is. I shouldn’t have to then go over to the tech library to find out exactly what I was given (and that is if I even NOTICED that I was given the tech)
And finally, BUGS I’ve noticed during my gameplay:
I’m sure they all have been noted in the other forum sections, but just in case:
“Sleeper ship” event text mentions a free constructor but in reality offers a colony ship
Event list on the top left of HUD, in many instances the text is too long for the mouseover box and so the text is chopped off and there’s no way to scroll it
“Leader Available” message in event list appears every single turn when you have an unused one. It’s extremely annoying. Maybe allow us to flag unused leaders as “for future use” in the leader screen and make those outside the alert’s range ?
“Climate Purifier” artifact tooltip in event list when getting it displays a+500 influence instead of a -20% pollution. Might have been fixed recently though I haven’t had this one for a while
I was able to trade Diplomatic Capital points even if I have not researched “Political Capital” tech. I know it’s a useless thing for now, and it didn’t affect trade outcome, but thought I’d mention it still. The trade screen should not allow you to use it (grey it out)
I have seen a few times in my game a YOR fleet that had NO surveyors, but was able to take Ship Graveyard anomalies. I know you can attack them with only ships, but the anomalies disappeared also which should not happen. Saw this twice.
Thanks for reading this, and for allowing me to play this great beta version. Keep it up !