Interstellar Space: Genesis

Started by solops, November 07, 2017, 10:51:41 AM

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MC


solops

#31
MOO3 remake +1.
I still play MOO3 with Bhruic's fixes and mods. It is still one of the top 5 space empire games.
That said, I think ISG did what it set out to do. Now it needs to get better.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

Jarhead0331

Quote from: Emir Agic on September 11, 2019, 08:21:18 AM
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on September 11, 2019, 04:40:29 AM

I would much rather see someone build a game inspired from MOO3, which as I've posted in the past, was, in my opinion, one of the greatest space 4x games ever made, at least in design and concept.


I've noticed you said that earlier and that you play heavily modded MOO3. Judging by reviews from time of release, main problem with MOO3 is added complexity which AI cannot handle appropriately. I would appreciate to hear you opinion about state of AI and if there any essential mod(s) which alleviate that shortcoming. Thanks in advance.

AI can certainly still be weak, particularly in the diplomacy department, which more often than not, seems pretty random and meaningless. There are definitely mods included with the major popular overhauls (vanilla, tropical and strawberry) that adjust and attempt to improve on the AI's behavior, but its unclear to me how successful they are. I haven't played the game unmodded in nearly 15 years.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


W8taminute

I really like this game however I have yet to have the ai initiate war on me.  Has anyone else seen this? 

I hesitate to wage war myself because I'm on such good diplomatic relations with all of my neighbors.  The trade and research benefits I'm getting because of it are too good to throw away because of war. 

This may well be the very first TBS I've played in my whole life where the ai does not declare war on you for no apparent reason.
"You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend."

Romulan Commander to Kirk

solops

Several AIs declared war on me during my initial game on easy. My second game, on normal, has has had several wars but none involving me. I wonder if the AI is too "rational"? It is really too early to tell.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

solops

"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

Martok

Quote from: solops on December 21, 2019, 12:25:35 AM
The 1.07 patch is out.
I saw that.  Can't wait to try out the new automation options, and see the AI improvements.  O0 


The game is currently on sale as well, 34% off ($19.79 US).  Definitely worth getting if you haven't already! 

"Like we need an excuse to drink to anything..." - Banzai_Cat
"I like to think of it not as an excuse but more like Pavlovian Response." - Sir Slash

"At our ages, they all look like jailbait." - mirth

"If we had lines here that would have crossed all of them. For the 1,077,986th time." - Gusington

"Government is so expensive that it should at least be entertaining." - airboy

"As long as there's bacon, everything will be all right." - Toonces

Tanaka

Quote from: Martok on December 21, 2019, 03:13:45 AM
Quote from: solops on December 21, 2019, 12:25:35 AM
The 1.07 patch is out.
I saw that.  Can't wait to try out the new automation options, and see the AI improvements.  O0 


The game is currently on sale as well, 34% off ($19.79 US).  Definitely worth getting if you haven't already!

Yeah I finally picked this one up with the sale and am really enjoying it. Lots of nice improvements with the new patch and a free graphics overhaul is in the works. I really like a lot of the ideas here. Love the hero system. Very fun game only getting better. I highly recommend.

Martok

Yeah, Interstellar Space: Genesisis is old-school 4x done right.  Many games in recent years have tried to recapture the original magic, but with either mixed results, or failed completely; ISG actually pulls it off for the most part. 


My only two real critiques at this point are: 

1.)  The visuals (and we already know the devs are working on a major update to that, although I'm trying to keep my expectations realistic)
2.)  The small map sizes.  (I know that's simply a difference in philosophy regarding the developers vs. myself.  I completely understand & respect why they didn't want to have larger maps, but I still yearn for them anyway. :P ) 


Otherwise, the game truly is excellent.  The devs definitely put a lot of thought & effort into the design of ISG, and I'm glad to see their hard work seems to have paid off.  :) 
"Like we need an excuse to drink to anything..." - Banzai_Cat
"I like to think of it not as an excuse but more like Pavlovian Response." - Sir Slash

"At our ages, they all look like jailbait." - mirth

"If we had lines here that would have crossed all of them. For the 1,077,986th time." - Gusington

"Government is so expensive that it should at least be entertaining." - airboy

"As long as there's bacon, everything will be all right." - Toonces

Tanaka

Quote from: Martok on December 24, 2019, 02:25:01 AM
Yeah, Interstellar Space: Genesisis is old-school 4x done right.  Many games in recent years have tried to recapture the original magic, but with either mixed results, or failed completely; ISG actually pulls it off for the most part. 


My only two real critiques at this point are: 

1.)  The visuals (and we already know the devs are working on a major update to that, although I'm trying to keep my expectations realistic)
2.)  The small map sizes.  (I know that's simply a difference in philosophy regarding the developers vs. myself.  I completely understand & respect why they didn't want to have larger maps, but I still yearn for them anyway. :P ) 


Otherwise, the game truly is excellent.  The devs definitely put a lot of thought & effort into the design of ISG, and I'm glad to see their hard work seems to have paid off.  :)

Agreed many feel the same way including myself. Better graphics are coming but as for bigger map sizes we can only hope. I also would like bigger options. Here is hoping!

Adam Solo  [developer] Dec 21 @ 7:17am     
I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the game!

The number of systems include systems which are visible from the start, typically the main sequence stars (red to blue color) and systems which need to be revealed through remote exploration: black holes, neutron stars, boson stars, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs and rogue planets.

So, yes, the option is working correctly. However, it could use some explanation that not all systems are visible at the start.

As for bigger maps, that's a possibility for the future, especially now that we have colony automation in the game. We'll see.
Last edited by Adam Solo; Dec 21 @ 9:49

Tanaka

#40


New patch 1.5 is out and 20% discount on the new Evolving Empires DLC and 50% off base game and Natural Law DLC. I have to say this game has gotten really good and is my current favorite Space X game. Now that you can play on huge maps I love it. I think better than MOO2 now. I highly recommend. These Devs deserve support for a great product!

https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/984680/

ABOUT THIS CONTENT
The galaxy's patience wears thin. Time is running short and it can no longer abide the childish games of its inhabitants. Although its races may still be young, their time for play is over, and their time for work has begun. While its throne can not lie empty, it is no place for a child. Ready or not, it is time for its favored children to take the reins of their existence. While many will falter, at least one must rise and evolve their race to meet its full potential. For the fate of the galaxy, and the many scattered civilizations which call it home, may soon depend on it.
Expansion Overview
This expansion brings two major new features into the game, Evolutions and Minor Civilizations. While these features provides tons of new content on their own, this expansion also includes 7 new leaders and 2 new music tracks!
Evolutions (New Gameplay Feature)
Explore new playstyles and evolve your strategies through the introduction of highly asymmetric space culture trees.

Evolutions provide unique, thematic, and highly asymmetric space culture trees custom tailored to fit every race in the game. With many game altering multipart perks to unlock, divergent paths to take, and randomization possibilities to explore, there's no shortage of exciting new strategies to experience. As new doors open, others may close, as taking the reins of your empire will have you facing tough strategic decisions as you determine how best to evolve it.

Each evolution tree is usable by its own race as well as all custom races assigned to use its affinity. And yes when we say all races, we really do mean all races, as any expansion race you own will also receive their own unique evolution tree!
Minor Civilizations (New Gameplay Feature)
Discover, survey, and establish relationships with a wide variety of unique minor civilizations and reap their benefits... or destroy them and deny their benefits to others. The choice is up to you.

Minor Civilizations introduce a wide variety of pre-warp civilizations which are randomly spread throughout the galaxy waiting to be discovered. While finding them is hard, earning their trust is even harder, and those who wish to reap the benefits of a deeper relationship with them will need to spend time understanding who they truly are. You'll need to be quick though, such powerful bonuses are certain to attract attention, and you wouldn't want such power falling into the wrong hands.

With 7 different categories of minor civilizations, and three minor civilizations within each category, there's always mysteries to uncover as you'll never know for sure which civilizations exist in your galaxy!
New Leaders
One representative from each minor civilization category, 7 new leaders in all, await the opportunity to put their skills to work for a mighty empire like your own. That is, of course, if you prove yourself worthy of their trust first.
New Music
2 Additional Starmap Tracks inspired by the Evolutions and Minor Civilizations.


Version 1.5 - Full Release Note
NEW
New Galaxy Shapes to be configured at game start: Elliptical, Ring and Spiral-shaped galaxies!
Steam Cloud Saves: Save your game on one PC and continue on a different one later.
Automated Infrastructure: Auto-assign infrastructure specializations for your colonies in one go and forget about it. Particularly useful with micromanagement in late-game for very big maps.
New ship idle alerts: A new "ship idle" notification will be presented every time a civilian ship arrives at a system, and there's no obvious action set for it yet; the ship is "idle" (e.g. a survey ship arrived on a system and awaits new orders, or a colony ship arrived, a colony can't be built and the ship is now idle. The same ideia for the other civilian ships).

AI IMPROVEMENTS
The AI now designs their ships with three distinct roles in mind: close-range attacker, long-range attacker, and a general defender or multi-purpose warship, all of which will behave differently in combat. Each role will tend to equip different and specialized equipment, from weapons, weapon modifications, hull reinforcement, maneuverability and special systems which will lead to new tactics.
The AI will also make smarter choices with respect to improved maneuverability opportunities, and will be more sensible regarding the miniaturization level of the weapons it equips (e.g. A state-of-the-art weapon may not be the best choice).
The AI does a better job at handling their leaders now. It will bring them more for key battles (especially invasions in the higher difficulties), while trying to improve their survival rate.

BALANCE
The accuracy "to-hit" formula for ships was revised to set a limit of 5% to hit minimum, irrespective of the range and the accuracy and evasion values. This was done to avoid having 0% or very low chance hit shots.
Free espionage level ups for leaders are now assigned more sensibly, to avoid wasting skill slots with spy skills on leaders who would probably not be a good candidate to be a spy in the first place. Colony leaders may see their existing spy skills improve but do not usually gain new ones on these free level-ups. There's also a bias to favor adding spy skills to ship leaders, but it will depend on what skills leaders already possess.
Credits obtained from scrapping a ship have changed from a factor of 8 production cost to a return of 1 BC to 12 production cost to 1 BC. Scrapping was too good, and on par with Trade Goods. Now, it should be more balanced.
Battle odds of 0% chance of winning are not presented now. It is rounded to a minimum of 1%. Battle odds are presented when the player has the Ultrawave Scanner.
The initial frigate and destroyer ship designs were unoptimized at game start. The frigate design now has two lasers instead of one and more maneuverability; the initial destroyer design now starts with maneuverability level 1. It had no maneuverability before. This also affects the 2 initial frigates that are available at game start.

UI / GRAPHICS
Holding the 'CTRL' key while left-clicking with the mouse on most notifications will center the map on the object in question (e.g. ship, system). The manual will be updated accordingly with this new hotkey in the official version of the update.
The AI will now build ships with alternative designs. Before, they always built their ships with the default model for a given ship class type.
The game now shows at a glance where a leader's ship is stationed, if it is travelling, or under refit, in the leaders' management panel, and also when levelling up leaders for better grasping of where leaders are currently stationed.
The background starfield (the small "dot" stars in the background) are now slightly colored.
The missile number icon in the ship design screen now has better contrast. It was a bit hard to grasp the ammo number before.
The Wormhole tooltip now clarifies that both ends of a wormhole are considered inside supply range, so long one of them is. When this is the case, a fleet can travel to any end of the wormhole.
The warning message that you're about to declare war on an empire is now displayed in yellow, for more impact and alertness on this important action.
When a tech is researched, or obtained through other means, the 'Research' screen now displays the research field as "...in the field of Propulsion", for example, and not "in the Propulsion field!".
The 'Direct Hit' achievement description was revised to clarify that a one-shot kill is not a requirement for unlocking the achievement, and that you need to get through shields, armor, or both.
The ship construction notification now displays a small icon representing the type of ship that has been constructed. This makes it easier to grasp what type of ships have been built on a given turn, especially when there's a lot of ships built.
The population assimilation ratios per turn are now displayed in the POP tooltip in the colony view (when inspecting the little POPs) when POPs are yet to be assimilated (either 'Pacified' or 'Revolting'). Also, a note was added to that tooltip to describe what actions may be necessary when the POPs are revolting.
Added social links to the main menu: official website icon links to the game's official website; the newsletter icon allows you to register the game's newsletter; and a survey icon allows you to answer the survey 'Interstellar Space: Genesis - What's Next'.
The supply range borders now expand immediately after a 'Logistics' technology is obtained from a tech exchange deal.


SOUND & MUSIC
The opponent's neutral/affinity diplomacy tunes are now played right after a peace treaty is established. Before, the 'angry' tunes could keep playing if the opponent was very upset. This was done to reflect this important change in the diplomatic state.


BUG FIXES
Base-Game
Fixed a bug when an ongoing sector remote exploration got revealed by ruins search, the current remote exploration would get corrupted in that sector. This is now fixed.
Fixed a rare bug where the UI would bring up the player's own ships and buildings for sabotage, and not the AI's. You don't want to sabotage your own ships and buildings! :) This occurred when both the AI and the player had colonies in the same system and the AI had a saboteur assigned to the player's colony in that same system. The player's saboteur would then pick up the wrong colony to sabotage.
Fixed a bug that could cause the 'Galaxy Map' screen (the one showing the map upon a battle encounter) to malfunction and not allow that screen to be closed if the player clicked on a fleet by accident while that window was open. This is now resolved.
Fixed a bug in space combat when fighting against large numbers of AI ships (more than 50), could cause some enemy ships to not be targetable and lead to further glitches where sometimes shots could be seen originating from enemy ships not participating in the combat. This is now fixed.
Fixed a bug that would cause the "You've won" message to be displayed over and over every turn after the player achieved a Conquest Victory and decided to hit "Just one more turn..." and continue playing.
Fixed a rare bug that could lead to less building slots to be available than should be allowed by the colony's infrastructure. This happened when an AI had a finished building or ship just before it was invaded. This is now resolved.
Fixed a rounding glitch in the empire early-breakthrough value on the Empire Overview screen. It could show a negative 0.00001 when it should just list 0%.
Fixed a glitch that would cause the Wormhole tooltip to not work / be presented on systems with Basic scan level.
Fixed a bug that could award the 'Direct Hit' achievement when a player's own ship or battle station would blow up from critical hit while it had full shields or armor.
Fixed a glitch in the exhausts of all but the two largest engines on the alternate Nova cruiser, which were detached from the engines and offset to one side.
Fixed a rare bug where a saboteur could be wrongly recalled from a sabotage job at a colony before it had a chance to complete the sabotage assignment.
Fixed a glitch that could sometimes allow a ship to keep rotating freely in combat after the rotation command had been given using the 'arrow icons' on the 'rotate' button, which could be confusing for the player. Now, the rotation operation should be much clearer and easier to use.
Fixed a glitch in the 'Legion of Shadows' event which could cause the last line of text to be cut off, and you couldn't scroll down far enough to read it.
Fixed a glitch that allowed the supply range borders from the previous logistics' tech to remain visible after researching Expert Logistics, which allows for unlimited supply range. No supply range borders should be visible at that point.
Fixed a glitch that would cause not all ships to be displayed in the fleet panel when very large numbers of ships were involved (>100).
Fixed a sound glitch that could produce two sound clicks in rapid succession when clicking on a system object for planetary assault (either colonies or outposts invasion).
Fixed an issue that would cause the production numbers in the colony overview panel to not update immediately when strategic resources were obtained from diplomatic trade deals.
Evolving Empires
Fixed a bug that was allowing Android Leaders to be bribed/stolen when androids are not supposed to be influenceable by Psy-Ops missions.
Fixed a bug in the 'Capital Defense Force' (CDF) of the Kaek evolution affinity Hub and Spoke, which could cause strange behavior when one of the CDF ships was captured, which would cause other ships of the same ship class type to become untargetable when captured or simply vanish after the battle.

FarAway Sooner

I've been wondering about this one for a long time.  Is there anything different than MoO2?  Are there at least some clear-cut bad guys out there somewhere?  I don't need details, just tire of Space 4x games without some bad guys in the universe...

Sparhawk

Quote from: FarAway Sooner on November 22, 2022, 08:10:51 PM
I've been wondering about this one for a long time.  Is there anything different than MoO2?  Are there at least some clear-cut bad guys out there somewhere?  I don't need details, just tire of Space 4x games without some bad guys in the universe...

I've always felt that the Drengins in Gal Civ games are over the top bad guys.

solops

"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

FarAway Sooner

5 hours in and I'm impressed.  I'm still trying to figure out how nuanced each planet is--my sense is that it still kinda falls into the Civ I trap that "every city should have the same starting building path", but the ability to pick infrastructure upgrades for your planets as they grow offers a nice balancing act between that and the "specialization from Day 1" path that's emerged in some other 4x games.

In my first game where I understood game mechanics, I've tried to turtle up early and get 4 or 5 different planets colonized and growing heavily.  3 of them are Terran-class worlds; the other 2 are "discovered" huge planets that have some Heavy Grav penalties but also have some sick production bonuses (Rich and Ultra Rich Minerals; one of them also has a Medium-sized asteroid belt I can draw upon) and are big enough to hold zillions of people.  If it's possible for people to still procreate and give birth in such heavy gravity...