Impressions of my first play-through

I bought the game a few days ago and up until today I was messing around just getting a feel for how production works. Today I actually tried to play a real game. It's a simple setup, a small galaxy with one Beginner opponent. I'm naturally comparing my experience with GalCiv2.

My first impression is that the pace feels much slower. I just hit turn 134, and it took this long to explore and colonize the galaxy. Researching feels extremely slow. The shortest time to research anything is 7 weeks. Manufacturing also seems slow: upgrading production buildings takes a long time on a planet with full population and lots of production bonuses. Despite the slow pace, the pace of individual aspects seems in balance. The Age of Colonization seems only about half-way through, and it is right about time to start researching warfare. I'm okay with the balance of the pacing, but compared to GalCiv2 it feels like a snails pace. With the time commitment I've made so far, a small map in GalCiv2 I'd be researching Planetary Invasion by now. I know they've discussed the pace issue in the dev stream, but I doubt they're going to be able to speed it up significantly, and that is concerning. A small map shouldn't take 6 hours, and that's what it feels like is going to happen.

The Population Pressure and Wealth approval penalties feel severe. In a full-8-pop planet in order to maintain a 50% approval I need to essentially emphasize wealth, add approval buildings, or (I assume this works) add economic buildings (in some cases all 3). That is to say, it seems quite difficult to highly specialize a Research or Production planet, because the approval forces me to de-emphasize those forms of production. I'm afraid to even try farms to increase my production because it seems for every farm I'm going to need an approval building. I can't imagine how this is going to play out once governments are implemented and higher approval must be maintained.

There is another post on these forums regarding the Age gating. I can see the issue. By the time I reach the next age I think I'll have researched most of the techs, which means I'm not specializing.

This is beta and there are lots of bugs and UI issues I can overlook for now. But pace of play and approval issues are decreasing the "fun-ness" of the game already, so I hope for improvement in those areas. I look forward to any feedback or tips regarding the above.

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peregrine23

Join Date 02/2007

+79

Right now there aren't approval penalties for total population, just how close your population is to the cap. Because of this, farms are in no way adverse to your approval, and even help as they lower population pressure. I have found I rarely need more than 2 approval buildings to keep a planet at 100%, so specialization in research and manufacturing is still very viable. You can also build approval modules on starbases and you don't have to use the tiles on your planet.

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eviator

Join Date 08/2014

+62

I started and finished a new play-through making more use of farms. This time through I did make use of at least one approval building on each colony, and approval wasn't much of a problem at that point. Farms in combination with production bonus buildings appears to be the way to go.

How long is it before the end of the Age of Colonization? It seemed about 185 turns. On a small map that is WAY too long. I have a feeling the devs are planning on some scaling that will allow planetary invasion earlier on smaller maps (they mentioned scaling for life support and speed for big maps in the dev streams). In real-time, AoC took about 3 hours. After hitting AoW, I went straight for planetary invasion and the game was over in the next 30 minutes.

The pace of this last game was faster because I was able to produce more, but it still felt like a slow start. I was hitting Turn much more frequently. The downside of this is that micromanagement of my colonies went to the way-side. I've got a LOT of feedback for the devs regarding UI, which I know is a work in progress.

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Quoting eviator,

reply 2

How long is it before the end of the Age of Colonization? It seemed about 185 turns.

One of the XML files shows that Ages are "points"-based:

0000 = Age of Expansion
3000 = Age of War
6000 = Age of Ascension
9000 = Age of Victory (but it still displays the string "Age of Ascension")

Now, these do not seem to be the total rps you've spent. The techs XML file shows that every tech has 2 attributes, ResearchCost and TechPoints. Conjecture:

you pay (ResearchCost + tech creep penalty) rp to research a tech?
and that earns you its TechPoints towards the Age?

Briefly, Age of Expansion lasts (for me, roughly breadth-first) 21-24 tech levels (so each tech is earning ~150 points on average toward the 3000?). With severe (nigh-optimal) micromanaging, that takes me about 80 turns (but I pay about 16 hours for it). Your last tech level will usually straddle the boundary, and take you from a few pixels left of the boundary (in AoE) to a few pixels beyond it (in AoW).

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