Designing your own opponents

[Draginol]

Lockdown from CivFanatics was the one who presented one of the key new features in the expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations II -- design your own opponents.

In GalCiv II, you can design YOUR civilization but when it's time to pick opponents, you've got the base 10 civs to choose from to play against.

In Dark Avatar (the expansion pack) you'll be able to create an opponent and it'll be saved so that eventually all your opponents could be ones of your own design.

The question is, what would you guys like to see when designing your opponents? What things would you like to choose to have be in an opponent (i.e. their ship styles, what they look like, their portraits, their dialog, etc.).

 

[Global Nexus]

Ah, ship styles, appearance, logo, dialog, etc. are all "obvious must-haves" when designing one's own opponents. Along with behavior -- choose your opponents' various levels of aggression, expansion, and other such thing. I, personally, would enjoy being able to decide opponents' levels of aggession, expansionism, military focus, diplomatic focus...stuff like that. Though, that's pretty much on the plate already, isn't it?

I'd love to be able to make two opponents play distinctly differently from each other, above all else. One opponent could be a peacable, diplomatic, alliance-building United Federation of Planets, the other could be an aggressive, conquestial, militaristic Goa'uld Empire, whilst the third could be a sneaky, behind-the-scenes string-puller akin to the Drath. Something like that, anyway. Including these various things would be great, of course. It would make playing in my own pet scifi universe a lot easier, anyway. <3

 

[Sahkuhnder]

Customization is a key to a game with a long lifespan. The more room to customize the aliens the better as it will ensure each new game is different from any game you may have already played in the past.

I don't really have any specific suggestions, but just want to voice my support for having as many variables as possible as I really like to try different approaches and compare the results against different types of opponents, including playing against opponents just like me to see how I do against an AI with the same custom stats as I have.

To me variables controlling how the aliens act would be more important than how the aliens look.

I think being able to make 'famous' races from movies and books would also be fun. To be able to endow them with their specific traits and then see how they play would be an interesting twist.

Anyway, great idea!

 

[W.i.n.t.e.r]

I think apart from the obvious techs and abilities, avatar and logo then follows ship design (i.e. that one could assign custom looking craft to them via the starting UI). Perhaps some sort of strategic behaviour slider would be interesting.

What I think should be added for these and as well for the player him-/herself is to be able to design one's home system in more depth- allow a certain ammount of points per civ to be allocated - i.e. thus setting size, habitability, bonus tiles, etc...

Customizing dialog would be nice yet I am not sure if that wouldn't be overkill in UI terms... just my 2c

 

[Comraddict]

metaverse integration? so the designs from other players can be easily incorporated (if that is not already planned) in my game.

 

[W.i.n.t.e.r]

metaverse integration? so the designs from other players can be easily incorporated (if that is not already planned) in my game.

... given the possibility of creating potential super-civs? Alas one could really base maximum stats on some sort of point system...

 

[Newbunkle]

It would be cool to design the way your opponents look, in a similar way to designing ships. i.e. pick from a number of heads, arms, tails, claws, etc. pick the skin colour, pick a few accessories like clothes, jewellery, weapons, and save it. It doesn't matter if they don't look as good as a pre-rendered race pic. It would just be fun to do it though.

 

[Draginol]

Right now what we have in there includes:

1) Decide what they look like - as a race.
2) Decide how aggressive they are (or random each game)
3) Decide what their preferred strategy for victory is (or random each game)
4) What ship style they use.

What are also looking at (if there's time) is to let players design up ships for them to use.

 

[Spacemanspif]

It would be nice to have a larger bank of racial images to work with. A couple ways to do this:
.You could use the minor race pictures, as well as some new ones
.There could be more available for future download or to make yourself
.Import your racial appearance from SPORE when it comes out (I've read that they are going to have some sort of model export function).

Also: It would be nice to be able to hand-pick a custom set of Ship features (Jewelry?) that the opponents would put on their custom ships.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

.Import your racial appearance from SPORE when it comes out (I've read that they are going to have some sort of model export function).

It would be hard to integrate that into the current game, especially since spore is stilla year off..