GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

Published on Monday, May 1, 2023 By Frogboy In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

So how many turns should it take to get a thing? Turn based games live and die on pacing balance. We don’t have a speed button to zip over bad pacing choices. So we have to be very, very careful on the number of turns something takes to get.

Take research for example. How many turns? 1 turn seems too generous. 8 turns is pretty long. But do you make the tech cost more or find ways to reduce the amount of research or whatever you’re getting in.

Let’s take a look at this example and work our way through it. So Armed Shuttles shows up at taking 1 turn. That’s too fast I think. On the other hand, it has a 50% discount which means it would have taken 2 turns. That still seems pretty quick though.

So is the tech too cheap OR is the amount of research we’re starting out with too high?

Let’s look at how much research we’re getting:

First off, why do we get 2 free research? That seems overly generous. Let’s get rid of that. So I got into the globaldefs.xml file and find that and get rid of it.

Now we’re here:

Ok. But still, start of game, that’s a pretty big number too.

Holding down the SHIFT key lets me do tooltips within tooltips.

The technology input seems like a lot for this early.

More tooltips within tooltips:

Wow, Rebe is giving me a lot of tech. That’s one of my colonies.

So it starts with 4 and 3.27 is getting to me. That’s pretty generous.

Let’s go back to the globaldefs.xml

I increase the rate to 2% per tile away. This changes the number to:

Now with this changed, let’s go back to the research center:

Armed shuttles are now at 2 (they would normally take 4 turns). Now the question is, is the 50% reduction to research cost too generous? I feel like if we changed that it wouldn’t be tempting enough to pick one.

And so the iteration goes.

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals