They are able but based on my experience with GalCiv 2, it will take at least half a year. Considering how bad the game currently is, make that one or even two years.

Now in the game there are big issues of balance; some can be easily fixed but some are complicated.

E.g. Summons, Archery-Melee, Stacked unit, High-Level spells - almost any combat aspects that are more complex than just fighting of two heroes with bare hands.

Here's what I remember in Galciv2

When if first came out, the units would take turns in their attacks.

This lead players to build cargo ships with lots of weapons and attack first always allowing them to win (cargo ships only have 1 hp, but it didn't matter cause it would demolish the ship it was fighting so it never had a chance to shoot back)

 Now ships attack at the same time

Then they needed to count every weapon individually, before the weapon values were all added up into one mega weapon

Example:  A laser does 1 damage

in the old game you could stick 5 lasers on a ship and it would roll between 1-5 for damage.  This made defence pretty pointless.

Now the game tracks each weapon individually so instead of rolling 1-5 for damage, it would instead roll 0-1, 5 times which was much better

If memory serves me correctly, all those things were added before or around the Dark Avatar expansion.  So basically Stardock doesn't just do some simple number tweaks, they change the whole combat system mechanics sometimes.   They are also never really done with balancing since they were tweaking things in Twilight of the Arnor so it's always an ongoing process however the game imo was balanced around Dark Avatar. 

My educated guess would be the game will be balanced enough to the casuals in 3-6 months with only the hardcore really finding any major exploits or OP strats which will slowly get hammered out afterwards but stardock says they are going into this for the long haul so this game is going to constantly be tweaked in the next 2-3 years.

One advantage they have is this game has MP which usually leads to more feedback on balancing but Stardock also has the added challenge of balancing the strat map and the battle map.  I wish them luck on that cause it seems easy but in reality it's a huge undertaking.

luketan, I don't think they would bring out a game which they know to be seriously imbalanced.

And... it isn't. There are quite a few issues, but on the whole it's okay. And will be fixed.

Besides - it is very difficult to balance a strategy game, especially when you're still fiddling with it, improving/enlarging/changing it. It is very normal for games to be somewhat unbalanced at the very start, especially when a lot of players mess about and try things the programmers would never have thought of .

Ciao,

Klaus

Okay maybe i overstated it. But if you read the dev journals, they definitely give a vibe that they think fixing game balance issues is easy to do and that gamers over-estimate it. I think technically speaking they are right (assuming the framework is flexible enough to easily accommodate changes), but it does take quite a bit of game play to figure out what to fix.

The problem here isn't like players are saying.. "Strategy X just kills it all"...  It's more like.. the game is just not fun.. 

BAH!! YOU SON OF A BITCH!!

Check back in six months to a year

... and possibly after the first paid expansion

To be honest, I'm feeling pretty burned. The state of the game *now* would be a good, solid, REAL beta test. It has all the pieces in place. It has lots of little bugs (and some major ones). But it has huge, huge gameplay issues, on every balance front, from AI to city development to spellcasting to tactical combat to army buildup to research to exploration, etcetcetc.

Worse, it has issues with simple blandness and Not Fun, in the tactical combat, the questing, the monster combat, and perhaps worst of all, in the magic system, something that should be one of the most interesting and enjoyable areas of the game to explore.

As a $50 (preorder!) purchase, it's a bit difficult to swallow (particularly since I'm one of the people inflicted with the awful, awful <10fps bug)

I've beaten on the AI repeatedly on every high difficulty level, even trying to avoid the most egregious of the balance issues in the game right now, but it simply doesn't present a challenge to an experienced thinking player, and in some cases, it won't even present a challenge even if you don't threaten it.

As for GC2/Sins - Sins wasn't their game.

I found GC2 to be extremely lackluster and boring on release, and the first expansion didn't do much for me. The second expansion however, was a major revamp of the game, and while I still find GC2 to be a very flavorless, almost empty experience, mechanically it was quite sound, and the AI was decently challenging (and had pretty cool behaviorlets that made it feel somewhat organic, a high compliment for AI in any game).

So, long story short - I don't see any reason Stardock would drop their support of this game. They have the team, they have the money and the time. The fact that it isn't in great shape now sucks (a lot), but they will likely continue to support it. In six months, patches should have cleaned up all major technical issues, nearly all of the minor bugs, and addressed many of the larger balance issues. Whether or not they will have addressed the simple Fun aspect of the game is a question (and answer) much more open to individual interpretation.

In a year, we'll probably see a good paid expansion pack that will (hopefully) enhance and extend the gameplay in various areas. Assuming the community sticks with the game, that's also around the time we can expect to see some larger mod projects that might be interesting.

I find the current launch situation pretty unpleasant all around. It has definitely damaged my opinion of Stardock as a whole, and while I still have reasonable confidence that they will improve the game, I'm shocked they shipped the game in this condition.

tldr: Yes, they'll improve it in time.

Very well spoken and I agree on all points.  The game for me is neither fun nor challenging.  I've beaten the hardest AI repeatedly and, sometimes, the harder difficulty even gives me an advantage.  I've even house ruled myself to avoid taking advantage of superior strategies and exploits.  The Elemental Team needs to make some fundamental changes.

You forgot the old "pile on as much defence as possible and leave off weapons" trick too, which wasn't fixed until circa Twilight when they stopped with the auto-resolve if both ships are still alive after fifty turns.

 Thing to remember when complaining about balance - it's impossible to properly balance a game until people are playing it. You kinda need to see what players are exploiting before you can fix it.