0.91 Mimot review » Forum Post by Basilisk83

I think the easiest solution is to penalize them heavily for over-population and starvation. Their approval should tank in those situations.

I admit I don't actually know what the growth mechanic is. When I want more growth (and I'm not the Yor, obviously) I just make everyone into farmers and hopefully slash pollution but it doesn't seem to change anything.

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The Mimot are indeed very good. Cari did an amazing job with them. I agree above that they should be pushed into a need for more food and be forced to move more production resources to keep food up or morale should tank (and production/economy) with it.

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

The Mimot are good. But I disagree with the basic thrust of the argument.

The Mimot don't need to be nerfed - nothing in the above suggestions make them more fun to play. Rather every other civ needs to be similarly OP in their own unique way.

Generally speaking, food is not a strong limiting mechanic in GC4. It would help matters if it were more important, every empire should be vulnerable and in disarray if its citizenry is starving. Buffing up this mechanic would bring natural penalties for faster growth. Especially civs with hard-wired faster growth, such as the Mimot. The food mechanic, as it's currently implemented, feels like an after-thought - or placeholder for dev that needs to get tightened up for the final game. This makes sense during dev to not have too many penalizing systems while things get balanced out - but it could get cranked up a bit now I'd say...

Cari did do an awesome job with the Mimot. Every civ deserves an equal amount of luv.

I'll note that my writeups (I've done Xeloxi, Krynn and Yor, thus far with Drengin incoming) have made recommendations along these lines (it's fun if every civ is OP & broken in their own unique way).

cheers,

-tid242

TLDR: no take-aways, make every race uniquely awesome - like the Mimot!

+2

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Quoting tid242,

reply 3

The Mimot don't need to be nerfed - nothing in the above suggestions make them more fun to play. Rather every other civ needs to be similarly OP in their own unique way.

That is not at all realistic. I don't care how creative you are, there aren't 15 unique ways to make each race OP. Can't be done. You need a combination of buffs and nerfs to create uniqueness. Part of the fun is figuring out how to deal with each race's flaws. If there's never any challenge then it's not much of a game. I might as well watch a movie.

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting slarjy,

reply 4

Quoting tid242,

reply 3

The Mimot don't need to be nerfed - nothing in the above suggestions make them more fun to play. Rather every other civ needs to be similarly OP in their own unique way.

That is not at all realistic. I don't care how creative you are, there aren't 15 unique ways to make each race OP. Can't be done. You need a combination of buffs and nerfs to create uniqueness. Part of the fun is figuring out how to deal with each race's flaws. If there's never any challenge then it's not much of a game. I might as well watch a movie.

With all due respect, I vigorously disagree. Videogames haven't really done this, because they've gotten into the mindset of being obsessed with "balance" - which tends to lead to little flair and lots of generics. (videogames also suffer from the feature of being able to modify post-release, unlike board games). And I agree, when a game is linear, the game needs to be balanced on that linear featureset, otherwise it becomes unplayable.

But with a game like GalCiv - how many outright ways are there to win?: Conquest, influence, Diplomacy, Research, Ascendancy. Whether you want to throw "prestige" in there too or not is up to you (a "balance" victory, basically?). And how many strats within each potential victory condition?

I'm not advocating for making Civ XYZ awesome at all 5 victory conditions - clearly that's ridiculous. But if, say, you make a race twice as good at influence (ie the Krynn), does that make them win every game? - no. Because being awesome at influence does not win you the game alone.

I suspect that the issue with the Mimot is that their 2x ships ties into more than one of the above systems in a very easy way to utilize, and thus seems very OP. On the other thread you discuss how the Onyx aren't really that great (in so many words) despite their crazy strong ships because (again, in so many words) there's more to the game than having good ships.

I did mention above that food seems to be a mechanic that's pretty useless at the moment. "Implementing food" may go a long way in bringing to the fore the problems with the Mimot's rabbit-rate-of-reproduction. After all, they suffer the problem of Rome, expand for food, or die. (and Rome died).

If you're into Board Games at all, I highly recommend you check out "Cosmic Encounter" it's a terrific example of there being no balance whatsoever, and every alien race (there are like 200 different ones, IIRC) is just COMPLETELY broken. At face value you look at every race and say: "what the hell, this is so f***ing broken, how can this not win every game?" But every game is a toss-up. Because there's more to winning than exploiting a single OP mechanic.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39463/cosmic-encounter

This is just my opinion, obviously, but perfectly balanced games suck to play and get boring quickly... The answer to a strong mechanic that works isn't to nerf everything to some generic baseline, rather it's to make more strong mechanics..

cheers,

-tid242

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Ya when I first started browsing the different civs figuring out what I wanted to play, I saw the Mimot and thought to myself "Holy sh*^, those seem like ridiculously over powered abilities". So I decided to play other stuff at first, kinda figuring the Mimot would be in for a bit of nerfing soon.

But then I saw some posts on the boards or Discord (probably both) that mentioned the Mimot were a favorite of the devs. So then I figured oh ok, this will be just like every other game I have ever played in the history of gaming. Whenever the devs have a "favorite" of anything, it will be the absolute last thing to ever get "balanced". And then sure enough, a short time later the poor Baratak got their primary ability to colonize dead worlds nerfed, but the Mimot remained as silly over powered as ever

So as I learned with all other games in the past, just go ahead and play and use whatever race/class/ability is a favorite of the devs. So while I might dip my toes in other civs to check them out a little bit, whenever I plan on really diving deep into a game for a while, I just make a Mimot variation. I'm sure you can still play and win with any other civ you prefer, if you want more of a challenge. I myself will probably try out stuff other than Mimot variations, once I get tired of face-rolling.

Happy Friday !

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yeah, baratak just got a nerf... yor got a nerf... drath got a nerf... onyx got a couple nerfs... why is the most powerful civ not getting any nerfs?...

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Quoting tid242,

reply 5

But with a game like GalCiv - how many outright ways are there to win?: Conquest, influence, Diplomacy, Research, Ascendancy. Whether you want to throw "prestige" in there too or not is up to you (a "balance" victory, basically?). And how many strats within each potential victory condition?

There's one. Dominate your a sector (presumably your starting sector). After many months of alpha/beta, no one has proven any other strategy to be viable. Once you control a sector, you snowball so you can pick whichever victory type you want. Yeah, there are some sub-strategies (Onyx Hive: secure promethion supply first; Terran: rush defense minister; Yor: secure duritanium supply, etc.) but it's all about positioning yourself to win that first war.

The Mimot are just out of control. They are at least a full difficulty level stronger than anyone else at the only strategy that matters. If you are not the Mimot and they spawn in your sector, you might as well restart (assuming that you are playing a difficulty level that would otherwise be challenging).

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting slarjy,

reply 8

The Mimot are just out of control. They are at least a full difficulty level stronger than anyone else at the only strategy that matters. If you are not the Mimot and they spawn in your sector, you might as well restart (assuming that you are playing a difficulty level that would otherwise be challenging).

lol, well as a datapoint, the Mimot in my game got wiped out (playing with all AI's on "bright"). I have not met all of the AI's yet, but AFAIK the Mimot were the first ones eliminated from this game (should have been Terran but no one's bothered to take their last core planet)..

Mimot are definitely pretty good, but I don't see them winning every game either..

It's an interesting discussion,

-tid242

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If I'm the devs I'd simply observe that it's not compulsory to have the Mimots in your game. In fact, having the Mimots in your game may well ruin the "immersion", RNG and "win the way you want" aspect of 4X a fair bit. Sure, you can have the Mimots in your game and play in a "Beat My Record for Turns Survived Against The Seriously OP Mimot" way (my basic play-style - "Yay Me! Took 250 Turns To Die!" ), but it you want to win and don't want to play as the Mimot, exclude them.

Or, yes, they could do The Nerf. But if they are the devs Poster Child For Galactic Domination, they'll still be less nerfed than other, less PCfGD races.

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Just curious, what galaxy sizes are you guys playing with? Right now, I've been mostly playing with just a few smaller sectors, and the Mimots don't feel OP. Strong, but not OP. But I can see how on a bigger map, or a map with a lot of planets, the Mimots would just be insane.

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Quoting Arcean_Endgame,

reply 11

Just curious, what galaxy sizes are you guys playing with? Right now, I've been mostly playing with just a few smaller sectors, and the Mimots don't feel OP. Strong, but not OP. But I can see how on a bigger map, or a map with a lot of planets, the Mimots would just be insane.

yeah on smaller maps where the colonizable planets and resources to civ ratio is small, their growth rate isnt quite as op, but that ship duplication is always op. that's the prob with the mimots, not just one broken trait, but 2. with no weaknesses (+20 food consumption is nothing atm). and yeah, on larger maps where the colonizable planets and resources to civ ratio is much larger, is makes the mimot's breeding and duplication of all colony ships, constructor ships, survey ships, and all combat ships much more op.

dont get me wrong, i like playing against good civs with a hard ai setting, and i always liked playing against the korath, and if this race is meant to be the super op race that's hardest to play against and an easy to use into race for kids or something then great, keep it the way it is. but just wanted to make sure it was known that this race is on another level than the others. maybe even throw it somewhere in the description that it's the best race for new players who want an easy game experience, just so people know what they're getting themselves into right now the description says they're an average race with an above average growth rate, but they're far more than average... and i dont think that they currently think about food nearly as much as their description says...

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Quoting tid242,

reply 3

The Mimot are good. But I disagree with the basic thrust of the argument.

The Mimot don't need to be nerfed - nothing in the above suggestions make them more fun to play. Rather every other civ needs to be similarly OP in their own unique way.

Generally speaking, food is not a strong limiting mechanic in GC4. It would help matters if it were more important, every empire should be vulnerable and in disarray if its citizenry is starving. Buffing up this mechanic would bring natural penalties for faster growth. Especially civs with hard-wired faster growth, such as the Mimot. The food mechanic, as it's currently implemented, feels like an after-thought - or placeholder for dev that needs to get tightened up for the final game. This makes sense during dev to not have too many penalizing systems while things get balanced out - but it could get cranked up a bit now I'd say...

Cari did do an awesome job with the Mimot. Every civ deserves an equal amount of luv.

I'll note that my writeups (I've done Xeloxi, Krynn and Yor, thus far with Drengin incoming) have made recommendations along these lines (it's fun if every civ is OP & broken in their own unique way).

cheers,

-tid242

TLDR: no take-aways, make every race uniquely awesome - like the Mimot!

Tid242 this is an excellent response and now that I think about it, your position is far better. I think the Drengin should be all about war, best weapons/defenses, faster techs in those areas and start wars faster and sustain with high production for ships.

+1

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Quoting Arcean_Endgame,

reply 11

Just curious, what galaxy sizes are you guys playing with? Right now, I've been mostly playing with just a few smaller sectors, and the Mimots don't feel OP. Strong, but not OP. But I can see how on a bigger map, or a map with a lot of planets, the Mimots would just be insane.

Ya everything is a little bit situational, depending on what kind of map layout you prefer to use. I prefer bigger maps, so I currently usually use the "Large" setting, which I think is supposed to be 8-12 sectors. I also prefer to play as "galactic civilizations", not solar system civilizations, so I want everybody to have space to expand into an actual big civilization before serious competition begins. So I play with 8 AI civs with distance between civs set to max; that way each civ gets it's very own sector to expand into for a while without competition from other civs. Under these conditions, Mimots have a massive massive massive advantage. If you played with settings where you had 2 or 3 civs in each sector, then the Mimots would still have a pretty big advantage, but they could end up getting kinda screwed with a little bad luck.

It is pretty funny to read some posts on here. I can get a pretty good feel for the kind of map settings people probably use, just by the issues they bring up. I do feel kinda sorry for the devs sometimes, because one of the great things about the Gal Civ series is that you can really make very different types of game to play, just based on what kind of settings you pick for the galaxy at start up. So a lot of people complain about things that are very specific to their own very specific preferred play style. It's like some people don't realize that if they don't like how things play out under certain conditions, they are free to change those conditions during the initial galaxy set up. It can make things a real nightmare for the devs to try balancing out, while still letting everybody have the freedom to play their own preferred style of game.

Happy Friday !

+1

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Quoting Larsenex,

reply 13

Quoting tid242,

reply 3

The Mimot are good. But I disagree with the basic thrust of the argument.

The Mimot don't need to be nerfed - nothing in the above suggestions make them more fun to play. Rather every other civ needs to be similarly OP in their own unique way.

Generally speaking, food is not a strong limiting mechanic in GC4. It would help matters if it were more important, every empire should be vulnerable and in disarray if its citizenry is starving. Buffing up this mechanic would bring natural penalties for faster growth. Especially civs with hard-wired faster growth, such as the Mimot. The food mechanic, as it's currently implemented, feels like an after-thought - or placeholder for dev that needs to get tightened up for the final game. This makes sense during dev to not have too many penalizing systems while things get balanced out - but it could get cranked up a bit now I'd say...

Cari did do an awesome job with the Mimot. Every civ deserves an equal amount of luv.

I'll note that my writeups (I've done Xeloxi, Krynn and Yor, thus far with Drengin incoming) have made recommendations along these lines (it's fun if every civ is OP & broken in their own unique way).

cheers,

-tid242

TLDR: no take-aways, make every race uniquely awesome - like the Mimot!

Tid242 this is an excellent response and now that I think about it, your position is far better. I think the Drengin should be all about war, best weapons/defenses, faster techs in those areas and start wars faster and sustain with high production for ships.

i agree, make other civs great in their own way (i always try to do this when i've made custom civs in the past), but that's a tall order with all these civs too. i do agree with you that the drengin should be more about war. i always thought it was weird that the unrelenting trait gave them and the festron a huge economy boost... i mean those are 2 of the last races that i would think would be worrying about their economy. i mean it's a great trait, but maybe instead it could be replaced with something a little more fitting for the drengin and feston... like free early weapon techs and maybe a policy that boosts military production or weapon dmg instead of economy.

+1

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting Larsenex,

reply 13

Tid242 this is an excellent response and now that I think about it, your position is far better. I think the Drengin should be all about war, best weapons/defenses, faster techs in those areas and start wars faster and sustain with high production for ships.

Quoting Basilisk83,

reply 15

i agree, make other civs great in their own way (i always try to do this when i've made custom civs in the past), but that's a tall order with all these civs too. i do agree with you that the drengin should be more about war. i always thought it was weird that the unrelenting trait gave them and the festron a huge economy boost... i mean those are 2 of the last races that i would think would be worrying about their economy. i mean it's a great trait, but maybe instead it could be replaced with something a little more fitting for the drengin and feston... like free early weapon techs and maybe a policy that boosts military production or weapon dmg instead of economy.

Lars & Bas,

Thank you for the upvote on my thinking.

I'm working my way through a Drengin game currently, so it's interesting that you bring them up. A good friend of mine saw some notes that I'm keeping on my thoughts (I just keep these on our private channel) and did clarify something that hadn't occurred to me: the Drengin are not necessarily all about fighting ship battles - rather they are about invading. I was complaining because I was on the back foot all game with the Alterians taking over my sector. His response is that this is what should happen. The Alterians have better ships because they have better tech than the Drengin. But they cannot match the Drengin production - the Drengin have the best production in the game and can always fight a war on two fronts. In fact, I've been fighting 3 all game, despite starting on the back foot and digging myself out of a bad hole for at least the first 8 hours of play (I just checked, I'm 17h into this game). The only adversary that matches Drengin production are the Yor, and Yor will win a head-to-head because their tech is ultimately better. This whole racial dynamic makes a lot of sense to me, the way he explained it, and the Drengin largely do play like that...

Anyway, I'll have a detailed writeup on my Drengin thoughts after I close out this game - prob this weekend at some point - but I'll have some suggestions about how the Drengin could be more scary - but I think their production/ships are good enough the way they are.

Thanks again for the responses, talk more later,

-tid242

+1

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting Arcean_Endgame,

reply 11

Just curious, what galaxy sizes are you guys playing with? Right now, I've been mostly playing with just a few smaller sectors, and the Mimots don't feel OP. Strong, but not OP. But I can see how on a bigger map, or a map with a lot of planets, the Mimots would just be insane.

Hey there! Here's a screenie of my galaxy settings. Easier than trying to explain it. As I mentioned above Mimots got killed off turn ~170 this game.. Also, all AI's available are in. 17 of them I believe. I've found this to be an optimal size/format to get to play with all of the AIs in game and get a feel for how they interact with one another and myself.

And here's how the galaxy turned out. Four sectors in a nice linear daisey-chain (the home systems are highlighted due to some tech or another I got). As you can see I haven't made it very far up the sector chain. I started in the bottom sector (red = me) and only about 1/2 the 2nd sector is revealed. I haven't even made it to the upper two at all! My prediction is that the Yor already won the game and has that whole top sector to themselves as I've met the Iconians but none of the other races from up there... ominous eh? But this layout is pretty cool this game for sure!

Cheers & hope this helps!

-tid242

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I absolutely agree: Neefing is NOT the answer- INCREASE the interest and power of the other races,. Nerfing means everything becomes bland and flatline... in other words: dead.

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I thought of a way to fix the Mimots: remove the "Draft Colonists" Executive Order only for the Mimots so that the other races have a way of keeping up (sort of).

This would only work if the AIs actually use Executive Orders currently, which I actually don't know for sure.

It also got me thinking that maybe as a way to add more flavor/balance to the game, each race should have a different set of Executive Orders. You could have one special Executive Order for each race that only they can use.

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting Arcean_Endgame,

reply 19

I thought of a way to fix the Mimots: remove the "Draft Colonists" Executive Order only for the Mimots so that the other races have a way of keeping up (sort of).

This would only work if the AIs actually use Executive Orders currently, which I actually don't know for sure.

It also got me thinking that maybe as a way to add more flavor/balance to the game, each race should have a different set of Executive Orders. You could have one special Executive Order for each race that only they can use.

Executive Order racial differentiation sounds like a good idea. It's not too difficult to think of a cool one for every race, and wouldn't be too disruptive, probably anyway.

Removing 'draft colonists' for all of the turbo-breeding races could make sense. Like tying the Executive orders to the Racial Traits, Biology, etc. so this would hold true for custom civs also.

On the question of whether AI's use executive orders. I believe that they do. In a past game I had embargo'd an AI and I'm /pretty sure/ it was getting colony ships without using the shipyard - although I wasn't completely paying attention - so I could very well be wrong about this and just assuming that they were drafting vs building... I'll have to keep my eye out for this in the future, if I ever have the opportunity to completely shut down an AI like this on turn 17 again...

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Quoting aerez4546,

reply 14

It is pretty funny to read some posts on here. I can get a pretty good feel for the kind of map settings people probably use, just by the issues they bring up. I do feel kinda sorry for the devs sometimes, because one of the great things about the Gal Civ series is that you can really make very different types of game to play, just based on what kind of settings you pick for the galaxy at start up.

That's the problem, you really can't. Pacifist strategies (diplomatic, mercantile, influence, or tourism) are completely unviable. You have to establish your own sector so you have to either win a war or stack the map so you can sandbox. If someone could prove me wrong, they would have done it by now.

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Quoting tid242,

reply 20

Removing 'draft colonists' for all of the turbo-breeding races could make sense. Like tying the Executive orders to the Racial Traits, Biology, etc. so this would hold true for custom civs also.

On the question of whether AI's use executive orders. I believe that they do.

+1 to removing "Draft Colonists" as an option for Mimot.

The AI uses executive orders except for the lowest difficulty level.

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I'm in favor of this as long as they add a special executive order to each race- that is a cool idea!

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting slarjy,

reply 21

That's the problem, you really can't. Pacifist strategies (diplomatic, mercantile, influence, or tourism) are completely unviable. You have to establish your own sector so you have to either win a war or stack the map so you can sandbox. If someone could prove me wrong, they would have done it by now.

Is Diplo victory possible at the moment? I actually want to try it.

In my earlier (Yor) game, I'm pretty sure the Iridia had the Drengin tied up in an alliance of some sort, because it wouldn't allow me to select "go to war with Iridia" when I was using the diplomacy screen with the Drengin. Unless they had just ended a war and were in the 'cooling off period' - however, I don't think that this was the case, because I'm fairly certain that game that they hadn't been at war - but they could have been and I just didn't notice, since you really have to click through and look at who's fighting who to notice..

So... it seems like the treaties exist anyway?

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+309

Quoting slarjy,

reply 21

That's the problem, you really can't. Pacifist strategies (diplomatic, mercantile, influence, or tourism) are completely unviable. You have to establish your own sector so you have to either win a war or stack the map so you can sandbox. If someone could prove me wrong, they would have done it by now.

I played a game over the past few days from beginning to victory that I would not have survived in without effective diplomatic and economic infrastructure and investment. And a good military and decisions when to use it and when to stay out of conflict.

Ignoring military will get you overrun by the AI who sees you as weak on anything above baby difficulties. Especially by aggressive and opportunistic civs. But a reasonable military is an important part of having some diplomatic leverage. Players that avoid military will likely lose. The trick is in having the 3rd top military (as i had at one point in my game) and being able to survive through strength in other areas.

I do agree with you that influence is way underpowered and we have been doing lots of tweaking in that area to help.

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