So I just watched the trailer.  I see these all (at least in the trailer) take strategic resources as well as money, imo they'll need to be rather powerful to be worth that price, especially the elerium/antimater ones

Also is there a maintenance cost in money?  The UI doesn't seem to show one.

I like that they aren't all combat ships, and they look really cool.

I hope they give us options that let us do things we couldn't normally do, like a colony ship that could colonize a planet you don't have to tech for yet, or a constructor that can build in a nebula. 

Edit: or a colony ship that could colonize a dead planet

Edit 2: Watching it again I see that the colony ship can be hired in the first tech age but can colonize tier 1 extreme worlds so that's cool.

Expansion looks very nice.

AND

Seriously?  Its well known that Torians' flesh delights the palate best in sushi rolls and is second only to their caviar.

BUT,

My last session with GalCiv3 ended in a rage quit when a vanilla AI colony ship with stacked engines snatched up a planet in my ZOI that I was 1 turn away from colonizing.  I don't stack engines or sensors and I can no longer bring myself to play the game as is.  If and until it's addressed I won't be purchasing content for GalCiv3.

Seriously? I would say that Civ style games are not for you then.  

Racing for good spots for new colonies/cities/etc. are a key gameplay mechanic of these games.  

Hey frogboy, I'm really excited for the expansion. But what do you say about adding the option to have a diplomacy modifier that makes the Ai more hostile towards you if you get too powerful or close to a victory? I was thinking, as I described in my realm divide thread, it would greatly help with the mop up phase.

The AI seems to have returned to gang-up-on-you-ness a bit since 1.5.  Not as bad as it was, but it still seems to daisy-chain ... when one declares war, another seems likely to follow, and another, even if they don't share an ideology (and even if one or more of them share your ideology).  At least that's been my experience with the couple of post-1.5 games I have played.  They also seem a bit more stupid as to judging whether its time to get out of a war they initiated -- the first AI that declared war on me, I started steamrolling.  I was readily able to wipe out their fleets with a single fleet of my own, and took half their planets, and still they expected me to give them something for peace.

I don't know how many of you have 6000 credits lying around in order to purchase one large ship. By the time I have that many credits I'm building huge hull ships in one to three turns. Conclusion: like most costs in this game mercenary ships are out of scale and will rarely be used because it's not economical.

I'm sure playing as the Arceans and Torians will be fun for the lore buffs out there and for those looking for a change. If this campaign is anything like the original release one, it will not be worth playing, even for story reasons. Hopefully they were able to really devote time to a rich and immersive campaign experience this time.

For me personally, what will make this expansion awesome is if they make the game more manageable for larger maps, like with the previously proposed constructor/starbase changes, shipyard sorts, filters, and bulk-obsolete, bulk upgrade and decomission, and bulk planet focus-changing. So I will wait until after the expansion release to see if they have accomplished these before I decide whether to purchase.

P.S. Is there no simple ruler capability to measure the distance between two hexes? I'm tired of counting hexes all the time.

Will the mercs be modder friendly?  Will we be able to add more on top of the base ones or will it be restricted to switching them out?

On the roadmap you've listed 1.6 as "hoosekeeping", can we get a better idea of what to expect from the patch.

Speaking of mod friendly, im wonder if the mercenaries designs of the ships can be auto gathered from other player designs in the workshop(then ship components auto added to the ships in game), or at-least have it as an option later in a patch. Would be really cool to play a game and find some really exotic or strange looking ships appear in the list. Would really add flavor to the mercenaries system, although i haven't played it yet so maybe it would suck who knows lol.

Also have the problem of bad ship designs if people made them or ships that have to many parts adding performance issues. But is an interesting idea i think and was the first thing to come to mind when i saw the screen shots and heard the words "mercenaries system" .

For those interested Gamespot posted a video showing the Mercenaries expansion in a bit more detail link below.

Sadly it doesn't show Torian/Arcean traits/abilities (hint Stardock )

I'll also highly likely be doing a Let's Play for GC3 Mercenaries within a few days or so after release on my YouTube channel Macsen Lets Plays

https://www.youtube.com/user/MacsenGaming

If you're looking for something else GC3 related to watch before Mercenaries release you can check out my currently ongoing Let's Play below.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHMuUHsmNFlRVIyIEnO1RKtccGjM5sfzR

Terran Resurgence (Custom Race available on Steam Workshop), Godlike difficulty "Worst Possible Racial Traits!"

There are new ship parts, which is very nice. More toys to play with. I wanted to ask: Will we at some point get completely custom colors for ships and races, as in GC2? Right now one only has a few predefined color schemes. There is a mod where you can add more color schemes, but one has to "guess" if number xyz results in a blue color etc.. Will we get a full color slider as in GC2 in either this expansion, or somewhere down the road?

Stacking engines is a perfectly valid option, and I have no issues with the AI using that.

I do have a problem with ridiculously high research speeds and then the AI even ignoring its own tech limitations by building ships that it hasn't got the tech to build yet, though. In this day and age, a non-cheating AI can be expected, I believe.

I don't like sounding negative, but this honestly just sound pretty dull. So we get a new way to buy ships without having to build them and a couple of new races. Are these suppose to be a groundbreaking new features?

This would be a nice feature