The Element of Chance

Can you win Galciv2 without luck on your side?

from GalCiv2 Forums
There’s just one thing worrying me about Galciv2: the apparently enormous impact of the element of chance on the outcome.

In both gameplay examples posted so far, it was mainly chance that determined whether or not the player had a shot at victory. In the first example, the player had several unlucky breaks and was washed out of the game. In the second example, the player was the beneficiary of a substantial number of random events, which gave him the necessary resources to achieve an overwhelming economic advantage over the other players.

I wonder how many games of Galciv2 will be decided primarily by random factors? Sixty percent of them? Eighty percent? Will this figure vary depending on the difficulty level or other controllable settings?
19,012 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Keep in mind, Brads playing those at higher difficulty/AI intelligence settings, so chance occurences can have a much higher impact. At those settings though, luck alone isnt going to win a game for you...you have to have the skills to stay within a certain range of the AI opponents , or a couple good turns are not going to hand you the game.

You want the random elements in there though for purposes of replayability. If the game plays out the same way every time, what motivation is there for subsequent times through? Even with the same strategy, youre going to have a different "story" unfold every time through, ideally.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I myself love a decent amount of random events and luck in a game BUT I really doubt its as much real "luck" as the stories implied. I think in these AARs the term luck is used to succinctly sum up hours worth of little steps taken by the human or AI player that resulted in something great (lucky!) or crappy (unlucky!).

A random event like, "Your Civilization find 2 billion Galactic Credits under the seat cushions of its big couch!" (I seriously doubt there is any even this silly) would definitely be some sort of purely lucky break but deciding to go all out in Beam Research at the expense of all other weapon techs after noting that the AI ships you've encountered so far didn't have much shielding is simply taking a risk that could pay off (lucky) or leave you vulnerable to some other alien race that did put a lot of effort into its Shielding Research. So when a gamble works is it skill or luck?
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
There is no profit without risk...

Sending a constructor out to build a starbase is a risk

Desciding which weapon tech path to follow is a risk

The random event wherein a minor race gains extreme power is a serious risk.

Nothing in GalcivII can be done without risk. Get used to it.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I think random events are my favorite thing about the GC series. in RL, you don't have full control over the universe, only how you respond to a gamut of variables and changes.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Interesting take on random events here and predominantly in favour of them.

Snakes and Ladders then.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
I agree that random events are a good thing in the game and can sometimes change the curse of a game.

But I was wondering if in the release version they were tweaked in order to adapt to the galaxy size.

(My reference is the last beta and not the gamma, so if it has been changed since, forgive me )

I was playing a small galaxy game yesterday. Because of my settings, the random galaxy offered only one or 2 habitable planets per player. I had only sol system. It was a very interesting game, where I could only hold on to my planets and sector thanks to my military starbase (through many battles my ships gained experience and one of them, a small hull, 12 hitpoints at start, is currently at 68 ). It was very interesting, everyone at war with everyone (and I mean everyone), and then I had a random event:
all unhabitable planets (class 0) for 2 sectors around planet X became class 13!!! In my sector alone 8 new planets habitable. Then I checked and the 2 sector radious covered the whole galaxy. All the planets were habitable now! It kind killed the game for me. .

So does anyone know if svents have been adjusted to galaxy size?
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Brad claimed several times that the random events will occur less often in the final release.

I was personally frustrated with a Galactic Recession several times in the same game.

It's just a matter of waiting until tomorrow now!
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
It's just a matter of waiting until tomorrow now!


That's been the hard part these last few days...
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top

The randnom events are not like what you typically see. It's not like "Factory blows up, lose all your production".

Instead, the events, which are uncommon, alter the galaxy as a whole requiring the player to adapt. 

The idea is to prevent people from creating an optimized build path through the entire thing.  I.e. no cook book strategies.

The Torians going on a rampage against everyone is not something that targets the human player.  The Drengin splitting into two empires isn't bad or good for the player.  Most of the events aren't actually good or bad but rather just alter the conditions of the galaxy.

Galactic Recessions were one of those things that we had in GalCiv I that was nerfed pretty hard this time because they weren't fun.  They're rare and milder.

Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
if you realy enjoy your game, and then some raly bad random thing happens, you simply load some autosave, and it wont happen again, will it?
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
if you realy enjoy your game, and then some raly bad random thing happens, you simply load some autosave, and it wont happen again, will it?


That's what I did. I still had that event, but in another planet and affecting only the planets of that system (instead of the whole, even if small, galaxy) which is fair enough.
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
Interesting responses. Thank you all.

Chance is a fascinating game design element. I find it works best when it is something that causes gameplay to change from one play to the next, rather than something that determines who wins and who loses. For instance, in the boardgame "The Settlers of Catan", the initial board setup is random, so it's never the same from one game to the next. But on each individual play, all players must play on that same board. So this random element plays no part in determining the winner.

By contrast, in "Monopoly", the die rolls (particularly during the endgame) are the sole arbiter of who wins. Did you land on your opponent's most valuable property? Did they land on yours? In the end, nothing else matters.

Then there is the middle ground; games like "Euchre", for example. If you and your partner get good cards, you might win if you play them correctly. Play them incorrectly and you'll lose for sure. But if your opponents have better cards than you, superior play won't help a damn unless they make some very dumb mistakes.

For many gamers (including, apparently, most of the people on this board), this middle ground is the ideal. Not for me, though. If I get wiped out of a game because all of my neighbours got lucky and had their planets magically transform into class 17 juggernauts, I feel like I've been wasting my time struggling through an unwinnable game. The response from most CG players would appear to be "suck it up and quit whining", but i'd rather lose on account of being out-thought and out-played by my opponents than on account of unlucky (virtual) dice-rolls.

Matter of taste, I suppose.
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
Having played hundreds of hours of GC2 so far, including beta and gamma, and preferring close games (I like about a 60% win ratio), I have to say that the random events will rarely have any real effect on the outcome of the game. I never lost or won a game because of a random event in GCII. Most random events affect everyone, and of those that don't, most are avoidable.

Game-altering events I've seen:

The Fundamentalists: Avoidable, don't play an evil alignment. Even when I have played evil and had this pop up, it was never a game ending event, just something that I had to deal with. But so do the other evil races (it affects all evil races when it happens).

The I-League: Avoidable, keep your people at least minimally happy. Back in GC1, I'd be cheering on the I-League whenever they popped up (it affects all races with low morale when it happens).

The "Everyone is ignoring your influence" Event: Very nasty, very rare, targets just you, and while it will probably cause you to change gears, unless you're at a critical juncture of the game, you'll survive.

Besides, the random events are background noise at most compared to the randomness of starting positions.