Galactic Civilizations 1.05

I haven't played 1.05 a *lot*, but no major issues, esp once the update to .071 resolved the scoring oddity some of us had. I had a few things that might have resulted from a game started with 1.04. I have a new game started, but may not be able to play much in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for the continued hard work.

I've had no problems at all with 1.05. I haven't had any stability issues since the betas. There's times I think things are "unfair", but I think that's more the difficulty level than the game itself.

I like, but then again, I've liked every update so far. I just need more time to play, my damn job seems to keep interfering with my game time . Keep up the good work, and I can't wait to see the X-pack.

I have started quite a few of games now and played one to the finish and have problems with infrequent crashes. I rarely had a crash in 1.04. Apart from that, I find it more balanced to my style of play than previous versions (i.e. I have a harder time winning).

No problems with stability. Works great.

I've only played one 'large' game on 'intelligent', so I can't give an definitive account, but the game seems easier.

The recent change to make the minors easier to exploit may have gone too far. I was able to take 100/turn for 12 turns from all three of the minors with very early techs. This of course gave me the money to further increase research and thus I got more tech fast and you see where this is going..

I have every wonder and every trade good except for one. I did get a fairly good start position though, so it may just be related to that. Anyone think this version is easier than previous versions?

I've had no general stability problems. Game plays reasonably well. Trade good leases have forced me to be more creative in how I handled them. The bad is still the memory leaks if you play the game long enough or leave it sitting there a while. But other than that.... seems to handle okay

I've had a few wins and a few losses (grin) at Masochistic, on small, medium and large. (I got to play a lot on the weekend: wife was out of town, and the kids were cooperative for a change.)

Stability problems have gone away (for me, anyway), and everything seems to work fine.

BTW, a nice performance increase when trading ships with the AI snuck in sometime in the last few versions - now works very nicely.

Only gripe: I am still seeing some really dumb ship tactics from the AI - like leaving their only planet vulnerable to a strike force (and hence getting wiped out), when it could have been invulnerable. [I can attack and wipe out an AI who has dreads using only frigates and star fighters without throwing people away on the attack. They ALWAYS either leave the planet so I can take it, or destroy themselves attacking my fleet. At beginner I could uinderstand this, but at Maso?]

On the other hand - they are starting to fleet up, which is good to see; and they have made some good counter-strikes against me. For example, I often take ALL my ships for a crucial war. In 1.05.071 for the first time an AI snuck a lone combat transport away to take one of the my (undefended) planets. And when I (stupidly) left the opportunity open again later in the game, he did it to me again! Very good!

I haven't had any troubles to speak of with the new build.

~SDC~

After upgrading to 1.05.071, the game is running very stable and smoothly. (Even on a system below minimal requirements: http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=71726#72231) Some small UI improvements (planet's list autorefreshs when changing sliders) make the gameplay much more comfortable.

Minor races are, in my opinion, to weak. Especially their willingness to pay you 100+ for a year or longer when you offer them a handfull of nice techs, and being willing to make the same kind of deal some months later again after you researched new techs, makes it often possible to run an economy that is completly based upon the cash of minor races. That makes the game a lot easier, sometime to easy.
In spite of that, the game is very balanced, couldn't be much better. Trading with the major AIs on higher levels can be very hard, but not to hard to be impossible - just the right kind of hard.

I sometimes got the impression that something is screwed about the random events (same bonus for neutral and evil choice?!) but it hasn't happend often enough to be sure that it is a bug, maybe it was just a strange coincidence.

The AI has become very good in the meantime. There are still things where it makes mistakes (and there allways will), but the important thing is: It's getting more and more clever with every patch.
However, I thing that the Yor are to weak, compared with the other AIs. In my games (usually playing on 'crippling'=all set to Genius), the Yor are nearly allmost the first to go. When upgrading the AI in the future, focusing on the Yor so they can keep up with the others would probably be a good idea.

Another thing I like about the newer version (1.04&1.05) is that now all kinds of ships play a role. In the earlier versions for example, I seldom used BattleCruisers and rarley met a BattleHammer, now these types can be encountered often and make more sense. I think the different shiptypes are well balanced now.

So far, keep up the fantastic work
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Zero CTDs for me. Except for that one where I had to click on those button placeholders for the expansion pack

I have a 1.4044 game that I've been trying to finish under 1.05 to fix its multiverse score, and I get CTDs randomly. I haven't managed to get through it yet.

Stability wise seems very good; I've had a single, non-repeatable CTD that I can think of (well, barring the easily repeatable 'click the expansion button ones').

Overall, I'm very pleased with it. I would say that minors are almost too easy to 'exploit', but they run out of cash soon enough and then you take their lands. So I'm not sure if it's imbalanced, or just an abstract concept of a resource you can find on the map. I leave that for you to decide. I would not want to return to the days when they were as stingy as majors, though. In that case, you just ignored them until you could take their lands.

Scoring seems much more intuitive although I still think your penalties for the different victory conditions are completely out to lunch. As example, I present the medium map I submitted last night for 12K with a military win. I actually set out to win that game by tech for "old time's sake" and played the entire game strategically towards that goal. After going through all that pain and tedium, I got a whole 4.5K for the tech win and said WTF, went back a turn, stopped all research, and proceeded to attack everyone and along with lots of culture bombing achieved a military win a few years later and got the 12K.

As others have pointed out, the ship balance is much better than in earlier incarnations. Depending on map size/situation, I'm now using everything except Rangers, Starhawks, & Phoenixes. The Phoenix I understand will be altered once Cloaking actually is in the game, Starhawks are very niche, but the Ranger doesn't really seem to have much of a role that I can tell: by the time I can build them I've probably already developed a fleet of Dreadnoughts and they're just not improved enough to waste the time with (even the AI only builds a few of them before moving up to the Avatars).

One thing that's not 1.05 specific that occured to me as I played that tech game last night is that I hope you've got something planned for the end part of tech tree in the expansion. Past Overlord, there is no reason to research anything as there's nothing to do, no structures, no significant improvements, no nothing. We've still got things like Galactic Domination that literally do bupkiss.

Anyhoo, with a minor update to fix the F2 refresh bug and maybe block/hide some of those expansion buttons that cause CTDs, 1.05 would probably be a good enough place to stop before the expansion (which I gather was the point of this thread )

I think the game continues to head in the right direction with 1.05 (although I do long to play a game with PQ +15% and 90 HP Battlehammers every now and then). I am actually having more CTDs now than in previous versions but it hasn't been so common as to annoy me enough to want to do something about it. It's probably 2-3 per game now as opposed to once every other game before.
In general, I can see improvement in the AI, especially on maso. I go between crippling and maso except for the GOTM. While it seems the Yor are still the weakest, they have hung around longer in my recent games. The AI is smarter about escorting its transports and that is a big step. On maso especially, when the Drengins and Yor attack early, they seem more organized than previously. Or perhaps, it is because they simply flood me with corvettes and battle cruisers then frigates.
I also think there has been good effort made to tweak the ships to be more useful. However, I still only build battleaxes to withstand the early rush and then dreads. Occasionally, I will build a battleship. On maso you'll most like be dead if you try it but on crippling, I generally try to hit terracomputers and the other research techs after it before hitting battleships. Dreads come quickly after battleships then. I also usually skip avatars. If I haven't just about culture flipped everyone by the time overlord tech comes, I'll build a couple just to beat down the opposition some more.

The one thing I would like to see the AI do more intelligently is build one starbase in a sector and load it up. Rarely do I see a built up AI starbase that is not on a resource. However, I have seen the AI, both Torians and Altarians, put 8 unimproved starbases in a sector.
All in all, I am pleased with the AI. I have played enough that I can beat crippling handily without breaking a sweat. You can also completely run the table on trade goods and wonders on crippling. On maso, that is not the case. And that's a good thing.



~SDC~

Very happy with the current version.

No crashes to desktop.

Paul.

~SDC~

Seems stable, the alphabetic sorting of ships in governor UI is great.
Transports are too much for starfighters now, which makes starfighters pretty useless except as an artificial way to boost your military rating.
Reading CodeMonkey's note about rangers, I think they would be useful if there were anomalies when rangers are discovered (spawning new anomalies when a race first discovers the corresponding tech for example).
I think the ai undervalues defensive phasers tech when trading. It is very cheap in comparison with other techs, and lets you build ships stronger than frigates (but slow).

Starfighters are still great in early game for taking out colony ships and freighters. Also a few colony ships can easily take out transports. Definitely a useful ship early game.

Paul.

~SDC~

I only had CTD's with 1.05.68, but I think everybody except Frogboy had these... However, I'd like to know what else but that issue was changed from 1.05.68 to 1.05.71.

Here are all things I'm not so happy about but except one of these they were in previous patches aswell...

- Minors shall not be that exploitable, that makes the game to easy... I liked it more as it was in 1.03.
- There is a bug when paying Tribute of more than 0 turns: You pay for one turn less than you should!
So if you make a payment of 1 turn instead of 0 you are going to save some money (up to 40%). I don't know if the bug also works when receiving tribute.
- AI's can ask me for money even if I am in the red while I can't do this. So either they shall loose their ability to do so or I shall be given it.
- I shall not be able to see the cultural influence of races I have not yet met. That is a great help in the early expansion phase.
- I shall not be able to see planets population/production/defense(if defended or not, not) of planets I have not explored just by plain having contact with someone. That's an even bigger help in the early expansion phase. (Ah, all these planets are owned by the Torians, so I won't waste time and send my colony ships elsewhere.)
- Races I have not yet met shall not be displayed in the Spend-Power display at the botton left.
- Enemy Starbases that I have scouted shall be shown on the minimap
- When fully zoomed out on a Huge or Gigantic minimap I shall be able to make up the resources

I think that's all ...

Care about my wishes and I'll love this game!

Code Monkey and Yellow Sign have covered everything that I was going to say. I did have 2 CTD that I could not recreate it reloaded fine.

My one complaint with the game, is when you are dealing with each colony during each turn phase. If you do not keep hitting next, maybe look at something quick to decide on that colonies production, or a trade good/wonder was built by a another race, the game does not indicate your colony has no social activity. The only way you can tell if you have a colony not producing any social at all is look at the planet list. Is there a way to fix this? It is a only a slight problem for certain situations. Maybe it is only me who has this problem repeatedly?

Other then my complaint above this is the most stable patch thus far.
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I have just played a little with the new patch

But I'm going to have to restart already.

I rush bought Diplo Translators (4th lease option), and I did my usual of colonizing 12+ planets.

I have basically no income, and I notice I'm paying lots and lots in "leases."

So either the lease options changed, or there's a huge penalty for colonizing lousy planets, or both.

Lease options changed substantially!

They are much better now in that all the options are useful depending on your circumstances. The fouth option is never as cheap per turn as it used to be, so watch out!

Paul.

~SDC~

This patch is pretty kewl! Still CTD on occasion but otherwise pretty stable. A tiny bug I noticed tonight was regarding the Omega Research Centre it says . . .

This massive center will give us a 50
109322144mprovement to research

Another thing I noticed was that a fleet of Constructors arriving at a spacestation all together apparently give you the option of upgrading as many pods as you have incoming Constructors . . .

I thought gee whiz cool and happily added ten upgrades at once, yeay for me! Unfortunately when I returned with more ships I found all the upgrades disappeared and I had to start over . . . fowi!

One last thing I noticed, some of the item names are cut of in the trading screen and the Lucky Rangers have no ID.

I tried using Smart exception for the first time but non of the buttons seemed to work so I can't submit the crashes I had. Mabye I did something wrong . . . again.


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Not sure if you are referring to the same thing but I see the following bug. For example, an AI has five techs for trade. Since the panel could only show four techs at a time, you would have to click the down arrow to reach the fifth tech. However, once you click on one of the techs to bring it down to the trading screen, you would find that you would no longer be able to see or scroll up to locate the first tech.

After playing several games...i have noticed the following:

CTD twice since i updated...none during 1.04 apart from that gov. screen.

Games slow down when playing for long hours...
Slight problem on how the tech is displayed. Usually, when i seletc "cost" it will show the cheapest at the top and the more expensive at the bottom. But after i updated, it was the other way round.

Apart that, pretty rock stable

oh yea, to solve those problem, i uninstall gal civ completely...reinstall it from my cd and than updated it to 1.05 from stardock and everything seems to be ok now.

Got one strange thing so far (1.05.70): got 43 corvettes out of one anomaly

~SDC~

Personally, I like the trading angle with the minors because you sure don't get a break with the majors.

Overall, well done. I never really have had any crashes or that sort of thing. The updates via Stardock work great!

I noticed that the majors try to use the Phoenix more. It looks they are beefed up a bit more and that is ok. I like the concept of the ship but at the stage of the game they are available, they are only good for specialized roles. Maybe if you give them a more randomized chance of being hit in an attack or something like that as compensation? Or make them completely unhitable by all ship until you research a new tech, say "Tacheon Tracking". Of course, you should give a msg that "It is rumoured that the Arceans have now developed the Phoenix technology."

Good job Frogboy & Co!
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ignore my previous post....i wasn't thinking when i wrote it