I agree 1000%. Something else cool might be if you ever lose control of the Senate, the other party might do something you don't like, like declare war on someone especially if its the War Party. Or block or stop your wars if its the Pacifists. They might even reset your economic priorities and you couldn't do anything about it until you got back in power. Yes, they could really mess up all your plans.

More diplomacy is always welcome. And I would guess that every player understands diplomacy (even if every player doesn't practice it) so increasing diplomatic options doesn't overly complicate an elegantly structured game.

It is true that the Terran elections are a little bit of a waste of time at present. Is there anything that can be done to make them more relevant?

I'm not sure. I tend to feel the same away about elections. Though losing your bonuses is definitely a big bummer.

The results of the election are in, and your party has lost control. Bitter, but resigned to your fate, you step back from power, and watch as a new ruler takes charge of the empire you have built from the ground up. You live out the rest of your days as a political commentator on the Galactic News Network, wishing that you had never switched from an imperial form of government.

GAME OVER: POLITICAL DEFEAT



Is that relevant enough?

If that's too harsh, throw in another moral event to go with it:


A year after losing power, it is clear that that the Terran Alliance is on the decline. Its economy and influence have dropped greatly, and you have noticed many simple mistakes the new emperor is making. What are your intentions?

A) Go help the new emperor. It doesn't matter if he takes all the credit for my changes and gets re-elected, helping him's the right thing to do.

Sit back on the sidelines and laugh. With a performance like that, he's bound to go down in the next election.

C) Revolución o muerte! (Revolution or death!)

Perhaps parties in the senate with large shares (>10%) can make themselves heard every so often. Maybe the occasional pop-up eg.

'the pacificists are very unhappy with your current war. They have staged a strike on planet X.' All military production is suspendend for 2 turns

or

'the war party supporters have managed to aggravate relations with race X. Should this continue war may soon follow' relations -> -20

This sort of approach could make keeping the people at home happier more important and relevant, as oppossed to just worrying when elections occur.

Paul.

~SDC~

I wasn't thinking about any serious suggestions, but now that you mention some...

How about coalitions for government? Nothing you can choose, but each party could decide to support you based on how you fit in with their philosophy. e.g. if you've got 35% of the vote, peace party's got 40% and the war party's got 25%, but the warries are happy with the amount of war you're waging, you get to keep government.

Of course, this could kick you out of government as well. Let's say you get 40, warries get 30, and techies get 30 votes. You've been too peaceful for the warries's tastes, and too low-tech for the techies, so they form a coalition and you lose government.


Something else I thought would be to have the elections represent the mood of the people more strongly. If lots of people are voting for techies, it's a sign to increase research spending. You could even have polls (no change in gov, just informational) every month, but as something you lookup, not a popup window. Kinda like the newspaper in SimCity, asking people what the biggest problems with your current government are.
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How about bribing some parties to join your coallition? Letting certain parties rule certain planetary system could be a plus too.

from frogboy:


cool, thanks. will they mostly be bug fixes? the second expansion sounds like it will grab most of the goodies i had been waiting for.

The 2nd expansion pack ideas look good although the map editor could do interesting things to the metaverse for the unscrupulus. I would certainly wish to buy it and would more strongly consider the direct download method this time. My personal opinion is also to not force a Christmas deadline if some of the options take longer than expected. It is the best time for sales so you might consider a pre-order if things are behind schedule but keep the game quality high instead of releasing something that isn't quite ready.

Yea we're not sure what will happen there.  There's a lot of interesting things happening behind the scenes.

I can say that there won't be a GalCiv II any time soon (i.e. no 2004 anyway) so an expansion pack would be the only way to extend it.  We do plan to do a sequel to Galciv but it'll take a lot of work (3D engine, much stronger game mechanics, more artwork, etc.).

There are loose ends in GalCiv 1 I really want Stardock to take care of though. I think I'm not the only one who feels that starbase proliferation weakens then game mechanics. I would also like to see the AI be more flexible.  In addition, think 2 more civilizations would expand the strategy of the game further.

I would also lik eto see the minor races take on a more active role. Right now they're just food for the other players.

What is $20? If $20 is hurting your pockets I SUGGEST you learn how to balance your budget. Stardock has produced a game that has paid for itself A BILLION time over. I am willing to more then $20 for the expansion.

-Antonio

Brad,
I'm sure I heard you say before that the minor races were suppossed to be cannon fodder for the major races

I definitely agree though, it would be nice to reach end stages of game with a couple of minor races still around. Addition of protection packs, protectorates, satellites states, may help. I would also love some way of determining what race lived on what planet. That should have a huge role in elections, morale, desire for autonomy etc. The higher government options like federation should allow for minor races to join and non human planets to get some autonomy. Perhaps you continue to gain taxes and influence but you loose control of the social queue, or even the military queue?

Paul.

~SDC~

I can see things like:
Diplomatic option: Trade monopoly. Target (minor) race can trade only with you.
Would make it worth keping the minor alive.

Brad,

I hope I can make the chat. Here's a few things I'd like to see:

1) You mention Royalty problems, and that you're currently having them. I'm ignorant about htis and frustrated you guys would be facing them. Exactly what's going on (as much as you can reveal without getting into trouble). Grrrrr... that PISSES me off! You guys DESERVE fair remuneration for the absolutely INCREDIBLE effort you have put forth on this game! BTW: Everytime I go to a game shop, I pull the GC box out of the shelf and flat display it so the vocer is seen and its not filed like all the rest like a book... Talk it up too.

2) YES! The greedy side of me says MORE expansion even at a cost! BUT, the realist and pragmatist in me has this to say: Beware of satiation of your market. You've already gone well past any other gaming company's efforts that I'm aware of for ANY game of this calibre. Don't undercut your own value, IMO. I'd like to see the game polished to a fine lustre by patches and balances and AI at this point which can be done on a level of development that keeps them free and not game breaking or major changes.

I would like to see you focus your creative and expansion urges for a GC3 product off in the foggy distance.

Making the game as complex as it is already is something I love, but more and more ships, and options can muddy the already beautiful focus of this game.

3) If you're going to expand anywhere I'd like to see it in the internal political game of running our own empires- keeping things happy and productive, and the politics of dealing with the other aliens. But already this is a top feature of this game and one that seperated GC from the pack for me.

Anyway- I'm at a frustrating point not wanting to start any new games until GCX comes my way... grr....

THANKS for being so interested in our opinions on YOUR game, and PROPS for having the forsight to stick to your vision over ours when it comes to keeping it together.

Hey, $20 wouldn't hurt me, but the fact is that I purchased a game under the expressed impression that updates, upgrades and patches would be free for one year. Also, based on experience from other software which offers free updates for a specified period, I assumed that this free period would start from my purchase date. I don't care to spend $20, but I won't spend it on a galciv expansion that should be free. I paid $44.95 for the game and that was to include these updates. They may be having problems with royalties, and they may have made promises which they now realize are not financially sound. I'm a software developer, I have made promises several times that ended up reducing my hourly rate from $125/hr. to below $50 or even $25/hr. I don't bitch because I kept my promise, I protected my integrity and I didn't pull a bait and switch.

Later,

Brian

I am definitely in the wrong line of business!

I have a Drengin.net account and would still donate $20.00 to see another X-Pack and I like the ideas that you would have planned.

Also along the lines of longevity will modding be more supported? Right now I use a couple of tech mods from the library here like one to terraform planets. But the tech's don't show up in the tech tree. Would be nice if the game was more Mod friendly.

Brian,

Please share with me what "other" games have provided as much free support as GalCiv. We also only decided to do the free expansion pack AFTER the release as a bonus option. And we are making good on that promise despite the problems in getting royalties from sales at retail from our publisher. 

We never promised nor implied that we would never have a premium expansion pack too later on. If you want free premium updates for a year we have that -- it's called Drengin.net and its existence prior to GalCiv certainly should give the impression that expansion packs after release wouldn't be free to non-Drengin users.

All we said was that would be continue to update the game for nearly a year after release. That is something that we're doing.

We're happy to provide our customers with value beyond what they had anticipated. But it really kind of stinks when people start treating the free expansion pack we're doing as something that's par for the course in the game industry.

Free updates for nearly a year after release != free expansion packs. The typical game gets 1 maybe 2 "patches". The first patch to fix significant bugs, the second to tweak features.

Some perspective...

GalCiv came out with the BonusPak on day 1 that was not bug fixes but new features. The game won numerous editor's choice awards on reviews that were NOT based on that bonus pak so we clearly didn't need to release the bonus pak.

Then we put out several free updates that have added tons of new features as well as fixes to bugs and tweaks based on user feedback.

And now next week we're going to release a free expansion pack for all GalCiv users whether they bought it direct (where we got paid) or from retail where payment has been late and incomplete (not the retailers fault, the problem lies elsewhere but I can't get into it presently).

And then post expansion pack we have a host of free updates already planned as well.

Now, we are currently asking whether people would be interested in seeing a premium expansion pack. For that, we could budget engineering hours to add in time consuming features like an extra race or two, a map editor, etc.

To use your consulting analogy, we are providing the service we had promised to our "customer". Now we are asking that customer if they would like some additional things added that were not in the original spec.

 

 

[Message Edited]

Brian Miller said:


I'd hate to further hijack this thread away from its original purpose, but I do think that this particular part of Brian's argument needs to be addressed a bit further. Clearly he got an impression -- which Brad/Frogboy has now stated was incorrect. I'd hate to see even one person get turned off the game and the company as a result, but I'm wondering whether other folks had the same impression as Brian? And if so, can we try to identify the source of confusion? It would really be a shame to have Stardock's very open and generous policies come around to bite them in the rear because people felt that they had been promised even more.

If I might make a suggestion, it seems that at least a part of the perceptual problem could be avoided by calling and treating the paid "expansion" as something quite different from the free "expansion". Calling them both "expansions" may be fair and logical, but it also immediately sets up the question of why one should be free while the other isn't. (And Stardock might justifiably respond that the one is free because they are going above and beyond their responsibilities....) Continue calling v 1.1 an expansion, since there's so much momentum behind that term already. But Stardock, please consider coming up (soon!)with a very different name/terminology for the paid product and pushing its usage consistently and forcefully.

Certainly I don't think that a simple semantic change would make Brian feel better at this point. But it might help to head off confusion and/or bad feelings in other customers.

i was one of the first to ask about still getting free stuff. i am not sure how to feel, but brad responded and said we're still getting free stuff. i was disappointed that most of the really cool stuff i had been looking forward to is going to be in the second expansion pack. but if we're still getting free stuff then i can't really complain much.

brad said "nearly a year's worth" and "about a year". plus, i don't know if they count the start as the first release date or the second, since i assumed the bonuspack was meant to be part of the year's worth.

for the guy who wanted info on the year of free stuff thing:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=author:bwardell%40getridofthispart.stardock.com+year+free&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=98ycndX278v4DYSjXTWcpQ%40comcast.com&rnum=10
"We also have budgeted about a year of additional development for the game
after release so that we can keep adding new features to the game based on
player feedback -- keep the game fresh and improving."

http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:vDaxXhQlJEsJ:www.galciv.com/docs/qa.html+%22brad+wardell%22+civilizations+updates+year+free&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8
"Q: Stardock has mentioned that the game is going to be developed for an additional year after release. A cynical person might argue that you’re just saying that so that you can release an incomplete game.

A: If GalCiv was our first game, there might be reason to be concerned about that. But going back and looking at reviews of our previous games you find them consistently saying that the games were very solid and feature rich."


edit: amazon dot com link not working. just go to amazon and look up the game and you can find the quote.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000899ZX/qid=1063474128/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-2392381-1470227?v=glance&s=videogames&n=507846
"The game's developer has budgeted an additional year of development time after release to add free new features based on player feedback."

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:EzGFXkIkCtQJ:www.apolyton.net/news/index.php%3FCategory%3DGalCiv%26Offset%3D21+brad+wardell+year+free+significant+apolyton&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8
"...Project Lead Brad "Frogboy" Wardell today relayed via the game`s official website, even then the official timeline of the game`s evolutionary cycle will not end.

[W]e have budgeted nearly a year`s worth of additional free development after release. So not only will you get [GalCiv as it is at the store... you`ll [also] get significant free updates. [..]"

[Message Edited]

Which is, of course, precisely what we've been doing.  We budgeted and have been carrying out a year of significant updates. Compare GalCiv 1.0 to 1.05 even let alone 1.1 coming out next week. And there is more in store.

Moreover, we haven't commited to doing a premium expansion pack. Depends on user feedback. 

You can pretty much figure out what kinds of things would be free: code stuff. And what kinds of things would not be free: art stuff.

Hence, adding way points, improving the AI, a tech navigator, and the kinds of things you saw in the bonus pack were mostly code changes.

By contrast, a map editor, new alien races, and new screens would involve a lot of artwork which gets expensive in a hurry.

2 new races would mean creating the aliens (modeling, texturing, rendering). It also means changing a half dozen screens and adding a lot of code plus two new AI personalities.  Definitely not something we could do for free. That's more of a sequel type feature.

What Russell quotes above is what we meant:

 When you look at the history document, you can really see us executing on that. Map editors and new races aren't features. They are new programs and content (the car manufacturing providing a deal on getting a motorcycle too wouldn't be considered a "Feature" of the car. Air conditioning is a feature. A motorcycle is not.

It would be great if the starbase proliferation fix could be free. I am happy to let those who want new races pay for them.

The problem with starbase limits in terms of having a logistics ability is that a ton of AI work would have to be added plus UI changes would need to be added.

As I've stated before I'd be happy to shell out the $20.00 for a 'add-on module'.
Not sure where or why people keep coming up with 1 year's free stuff from, I've been lurking around these parts for afew months now and the only thing that comes to mind is Drengin.net where 'free things' stuff is mentioned.
Anyhow I would love to see that map editor though I'd like a even bigger galaxy option . I seem to run into races pretty quick even on the gigantic level (I only play this size) and I like the ability to get my feet sorta dug in before running into the AIs, but that's just me.
For the record: I have been far impressed with Brad and company's performance. I wish other company's did the same.
Sincerely
Kelly

To give a fine example of a game with excellent support, updates, etc. Warcraft III - true, the expansion wasn't free, but they never acted like it would be.

To point out where I got the idea of free upgrades, support, etc. The exact statement that I read regarding this I cannot find now - but it was to the effect that the game itself would have continual development, tweaks, addons, patches, etc for a period of one year. I point to old threads such as the following

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=25465

Brad's own comment here backs up my impression that all bonus packs, addons, etc would be free. I read a lot of posts with similar information before I bought the game. In most cases Brad confirmed that updates would be free for a period of at least one year. In other cases no one from stardock denied such conversation. The above post is dated in March, before the official release.

Basically, I still feel that one thing has been said and another is being done. Brad tries to compare an expansion to the game as a motorcycle added to a car. This analogy doesn't fly with me. An expansion to the same game would be and extension of the game, clearly a motorcycle is not an extension to a car. An expansion to the game is like getting a spoiler on the car, or a moonroof. Saying that an expansion, or a map editor, or new races are not features is clearly trying to change a definition to suit the argument.

The point is it has been stated that updates and expansions would be free (see the above mentioned post in which Brad commented). Now, you say that expansions were not explicitly stated to be free.

Also, the description for Dregnin.net is that 1) All stardock games will be made available there 2) Beta games and updates will be avialable there first. Never has it been stated that some updates and/or features of galciv will only be available to dregnin.net subscribers - or at least not in my extensive reading of these forums.

Edit to paragraph 2 - The "free updates" statement was addressed in-depth by russellmz2 the statements he provided were the statements I had read and clearly would lead many to believe the expansion packs would be considered within the free updates.
[Message Edited]