Stellar Frontier?

I have played it...

I did not like a couple of features that did not seem to have an option. It seemed that whenever I found an upgrade floating in space it got equipped whether I wanted it or not...

The gameplay also seemed to be a bit redundant, but I might have just been playing on poor servers, or that the computer was a poor oponent

Brad I have played SF quite a lot and like the game. It's the community that sometimes really annoys me. There is very much a mob focus in some games, where you join a game to discover that there is a group of human players on one of the other teams who dominate everything (play, chat, score). You can either join their empire in the game or leave (or play with a group of friends).
I usually play SF as single player on my computer now as I don't want to have to play in a team to get enjoyment.

Things which would be good to see in GalCiv
- very dynamic universe. there is a lot of changes in power throughout a game with no clear winnng empire till towards the end. Even then if a skilled human player joins the weak empire all can be turned around. It would be great if Galciv endgames were not a foregone conclusion.

- personalised ships. One of the beauties of SF is that players can equip their ships as they want. There is no 'best' ship. This leads to lots of fun and forces you at times to change your equipment for a particular task or to attack a particular enemy. In Galciv this would be too difficult and change the game. What could be good though is if empires can develop ships in different directions. Maybe add ships with different types of weapons / features (long range, short range, defensive/ offensive / shielded / armored). Each empire then can develop a range of ships (and advance them through further research). When you end up in a battle with another empire you find out what type of warship they are using and deploy something suitable against them. For example, the Yor use a fleet of long range lightly armored and shielded destroyers (think missile boats), you must either match them with long range, or send in heavily armored ships which can close to killing distance before being destroyed. If you send in slow moving battleships, they may never be able to close the distance before being destroyed, despite their armor.

Things which I would not like to see from SF in Galciv
- Mob mentality. I gave up reading the SF noticeboards due to the huge level of abuse and crap on it. Many games become similar with the chat being used to curse and complain at people. I hope the metaverse will never develop this level of childishness.
- Team swapping. The most annoying aspect of SF is the way a player on the loosing team can swap to the winning team and then sabotage the game (fly colonies into the sun). There must be NO way someone can do this in the GalCiv metaverse.

most of my wporries are about multiplayer aspects which won't be an issue to Galciv. I'm slightly worried that the Metaverse may develop into an ego issue with different kids trying to prove they are better. If this happens I'll just ignore it and keep playing single player offline.

Paul.

ps.
Cain - you can lock your equipment so that upgrade items are not applied! Use the / key on the equipment window.

I agree with regards to the mob mentality. And in fact, one of the reasons we created Access grades here on this site and have switched to this forum was to ensure that can't happen here.

Basically there are 9 access grades and as you get higher, you gain the ability to have more control over the content. We can thus encourage the people who are positively contributing to the community by raising their access. We can also delete posts (which is a pain to do on news groups but here is literally a single click). We can also lower access based on poor behavior. If someone ends up messing with the metaverse or abusing others or behaving poorly in general we can discourage that sort of thing by restricting their access.

This system has worked very very well on WinCustomize over the past year. People feel comfortable to submit their skins and themes because they knwo they're not likely to get abused by some obnoxious teen. They're much more likely to partake in an interesting discussion fo the same reason. It was tough at first with the people who consider abusing others and swearing at everyone forms of "free speech" but over time those people just left since, to be frank, we don't buy into "free speech". We're not the government, we're a private company and we want a place that is friendly and enjoyable to visit. Even I don't often go into the Stellar Fronter NG's because of all the abuse and trash talking.

There is a lot to learn from it though in the sense that the community there, the positive parts of it which do represent the majority, have really put together some incredible stuff for it.

I have played SF for about 3 years now... I don't flood the NG very much and I try to stay in meaning...and I know what you all mean by considering it a "bad" community. I helped creat the offical SF site now, in fact I designed it for Mercury Imposter, and he updates it now. I also helped creat Plant Stellar Frontier which has now gone to Stellar Frontier Central. I have helped Doug fix quite a few major bugs and made some good suggestions for new features. SF is my favorate game I have evr played and what I have found with it is you just have to relax with the community and ignore everything you can. SFC(Stellar Frontier Central) forums IMO is a MUCH better soirce for REAL discussion and such. The forums there arn't being spammed with usless junk and if you are interested in SF you should check it out @ http://www.stellarfrontiercentral.com

Myself and a few other of the fairer vets are hoping to create either Galactic Civilizatiosn Wolrd or Galactic Civilizations Central...

One of the more respected SF players, Anaxis, is creating a GCiv mod which includes all the GCiv races as opposed to 3(+pirates). Its turning out really well, you should all come try it out once it is done.

I really wish that the SF community wasn't how it was...it was much better while SF was still in beta, but then again...it was lucky to get 3 people in one game...now there is always at least 3 people in every server and we somtimes see turn outs of 20 or more during large events.

Some great programs have been made for SF...one of the greatest sites was created by Jason Kane @ http://jkane.cjb.net which features a collection of programs such as a scoring utility and he is working on some map making utilitis.

Many players have made some good new ships and grafix for SF such as myself and The Obliterator and Nate(Of course!). I payed my freind some money to make a ship rotating utility which will take a square BMP and put it into the desired frame amount so it would fit with SF.

What I have recently been working on is "skinning sf" it can be done and quite well actually...if you have ever played SF extensivly the standerd design might get a little boring...for an example of this go http://hosted.barrysworld.net/drengus/previews/dh_theme1.gif

I am working on a "skin" for the galactic civilizations mod... so it will stand out...it should be the best yet considering I just found out how to customize the buttons in SF...although it is a pain(I have e-mailed Doug about a suggestion to change a bit in this).

Those are all the good things latly that have come out of the SF community...but there have been some bad things as well... Cheating servers can be found on the nexus and there are fleets which go against all rules of honor...the community is getting worse and worse.

I am going to play GCiv alot and try to help establish a strong community in it, but hopfully the evilness in SF stays in SF, but I also think that GCiv will be more protected against this.

I just can't wait until GCiv come out! I have played every verson of it on OS/2 so far and its a great game!

I tried it out some time ago. Brad, you are correct when you said it takes a certain type of
gamer to play it, and I am not that kind.

Cheers,
Jack