Story: Humans gave hyperdrive to everyone and yet they all start out on home world, with nearly 20th century tech? Umm... okaay. Lame. |
Given that the focus of the game lies in the sandbox mode, the story is generally irrelevant; many players make their own, or just ignore it altogether. Regardless of the story behind it, the starting situation is the same as with any game in the genre: each civ begins with one planet/city and roughly the same level of technology, expanding into the galaxy/sector/world from there.
And it most cases...PARSECS away from the home star. In some cases with my hyperdrive it takes more time to go intrasolar than to go to another star system. |
The tiles in the game are 'warp-adjusted' parsecs based upon the speed of a first-generation drive. Gravity wells have a severe negative effect on hyperdrive's effectiveness, such that while in a system ships are effectively travelling under the power of their thrusters alone. Thus it can still take a couple of weeks to travel in-system, while not taking much more to travel to an adjacent star (since hyperdrive is only truly effective in deep space).
Range of ships and speeds/time. Being able to travel 30 parsecs from home in 16 weeks, but cant go any farher? |
Supplies and fuel are bulky. Want to go further? Build ships with more support modules so they can travel further from potential resupply depots (your planets and starbases).
That is stupid. The weeks system is absolutely lame. Space travel even
at faster than light speeds takes YEARS. YEARS! Now years would
restrict range...but weeks? |
Got an example of real FTL space travel you'd like to compare with? Travel times in GC are not inconsistent with those in other major sci-fi universes, where all but the most basic forms of FTL travel are
significantly faster than light speed (going by star trek standards, warp 5 would be fast enough to reach more than 120 nearby stars in less than a month).
My spacefaring race, with hyperdrive...doesn't know how to focus on more than one thing at a time? Researching one tech at a time is LAME, unrealistic and boring. |
That may be your opinion, but it's a game mechanic common to many notable games in the genre (one exception being MoO3, which you've already implied you disliked).
Insulting a sci-fi game for being not realistic enough seems like a cheap shot to me, since such games inherently include things which are not currently and may never be realistic. And for those things which do have present-day analogues, game developers most generally (and rightly, IMO) opt to place gameplay concerns at a higher priority than pure realism. It's a game, not a simulation, after all.