Here are a few random thoughts on the game. I'm writing this from work and some of the terminology may be off. This is whatever version was active on April 29.
Observations
- First of all, I needed a VPN to pick up the DLC on Epic. I wasn't in the right region. New Jersey worked. I'm not sure why this wouldn't be global.
- On the fourth difficulty from the highest, it was not too hard to get a Prestige victory without any fighting whatsoever. The Mimots were maybe at 67 when I pulled 100.
- The discounted tech breakthrough feature works possibly too well. Once you get the 75% discount from one of the cultural traits you can build up your tech quite quickly. My guess is the AI doesn't use this feature. I achieved a tech lead noticeably earlier than in vanilla.
- Regarding Challenges, the AI also doesn't seem to use them either.
- The bad guys (e.g. pirates, green baddies and orange baddies) don't seem very aggressive. Probes are absolutely untouched and I don't even recall constructors or colony ships getting iced. Anyway, they seem to be much less of a bother than before.
- To make the game more challenging, about 10 turns after the Prestige victory I selected all of the, well, Challenges (except two locked ones). This meant all other 20 civs were against me since that's one of the Challenges. To make it even more, cough, challenging, I built the Great Archive (?) and everyone now has the same tech as myself (other than a few techs I've researched since then).
- About 20 turns after building the archive the situation is now somewhat dicey. The whole galaxy is now starting to pour out of three starlanes like ants whose anthill has been disturbed. My asteroid mines are being eliminated one by one. Sadly, though, superstacks are not so common. It's fighters everywhere in ones or twos.
Suggestions
- Make the Prestige victory level selectable at the beginning. Right now it seems pretty quick.
- Maybe institute a feature where you have to beat the next best player by 10-20% to get a vic.
- I could have sworn back in GalCiv2 days when you were nearing a victory, the other players started ganging up on you (maybe this was MOO). This should happen to some extent.
I'll probably think of a few others. Let me say it's a great game, but could be improved a bit.
Cheers,
CB
