Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

After Stepping Away For A While...

Happy New Year Everyone,

I have decided to start playing Galactic Civilizations III again after a break of several months after being frustrated with the status of the game. Here are my thoughts on where the game is currently.

Positive

Love the soundtrack - great work.
Love the stability seems very improved since I stepped away.
The added Notifications, sort options and all around improvement of the right options bar.
All around support of Stardock and everyone associated with the game.
Galactic Rift.
Precursor Planets/artifacts.

Negative

Still has long turn times on the largest possible game with max AI.
Little to no multiplayer activity (although more of a community issue).

Reasons for this though is games are moderate to long may be in progress for multiplayer, however, no way to join in progress games.
It would be a great to request an in progress game somehow, however, I don't have an answer for this.

Weak diplomacy, AI still will trade the farm. (Although better than it was.)
[Bug] Adding multiplayer additional AI opponents still defaults to the top of the list after each new AI added causing it to become a hassle if adding many AI. (This has been around since beta and was reported back then as an annoyance.)
Number of Habitable planets per system, I know this was reduced do to a time/memory problem, however, it's still by far less than Galactic Civilizations II had, also way to many dead systems. I know this can be modded.
[Bug] Miniaturization Specialization tech is all lower case, where as all other techs have an upper case first letter.

Requests

It still would be nice to have an option to auto survey in only area of influence or avoid wormholes.
Have AI start to become aware of a player collecting all techs, or trade resources, or strategic resources. This would make it increasingly hard to obtain these if one is gathering large numbers of these options.
An auto colonize option. Have the ability to send colony ships auto jumping from star to star until it finds a habitable planet and then colonize best planet around said star or if known planet already has been revealed have it head to that planet unless another ship in your control already is in route.
An indication in the diplomatic screen to indicate which faction/factions you haven't talked with yet. This can be especially nice with a large galaxy with many factions/

Anyways, these are my thoughts, continue the good work This is a great game.

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a0152570

Join Date 06/2014

+49

Hay S. Good to see on line again. H N Year!

Positive

ü Love the soundtrack - great work.

ü Love the stability seems very improved since I stepped away. HUGE!

ü The added Notifications, sort options and all around improvement of the right options bar.

ü All around support of Stardock and everyone associated with the game.

Galactic Rift.- eh

Precursor Planets/artifacts., Sorry to say I think this still needs work, nice idea but still feels like a I win button to me.

You left out a big one …AI improvements, planet builds, fleets, …..

Negative

Still has long turn times on the largest possible game with max AI.- Toughfy. More power is likely the answer for the foreseeable future.

ü Little to no multiplayer activity (although more of a community issue).

ü Weak diplomacy, AI still will trade the farm. (Although better than it was.). Moving in the right direction but still needs work

ü Number of Habitable planets per system, I know this was reduced do to a time/memory problem, however, it's still by far less than Galactic Civilizations II had, also way to many dead systems. I know this can be modded. – That s what I did

Requests

ü It still would be nice to have an option to auto survey in only area of influence or avoid wormholes.

An auto colonize option. I see your point BUT exploring is one of the 4 X’s

ü An indication in the diplomatic screen to indicate which faction/factions you haven't talked with yet. This can be especially nice with a large galaxy with many factions

Sliders (or something) to adjust sip blueprint defense selection (vs ‘best defense)

Hoping for a lot in the up coming expansion

AND looking forward to it

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Some additional thoughts after 100 more turns....

Postive

Option to acknowledge that you wanted to declare war. (No accidental declaration of war anymore.)

Negative

[Bug] Diplomacy, When trading for more than one trade resource (example trading for 3 Snuggler Colony's) the AI treats it as trading for 1. Which would be fine if they didn't stack but, they currently do and have since early on.
When is the invasion screen coming? This has been promised since prior to release.
Turn Time is still 3 Minutes around turn 200 with 100 players on largest galaxy. This shouldn't be this way this far after release, makes the game hard to play with this many players. This has been present since early on and all bug reports created kept pointing to try starting the game with the latest version that should fix it. This is what caused me to stop playing for the last several months. Guess what the game is still doing this at the newest version with a new game created. I will either create a new support ticket or reopen one of my old. Ticket #RZZ-170-98668

Suggestions

Trade Resources should be traded longer or, should be an option for them to be longer.

Questions

What does a ring around the planet mean in the diplomacy screen see screen image below?

Ring

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Rhonin_the_wizard

Join Date 10/2009

+183

Quoting Seilore,

reply 2

[Bug] Diplomacy, When trading for more than one trade resource (example trading for 3 Snuggler Colony's) the AI treats it as trading for 1. Which would be fine if they didn't stack but, they currently do and have since early on.

Odd, the AI asks for more when I trade for two planetary artifacts of the same type.

When is the invasion screen coming? This has been promised since prior to release.

It is scheduled for the expandalone next year(2017), because of the backlash of a loud minority for removing the wheel Stardock is hesitant to make major changes to the base game anymore.

What does a ring around the planet mean in the diplomacy screen see screen image below?

That looks like a precursor world, the accelerator type if I'm not mistaken. Their civilization capital must have mood to that planet.

About small number of multiplayer games Brad said a very tiny amount of players even click the Multiplayer button on the main menu, so maybe most people aren't interested.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Quoting Rhonin_the_wizard,

reply 3

What does a ring around the planet mean in the diplomacy screen see screen image below?
That looks like a precursor world, the accelerator type if I'm not mistaken. Their civilization capital must have mood to that planet.

Odd, okay, [Bug] when this happens one is unable to click on said planet and can only enter diplomacy with said race if they go there through another race.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

[Bug] or by design? Auto survey doesn't survey guarded anomalies, this includes precursor anomalies. There should be an option to have them survey these or not. This means that mid to late game survey has to be done manually.
All Treaties (Culture, Research, and Free Trade) state increases each races output of selected treaty by 25%. Does this stack? If it's suppose to it doesn't, seems to me there is no real reason to pursue more than one of these treaties.
[Performance] Turn times continue to get worse as the game continues, I'm now approaching 4 minutes between turns.
No way (at least what I've seen) to upgrade all ships of certain design.
[Performance] After the long turn ships jump across the map, they don't move smoothly and each time I do move any ship the game locks for a short period of time prior to the ship finally moving.
Unable to move around the map while turn is processing. (or at least game is very choppy during this so virtually unable this is different from in the past).
[Performance] Moving around the map shortly after turn causes the game to lock and freeze for 10-30 seconds depending on the situation.
Allied factions not voting for me in UP, in fact I'm getting factions who see me as hostile or dislikes voting for me.

In case my system is under question my specs should handle the game just fine.

Win 7 64 bit professional

AMD FX 9350

16 GB memory

2 GB Radeon R9 270x GPU

Tried playing with the game performance options with no significant change on performance.

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Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

Greetings Seilore and Happy NEW YEAR!

Having max factions on Insane will be a performance issue. I changed to a GTX 970 w/ 4 gigs onboard and my turn times iwth 35 factions and max minors is about 25 seconds. Keep in mind you get better performance if you have a processor that has more threads. Each AI will take its own thread. I have an I5 and thus have 4 cores/threads available to process ai factions. My turn times are longer the more factions I add. My friend has a computer I built for him. He has an I7 which has 8 threads. His turn times are actually faster than my system on the same game.

I know this does not solve your performance issue but hope it helps.

Good to see you back! I am also playing a fun game in Distant Worlds..Fun Stuff!

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Island Dog

Join Date 06/2003

+1037

Welcome back.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Quoting Larsenex,

reply 6

The strange thing is it doesn't seem to jump until the map starts to be revealed, so whatever the performance hit is it's only after this happens. The game starts out very quick and great turn times. Once I start meeting factions the game still moves quickly yet. After that the exploration treaty starts to reveal itself, which is great for revealing the map and meeting the rest of the factions throughout the galaxy. I've noticed that the turn times seem to get longer with this revealing. Once each race is sharing the revealing with me and I can see the whole map the turn times get extreme. This seems to happen around turn 200 which is when we get the technology on slow research rates.

What I don't understand is why. I would think the AI is still doing things from the begining of the game just behind the fog so why does it take so much longer to do this outside of the fog especially being that I can't directly see it anyways because I'm only looking at one piece of the map anyways. It's almost like my screen is watching every player take their turns when there is no real reason for me to see it unless I happen to be looking at it. Why can't the game do this quickly in the background?

Anyways hopefully this improves later on.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Quoting Island Dog,

reply 7

Welcome back.

Love your picture.

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erischild

Join Date 01/2012

+136

To my understanding, the issue is not about what you are seeing (what's on the screen at the moment) but more about what each of the factions see as all the other factions are moving. As the number of factions meeting each other grows along with the number of ships each factor has sailing, the interaction of all these views and viewers grows on beyond exponential. Meanwhile, all sorts of pathing decisions are being made to make sure ships won't look stupid driving into each other just in case you suddenly click on that part of map for no reason. I am sure the devs are utilizing interesting shortcuts to optimize this, but I write off a lot of this delay as the price we pay for the AI not having full omnivision. And I consider it worth the price.

As far as I know, none of the delay is AI making its decisions, only the processing of those decisions that have been made once it is the AI faction's turn. Otherwise, the AI decision making is constantly going on for all AIs except for the current player faction. This makes me wonder: if I walk away from the computer for an hour, does the AI do a deeper and deeper analysis and decision process?

Then again, I am only guessing when I should be busy blowing up space ships.

And welcome back.

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Probably because of visibility calculations.

Even so, let's be reasonable; It's the maximum amount of AIs in the maximum amount of space. You're really hitting the threshold of your CPU at that point. It's naturally going to take a while.

[Interesting observation of human behaviour here as well: people seem to go right for the biggest map possible or stay around small/medium size. Not a lot in between. I would love to see some stats on that.]

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Additional thoughts now at turn 260.

[Bug] Planets will display protected by displaying the shield, however, they aren't really protected with any ships in orbit. Doesn't have any special effect as some of my planets show shield some do not, no rhyme or reason.
[Suggestion] Have the game remember your screen settings, for instance zoom level on map and on mini map alike. This has never been in the game and gets annoying when you have to constantly redo every game.
[Suggestion] Have a way in the diplomacy screen to auto go to the trade screen with any race which one is able to trade with. (Again becomes annoying having to keep selecting trade with each faction and bypass ones that are not ready to trade when going through 100 different factions.)

This would even be nicer if one could choose to only show factions with techs that can be traded.
Another option would be only show me factions that I can sign treaties with.

[Bug] Number of turns to complete ship isn't reflecting correct time on shipyards. Mine currently telling me 2 weeks, however, everything is completing in 1. If this is because of production overflow it should reflect this so it's not confusing to the player.

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