Like building stuff in cities, I want the same things built in the same order everytime, but I have to do it over and over, I can’t just copy and paste a list of orders.

Food Buildings->Production Buildings->Culture Buildings->Defenses->Army Buildings->Armies. That’s the entire formula, thats it over and over and over.

But I’m generally of the opinion that sci-fi makes for more interesting stories than most other genres, and agree that you can get more interesting stories out of GalCiv. I absolutely love your old War Diaries, they were a ton of fun to read. The story itself in each was cool, but you add a lot of humor to them too.

Is the previous GalCiv diary (the Spectral Hares?) online somewhere? Much searching hasn’t resulted in finding it.

Second half of Plan B here, linked from here.

As far as Civ V, I think it’s a great game, but it does have its share of annoyances. Like Michael said, it always irritated me that you couldn’t produce buildings and units at the same time. Why are all my soldiers moonlighting as architects and construction workers? Do they share the same space, like when your PE class gets kicked out of the gym to make way for the book fair?

But, my biggest complaint is army management. Individually moving dozens and dozens of units is needlessly time-consuming, especially because they’re constantly stopping. Even if you try to move large numbers of units as a single group, one unit can bring everything to a halt if they run into an obstruction. I’d like to be able to select twelve units, point at a city, and say, “Kill them until they’re all fucking dead. Now don’t bother me until everything is on fire forever.” We have a production queue, why not a military command queue? 1) Pelt the city with cannon fire. 2) Mounted units whittle away at defenders, then disengage when their health drops past half. 3) Send in foot soldiers to seize the city. Repeat this process for five turns. Boom. Leave me the fuck alone.

For those precise reasons, I’ve always liked the early game. When you’re only managing a few cities and units, your decisions seem more important and engaging. Snatching a new resource feels important, customizing your cities’ productions has a direct and meaningful impact on your empire, and terraforming keeps you busy. Once you get to the point where you’re managing thirty cities, however, everything feels like a giant hassle. If I go to war and invade a dozen cities, there’s a dozen more fucking cities I have to dick around with. I have to fix their fucked-up terraforming, fill their production queues, and pay for my own units to garrison them.

At least they got rid of troop transports. There was never a unit that more closely embodied the spirit of pointless busy-work than those mother fucking troop transports.

While I can definitely see the problem with having military and social divided, I wonder if the focus button for the planet didn’t effectively do the same as disabling production entirely. Either way I never found it to be a problem, since it was an optional level of micro management that wasn’t necessary to win games in SP (in the levels of difficulty I tried), but I can definitely see it as a problem for MP or more OCD style of gamers.

Speaking of dividing production you also had sliders in the budget screen, that you could crank, to diminish (or completely eliminate) a certain type of production, and focus entirely on another, which also helped from my experience with the game.

I wasn’t a big fan of GalCiv’s split between military and social production. Splitting your production between a ship and an improvement is counterproductive as these are only useful once they are done. It is better to spend 4 turns making a ship and then 4 turns making a building, compared to spending 8 turns to get them both. Using the first method I get 4 extra turns to do something with my ship.

Using the production queue in Civ5 lets you pause work on an improvement so you can switch over to making a unit. Turn on the queue, add the unit, then use the arrow icons to move it to the top. This isn’t obvious if you haven’t played with the production queue turned on. And perhaps switching production should automatically turn on the queue so the player has to explicitly choose to lose progress on their previous construction.

Sadly this doesn’t help with the whole monument, amphitheater, opera house, museum chain. You can only queue buildings that you have available right now. I don’t know if a tech tree like interface would help there, or making it so that once you queue up the monument the amphitheater would show up on the list so you could queue that up too. Both have UI issues that could be troublesome.

I don’t fully recall how GalCiv handled this. I think each type of improvement had tiers (production had the factory, xeno factory, manufacturing center, industrial sector chain), and you only had the latest one available for construction. So you didn’t have to remember that a factory came before a xeno factory. If you had the xeno factory tech, you just plopped it down. Anyone confirm this?

Also learned: if you’re going for a Culture Victory, you should always play Brazil. They get double tourism and increased great artists/musicians during golden ages, which I tended to be in most of the time. Would have saved me at least 3 hours in that game.

MikeA: Probably the two biggest things are unit movement and building pre-requisites.

In Gal Civ, once I’ve ordered a ship somewhere, that’s usually the only click I’ll have to make to get that done. In Civ 5, it feels like every unit has a new reason for stopping every turn.

And Civ 5 has a long chain of pre-requisites for the good buildings, but as far as I can tell no way to queue production. I wanted all my cities to build either Museums or Archeologists, but 10 or more of them didn’t have the required buildings, and couldn’t build them. I had to look on a wiki to find out that a Museum requires an Opera House, an Opera House requires an Amphitheatre, and an Amphitheatre requires a – Monument, is it? Then I have to manually tell each city in my empire to build the earliest thing in that chain that it doesn’t already have, them babysit all ten of them through that long, decisionless process for the next 20 turns.

It’s been a while since I played GalCiv, but I don’t remember it making me do that.

Have you considered doing one of Crusader Kings 2?

Take building things, in civ 5 if you want to make a building you start making that building, and you can’t do anything else in that city until you finish it, so if you enter a war and need to pump out fighting units, you now either have to cancel the construction of something that was being built for a long time, or you wait for it to finish and then make the units, in galciv this doesn’t happen, making buildings and units are two separate things, what you have in galciv is an option to put “focus” on research, making buildings or on constructing ships, now while this is micro management this is optional micro management, if your empire is small and not very developed, you will want to use the focus, and this is fine you only have a couple of planets anyway, but if your empire is big you can just ignore it, since it taking a few more turns isn’t going to lose you the game (in SP anyway), the units are still coming out, it’s just a little bit slower.
This construction thing obviously extends to the way that you build your planets, you have a certain number of slots, so the choices you make pretty much dictate what that planet will be good at, in civ you end up building anything and everything for minor stat increase, and end up with all cities being the same, some are just quicker at making things.

You also have for example the design decision of one unit per tile, which just simply doesn’t fit the game, first of all the maps are too small, secondly every time a unit gets someone that could possibly block it’s path you need to tell it where to go yet again, and when a unit takes several turns to get somewhere and the map is crowded this tends to happen a lot.

OFC it isn’t just design decisions, you also have straight up better implementation, like the construction in planets automatically putting upgrades on queue. This is before we even touch the ludicrous stuff that civ 5 does that I still have no idea how it passed through user testing, like when another civ bullies a city state under your protection you get a message from that civ apologizing for doing that, and then you can forgive them or get mad at them, but if you want to check what the city state actually is to you, you can’t just go and check it out, you first need to make the decision and only then can you check what city state was bullied, this on a game that randomly picks city states, and randomly generates a map, and randomly puts said city states in said map, is just mind boggling badly implemented.

In the end while galciv 2 is far from perfect, making many of the mistakes other 4x make, is a game that understands how the player wants to play it, and tries to accommodate for that, realizing (for the most part) that repetitive actions aren’t gameplay, they are just useless busy work.

With all that being said, I would advise people to try brave new world if they have an interest in the genre, tom kind of played it wrong, not his fault, the game doesn’t do a great job at explaining itself, and so it ends up needing more than one play through to get what the game has to offer, but the first game is always going to end up with people doing things that kind of make sense, without really knowing the consequences and how it ties in the later stages of the game, or well at least that’s how my first game went, with the difference I got bored and just annihilated everyone.

I’m intrigued as to what it is about GalGiv2 that made it’s large number of micro decisions less distracting. That game has you faffing about with tax rates, ship designs, spending ratios, and fleet compositions. What is just the theme (“I’m going to blow up your sun!” verses “I’m going to play a concert in your wheat field!”) or some other aspect of the design that made these micro-decisions more palatable?

Also you should really try making another game and begin the world congress (you need to meet all civilizations and have researched printing press), it’s IMO the best part of this civ expansion, it’s a lot like galciv 2 council thing, but for the most part it felt to me like the actions had a more significant impact, mostly because it integrates city states into it.

Basically the first civ to form a world council, gets to host said world council, that civ gets extra votes, and each civ gets votes based on their relationship with city states, city states are minor civs that aren’t fighting to win the game (also they only have one city), you can do “quests” for them to improve your status with them (or just straight up bribe them), if you are the civ with the most “friendship points” with a city state you not only get bonus like resources they have, but you can also get stuff like free units (if the city state is militaristic).

Unlike the galciv2 council several resolutions (new game rules) can be passed, so if for example you have 4 votes and the other civs have a total of 8 votes, and there is two resolutions being passed, you might wish to divide your votes, or if one of the resolutions is especially harmful to you, you can decide to put all your votes as no on said resolution, and some of this resolutions can have a significant impact, for example you can declare a world religion, and the civs under such religion get extra votes, or you can for example embargo a certain civ so no trade routes can be established with them. Also unlike galciv council, you can repeal passed resolutions (if your the world congress host I think).

You also have spies which is as exciting as always (which is to say not exciting at all), you can create your religion, which ends up being a lot like the process of creating works of art, and Ideologies which are a little like policy trees, but with a bigger impact.

Obviously this all sounds a lot better than it works in reality, but that’s part of the bloat first design of 4x games.

P.S. If you go and play again, keep your civ small, like most/all 4x (and a lot of wargames) they didn’t really design the game to be able to handle the expansion (it’s not like it’s one of the x’s or anything).