Galactopedia

This is a great resource - much thanks to the builders!

Galactopedia in printable excel goodness:

Ship Stats (Armor / Weapons / Etc)

Planetary Improvements

Thanks so much for this program! love it! I was about to ask if they could add improvements but hey, its done already!
Now what we need though is to be able to see what improvements, ships, modules, bonus, etc a Tech can give us. A link to that improvement, ship, module, etc would also be greatly appreciated.

Now if research could actually show what bonus, modules, improvements etc it gives you would be nice. Also if those improvements, bonus, etc could be links to that article in Galactopedia would make the app 100% complete

This isn't very useful in its present state. What does +15 economy tell me? Nothing useful. I don't even know whether that's +15 points or +15%, much less whether it stacks with itself or anything else, or whether that would be +15% to my base or adjusted stat.

Would you be excited if I told you I put +15 in an envelope to give to you? Maybe, but you don't know how much money was in the envelope to begin with, or whether I put 15 cents, 15 dollars, or added 15% to what was in there. As a matter of fact, if there were 0 dollars in the envelope and I added 15%, then there's still nothing in the wallet.

See what I mean?

Biting the hand that feeds again, Citizen Heavensblade23? For free even?

I maintain that this is an excellent resource even in its unfinished state. The resource's author promised more when more time was available - to my knowledge. I sincerely hope that the author of this utility ignores the negative prattling of people that are not satisfied with their charitable efforts.

I'm not going to argue with you in every thread, so save it.

Those numbers are exactly what's stored in the XML files. I don't know what they mean -- to my knowledge, even Stardock doesn't really know what they mean since the internal equations are heavily fudged for balancing. Brad recently made a JoeUser post about this subject.

So the numbers are indeed not useful in isolation; you have to compare various projects down the same line of research and look at the relative improvements to get an idea of how useful a project might be. Or else you have to learn somewhere else how to properly interpret the numbers.

That said, the goal of the Galactopedia is obviously not to document GC2's inner workings -- please ask Stardock about that -- but merely to provide a comprehensive list of all research & build projects and other game objects, and their interdependencies.

This latest build (as of today) is truly impressive. It almost qualifies as a strategy guide. While better documentation of the inner workings would certainly shorten the learning curve, the Galactopedia has been instrumental in my first victories in the game. Yeah!

What an excellent resource! My only real irritation with the game has been trying to figure out what I needed to do on the tech tree to get the improvement/ship etc I wanted. Thanks.

Bump. I just don't understand what devs were thinking when they put the tech tree interface in the game. Its *almost* unuseable. For example to find the tech I need to get xyz mod. I have to

1 Go to large view
2 Scan around
3 GUESS which improvement may be in which tech.
4 Since you CANT SEE the inside of the tech in large view. switch back to Tiny view.
5 Read text (to do this MUST click on it)...thereby deselecting what tech you are currently researching)!
6 Read minimal text in the box.
7 Repeat steps 1 to 6 until you find tech
8 Re-select your existing Tech.
9 Alt tab to PDF to try to find what XYZ module does!
10 Tab back into game
11 Make a cup of tea. Congratualations it took you 15-20 mins for somethign that shoudl take 15-20 seconds!

Come on devs!

BruntFCA, you are so right. While step 11 is obviously partly humorous, it does take way more time and effort than it should. Beginning players are the worst hit by this, making learning the game that much more fun for newbies. Maybe this is a planned features for us overweight geeks (like myself) to burn off a few more calories while we game?

What could be next for Galactopedia?

Maybe a fleet battle simulator but that would derive from it's original point.

Also maybe the same Shipyard that's incorporated in the game (though that would be a lot of work and the app would be bigger than the actual 68Kb) and could be used to make easier screenshots of your ships.

Also if the techs could be organizable (in the list and description) by color and the background of their names be colored (in the same way as when you want to choose what techs you're going to research).

Finally, thoses pics that (at least for me) don't appear for all the Drives (except Hyperdrive, Hyperdrive + and Ion Drive) should be fixed.

When a picture doesn't appear for an entry, it's either because Stardock's XML data does not specify a picture or because a specific picture could not be found. Also, GC2 itself can render 3D model files; I can only show PNGs or similar bitmap files. Nothing I can do on my side to fix this, unless some Stardock guy would tell me which image files to show for the image-less entries.

As for colored techs, I think the technology icons already correspond to the tech tree colors (more or less). Personally I find text on colored background hard to read... it's a possible enhancement but not a likely one.

A fleet battle simulator is already available as a stand-alone application, please check the GC2 Wiki. Maybe someone will make a stand-alone shipyard, too, but such features are way too big for what I'm doing here.

What I'm going to do next is to refine the interface: add a tree view for technologies, add some help text & "About" box, put radio buttons into nice groups, add hyperlinks to entry text. Also, I still want to add some way to print a reference list. That's the scope of my planned updates for now.

Oh yeah, I forgot: there were several requests that a manually selected GC2 path should be persisted. That's also something I'm planning to do, along with a proper installer/uninstaller.

Keep up the good work, Citizen Chris Nahr !