Improvements Needed

from GalCiv4 Forums

Hi ALL, 

I want to say first off Thank you for a great game and the new updates.

After spending countless hours playing I noticed a few things that could exponentially improve the game.

1. Ai is not aggressive enough on all difficulties excluding Godlike...Which does lead to boring meta gameplay at times. I feel like they only  initiate war if they are stronger or losing on territory influence.

There is no surprise wars from deceitful civilization even if they are weaker than you... Civ's with this characteristic trait should be initiating wrong plays to cause RNG within the game and making it more unpredictable ultimately making it more fun over the long term.

Everything feels like 1's and 0's an if it doesn't make mathematical sense the ai wont do it but that's not how real life works and also causes repetitive gameplay. Clearly this is due to the ai model within the game but increasing the RNG would be an improvement. 

2. The new maps are great but they should be able to be modified in terms on size and players instead of locked to preset creation. 

Maps in general feel repetitive even with changing size and clusters and star frequency. I feel like there should be more elements within the games like Patches of the map that only have asteroids floating randomly such as the asteroid belts in real life, 

Random Pulsar's causing Havoc

Mechanics where flying to close to a black hole sucks your space ship in and teleports it randomly to another sector or destroys it completely 

Cosmic Radiation patches like nebulas but dealing damage when flying through them.

Minor races that have different traits and can be hostile towards others or plan on expanding their empire like Civilizations 6 where barbarian clans develop into city states.

And finally more interesting planets with lava, crystal, Gas Biomes that may cause the planet to be destructive and lead to the collapse of that world down the line. (Also Causing RNG but more like Natural Disasters in Civ 6)

I understand that some of the topics I have mentioned might be planned for later development or not planed at all. I do fell like the changes are needed to give the game a more deeper and more unpredictable feel that its missing which should've been incorporated long ago to keep it more playable. I feel like after so many hours you can literally predicate where each and every game is headed.

I also mean this in the most respectful way as constructive criticism to improve the game.

Kind Regards,

Alex 

Galactic Civilizations IV Type: Discussion
197 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Two different asks are bundled together here and only one of them does what you want.

Hazards on the map, pulsars and black holes and radiation belts, are the map rolling dice at you. They make a game unpredictable in the sense that the same opening produces different accidents. What they do not do is make the opponent unpredictable, and the opponent is what your first point is actually about. A civilisation that declares war only when the arithmetic favours it stays exactly that no matter how many asteroid fields it has to fly around on the way.

Which is why the first point is the stronger one. The pattern you describe, war when they are ahead or when they are losing ground and not otherwise, is the thing worth naming, and deceitful ought to mean a civilisation that misreads its own odds or takes a bad trade over a grudge. That is not RNG. RNG is a coin toss. What you are describing is an opponent whose reasons are not all arithmetic, which is a much harder thing to build and a much better thing to have.

On the planets, worth knowing before anyone spends too much hope on it: I asked for something adjacent a few weeks back, planets with enough written on them that you remember one from another, and Draver's answer in that thread was that there is no text space for background lore on planets, and that events and event chains are where a good deal of this sort of thing can be done if you mod it. So lava and crystal worlds that turn on you would most likely arrive as events rather than as a new planet system.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The minor races idea is the one I would drop. A neighbour that expands on its own and turns hostile sounds like pressure, and in practice it is a war you always win, because it never gets big enough to cost you a fleet. What it adds is movements you have to keep making, and that is not the same thing as difficulty.

On the AI I would settle for less than fmarrow is asking for. Before it needs motives it needs to press a lead. The games I stop caring about are the ones where I am plainly second on the map at turn a hundred and nobody comes for me, and that is not an absence of grudges, it is an opponent that will not spend ships on an advantage it already has.

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