STUPID DOUBLE POSTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And by the way.......

CONGRATULATIONS ON REACHING 700 REPLIES!!!!!

I still stand my promise to give everyone +1 Karma when this post dies!!!

Hope some of it comes back my way.....

Huh? Forcing players to have an equal attack and defense on cusom ships seems rather... draconian, and I don't see how it would change any of the game's problem areas. Also, there is no way to justify it in a sci-fi setting, and no devs would ever think about including it, for fear of angry space-combat junkies storming the building with pitchforks & torches. If memory serves, Alf, Sole, and GD had resolved this particular issue several pages back.

This is the kind of translation I could've used, although that's not how I read it.  EF's posts remind me of Zyx's sometimes.

I dislike the idea of a hard cap on weapons or defenses, though.  At that point you may as well just define per-ship values as in Sins and remove customization entirely, which is a Bad Idea from my perspective, as that's one thing that makes GC(2) what it is.

Really?  What was our solution?  Crap...

*wanders off to get lost in the rest of the thread*

I assume you resolved it. You stopped "yell"ing about it, anyway...

Because it doesn't fit. This goes back to the question of why you're adding a mechanic.

Most RTS games have unit caps to discourage certain kinds of behavior. For example, some units are so powerful in mass quantities that the game has to provide a mechanic to keep massing such things from being too easy.

Also, RTS games not only have a unit cap, they also have a quantity of units that the player is allowed to have currently, based on the number of some building or unit. Overlords, Supply Depots, and Pylons serve this purpose in StarCraft. This is an integral part of the advancement mechanic in this game.

TBS games don't have any of these features. The only thing a unit cap would do in a TBS is force turtling; you can't afford to attack anyone, because someone else will take the opportunity to attack you. Or you get double/triple teaming.

Oh, I'm not; I'm letting the fact that it is overall a poorly conceived idea do that.

If you're having to put arbitrary caps on the ship construction mechanic, then you should just change it. It seems like what you're wanting is something more rigid than the GC2 ship construction scheme, like a slot-based model. One where you have chassis that have slots, but what can go in each slot is fixed. So an early-game ship might have one attack slot and one defense slot. A mid-game ship might have those plus a utility slot for powers. End-game ships might have 2 attack slots and/or 2 defense slots. Some might have "generic" slots that can hold any kind of module. And so on.

Hey, that's a really clever idea! Would help with a lot of the ship imbalances that have found their way into the game, but the players would not find it overly restrictive, and it requires a minimum of coding. ! 

Alright, and now for a bit of spoofy magic...

Triangular tiles on a true Geodesic sphere -- how's that for 3D immersion?

Sim Earth(s) modernized and while it spins (we can move the left-side top corner boxed planet surfaces, even zoom in already, don't we?!) the clouds project some shadows on your incoming Capital Icon right there clockwising its way above the equatorial Horizon.

But, watch it... soon after a Korx invasion transport is slowly approaching and - in fact - from the Sunrise glow you couldn't really detect that it was within a Fleet.

Bye, bye Flat World and welcome to the era of realtime 128b graphics produced by hyper cards!

Oh man, what are YOU talking about when you're writing...

15-- Cities in Civ#x = Planets in GC2, no matter how much you spin it away from facts or interpretations.

19-- "i described", i must have skipped it somehow.

20-- What Trade idea, exactly? Tech trading in CivIV and GC2 work exactly the same. Techs, almost. But i'm going after Trade * (of everything, resources by Camels/Civ VS. nothing of that sort in GC2) *and* Diplomacy as a whole when i observe both games.

22-- GC3 needs tactical combat features to evolve beyond Civ4&5&6. Fine, YOU don't want it. We know. Life goes on. Sometimes, innovation hurts & changes are scary.

26-- Yep, but WHAT do you describe?

27-- No it hasn't & by far.

So yes, your comment is entirely nonsense.

Oh man, stop insulting me or i'll ignore you. (Edit:Done!)

But weirdly, you're trying to shove it all down our throats.

Retaliatory comment #1 -- that makes sense.

I don't want tactical combat, either.

Zyx, edit that last part of your post.  There's no need for that.

And who would they continue playing against, please tell me? Oh, okay - i'd be watching a simulation of AIs gameplay, right?

Are you really taking me for a fool and absurd silly human player here or not?

GC2 is a single *Human* player game that opponents driven by algorithms TRY to prevent me from reaching any Victory conditions. I'd prefer skipping the busy work involved when it's demonstrably obvious that i am too near from these for any code to catch up -- in such a way, that the context itself (including the opponents still weak, poor, stuck on two planets enough to have the toggle condition of admitting it *you lost* on by design and triggered by calculated undeniable superiority FACTS.) can also understand.

Silly rules are compiled, not defined via theories & MY suggestions.

Retaliatory comment #2 ; that makes sense.

I'll stop, don't worry. He deserved it.

Doesn't matter.  This is the Internet.

I was specifically speaking of the bottom part of your post in reply #709, which comes very close to a personal attack.

-

If I'm reading this correctly, you seem to have confused the idea of an auto-win condition with the idea of playing after winning.

The argument about a generic auto-win condition (GC2's diplomatic, influence, tech conditions aside, as they're not necessarily good ways to do it but hardly bad ways to do it) intends to soften it by allowing the game to continue if the auto-win threshold hasn't been reached.  The specific portion you quoted from Alfonse is where he's talking about what the AI must do to justify that you don't have the means to always defeat it at that point in time, which I, as someone who codes as a hobby, don't believe we have power to do that yet.

There is a settings option that does that exactly called *Allows Surrender* that we check mark or not... and to illuminate everyone on my suggestion about this specific issue (as i guess, nobody can make that deduction yet) -- i just want the same decisive power DURING gameplay under certains conditions.

Clear? Scoutdog?

Furthermore, IF i had checked mark the option of *Allows Surrender*, i would also need another popup given to me when one AI is on the verge of surrendering to the second best AI (my worst enemy maybe!) in order to deny or approve that *simulated* hypocrisy trick stabbed in my back sort_of emotional reaction. Yet again, during gameplay. Heck, this principle could even be dropped into a Diplomatic or UP type of function.

Even clearer, everyone?

So am i, but there's a reason; if there's one area complex enough to give at least a fair chance to AIs against human intelligence this is the ONE.

Lemme try being clear and be patient, it may take awhile;

Beam*Shield + Missile*Point + Driver*Armor is a three layer process that enforces matchup leveling between the nature & capacity of weaponry to obtain results.

By attrition, ships come & go. Combat experience puts an edge overthere, values and quantity of components_modules puts some more overthere. Fleeting, logistics, puts advantages overthere too.

If you were to evaluate combat odds on Attack/Defense *caps*, the variety loss wouldn't compensate for a lack of supplemental assets on any given ships for a simple reason; hull sizes would stop meaning anything.

Forget engines, sensors and supports *ALSO* for (yep, again) the same simple reason; quality (or effectiveness by design rather than amounts) stops being relevant.

It's a guessing game of hit the right spot with the right stuff. Defensively, you escape destruction. Offensively, you wreck havoc.

You mean this...?

VERY appealing principle indeed. Turning harpoints into a slot might be a little tougher for AIs to determine WHAT to insert exactly on their hulls, but i like this idea (underdevelopped, incomplete -- but still vaguely familiar; Stars! anyone?) or "mechanical device" by Alfonse. Besides, everyone knows a single Colony module has a fixed size of 20, but you all have yet to put a XW_LandTank on you ships along side the "Dimensional Jump" engine!

What I was talking about is NOT a system where the AI plays on after you loose. I am taking about a system in which after you win you can opt to continue the game afterword, as in: if you have won a culture victory you can move on to flip those last planets or reserch up the tech tree a bit more. In some situations (Conquest Victory springs to mind) this would be mind-numbingly boring, which is why it would be an OPTIONAL feature. It would have a small value to the player, but it would require minmal coding to do, so I think it's worth it.

Also, although I am not against tactical combat in general, I DO NOT want to see it in a TBS game. There are some things that just do not go well together, and this is one of them.

If you put it that way, i also figure it's worth it. But let me add something important; there are exploits in the current "rules" that allow me to indirectly continue playing in some situations such as declaring war to turn off the definitive Influence win trigger after x number of turns for example -- and many other tricky steps to take while we keep everything on hold.

I want this whole "thing" expressed ON the UI by some fine-tuning & deterministic popups (designed within the code to be as less intrusive as possible and yet helpful IF i want minimal control over some of the decisions) that, in fact, allows me to identify causes & effects as it pertains to any of the AIs reasoning.

Maybe my idea wasn't too well thought out after all.

So what. For some it works, for others it don't.

I'm not too interested in doing nerd-like game mechanics research in order to formulate a better one. I don't have the time or the patience.

Maybe if they Stardock was somehow able to shorten the micro-managing, the game could be played through the internet. That way people would acctually be presented with a challenge.

Maybe they could implement voice control the way that Tom Clancy did in End War. That is a cool feature.

It might eliminate many more cases of premature arthritis in avid gamers.

And btw.....

Thanks for the Karma Zyx

Hey Zyx, I see what you mean by making hundreds of triangular tiles.

Funny thing is that I googled Zyxpsilon for no reason, and then found this picture of yours.

Now that I know what your idea looks like, I can clearly see that it is a fucking awsome idea!!!!!

The other guys on this forum are just conservative Douche Bags (no offense, I'm a Douche Bag myself).

But all in all, if this was incorporated into GalCiv3, I think it would work very well.

If you didn't already post a link, I'll post it here anyways.

LINKAGE

I'm neither conservative nor a douchebag.

Let me rephrase that.....

MOST people in the world are Douche Bags.

If you're one of them, good for you.

If not, even better for you.