The strange contradictions with game worlds

So you've climbed out of the primordial soup, wore a tie for a few millions years and now you're ready to take on the stars eh? Oh, you've conquered the energy return paradox of supralight travel, you've gene preened your civilization to adapt to the poisonous vacuum of space and threw your head back with a maniacal laugh as the C-beams glittered before you and fell silent - you thought you'd seen it all.... well get ready for your biggest challenge yet, Mr/Mrs Futurepants - __putting people in boxes and lowering them to the surface of a planet so they can do an invasion of it__

Doesn't this seem weird? I'm piping firey white hot death all over this map, i am all the scunion, but oops woah now *handbrake sound effect* we're gonna need to do some basic drivers ed 101 here kids. First you gonna need a license for that transport. Then you gonna need a license for that citizen. Then you gotta put em on the invasion wagon and then...

I get that it's meant to indicate to the orchestration AI that you're into that whole invasion thing or it's just meant to be a "another barrier [tm]" but i don't mean galciv specifically i mean generally, this is a common scifi 4x trope, and it is a bit anachronistic isn't it? I mean sure somebody at some point had to have a meeting to discuss how they were going to invade their neighbours cave but it didn't take 5 years and it feels out of sync with the scale of everything else, by the time you're invading enemies planets you are pretty much a pro, I wonder if there's a better way to articulate this change in epoch or workflow because from the discussions i've had with the team they seems pretty adamant about reducing unnecessary drudgery in the game, and spending 5 turns at mid game to get these techs is at least an hour, unless you just force end each turn because you hate your people you monster. Bit frustrating, not painfully - but i'm sure it'll confuse a newb - and because its odd it made me think about why we do this particular dance at all in the 4x games. Also the random tech thing is not helping this make more sense i'll end up with invasion but then i'll find out the tech i need for training people to be soldiers isn't done and i have to shuffle the deck several times to get it, shouldn't earlier techs be higher probability than later techs? or at least those that don't work without earlier techs should barge their way in before the later tech does.

Also when trying to populate the transports if you don't have that earlier soldiering tech there's no error it just does nothing like no handler exists for that case (have later tech but not earlier tech) . I realised it might be "Yet Another Lock" so checked to see if there was a soldier work type you can assign civs and sure enough there is, but i didn't have it, so i had to try to find it. eventually found it at the start of a block planetary invasion is in. Looked like i had all the techs after it but not this one, probably because i traded it from a spooky alien earlier in the game.

This brings me back to something else I mentioned a couple weeks ago you may need to check - I think if you trade in a tech from another player it might set the watermark for the selection criterion for your tech random selector from the highest known tech in a tree branch rather than just remaining unknown techs, because i don't see those techs coming in normally after you've gone higher. It's anecdotal as i haven't done a full repro but it kinda fits.

I see we've also nerfed survey XP so after 170 turns i haven't had a single ship upgrade lol. Don't do things by halves do ya I really loved upgrading my little ships, it gave me a weird unexplainable buzz, i think because 4x is REALLY dry an experience, a cerebral orchestra of a million abstract excel spreadsheet cells, so to break that up with little puffs of organic win magic "kaching, upgrade yr little spacemans yay!" really works well. I keep forgetting the working title of this game is NO FUN! so i can mod that back in it's fine

galciv iv early access feedback

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Indeed. The premise is something that I've had a hard time with in recent years.

When I designed Ashes of the Singularity, I dealt with the fact that there are no spaceships at all. It's all about Post-Humans and quantum streaming of remote constructs doing all the work.

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Yeah, whats a safety margin to a robot anyhow? just fire them out of a canon at the planet you want to do an invasion at.

Did you start playing with HDR/emissives in Escalation? it looks fantastic compared to the original, so shiny, and i'm almost certain that's about the same time Unity dropped PP2 bloom diffusion and HDR cam mode. I should really have another poke at it.

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Completely agree: It's weird you can research/use Tech B when you haven't researched/bought Tech A and logically, you should know A before you can even consider researching B. bradzoob's suggestion, which seems to me to be changing/limiting what the Random Tech Generator gives you to "Well, you're not at Level 2 yet, so you can only research Level 1 Techs", makes sense.

The example here seems to be knowing how to Invade Da Enemy before you can even Kill Da Enemy properly, but it also feels a bit like "I know how to make an MP3 player for the zero MP3s I have in my colleciton, but, damn, I can't play my 200 gramophone records because figuring out how to make that gramophone is way too advanced for me!"

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SchismNavigator

Join Date 06/2012

+165

The fancy term for this is ludonarrative dissonance. Although it is most often used when talking about playing the good guy in a game where your main method of communciatin is by shooting thousands of enemies.

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@mrblondini I'm just actively avoiding trading tech now because it creates holes all over your empire that you can only solve with a tech search, a google search and repeated tedious dice rolls, sure there'll be a fix soon

Yeah i think it's just a jolt in pacing, keeping it personal while on a galactic scale, but at the expense of coherent evolution, that old game chestnut where it has to play like a game because sadly it is a game and you are not an actual space warlord who would definitely have already known how to invade a planet because you're such a clever warlord and quite handsome.

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To be fair, a successful invasion requires a lot more than just dropping an army on someone. There is a great deal of logistics involved to support an invasion after it's started. There is a reason that naval invasions have been so difficult to successfully execute throughout history. Now imagine that instead of a going across a relatively small sea to attack a relatively small nation, you have to project power across entire systems to secure an entire planet. I don't have much difficulty thinking that would require a great deal of planning and specialized equipment.

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You're talking about strategy on a per front basis, but this is just to unlock the tech that enables building of vessels, which is something we already have. Otherwise we'd be researching this tech every battle which I guess is the whole 5 months invasion thing, which for some reason is a standard length of time regardless of the number of troops you send; ergo we already have our strategic planning cost per battle. Naval battles of Earth are difficult because they're in the ocean and the ocean contains sneaky hidden rocks and sneaky shallows, which is why the UK doesn't speak Spanish but has no bearing on space invasions because the biggest trick to those is being in space for _any reason at all_, rather than "trying to invade a planet", because trade ships, colony ships, war ships any other ship already has to do those things. It seems to be a theme in GC4 that instead of sticking to force multipliers we're instead reverting to the ye olde time of integer gating. No invasions. Some invasions. It's all or nothing and just awful for scale.

Suggestion:

Allow any ship to perform an invasion, just let it suffer the consequences of not being trained in Invasion 101.

This concept extends to every facet of galciv4.

Also, scaled events are fine so long as they're designed to be met by scaled responses, so far from my review of the development process i've seen the response to complaints of asymmetrical scaled events has been to remove the events rather than supply the counterpart that provides symmetry. You can't spawn 50 green goblins but only allow ships to attack one per turn, that's ludicrous volumes of overhead and tedious micro. That doesn't mean removing the goblins, it means planning how you're going to meet scale with scale. I have a dozen ideas for this just off the top of my head.

Also it's important to understand what tedious micro is, it's performing the exact same task and getting the exact same result a multitude of times. It's busy work, it's just awful. Removing the ability to manage the upgrades on the ships has taken away the only pleasure there was in that micro. now i'd rather just not hear about it when a battle is about to happen because there's nothing i can do about it and i don't care.

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