No. GalCiv isn't that kind of game. But we do want to embrace the citizen system more fully. I've been trying to find ways to make the people themselves more important in these games.
Oh right, something I forgot to bring up the last time. It's seriously kind of bullshit that Citizens can only be transported between planets with those slow, dinky little shuttles that can only be sped up using hyperlanes, and that we can't even control to move them out of the way of pirates or enemy ships.
Surely, our powerful, resource-rich galactic civilizations can do better than that for our most important VIPs?
For GCIV, Citizens should be similar to how Mercenaries currently work. We should be able to design unique ships equipped with whatever components we want to give them, and be able to control them fully. They could then be sent to planets to confer their bonuses (for those like Workers, Engineers or Entrepreneurs), or even sent to the planets of other Civs to produce their effects (e.g. sending Diplomats to a Civ's homeworld to increase Diplomacy with them, or Spies to a Civ's high-Research world to steal their tech etc.).
To preserve the "shuttle" aesthetic, you could limit Citizen ships to nothing larger than Small hulls. Exceptions could be made for Generals (you could open up the Cargo hull option so unique Transport ships can be built for them), and Commanders (all sizes available up to Huge, so you could build any type of flagship for their fleet from battleships to carriers).
The problem in the past was CPU power. That is, there was only enough CPU power for one AI per Civ. But now, we can have lots of AIs per Civ which lends itself to a lot more interesting, non-random events happening as a result of internal power struggles.
Oooh. Looking forward to seeing what you guys have in the works, in this regard.
Exactly!
You know what game did a really good job with this sort of thing recently? Crusader Kings III. There really should be some articles on CK3's battle system because it's so simple and yet so elegant. I can't say enough good things about that game.
The ironic thing is that a lot of the new CK stuff works better in a GalCiv type game than in CK and none of it is in Stellaris for some reason.
Interesting. That's some new reading material for me in my off-time, so I can get an idea of where you're all going with this for GalCiv.
Honestly, I'm looking forward to the day when you share more about the new combat system for GCIV. Any thoughts or suggestions I might have about combat just isn't going to be useful until then, when we get a better idea of what you've come up with.
It's funny you should say that. Because that's our thinking too. >= class 10 only.
I'll recommend stealing another idea from Stellaris in this regard; specifically, sector management.
You could designate a high-quality planet as the Sector Capital, and build a sector around it that encompasses the closest lower-quality planets around it. These non-capital planet could then supply the sector capital with not just credits/production/research etc., but also Food and/or Population cap (in the sense that low-quality planets are the "rural" areas to the "big city" that's the sector capital, with food being supplied from the former to the latter, and people moving from the former to find jobs in the latter).
You could even adapt an existing mechanic in GCIII for this already; specifically, the Commonwealth mechanic. That would work just as well for designating Sectors, as it currently does for spinning off your own Commonwealths.
Sectors would allow players to designate entire groups of planets as Military/Research/Economic, instead of just individual Planets as is currently the case with GCIII. Heck, you could designate a Fertile World as the Capital for an Agriculture Sector, and using that to feed the Food/Pop of other Sectors in your civilization using Supply ships (which opens up an opportunity for enemy commerce raiders).
This could even allow you to move away from global pools of Resources, and introduce gameplay which involves moving mined Resources such as Durantium to Sectors which need them for building Starbases and planetside, and Thulium/Elerium/Antimatter to Military sectors with lots of Shipyards that need those to build your warships. Again, opens up opportunities for commerce raiding and/or privateering.