Planets in GalCiv II felt like places

from GalCiv4 Forums

Something I keep missing from GalCiv II is how much the game actually told you about a planet. You'd survey something and there would be real description attached to it, a bit of history or some detail about what was down there, and it gave the place character before you ever dropped a colony ship. Half the time I'd remember a planet from a previous game because of what it was, not because it was a class 14.

GalCiv IV has plenty going on with planet features and improvements and I'm not saying its empty, mechanically theres more there than there was in II. But it reads like a spreadsheet row. Quality number, couple of features, decide yes or no, move on. I colonize dozens of worlds in a game now and I couldnt tell you a single thing about any of them afterward.

I dont think it needs to be some big system either. A couple of lines of text per planet that varied by type and by whatever the survey turned up would do most of the work. The Drath homeworld should read differently than some ice ball out on the rim, and right now they mostly dont.

The older games got a lot of mileage out of writing. Would be nice to see some of that make it back onto the planet screen.

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Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

The thing that makes this frustrating from where I sit is that it is mostly a content problem rather than a systems one. Planet types, features and the survey results are all things the game already knows about a world at the point it shows you the screen. Nothing new has to be tracked to say something about them.

What is missing is somewhere for the writing to live and a rule for picking which line to show. That is the part I would want opened up, because if the text were data driven then this stops being a request the studio has to fund and starts being something the community can fill in. There are people here who would happily write a few hundred planet blurbs for free.

Whether it is currently exposed anywhere useful I genuinely do not know, and I am not going to claim it is until I have been through the files properly. But a description field keyed off type plus whatever the survey turned up is not a large ask compared to most of what shipped in 4.0.

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Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

That's good feedback. What you guys are saying is that you'll like too see a stronger narrative track woven into the galactic map itself. Quite an interesting idea, which would require a lot of creative work indeed! You can already do a lot of that through events and even chain of events if you'd want to mod that in the game. There's no text space for background lore on planets though. I'll pass it along!

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

No text space for it is the answer I was hoping not to get, and it does explain why nobody has simply dropped a paragraph onto that screen.

The events route is not the same thing though, and I want to say why rather than just sound ungrateful about it. An event is something that happens to you. What I am after is something that was already true about a world before you arrived, and stays true whether or not you ever act on it. Those two read very differently even when the words in them are similar.

There is also a difference in where the work lands. An event chain gets written per scenario by whoever is modding it, and has to be maintained by them. A line of description keyed to what a world is and what the survey turned up gets written once and then applies for as long as the game exists. What that costs on your side I have no idea about, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Passing it along is more than I expected on a thread with two replies in it. I would rather be told there is no room for it than hear nothing.