Forum Overview :: Galactic Civilizations :: Retribution notes (and some Intrigue notes)

[quote name="laudablepuss"]I don't know what to say about the mutations and changes that have happened to this game since 2015, or even since Crusade. It really feels like the devs (Brad) have decided to cripple certain play styles. I dunno. Remember when the way to win was to get a hyperion shrinker and buff the fuck out of that? That was 2016 Gal Civ, chump, get with the times. :( In Intrigue, they introduced the idea of government types and they came with colony cap limitations. Your terrible "colonial" starter governement type could handle up to 4 colonies (bumped to 5 in Retribution). After that you start getting a civ-wide morale penalty. That's okay if you research Supportive Population and another tech whose name I forget that also gives you a civ-wide morale boost, and make and upgrade morale improvements on your planets. I had a government type that had a colony cap of 24, but my actual number was 53. It was difficult but doable. (Note, you're supposed to spin off "Commonwealths" to reduce your planet total. That creates an AI controlled faction with however many planets you give it that is automatically allied with you. This faction then is instantly at war with everyone in the galaxy and surrenders 10 turns later back to you, giving you all their remaining planets.) In Retribution, they got rid of those morale-boosting techs. Instead, you get "Immigrants make us sad" tech which reduces civ morale by 10%. There are THREE of these techs. Want tourism and cultural outreach tech tree stuff? -30% morale. Now I gotta devote more of my citizens to morale duty, which isn't terrible but it's another tradeoff. And if they're doing that, then they aren't doing economy duty . . . I mentioned tourism and economy there which leads to: how do you make money? In Intrigue, tourism was far and away the best way to make money. A port-of-call improvement on several planets and you're off to the races, making hundreds of itchy and scratchy dollars per turn. Retribution makes the port-of-call building ONE PER PLAYER. I end up sending out a ton of Treasure Hunt missions (constructed in shipyards). Oh by the way, some government types can't send those. One of the other methods of making money, wealth improvements, seems pretty pitiful to me. A couple buildings give you a +x number of actual credits -- these are very handy and you want to buff them with adjacency bonuses. But uh, "market centers", the generic (terran) financial improvement, don't give wealth adjacency bonuses anymore. They give approval bonuses. Approval buildings give approval AND wealth adjacency bonuses. Gotta keep them bankers happy! What the hell happened to planet specialization??? The other way to make money is trade routes, so better max those out now. The AI seems to already know this and I got flooded with trade ships (more than before even). More generally, all buildings that give +y%, like factories and market centers and research centers, seem pathetic, although they upgrade over time. You need something that gives you raw + to production. Space Elevators, Space Ports, and one-per-player buildings like Galactic Mainframes and Central Banks are the way to go, it seems. Hypergates, introduced in Retribution, are nothing of the sort. They create "hyper lanes" which means you get a speed boost when your ship travels along it. The gates are not required entrances or exits. And your enemies can use them if they're on. I guess Brad has never seen Cowboy Beebop. Also the gates require administrators (see the Crusade notes about those). Retribution changes the tech tree around in a lot of ways. One interesting result is that carriers are now easy to research before you get medium ships -- before in Intrigue and earlier I typically got them after getting Large ships. So I personally never ever ever made a cargo ship carrier. Now it makes sense to have a few of these low rent carriers flying around in the early game. I guess it's cool, I like my new caveman blimp ships. Pirates don't even seem to be in the game anymore. Whether that's good or bad I don't know, but the AI keeps warning me about these guys that aren't there. Reminds me of Gal Civ 2 when I'd click around and see that an AI faction or other was at war with "The Pirates!" exclamation point included. Yet they were never seen except when a faction kerploded and their fleet went rogue. That's all for now, I'll add more deep thoughts if I have any.[/quote]