Was Galciv so bad?
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Hi All,
Hope no-one takes this personally, but I was very surprised to find myself very frustrated and even angry after coming back to play my GalCiv demo from earlier in the year.
At the time I had probably been around Moo3 for the week or so I could be bothered to try and have fun with it. So, GalCiv was a welcome breath of fresh air. I remembered a good story line, and something different with the galaxy, ship movement and tech stuff. I was almost going to buy the game with the Altarian Prophecy coming out.
But now I just played the demo again, I found it has several short-comings that I didn't seem to notice the first time. Fleets is a major headache. I can never tell if my ships are merged or not, or how much movement they have left. I mean, after playing Star Chamber I saw how easy it is to manage things like that and I can't believe how badly it's managed in GalCiv. Another thing is the automatic jump from ship to ship when it's run out of moves, as though I don't want to look at the enemy fleets in that area or the planet I discovered. Really annoying, did I miss an option in the menu to turn this off or something?
The tech itself is quite cool, I like it, although the demo doesn't have the hyper links I think are in the full version, or an updated full version. So, I can forgive that point. But perhaps the worst thing is this - I can never get an accurate figure of how long my tech is gonna take, or how long things are gonna take in production. If I make any changes to try and tweak how long things will take, it seems to take 3 or 4 clicks on planets or between sreens before I get an accurate figure. Why does the game have to mess about showing me several different sets of figures? I can't think of any other game that does this hardly at all, let alone so much you don't want to bother trying to manage your systems at all.
That said, the weather is hot here, and I was quite unhappy when I lost all my transports because it automatically jumped from one other ship because it had no moves left. But I honestly don't remember GalCiv being so bad with the combination of problems I described above.
I mean, there are so many good points of GalCiv I haven't mentioned, so forgive me if I sound like I'm trolling here, but I know there are some lovely features that gave me good memories of this game.
What I'd really like to know is, have the above problems being fixed or changed in some way in the current GalCiv, or are they waiting for the Altarian Prophecy add-on to be solved. Let me try and re-iterate the main problems I see:
1 - Very Messy fleet management of merged / unmerged groups and movement left
2 - Automatic ship jumping when no movement points are left
3 - Tech tree preview item / item descriptions or links
4 - Inaccurate production & tech 'estimated time of completion' figures when you play with spending figures
I won't mention the production q allocation being similar for all planets, since I understand that's a feature of the game, but added to the above 4 points I found my return to GalCiv much less pleasant and downright frustrating than I had hoped.
Please please please tell me things have changed a bit and tell me what I'm doing wrong so I seriously think again about buying the game and the add-on.
Like I said at the top, hope this doesn't come across to personally, but I finish this message rather confused with the past 2 hours. :-/
Thanks for your time,
- Steve
Hope no-one takes this personally, but I was very surprised to find myself very frustrated and even angry after coming back to play my GalCiv demo from earlier in the year.
At the time I had probably been around Moo3 for the week or so I could be bothered to try and have fun with it. So, GalCiv was a welcome breath of fresh air. I remembered a good story line, and something different with the galaxy, ship movement and tech stuff. I was almost going to buy the game with the Altarian Prophecy coming out.
But now I just played the demo again, I found it has several short-comings that I didn't seem to notice the first time. Fleets is a major headache. I can never tell if my ships are merged or not, or how much movement they have left. I mean, after playing Star Chamber I saw how easy it is to manage things like that and I can't believe how badly it's managed in GalCiv. Another thing is the automatic jump from ship to ship when it's run out of moves, as though I don't want to look at the enemy fleets in that area or the planet I discovered. Really annoying, did I miss an option in the menu to turn this off or something?
The tech itself is quite cool, I like it, although the demo doesn't have the hyper links I think are in the full version, or an updated full version. So, I can forgive that point. But perhaps the worst thing is this - I can never get an accurate figure of how long my tech is gonna take, or how long things are gonna take in production. If I make any changes to try and tweak how long things will take, it seems to take 3 or 4 clicks on planets or between sreens before I get an accurate figure. Why does the game have to mess about showing me several different sets of figures? I can't think of any other game that does this hardly at all, let alone so much you don't want to bother trying to manage your systems at all.
That said, the weather is hot here, and I was quite unhappy when I lost all my transports because it automatically jumped from one other ship because it had no moves left. But I honestly don't remember GalCiv being so bad with the combination of problems I described above.
I mean, there are so many good points of GalCiv I haven't mentioned, so forgive me if I sound like I'm trolling here, but I know there are some lovely features that gave me good memories of this game.
What I'd really like to know is, have the above problems being fixed or changed in some way in the current GalCiv, or are they waiting for the Altarian Prophecy add-on to be solved. Let me try and re-iterate the main problems I see:
1 - Very Messy fleet management of merged / unmerged groups and movement left
2 - Automatic ship jumping when no movement points are left
3 - Tech tree preview item / item descriptions or links
4 - Inaccurate production & tech 'estimated time of completion' figures when you play with spending figures
I won't mention the production q allocation being similar for all planets, since I understand that's a feature of the game, but added to the above 4 points I found my return to GalCiv much less pleasant and downright frustrating than I had hoped.
Please please please tell me things have changed a bit and tell me what I'm doing wrong so I seriously think again about buying the game and the add-on.
Like I said at the top, hope this doesn't come across to personally, but I finish this message rather confused with the past 2 hours. :-/
Thanks for your time,
- Steve
I could live with the ocasional lack of update (works most of the time) if the figure was correct, when a planet produces exactly the remaining points to complete an item, it says 1 turn, and not "Next turn"