I play a free game called [link=http://www.wesnoth.org]Battle for Wesnoth">Link It is a TBS game that has fantastic multiplayer. But it is a very different sort of game. There is only one resouce and no micro management at all. Its all about moving your units around and exploiting the enemys weaknesses. GalCiv on the other hand has huge scope and the turns are much slower. I don't think it would make for an entertaining multiplayer experience. What I'd like to see is a more intricate ship designer, more jewlery, random events, races, technolgies etc. and a better battle visualiser.

An espionage victory is a nice idea. You'd win because you've managed to make yourself the Stasi of the universe. No one makes anything without you knowing and anyone can be kidnapped at anytime.

Good work Frogboy. I'll look forward to news about the new features later. I haven't followed the news about a game's development so closely for a long long time.

PS: lol @ the trolls. It's fun to watch people get teasy when they don't get what they want. Aww, too bad.

My opinion in this poll is a bit mixed...

I voted "no", because this is the kind of game people play in SP way more than in MP. Playing a turn-based game over the email or internet takes AGES, since often you'll only be able to do one turn a day unless you're like online all day long. A game in a large galaxy could easily take more than a year to complete if you always have to wait for another person to take his/her turn, and that increases exponentially if more players are added. Because of the inconvenience of MP, I believe the focus should be on enriching and enhancing the SP experience. Simple things like more hulls and jewelry, and more complex things like new Tech branches, expanded espionage/diplomacy, and all other kinds of cool things that Devs and/or fans may come up with, as well as improved 'modability' of the game, would do so much more for me than a MP expansion.

On the other hand, there's HotSeat and LAN. If you play one of those, you're basically playing with multiple people in the same location, at the same time. This means that you won't have to wait several days for the other guy to take his turn. Sure, it's still slow, but nowhere near as slow as playing against someone who may be in a completely different timezone, or at least can't always be playing as much as you are, or can't be playing at the same time you are.

So, if restricting multiplayer to LAN and HotSeat would make those 4/5 slots into like 2/5 slots, my answer changfes to "yes". If not... I'd still prefer SP content to MP.

Hi Brad,

you asked for things we would like to see in an expansion, here are some things I miss in GC2 and I would like to see in an expansion:

Terrain
This means something like asteroids, nebulas, junk and such. Simply things in space effecting the travelspeed. Think of nebulas or supernovas of twilight empire, they can effect your strategy in different ways.

Espionage
I would like to see a ImperiumGalactica2-like spyingsystem. I don't know if you know the system, but you get spies (from different races) and you can send them on missions, if they succeed they gain experiencepoints. These exp can be distributed for special skills like "sabotage" or "spying" so you get specialized spies after some missions and you really feel the pain if one gets down.

Specialized Techs
This idea is stolen of SE4, there you can select a special tech at the beginning, this techtree is only accessable for races selected this tech, this contains special bonuses and special weapons. Using this idea would make the races much more different.

Racedependend interfaces
It would be great if the interface would change depending on which raceslook&feel you choose. So the terrans "normal" the drengin more warlike and so on.

Terraforming
Please give the ability to colonize uninhabitable planets, it should cost much, but sometimes it is strategically usefull to have a supportcolony (instead of a starbase)

Spaceminers
This could be used together with "terrain", I mean real mines not only this spacestations there are at the moment, I think of some huge ship (Homeworld-like) you could send to asteroids/nebulas and then gain supplies from there.

Spacemines
What about placing mines in space?

Supergates
Ability to build a limited number of gates (maybe galaxysize+1) in order to shorten the ship-supply-ways. These gates should work like the stargates, so transport a ship immediately from one gate to another. Maybe ignoreing who the game built?

Real pirates
Having real pirates like in ImperiumGalactica2 would be nice, simply a minorrace with several planets and hostile to everyone.

Greetings

Torsten

The most you could ever hope for is about 50% if that, if Stardock can get 33% of their original releases sale number at $20s then I think thats worth the investment. So 33% of say 100,000 copies sold todate, thats 33,333 @ $20s minus costs is a lot of potential money.

Hmm, are we twisting numbers now? You say that they would do good to sale an expansion to 50% of the 100K copies sold and then you try to turn around and say that 33,333 of the 50,000 would buy an expansion with MP. While MP is great, it isn't the end all of features that (according to this poll) the majority here want from a turn based game. So using your logic the actual number of folks that MIGHT purchase an MP expansion would be closer to 15K.

You then further state...

I have long since stop playing the game in hopes that something new will be added to it that would tempt me back, but alas, there is nothing so far, but a MP pack just might do it for me personally.

"Might" is the magic word in the above. You have stopped playing the game, which is your choice, and you MIGHT purchase an expansion if it had MP. Then there is the 66% of those that responded NO to the poll and if it acaully represents 66% of the 100k players (if only half of those are still playing) then there is your 33K audience and they are telling SD they want more content over the choice of MP.

Saying that Brad has no idea what he is doing running a business is bit of a stretch isn't it? He has gone against the "norm" with the NO copy protection and yet still sold over 75K copies. Just because the vocal minority says that the game sucks without MP does not make it true nor does it mean that Brad doesn't know what he is doing. No matter if we want MP or not, try to keep your opinion to how you feel the game should go and not start throwing around insults if you think you are not going to get your way.

My buddy & I use to play BOTF for a month, an hour here & there.... It was great fun & they are almost the exact same game..

Each person has turn timers, that you agree to set the time on.. we did 5 minutes & then it would turn automaticly.. Connected by IP & it went perfectly.. Its the SAME GAME!! So i know MP can work..

GREAT FUN.

I voted yes.

Whilst i too am looking forward to an expansion pack for this game i would prefer it if you could get the UI 'bugs' rectified first please

You will by now know one of my 'pet hates' at present is the non-working 'Set Homeworld' button Heck i may even resort to bribery to get this looked at sometime soon, as i have only been complaining about it since the game was released (the beta of the game had this feature working fully!!)

Still love the work you guys are doing over there

DG

PS Multiplayer =

I would like Hotseat and PBEM MP only, as either patch material (this is the easier form of MP to implement), or part of 1st expansion (which is full of other things).

So I'm not for sole MP expansion.

Frogboy, I knew from the moment Stardock said "we'll add multiplayer if you guys want it" that you weren't going to do it. Maybe you fooled some other people, but you never fooled me.You started out with a teasing, tentative promise and then you guys spent the first few months of release prepping the user community by touting your success at developing a game soooo good it doesn't need multiplayer. Then came the poll, which is garbage in terms of market research, and I knew immediately what the result was going to be and that you'd jump on this opportunity to say "See? No one wants multiplayer?" And then, to make it worse, you don't kill the idea of multiplayer entirely, you just drag the tentative promise of it out into some far distant month, long after all but the most rabid of single-player cultists have stopped checking your web site every day.

Here's why your poll is garbage.
1. The only ones who voted in it are already part of the user community cult. They made the decision long ago to buy the game despite multiplayer, and the fact they still get on the web site at all is because they're part of the metaverse and spend sizeable amounts of time on the forums. Those people are valuable, absolutely. But ask yourself how many copies you sold of the game and compare that with the number of people who participated in that poll. I'll bet you good money for every 1 person who voted Yes in that poll there are 20 people who bought your game, enjoyed it, got tired of playing it single-player, and moved on to some other game. They have no reason to keep coming back to your web site. They did not vote in your poll. This is the same reason why you don't gauge how well the President is doing his job by his numbers on the Fox News website poll.
2. As jpf190279 said, even with the sample size being as small as it is & heavily weighted with "cultists," 33% of them would pay you $20 for a multiplayer expansion. That's 33% of the people still playing the game heavily enough to frequent your website, which is a sizeable sum. Even if you don't think so, what does that percentage balloon to when you include GalCiv2 players who are not single-player fanatics? Add to that the fact that practically every single critic who reviewed your game listed no multiplayer as a con. It seems pretty possible to me that of the people who have played and enjoyed your game, the percentage of people who want multiplayer can be as high or higher than 50%. But you aren't asking those people.

Here's what I think. You guys don't want to do multiplayer. You don't want to write it, and you don't want to support it. I doubt you even have coders who are capable of it. You do not intend to do it, now or ever. You don't want people to not buy your game, and you didn't want critics to slice you up in reviews for your arrogance. So you've decided to make that a "maybe" and scramble to find a way to justify yourself to the customers, knowing it was never going to happen. And for a company that so sanctimoniously pats itself on the back for having the guts to buck conventions like copy protection, it's ironic you don't have the guts to tell your users the truth and trust it's a decision they can understand and live with.

Come clean, Frogboy. You're not doing multiplayer. It'll be AI tweaks, ship designs, and starbase models from here on out. Just say it, and quit jerking the rest of us around.

Multiplayer is a very dangerous road to go down.

People bought this game for single player and would like see the resources put to improving the single player experience.
To put alot of resources into multiplayer, you risk pissing off the majority of your customer base. Not a good thing to do!

The smart thing to do (If you go down that road) would be to treat multiplayer as a separate game AND a separate development team. The sales of the multiplayer game would pay for this new development team.


Now, to keep the current game alive for some time, there are lots of great ideas that keep coming out.

I'm already at the point where the game is starting to feel stale.
Here are some things to consider...

1 - More Diplomacy and character depth for the races. This would make the races seem more real and life like than just playing the "AI." You gotta give them "LIFE" This would help people get drawn into the game more.

2 - Updated graphics would also help freshen the game. The blurry stills in the game takes you out of the game,
Clear futuristic stills would draw you deeper into the GalCiv world.

3 - And finally the cheesy planet battle invasions gotta go.
Give me a few cool futuristic battle stills any day.

Good luck

I must admit when this poll was on i voted on "No" becouse i still was a "newbie" and was fascinated with the good AI shipbuilder etc. so i wanted the game to improve in that. But after i started to win vs a masochistic AI the game just stopped being fun ... i think your first expansion should have multiplayer this way more ppl like me wont just leave the game on the shelf and wait 1.5 year for the multiplayer ... now i would vote for "Yes" since the only challenge that i can get from this game is another human being im sure some of the people changed their mind like me so please before you decide if youre going to make a multiplayer exp or not put up another poll with some more options