| 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.