You're losing me, Alfonse -- a single player TBS game such as GC2 interacts with a Human to declare pertinent information while an algorithm is a gameplay process that reproduces AI behavior as virtual opponents against that Human; the code takes these decisions already & we're simply unaware of Victory gaps until we click on the provided screen to look at the numbers (TA sixth box of growth bars to compare, that is!) or instinctively figure out the situations are becoming hopeless.

The big Resign (on for me, the windowed close-X!) is enough for anyone to give up.

Funny you should mention it, i HAVE been pushing for a true Econo Victory condition for eons. As for Military, i prefer the term Conquest since it is described as such on the UI.

Well, i'll be damned... we CAN agree on something this much fundamental.

I never supported that.  I'm fine with 72, other than it being a strange number; I'd just prefer that planets have more room to build on those 72 and that planets in general be higher quality-which doesn't necessarily have to relate to tiles, either.  This would also seem to be in line with your idea about all planets eventually being colonizable.

I'm not allowed to use different words?

I even tried in my earlier post to be more polite about it-you simply don't have any idea of what you want to replace these systems.  The ones I've quoted almost certainly fall into this category, which is my main complaint about your "input" in this thread.

How is 27 "making the AI play stupidly"?  The (primary) goal of the diplomacy stat is for the AI to offer you (and itself) better deals; while there are other functions it happens to serve, such as being able to rape it via this due to having a ridiculous military, this is not a bad idea in and of itself, and doesn't necessarily need to be removed, particularly since, as we have already discussed, the military ranking formula needs to change, period.

11 is removal of formulas you can't write and compute blindfolded while underwater.  It should be limited instead to formulas you can do in your head, which is not as far down as 5th grade math.

No, 3 isn't clear at all.

I'm going to continue suggesting that you go play Sins just so you can see how the changes you're suggesting would probably be implemented (plus or minus-IC did have a number of SD devs collaborating) until you do.  And if you have better ideas, then for God's sake, man, provide details.

Well 20 pages away in a past and now, i know...

I stopped at number 1. GC2 is not & never will become Civilization IV no matter how many ways we, you, i, him, her or (more importantly) devs (that ARE reading us all) could ever find to change, replace, enhance, modify (pet peeve of mine, btw), create, design other similar or entirely new features for it.

We can always recommend this & that & what else and hope the message sticked in a brain somewhere... in the meantime, IMHO -  their innovation plans & our gameplay balance experience(s) is a volume cranked up on your mp3 players that even the deaf could hear miles away.

33. Tactical interactive combat in space (ala- X-Wings) & on planet surfaces (ala- X-Com); MY ship laser weapon button directed at opponent ship (#3 in a fleet) shields defense array currently damaged & rapidly dropping, from sabotaged capitals to demolished factories. Bring the pilots in a cockpit & firefighters repair missions.

You just answered your own question: offering you deals that aren't in its best interests is playing stupidly.

That's called "Moving the Goalposts," so no, you're not allowed to use different words. A debate about the quality of my ideas is quite different from saying that all of my ideas are just throwing stuff in GC2 out without adding something in return.

Also, I would point out that, while you may not like my ideas, I have had a reasonable quantity of support for most of them over the lifespan of this thread.

No, it's replacing them with formula you can. You may not like it, but it isn't removing without adding.

Am i still being misunderstood about the 288 tiles?

Lemme TRY a clearer explanation then;

12x6 = 72 **SQUARES** this is now.

12x6 = 72 **TRIANGLES**, this is later ---- but, add 3 more layers of 72.

72x4 = 288. Not squared -- but still adaptative enough for some incredibly variable shapes of polygons.

dare i insist - RE-look at the linked image (sure it is BIGGER, but i needed the room to drop every situations). Until you realize the old surface grid is nowhere near the new grid. In total, in maths & in additional features possibilities.

(EDIT, PS... the triangles may or may not be smaller than the squares above -- according to a proportional modulo equation. On the left side, there IS a Starport which takes up more than 6 triangles, btw and the triple set of farmlands is another indicative of possible variations.)

Cumulative BCs and not nerfed by the current 50,000 barrier penalty limit.

Not spent, in a virtual bank. 75% (speculative figure only) more of a total than the nearest AI opponent still standing but only when any of other winning conditions are close enough to declare a clear winner within 10 turns. Meaning - gimme the choice.

All of the above directly refer to Civ-IV gameplay and not the UI only. Put Cities in #26 for Planets, etc.

Doesn't mean i agree OR disagree about everything else and/or/if not quoted above, Alfonse.

Stating that you want x removed without providing for a y to replace and stating that you want x removed while providing such severely limited details about y that someone could almost design a y equal to x are almost equivalent.

Don't pretend I'm changing what I said; I'm not.

Just so long as we can agree that you're attempting to dumb it down too much, I don't give a damn what you call it.

What reason might that be?

I actually like quite a few of them.  I just think you're providing inadequate detail.  There are of course plenty that I don't like, but that's beside the point; you're providing inadequate or zero detail on them as well.

And hence they can't really be called ideas.

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While we're on the subject, I don't want an auto-defeat screen, or an auto-win screen, or whatever you want to call it.  Although this conflicts somewhat with attempting to balance out the rich get richer and poor get poorer mechanic, at some point where one civ has a clearly overwhelming advantage it should become drastically easier to finish the game...but the other civs would still have a chance.  The influence condition is a decent example of this kind of mechanic, albeit far from perfect.

The way that Sins does this, for instance, if one can call it that, is not how I'd like to see it in GC3.  There's absolutely no reason for me to continue playing a game after the AI is defeated, as nice of a feature as it is.

So am i. Surprising comment, isn't it? Wanna know why? Cuz we already have 5 of those in TA.

A winning condition is a goal, how it is deployed and brought to your attention is context.

There is basically no difference between an AI & human opponents as long as a ruleset considers (important term if there is ever one, btw) them equal. Introduce advantages (hidden or otherwise) in the algorithmic applications of these same rules, then you are creating the proverbial jack-knife against any human driven capacity to counter measure up to IT **in order** to reach a goal first or in a more strategic manner than the AIs.

Win-Lose, once more. I progressively discover the "auto-screens" all by myself just as much as certain situations dump numbers & values on the statistic total(s) of my opponents for me to stare at.

Thalan has 125 planets, i've got 25... and they don't have more than 74% influence over the last 150 turns worth of twisting and turning.

But on these 25 planets, i've got a packed house of a deck load of lethal invasions ready.

Should they or *I* surrender?

See?

Bang, i reach Tech-Vic in 5 turns and ooops they up their research focuses 125 times over and match IT at 6.

Who wins, clearly?

Auto! Because, after all, the intelligent AI would surrender to me if that's what they *can* decide to do.

(But, i should stress on the fact that i never play my games with Surrenders ON, i'll let you decide or figure out why!)

I don't know if this has been mentioned already (i don't have time to read 28 pages hehe) but i've alwasy thought its odd that as soon as you've met a race, you instantly know their full economy, research, military, population, influence via that little graph at the bottom, maybe this should be tied into espionage?

Really, this is getting asanine. If you're not going to back up your statements with any actual facts, then please stop making them.

Here are some facts:

15: Planet viability has nothing to do with Civilization. For two reasons: 1, not all cities in Civ are equally viable either, so I clearly cannot have taken the idea from there. And 2, the reason I want planet viability is precisely because the game is in space. The random-number-generator is what dictates how many planets you can get, not your choice of terrain. You can't do the kind of fudging you do in a Civ game to make the best of bad terrain; a PQ4 is a PQ4. As such, you need to make sure that all planets can be reasonably useful.

19: Civilization IV doesn't have any collective unionization of the kind I described. It has something similar to the UP, which I arged against. So in fact, this change would be moving it away from Civ.

20: Tech trading in CivIV and GC2 work exactly the same. Therefore, this idea would be moving away from Civilization.

22: Neither Civilization nor GalCiv have ever had tactical combat. And I want to keep it that way. I guess that's technically making it more like Civ, but that's a pretty poor argument.

26: Civilization does not have a robust alternative planetary/city conquest mechanism of the kind I describe.

27: That Civilization doesn't have a gameplay-sanctioned way to dominate the AI doesn't mean that removing GC2's mechanism is intended to move it towards Civ. There are plenty of reasons to remove Diplomacy on its own merits, and this thread has outlined them in detail.

So yes, your comment is entirely nonsense.

Good game design should be taken wherever it is found. And ignoring CivIV's incredible advancements in User Interface out of some sense of pride is just stupid.

BTW, I would point out that it is clear that Wardell has not followed your advice of ignoring the competition. The UI of Elemental clearly shows that he has learned the lessons of CivIV's UI.

Note that a good game mechanic idea can be bad for your specific game if it does not fulfill what you want that mechanic to accomplish. That's why you should look at other games and evaluate what works for your game and what you should rightfully ignore.

And to answer Sole's question, that is why I didn't propose changing the resourcing model to look like Civ's; because it works against the goals of a GalCiv production model.

The details don't matter. What matters is what the eventual mechanic should accomplish.

For example, GC2's resourcing and production model rewards local specialization (planets have a specific function: money generation, production, etc) and global generalization. Compare this with Civilization, where local specialization is mostly discouraged; every city of a particular size ends up looking for the most part like every other city (with the possible exception of factories). It is that (among other things) which gives each game its unique feel, not the specific mechanics that create these effects.

We aren't designing the game here (and if we are, we're going about it the wrong way). If I were to provide what I would consider relevant details to how to develop some of my ideas, I would effectively be designing the game. It would involve the creation of a multi-hundred page document, detailing interdependent mechanics and so forth.

Describing how production should work is meaningless without knowing also how combat works. Or how influence or any such replacement would work. Mechancis are interdependent, so talking about one in the absence of the rest is not useful.

What is useful to a game designer is not what a specific mechanic should be, but what a specific mechanic should do. The process of game design is to take a set of goals and to build the mechanics that fulfill those goals. Taking that process halfway doesn't interest me; either stop at goal setting or take it to the level of a full design.

The thing about space is that it's... space. It's open and empty. It's hard to stop someone from just wandering wherever they want.

I would say that whatever mechanic gets used should be fairly trivial. Probably not on first contact, but it should not be too difficult to get basic statistics from another race. Likewise, it should be quite difficult to prevent someone from getting basic statistics.

However, what might be interesting is the ability to, if you invest in espionage in some way, lie to someone. Not like Diplomacy or the Spin Control Center; I mean a real lie. If they have been relying only on basic espionage, you should be able to invest more in espionage and be able to feed their "agent" (not that I'm suggesting it be based on DA's agent system; it's just a general term) specific misinformation. That way, you can actually have a espionage war: they have to spend resources to make sure they're getting accurate information, while you can spend resources to keep them from getting that information.

That's not how it works. A victory condition is a special rule of game design; it is what defines that the game should end.

You don't have the choice not to surrender the game when you are in Checkmate; it is a mathematical fact in accordance with the rules. You lost.

Similarly, if the clock runs out in a sport, the game is over (unless it is a tie and the rules have something to say about that); you don't get to choose whether you should surrender if you have fewer points than your opponent.

What you were talking about originally was if you're close to a victory condition and essentially assured of victory, but not having achieved a victory condition. You said that, at that point, you should be given the opportunity to automatically win, and presumably the enemies should be given the opportunity to play on. And further, if your enemies want to keep playing, they have to justify it to the victor in some way.

You're talking about a fundamentally silly rule. Chess has rules for this because it's entirely mathematical; you can prove that you've won, even if the other player isn't checkmated yet. As I pointed out, and as you agreed, there is no mechansim to do that in a TBS game. So the entire foundation of the rule collapses.

This isn't exactly true.

Everyone "knows" this, but it's simply not true.  Individually, except in the instance where a planet doesn't have a high enough PQ to support the necessary population, and given a mean population that is relatively close to the mode, it makes no difference if I have two stock markets on one planet and one on another or three on one and none on the other.  Pop growth needs to be taken into account, such that planets in the heart of your empire serve better as economic planets until pop is maxed, but the more planets you have, the more the statement you've made is untrue.

In addition, the lowest class you'll find in DA/TA is class 5+3 terraforming tiles=class 8, which can support a 14B population, albeit not a 20B population.  But a class 9 (6 before terraforming) will support 20B population, although neither it nor a class 10 gets the +10% approval bonus for high quality, so it's almost irrelevant.

It's true that clustering research tends to be a good idea, because of the few (with TA) research +% improvements, but clustering industry isn't as good of an idea because if you have 150 military production on a planet and you build a ship that costs 100BC you spend 150BC in production (assuming no bonuses, so none of it free) to build it-the overflow is wasted, so it's useless to have more than you need.  And there really aren't too many research +% buildings, nor are they fairly early on in the tree.

The optimal planet in GC2 has enough factories to build whatever you're building at the moment and filled out with economic buildings, obviously a farm, and a morale improvement if necessary.  On the other side of the coin, labs is more complicated, but it's probably around an average of 3 economic buildings per class 10 planet (may change slightly dependent on version).  You'll lose something by generalizing, of course, but it will be less than you otherwise would due to the initial colonies, and it should be very minimal.  I don't feel like creating figures or running the math, but you're more than welcome to if you'd like.

So you're technically correct that, for a small number of planets, specialization is rewarded, but the reward is a lot smaller than anyone thinks it is.

For what it's worth (to you, probably not much), I generalize my planets.

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Scout, I just said Sins has that and as nice of a feature it is, I'm not sure I want it.  I don't think I'd ever use it.

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That sounds like fun.