Much the same for me Ed. I finish very few games. In fact I have only finished one since Crusade. 

I enjoy designing ships a lot and I would like to do ship sets. My problem is I only like to work with one style and I if I design for 10 different factions, the ships all wind up looking the same.  

Large Empire building.  That's the main draw for me  Combat, Diplomacy, and the other stuff interact with that, but it's the main attraction.  If I can build a better economy than you, I can use it to build a fleet that will pummel you.  Or not, if I so choose.  

I do some ship designing, but not near as much as other folk, and they are all highly animated and often weird or whimsical.  The designer is an amazing toy all by itself and the game would not be the same without it.  I am playing with the Civilization Builder a bit.  I have done some work with the dialogue stuff.  I have no real skills at artwork, so I will have to crib things from somewhere if I go that route.  It has the potential to become an involving toy as well.

I play GalCiv more than other 4x games (over 1200 hours with GalCiv 3 so far) for all of the customization in creating races/civs and designing your own ships, and the feeling of free exploration of a vast galaxy. I enjoy Endless Space 2 also, but it just feels much more limited than GalCiv. Which reminds me...

Hey Stardock quit shrinking the damn galaxy sizes, I like my galaxy feeling almost overwhelmingly vast !!!  The new ludicrous size is good, now keep your hands off of it please

But anyways yeah it is the giant sandbox feel that I really enjoy about GalCiv 3. I rarely finish a game because so many changes occur to the game before I can actually get one finished, and I end up deciding to start over to play with all of the new changes. Hopefully they will have all of these annoying bugs fixed soon, so I might actually stick with a game until conclusion. I mean that is honestly my main reason for all of my restarts since Crusade came out; I run into bugs that might not be game crippling but are certainly annoying, they come out with a patch that fixes said bug, so I decide to restart. A good current example is the starbase range bug. I have the techs researched that should extend my starbase range out to 11 hexes, but the last tech is bugged so it doesn't actually take effect. So my starbases I placed thinking they would be able to get that resource 11 hexes away, well my starbase can only reach 9 hexes because the game is broke, so I can't reach that resource... But despite it's problems, GalCiv is still my favorite 4x game just because of it's potential. And Crusade has it almost reaching the best of it's potential in my opinion (if they would just get all the damn bugs fixed)

+1 to this comment for sure.

Myself - I play because I like the chess-like play.  It's turn-based, so it can be a thoughtful game, and there are lots of layers to the deeply complex strategies that are taking place. 

While I have to say that GC3 still has a few (small) kinks to work out to be at the polish level of GC2 in terms of balance, AI utilizing all the cool stuff, etc. - GC3 is still a balancing act to play and win.

It's really the first franchise that offered good competing victory paths (influence, research, etc) that don't involve conquest.  And I think it gets the dynamics correct.  Influence/culture sort of builds itself but needs some protection.  Research and Conquest are intrinsically expensive endeavors, and (like influence) are vulnerable to upset by outside forces.  I like that money is not an end, but rather represents underlying productive capacity (much like real economies), it is abstract, esoteric and worthless in and of itself (yet, paradoxically is crippling if you have none).   For example, how stupid would an "economic victory" be?

Unlike a lot of the posts on here, I don't really care about aesthetics of designing/building ships and if I "design" anything it usually ends up just being some module with a bunch of guns and engines randomly attached to it.  If Brad ever gets his wish of 'strategic placement' it'll be different, but like GC2 there are a lot of flying construction modules with engines randomly strapped on in my civ.

Ditto with the civ builder - I love it, but don't take any time finding cool pics, or writing nifty descriptions - I'll just grab stock assets (although I would LOVE for a DLC with a bunch more vids (or ability to re-color existing vids) and crap), rename "homeworld" to "Mullet Porkchop" (or whatever pops into my head) and see how the abilities line up.

I like the metagame of trying to determine what the underlying mechanics actually work out to be - what the best counter-strat build paths are, etc.

That sort of thing. 

I feel for you on the Founder's issue Ed49663, unlike you I got in on the Founders ed.  I learned long ago to trust Stardock, and Brad and just give them money whenever they ask.  I'm also in a position, financially, where doing so is never an issue.  If I were still a poor college student it would be more of a gamble.  But I couldn't be happier with not having to muck around with figuring out which DLC to buy..

It is a great game tho, looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.. great thread btw.

-tid242

Made me chuckle. Such a true statment though, the amount of times I have sat here at 4am thinking 1 more turn get that research finished and I'll go to bed, then 20 turns later its 4.30am and I am still going 1 more turn.

So why do I play? ^^ That, the deep strategy and the fact the game is modable. I love coding! Nerd, yes, and proud of it! Yes it is mostly ^^ that. The game is addictive. So addictive. It's worse than cake.