Welcome to the awesome GalCiv community

from GalCiv3 Forums

Greetings!

Can you believe it's already been 6 months since release! I hope you guys are having as much fun with the game as we've been having taking your feedback and adding to the game.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the CEO of Stardock. I designed and wrote the original GalCiv for OS/2 way way way back in the 90s. I also designed GalCiv I and GalCiv II and consulted on GalCiv III.

One of the reasons why I love making 4X games are the people who tend to play them. Anyone who is on a lot of forums can tell the difference between a 4X game forum and a regular game forum.

Another reason is that 4X games are updated for years. In fact, we just released a huge update to GalCiv II (2) this past week and that game was released a decade ago and much of the updates in it came from the fans themselves. 

With the Steam holiday sale here, we'll be getting a bunch of new players so I want to give some helpful links out here and welcome them to one of the best gaming communities on the net.

## Some Helpful thread to read ##

#1 The Wishlist thread.http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/598198173700392501/

We mine this thread regularly. We don't respond to it nearly often enough but we read it. A lot.

#2 The roadmap thread.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/

If you're new to 4X games, you may be surprised to find that we update these games as often as we can. There are actually more engineers on GalCiv III full-time than we had when we made GalCiv II. The main reason for this has to do with digital distribution but what's really wonderful about it is that when you buy a game, you can expect continued updates for as long as there is sufficient demand.

#3 The helpful links thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/620713633843484431/

This just gives you some help in getting started.


## What to expect next ##

You may hear the term "4th generation game engine". This is a technical term for what amounts to the move from 32-bit, DirectX 9c, single core designed games to 64-bit, DirectX 10+, multi-core. GalCiv III, as far as I'm aware, the first gen 4 4X. Which, in itself, means nothing other than that iit means there's really no limit to how far it can be expanded which is what we plan to do.

So let's get specific:

In the past 6 months we've a ton of new features which you can read about here:https://forums.galciv3.com/461047

The roadmap goes over the long-term plan but coming up we have:

#1 1.6 which is going to feature a lot of UI improvements. Now, UI isn't glamorous. It makes for a bad screenshot. But in a game that you may play for many hours, good UI makes a big difference between fun and tedium.

#2 The First expansion. I can't tell you what it is going to be yet but I can tell you that it is something that no GalCiv game has ever had before (or even something similar) but at the same time, it is a feature that probably should have been in every GalCiv game -- I just didn't think about it until now.

If you have any questions or thoughts, you can post here or post on the official Stardock forum where we hang out the most:

https://forums.galciv3.com/forum/1058

Have fun!

19,226 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


#1 1.6 which is going to feature a lot of UI improvements. Now, UI isn't glamorous. It makes for a bad screenshot. But in a game that you may play for many hours, good UI makes a big difference between fun and tedium.
End of quote

Well well well, color me happy.  I probably shouldn't get my hopes up patch titles have been pretty misleading/not reached expectations before but glad to see nonetheless.  I was considering making a YouTube UI video with my big four requests or "asks" for UI improvements because this frustrates me so much perhaps i don't need to if Stardock are now officially working on UI.  Demographics huh :) Good to here!

My top four would be:  (posted some before as have many people on here)

1:  Individual hotkeys for ships/planets/starbases

2.  Race diplomacy screen - right click/hover on tech shows tech information and add icon next to tech on hover shows races that have/don't have that tech or you could e.g. color code tech text to denote how many have it etc. (If your keeping tech trading in the game)

3.  Ship design/shipyard - More queue options e.g. ship class/cost/alphabetical etc.

4.  Production allocation Focus buttons - Individual buttons added to planetary queue (Main screen) and in govern screen.  And a global change option also.

Hopefully four isn't too big of a deal for next patch or two.  Can't speak for anyone else but I think those four improvements would have a dramatic impact on reducing tedium/wasting players time.  I assume the constructor/starbase changes are still coming. 

 

Merry Christmas everyone old and new and a happier 2016! 

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Macsen's 2, 3, and 4 are at the top of my wish list.

2. In addition, I also need simple identification of which techs are specializations, plus which techs (and their effect) I would be unable to research by getting that tech.

3. In addition to the sorts/filters Macsen identified, I want the ability to multi-select ships for obsoleting/deleting.

4. Yes!

My own constructor/starbase wishes: Let me choose the constructor and shipyard requested by starbases. Give me a map in the star base screen or some other indication where the star base is so I can make wise module decisions. Let me create a custom queue for my star base module priority to auto-build when constructors arrive, including modules not yet researched (it will build the next unlocked module in the priority list). Let me save this queue as a template so I can apply this template to multiple similar star bases.

Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting eviator, reply 2

I also need simple identification of which techs are specializations
End of eviator's quote

I knew I'd forgotten something, that wastes a lot of time for me in diplomacy as well.  Definitely needed!

 

I think Constructor/Starbase what has been previously mentioned you only need constructor to set up initial starbase then modules will be handled similarly to how production to shipyards work.  I may be miss-remembering but sounded good to me, would mean a lot less constructor ships and having to move them all. 

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top
Quoting MacsenLP, reply 3

I think Constructor/Starbase what has been previously mentioned you only need constructor to set up initial starbase then modules will be handled similarly to how production to shipyards work.  I may be miss-remembering but sounded good to me, would mean a lot less constructor ships and having to move them all. 

End of MacsenLP's quote

I had forgotten about that. I'll wait and see.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I guess I'm in the minority but I like having a reason to click on my planets each turn. I don't want everything controlled via universal commands. The planets feel more important to me that way. I'm just afraid you want the game streamlined for rediculously large maps to the point where the game can be played from a spread sheet. Don't lose the immersion just for efficiency.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Ragic, reply 5

I guess I'm in the minority but I like having a reason to click on my planets each turn. I don't want everything controlled via universal commands. The planets feel more important to me that way. I'm just afraid you want the game streamlined for rediculously large maps to the point where the game can be played from a spread sheet. Don't lose the immersion just for efficiency.
End of Ragic's quote

I can understand that, but let's be sane about it. When messing with the focus buttons we go in, switch a focus, then leave. There is a better reason to visit your planets: laying out the improvements. Much more immersion to be had there, and fortunately it already exists. Well unless you let the AI build your planets up. Then it's your own fault.

Reply #7 from LittleTinyFrogs Forums Top

Ive had that conflict since moo2. Maybe the solution is to have 'regional capitals'?

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Ragic, reply 5

I guess I'm in the minority but I like having a reason to click on my planets each turn. I don't want everything controlled via universal commands. The planets feel more important to me that way. I'm just afraid you want the game streamlined for rediculously large maps to the point where the game can be played from a spread sheet. Don't lose the immersion just for efficiency.
End of Ragic's quote

 

No-one's suggesting that we remove the present ways to interact. The best solution would be to have both - individual micro-management is fine when you have 10 planets but painful when you have 50. And focuses practically beg to be set-able from lists; just enabling us to do that could cut down on tedious clicks per planet enormously.

 

As to reasons to visit planets - it'd be nice to have the old 'planet blurb' from GC2 back - the one where it gave you a quote from the guy on the street and explained life on the planet based on the prevalence of buildings. Planets really lack character atm, which makes managing them kind of dull.

 

Some kind of planetary events would be cool too - like galactic events, but without the big popup (show 'em in the game log, display them on the planet screen and have icons for the list screen) and just applying a random bonus or penalty for 5-10 turns. This may also encourage generalization a bit more - a generalist planet can benefit a lot more from a random event giving +50% research for 10 turns than a fully specialized industry world would. They can be totally random at first, but adding different triggers later would allow even more character - so planets with level 2+ medical buildings don't get plagues, planets with Economic Capitals are more likely to undergo a stock market boom (or crash) etc.

 

Stick in a little 'history' log on the planet, and each one will start to develop a whole character of it's own (I'm sure we had something like this in GC2, but I may be thinking of a different game). So we'd see the date it was founded; the date it built it's first building; the date a governor (with a randomly-generate name) was appointed; the date it had an economic boom event, the date it had a plague, the date that it was hit by a stray comet and the planet class dropped 3 levels etc. 

 

With a few of these, I'd visit planets just to read their story from time to time, and actually managing them would be interesting just to see how their story evolved.