I forgot to mention another of the things I tried: I installed the game onto a windows 7 virtual machine (in the same computer) but had the same results. Also, I should mention that stardock support is being very responsive and aggressive in trying to solve my problem.
I have an acer v15 nitro - intel I7 and geforce 860m; I think the graphics drivers are up to date because "NVidia gefore experience" is set to autoupdate. By the way, I forgot to mention one of the things I have tried is deleting the galciv3 directory under "my games" - this also had no effect (also tried deleting just the prefs.ini as suggested by stardock support after I submitted the support tool data).
I simultaneously submitted a ticket when I made this post. I mentioned the splash screen. Ticket ID: KJB-194-10939 Subject: Galact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splash_screen
I am using the opt-in build; the only difference from what was stated above is: in the development build, the splash screen appears, whereas in the stable build, no splash screen appears.
I'm having a problem getting the program to start. I haven't played in a long while but it did previously start. Since then, I upgraded to windows 10 and when I tried to start the game, it updated steam and the game (so I'm not sure if one of these may have caused the problem) However, when I press play, nothing happens. The program appears in task manager for a few seconds, then disappears. Afterwards, pressing play leads to the prog