So yesterday I played my first serious game of Galciv III with Altarians(cca 3 good 2 pragmatic ratio) on a large galaxy, and I gotta say, I am actually quite impressed with some of the things that have been done.
Here I will share with you my gameplay experience, what i found annoying and what i found awesome, and also some suggestions about tweaking things a little...
But first things first...
The first thing i noticed is that when i move my cursor to the edge of the map, the map won't move as it does in all other games... Not sure if there is an option for that but I didn't find it... and it vas very annoying, so it took me some time to get used to navigating with arrow keys (eww). It was also annoying that i coouldn't move where i was looking at via the minimap...
With that out of the way, the addition of (Idle colony)/(Idle ship)/(Research) reminding you what had to be done is a very neat improvement I have to say and it was very useful during the early and mid game. However, during the late game it became quite annoying, because i was preparing an invasion with dozens of ships that were idling on the borders and i had to "pass" each one of them before i could end the turn... Is there an option to ignore ship idling ? Because there should be if there isn't. If there is, please make it clear where it is in a future tutorial which will hopefully be included in the finished game. That, OR maybe even better add a secoond button above the end turn button which tells you what needs to be done... For example, if I want to end turn and ignore the idle planets and ships, I should be able to do so without visiting each and every one of them.
Maybe a better choice would be to make end turn button do only one thing- end the turn, AND add another button above it that tells you what needs your attention. So if I am preparing an invasion there would be lots of idle ships that I want to ignore, but i could end the turn without much hassle. However, when the action starts I can go through the upper button clicking Idle ship and giving them orders when I need to... The player should have the option to end the turn quickly....
Another thing I noticed is how beatifully Alt+Tab works... I've never seen anything as seamless like this before, except in minecraft 
. So I was able to answer messages on facebook and skype while I was playing, without long transitions or fears of crashes. Good job on that one.
I also liked the Ideology part of the game, very neat, though it would be nice there was some other ways of getting ideology points beyond colonization...
Maybe you could get evil ideology points via evil invasion methods(enslaving, chemical warfare...), good points with standing non agression treaties with civs weaker than your own and pragmatic through good relations with both evil and good races ? Just a crude idea...
About good ideology... I understand why people are content in good civs but i had 100% approval with 26 bil people and no approval buildings... this should not be possible
Diplomacy is taking shape which is nice, I was glad to see that AI is now more reasonable in trading military techs that it ever was in GC2. In GC2 the AI wouldnt sell me military techs even if I offered planets for them.... Now they will trade techs reasonably. However, they will NEVER EVER accept a non agression treaty unless you have more power than them. For instance, I was having 80 k power and Krynn had 90 K. I suggested a non agression treaty along with some juicy techs and they wouldn't take it... but as soon as I got just a teeny tiny bit more powerful than them they were practicaly willing to throw all their techs at me for that non agression treaties.
Could this be tweaked ? Make AI consider non agression if you arent vastly underpowered than them and in good relations, same ideology etc...
Another thing about diplomacy i noticed that I couldnt figure out how to make culture and science alliance work even when I gifted them the techs to do that... Maybe its locked ?
Moving on to United Planets council... While i was chairman i wanted to repeal the tech ban trading that those stupid other races passed... So I suggested the repeal and what happened was, the title of the subject was "Repeal: tech trade ban" or something, and in the description it basically said "we will ban tech trading". So I clicked no, I do not want to ban tech trading, but what it did, it voted no on the repeal and i couldnt trade techs, which was confusing... Next session i redone the repeal and voted yes and i could trade techs normally... So i suggest to make it clearer what yes and no means, am i saying no to the repeal or to the law i am repealing?, since the title is different but description stayed the same...
Next, I will suggest a series of progressively more insane and improbable suggestions to the game in other seperate threads.
Diplomacy and tourism
https://forums.galciv3.com/461862/page/1/#3525717
