RemingtonRyder

Let's take an example from popular sci-fi. Suppose that your enemy starts teleporting nuclear warheads into your warships. It's a cheap tactic, but so is finding some kind of way to jam the teleport so that the warhead can't be deployed. Therefore the playing field quickly becomes level again. For tactical combat to retain its freshness then, there needs to be some sort of tactics room which allows you to develop new ways of gaining the upper hand that

[quote who="DivineWrath" reply="4" id="3412404"]Is current technology capable to creating high quality speech without voice actors? The best voice actors will cost money.[/quote] I don't think so. At the very most you'll get a computer player that sounds like an answering machine. "Lord Kona isn't here right now but please leave a message after the screaming slavelings," ;) I wouldn't mind voicing Lord Kona actually, get my name on the credits, it w

The Hyperion Matrix. Yeah. Best thing for it is to just nix the food bonus and give them a pop growth boost, because that's actually handy on a homeworld.

The AI also uses bonus food tiles very poorly. When approval starts to plummet they tend to lower taxes as a stop-gap measure, but then they don't do much about the problem.

Well from what I can guess about Steam Workshop and how it integrates subscribed mods with the game launcher, there are still going to be mods that will not be compatible with each other. If I come up with a whole new tech tree mod for GC3 (and being honest, when I get a look at the tech tree I'm likely to say 'aw, hell no') and someone else comes up with a tech tree mod, then it's possible to subscribe to both of them, but only the one which comes last in the loading

I think the crucial thing for tactical combat is to build it around the expectation that the AI should be competent at it (it is possible to teach them if you do this) and fun for the human player(s). Not fun as in 'lol your ships go boom' but worth watching and participating in. This may mean that it is not as feature-laden as you would like, but still gives you some kind of adrenaline rush during each battle. One of the things that I've observed from playin

I found starbases and the huge number of modules to be a bit cheesy. Lure a bunch of enemy ships into a ship-assist kill zone - hey, the starbases are the ultimate bait! - and tear them apart, then rinse and repeat. If you have a ridiculously large empire and money to burn you can create a wall in space. One of the things that I did with my mod was to severely cut back on ship assist modules, bringing them into the game much later in the tech tree and in very small numbers

I think the most burning question for me is whether the modding support is any good on Steam. I do play a modded game on Steam (Skyrim) but I'm not sure what sort of challenge it is going to be to write a mod for GC3 Workshop. One of the things that might actually win people over (to the dark side, some might say) is having a huge mod library for GC3. Anyone have any insights?

I think the most annoying part about following the same derivative research for new modules was that you rarely saw an improvement that warranted upgrading ship designs. This was because in terms of value for space or cost, the modules were packed too close together. If they were spread out a bit more, with a good increase in firepower through the tech tree, then you would have something to look forward to.

I'm playing GC2. I've got Thalans squatting on planets that should be mine. Get off my lawn, you insects!

It looks vaguely Lantean to me. :)

One of the things I found lacking in GC2 was the actual weapon progression. You go from Lasers to Phasors with a fairly lacklustre improvement in firepower and marginal improvements in space efficiency and then suddenly woosh, you have a Death Doom Ray. Just this weekend I spreadsheeted most of the weapons to look again at how much damage you get per bc and unit of space. It's not always worth it to upgrade a ship to

Being able to filter the list of colonies instead of just sorting it would be really helpful. Maybe I want to see just colonies that are specialised in research, or the ones which haven't been specialised yet, or the ones which are in danger of flipping to another civ.

Well, speaking from experience, the one thing that seems to liven up GC2 and make things interesting is loading in a mod. So if you think you'll get bored with GC3, there's always a chance that someone will make mods for it. :)

There's plenty of time to preorder, so you can be patient and wait for the pretty screenshots and the tidbits that will be coming your way. It's better to make an informed decision where your money is concerned.

An ship editor which can auto-save designs when you exit would be cool for multiplayer.

If there are still going to be bonus tiles on planets, I have to say that it would be nice to be able to see them (and whether they have an appropriate improvement sited) without cycling through every single planet.

One of the most interesting implications of hexes is that the map need no longer be square-edged, and indeed you could have a more disc-shaped galaxy.

If only you could get Richard Ridings in to read the technology descriptions. ;) "Your minions have discovered a lost technology in the next room. You will find that this low broad downing soft item of furniture has the power to cure fatigue and restore vitality."

There was an auto-upgrade feature in later versions of GC2, however the module prioirty list didn't persist on reloading. If you didn't want a particular module to be built there was no way to uncheck it. Basically there needed to be a Starbases governor.

Brad, in all seriousness, I think if you want to rebrand retroactively, there's no reason why you need to use the same brand for each title. In fact, it gives you a lot of freedom in future iterations if you aren't stuck with some weighty name. Yeah I know, that narrows it down to like, practically anything. :D

Personally I like the Telenanth or alien artefact events more than the rest. There's a bit of excitement when suddenly one race becomes a bigger threat that they were before. I also like the events which mess with tourism and trade, making them as important as tax income. I'm not particularly wild about the Jagged Knife event. I liked the Dread Lords event but I never get to duke it out with them anymore. :P As for new events, I think that it migh

I was playing a modded game of GalCiv 2 last night and discovered for myself what happens if you rush too many colonies too soon. I ended up 2000bc in the red with a shrinking approval due to prolonged debt, and having to keep taxes low enough to keep approval hovering at about 50%, with just enough income to eventually get out of the red. I managed that after snagging 25 colonies but not researching far enough to get any economic buildings. Thing is, this can happen to

My own exploration strategy for a scattered cluster galaxy: Use the survey ship initially for scouting, use cheap scouts once you have a second colony to build them from. Avoid going too far out - the bigger the search radius, the greater the chance that another race will get to one of the nearby planets before you've even seen it. Also, the further you have to send a colony ship, the more chance you will not have a very contiguous empire. If you encounter an

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="115" id="3407462"]Stardock has another two announcements to make. Based on certain thread, one can try to guess some of the stuff but I remember one pic missing there rigt now that seems to belong to one of the other two iOS games they are making.[/quote] Well okay. I guess we'll see what happens soon enough!