Great game so far, I wanted to add in my thoughts on how to make it even better for release!
Governors
Governors aren't in the game yet, but, on a game of this scale, they really need to be done right, so I figured I'd add in my thoughts. Some things I'd like governors to be able to do include:
- If an option is set. dynamically adjust the civilian / military slider based on what is being built on the planet. If it's an infinite project, adjust towards military. If the planet is upgrading or building things, adjust towards civilian.
- Along the same lines, dynamically adjust the production / econ / research slider based on whether anything is being built or not. Allow the player to have presets for "constructing buildings = 90% production, 10% research, working on infinite projects = 10% production, 90% research", etc.
- Alert the player to non-optimal building placement if the resulting production / research / economy is some % below the theoretically ideal output. There should already be an algorithm for this (what the AI is using), so it shouldn't be hard for the governor to be like "If you swap the location of the farm and the factory, production will go up by 25%". Only much more complex.
Resources
As far as I remember, this is Gal Civ's first foray into resources, and I think it's too tentative of a step. As they currently exist, there are 3 resources that are evenly spread through the galaxy and are fairly common. Even if they weren't common, they just aren't that significant yet. Lacking 1 or 2 isn't going to affect a player. Lacking all 3 probably isn't going to do much either. If Stardock wants to add strategic resources that are required to build certain technologies, they need to go a lot further. Increase the number to 5 or 10 and make each available only in specific parts of the galaxy. Aside from forcing players to adapt their strategy, this will create conflict, which is another area where the game needs to develop.
Creating Conflict
I've played through 3 games on galaxies from small to large and no one has ever declared war on me, and I only declared war because I wanted to see what it was like. I'm sure in the final game the AI races will declare war on me more than I'd like, but I think it would be interesting to design into the game reasons why there is conflict between races. Aside from the scarce resources above, some other reasons that might be added to the game beyond the standard "I want your planets" might be:
- One of the nastier races decides that your race is delicious and wants to start farming you, or, if you are the nasty race, be given an option to start eating another race and get bonuses to approval and pop growth when capturing the yummy race's planets
- Piracy / protecting pirates - I feel like piracy against trade routes will be added in at some point, but it needs to be significant. Piracy shouldn't just negate a single trade route and the 15-20 bc income from it - that's nothing. Having to rebuild the ship? Whatever. Maybe the income penalty needs to be significant (halve all trade income or something because people are scared?), or something else, but it needs to have a real & painful affect on a player.
- Executing a prominent citizen - one of your race's prominent citizens was arrested and executed on trumped up charges while on another race's planet, and your citizens are in an uproar and demand blood
- New galactic sectors appearing - this is probably hard to do, but an entire new sector of the galaxy becoming accessible for colonization would certainly add conflict as races fight over the new planets and resources.
- Espionage - when this is added in, there should be a diplomacy option "If I catch you spying again, I will declare war on you".
I'm sure there are more, but I'd like to see some natural causes of conflict in the game.
Starting positions
In my experience with Stardock games from GalCiv, Elemental: WoM through Legendary Heros, and now GalCiv III, one thing (in my opinion) that they have yet to get right is starting conditions. The difference between a bad start and a good start can be an entire difficulty level (Brad even said this about one of the games in the Elemental series). GalCiv III needs to work on normalizing this, either by attempting to make everyone's start a little more similar (e.g. a similar number and quality of colonizable planets within 20 tiles) or having a separate option, in addition to each race's difficulty level to set how good or bad their start location is.
Another option might be to expand the definition of habitable worlds to include pretty much every planet out there and condense the colonization line so that productive colonies could be set up on these worlds quickly at the expense of other research. That would mitigate bad starts by allowing the player or AI the option to focus on colonization research. They still would be a little behind, but they wouldn't be permanently crippled by the lack of planets.
Merging building screen with resource setting screen
This is more of a nitpick, sorry, but it would be really convenient if these were one screen instead of two separate ones. I think there's enough real estate on the screen to do it, and it would make things a lot easier.
Auto-requesting constructors at starbase
Another nice-to-have feature, but I think it would be nice to be able to queue constructions at a starbase and have constructors automatically queued and then sent to those starbases. I think I spend like 40% of my play-time micro-managing constructors to all of my starbases and it's a pain in the neck.
Balance & Other
I'm sure a lot of these will be addressed naturally during the course of the betas, but I figured I'd mention them:
- Precursor artifacts are not particularly powerful. I haven't researched it all the way, but now that planets get +600% from buildings, another +25% or something is not particularly significant. Same with economic starbases
- Have a filter to hide automatically-generated ships - there are way too many of them
- Starbase sensors - I can make a ship with 20-30+ sensor range when my starbases are stuck at range 9
