It's more of a theoretical right now. I think that'll come from the feedback.  Personally, I could imagine 100+ civs in a large enough galaxy.

Heck, I'm just happy that my PC will be able to run the game.

So many civilizations to conquer I mean with which to have diplomatic and trade relationships with, and not all about taking their planets by influence.

Speaking of conquest by influence, one of the things that bothered me a little in GC2 was no matter if the planet was colonized by me, it defected to me, I invaded it or bought it, there was no difference. Any plans on making this different in GC3?  

Frogboy has posted a tentative schedule

https://forums.galciv3.com/452913/page/1/

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Here's my take on it

You have to be realistic as to the trade off between

New features/tweaking/testing/time

Functionally it's an alpha. But it's still available to a lot of people. So you can't just roll out patches like you would internally. If your code crashes and melts your face off internally, that's ok, but to external players, that's not that cool. So there's still some semblance of 'hey lets at least do a minimal passthrough testing before giving it out' thing between patches. So you can't functinally roll out patches reallly quickly without sacrificing the testing aspect.

Rolling out patches quickly also makes it feel like you're on a treadmill from a development perspective. Wanting to do nly small changes rather than addressing large sweeping issues that might take a month of planning and dev work.

Thus I think realistically it makes sense to see large patches happen maybe 1-1.5 months. Then hotfixes in between to address critical face melting problems.

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I think it would be nice for Stardock to have an "Experimental" beta channel. A place where they can roll out new features for users to test for those who want to be on the 'cutting edge'. But with the understanding that save games could be incompatible, hardware issues could arise, etc. I realize it seems like we're doing that right now, but again, it's important to realize that even as an alpha customers do have an expectation of the game not exploding when you hit Start.

          Hi everybody.

It's been more than 20 years since i first played MASTER OF ORION. Having spent hundreds of hours on that game as a kid i had been wondering for a long time when a worthy successor would arrive....

...Until I played GALCIV2....

Congratulations to Stardock for bringing us GALCIV3 and although i'm not fond of alphas or betas, i can't wait until i get my hands on the finalised version of the game  .

So awesome.

For now, I'll settle for an awesome base game (equivalent at least to Twilight of the Vampires... I mean, of the Arnor + 1).

What does +N levels to improvement type Y do? I can see a little number up in the corner of the improvement types that changes depending on what kinds of bonuses to the correct improvement type are available, but I don't see any change in the actual bonus provided.

Also, is there a way to turn off that stupid beeping noise at the end of the turn?

Later (aka Wednesday).

From the info you've given on the forums, I see about 7 major races in the game for initial release.

Terran
Altarian
Drengin
Iridium

Yor
Krynn
Thalan

What other races are expected to make the initial release, and are we going to see all these races in the beta at some point? 

I just want to say I did not hesitate to cough up my hard earned money because in my humble opinion it is actually good value for money.  A $100 game that you spend 100s of hours playing is much better value than a $5 you only play once.

Now I can't wait for the finished game

That blew my mind. I cannot wait to play these large, LARGE games!

Burba - that's interesting, but that's an entirely different model for a game than GC3.

At some time in the (far) future, Game Developers are going to come together and form a consortium that handles combining different game types, so you can have something like a 4X with RTS combat, Spore-like planetary evolution, "spy" missions that play like Thief, etc.  All in a persistent universe like Eve Online.

But I'm not holding my breath, because the amount of work to do that is staggering.