Been a few months: revisiting SiS

[wminsing]

With Civ VI out SiS slipped off my radar a bit, but I caught the latest set of updates it was time to give things a whirl again. The game is progressing nicely. A couple of highlights and issues I encountered:

First, Galactic Council victory, very cool! Except... I won the vote as the Ashdar and the game didn't end. Is the victory condition actually implemented? If the other players rejected the vote I didn't see any message indicating such. My initial gut check is that the victory type might be a little too easy on this pass as well. I was only about half-way into to the tech tree, but between myself and my trusty Yoral allies we had the 2/3rds of the vote all sewn up pretty easily I think the 'who votes for who' logic probably needs to look at the relative strength of the two allies. But on the other hand the Yoral and I were the two strongest powers, and had been solid allies for most of the game. So that seemed fair.

Second, for big fleet actions some sort of fleet layout planner would be very useful. The default 'crescent' formation isn't bad, but it still exposes the ships on the end of the line to being overwhelmed; I'd like to be able to place bigger/tougher ships in those positions as an option. Hand-placing every ship before combat seems like it would be too tedious, so maybe have 4-5 pre-canned formations?

I know a weapons balancing pass is probably still to come, which is good; the Heavy Railgun rules everything and missiles/torpedoes/fighters are still underwhelming,

The 'harpy' encounter could stand to be beefed up, right now the poor critters are pretty easy to thrash. The power levels on the Marauders and Pirates feels better though. The Marauders in particular are still tough but no longer build giant armadas. I have noticed they don't seem to raid as much though?

That's all for now, but I can say the game is shaping up REALLY well, and delivering on its early promise. It's already a good game, and I think it's going to be an amazing game.

-Will

[Arioch]

Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback.

We certainly have more to do with the AI; right now, if you can accumulate enough Influence it's a little bit too easy to make them do whatever you want. But at least it's a step up from having to kill everyone.

I'm curious to know what you thought of Civilization VI.

[wminsing]

Sorry it's not more detailed, I'll try to provide something more concrete after a couple more play-throughs.

I actually don't mind that your allies will vote for you if you are the stronger; that's actually fairly refreshing over the 'every man for himself' that I usually see happen in diplomatic victories. The only things that struck me as slightly odd as 1) it happened so soon in the game and 2) the Yoral were nearly as strong as me (I think one vote separated us). But overall I think the system makes sense.

I could write paragraphs on Civ VI, but my super-short review is that it could potentially be the best Civ game yet, but it is currently hampered by a lackluster AI, a couple of boring victory conditions, and several subystems that could work better.

-Will

[wminsing]

Ok, I did run in to what might be an issue, or at least at least behavior I didn't understand. I had conquered the Teros Ashdar, and after being part of my empire peacefully for several dozen turns a bunch of colonies suddenly experienced new waves of unrest. When I checked those colonies the angry colonists reported that they were angry that I had bombed Teros Prime and killed a lot of them. But.... that was many turns ago, and all of the colonies had zero unrest of quite some time. Happened three turns in a row (different colonies each time) and then it stopped. I uploaded this saved game if this sounds like a bug.

-Will

[sven]

Ok, I did run in to what might be an issue, or at least at least behavior I didn't understand. I had conquered the Teros Ashdar, and after being part of my empire peacefully for several dozen turns a bunch of colonies suddenly experienced new waves of unrest. When I checked those colonies the angry colonists reported that they were angry that I had bombed Teros Prime and killed a lot of them. But.... that was many turns ago, and all of the colonies had zero unrest of quite some time. Happened three turns in a row (different colonies each time) and then it stopped. I uploaded this saved game if this sounds like a bug.

Thanks for the upload. What's happened here is that you first freed some Teros slaves, which made the Teros happy with you. A few turns later, you bombed Ashdar Prime, which made them unhappy with you. However, the two morale mods perfectly canceled each other out while they were both active. Both expired after 15 turns; but the positive perk did so a turn or two before the negative one. Thus, this strange 'delayed reaction' behavior. I admit it's odd, but it's not exactly a 'bug' per se -- more an unintended side-effect of the rules I wrote up.

[wminsing]

Ah, that DOES make sense. I agree not a bug in this case, just need to pay more attention to morale mods!

-Will