Galactic Civilizations III

[whatevername]

C'mon, you've never traded the MOO2 AI useless stuff like Quantum Detonators before?

The severity of it is such that in one game all I did in peace time was building those useless ships and trading them for tech and credits? non-stop with everything focused on industry. Didn't do any research at all.

I lost to AI like 40 times in MoO2 and 0 times in GalCiv 2.

Okay but how often you lose isn't necessarily a measure of how good the AI is. I mean the MoO 2 AI can be harder to beat but that's because it cheats outrageously, not because it's smarter. In fact, IIRC in MoO 2 the lowest difficulty setting (Tutor) is the only one where the AI doesn't cheat.

I mean don't get me wrong, I think MoO 2 is the far better game. But AI-wise it doesn't hold a candle to GalCiv 2. Or hell, many 4X games.

That being said, I seem to recall you mentioning a few times that you feel Civ 5 is one of the few strategy games with tolerable AI, so I'm not expecting a rational conversation to come out of this.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/do-you-move-your-settler.92981/#post-3389861

Civ 5 AI sucks so much that thinking about moving settlers should be the last of Firaxis' problems.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/age-of-wonders-3.80326/page-17#post-2903030

3D is shit. Just look at Civ V, they spent all their time on the glorious 3D. That's why when I played as England on deity or whatever the highest difficulty, the AI was lucky when it sank 2 of my ships in the whole game.
HMM 5 - it's 3D alright, the AI is pathetic compared to HMM3 and there were less factions than in HMM3.
HMM 6 - beautiful 3D, the rest is shit. Oh look, most of the able-bodied recruits were already killed in HMM1, HMM2, HMM3, HMM4 and HMM5, what are we gonna do??? Recruit females!! BOOBS!! There's only 3 kinds of resources + gold FFS.
SupCom is much worse than TA.
Recent XCOM is worse than the original.
Jagged Alliance: The Shit or whatever it's called is shit compared to JA2.
King's Bounty 3D - no AI at all, you can play both games WITHOUT BUYING ANY TROOPS!!! AND WITHOUT LOSING ANY TROOPS THAT YOU START COMBAT WITH FOR 99% OF THE GAME. And there's several ways to do that.
Disciples 3 - I haven't played the previous ones, but D3 was a cluster....yuck.

 

[flyingjohn]

I think you are over glorifying the old strategy games ai,especially heroes which is terrible in all iterations regardless of 3d.
Also "King's Bounty 3D - no AI at all, you can play both games WITHOUT BUYING ANY TROOPS!!! " is a blatant lie.
In order for you to get good troops you need to buy them,getting fodder from the map will not work since it is fodder and it will be destroyed easily.
And yes you can do a no loss run,but only with specific units and spells that you need to know beforehand in order to pull it off.
I mean any enemy hero with archers and spells will give you losses.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

AI in the classic HoMM games was not stellar, but it wasn't nearly as bad as in modern Civ games for example. Calling it "terrible" is definitely an exaggeration.

The biggest issue with AI in the strategy games today is that designers implement rulesets that their AI completely can't handle. This is especially evident in case of diplomacy in most 4X games.

 

[whatevername]

I think you are over glorifying the old strategy games ai,especially heroes which is terrible in all iterations regardless of 3d.
Also "King's Bounty 3D - no AI at all, you can play both games WITHOUT BUYING ANY TROOPS!!! " is a blatant lie.
In order for you to get good troops you need to buy them,getting fodder from the map will not work since it is fodder and it will be destroyed easily.
And yes you can do a no loss run,but only with specific units and spells that you need to know beforehand in order to pull it off.
I mean any enemy hero with archers and spells will give you losses.

ROFL. I also forget to mention that you can do it on "impossible" /Dr. Evil.
Since it seems you do not possess the capacities to come up with this on your own, I will sell this info to you for a measly 100 brofists(you can do that by brofisting my 100 posts).

 

[MilesBeyond]

snip

Fair enough. I must have been thinking of someone else. I apologize, that was unfair to you.

That being said, I still maintain that GalCiv AI is way ahead of MoO 2, and I haven't seen anything to refute that. I also know it's off-topic, but in your quoted post, I really don't think that there's a correlation between 3D and bad AI. Now, to be fair, just about every 3D strategy game I've ever played, or at the least every 4X game, would probably be better if it were 2D. There aren't a lot of things Civ V got right, but one of the things it did that was absolutely incredible and that every game should provide is the Strategic View - at the click of a button, everything became a sharp, clear, top-down 2D display. But I digress. The problem with AI is that, like writing, it's something that you can't improve just by throwing more money or more personnel at it. This also means that, unlike things like graphics or sound, it isn't really something where we can expect it to improve alongside technology. Don't get me wrong, there's certainly an extent to which good AI is limited by technology, but I think we've surpassed that for the time being. Making good AI is no longer an issue of a lack of processing power.

I think the bigger issue is development cycles and games becoming more complex - not more complex in terms of game mechanics, but more complex in terms of the number of moving pieces that need to be coordinated. For example, Civ V is not more complex than Civ IV, but the introduction of City States means you have to also develop AI for small, largely passive players, as well as teach the existing AI how to interact with these. Like I said, more moving pieces. Or for a non-strategy example, Oblivion had much simpler mechanics than earlier games in the series, but with the sudden need to program every AI in the game to have its own schedule and to be able to procedurally generate conversations with other AI, you're adding a whole new layer to what you have to program, and it's no surprise the AI was impressively stupid as a result.

 

[flyingjohn]

I think you are over glorifying the old strategy games ai,especially heroes which is terrible in all iterations regardless of 3d.
Also "King's Bounty 3D - no AI at all, you can play both games WITHOUT BUYING ANY TROOPS!!! " is a blatant lie.
In order for you to get good troops you need to buy them,getting fodder from the map will not work since it is fodder and it will be destroyed easily.
And yes you can do a no loss run,but only with specific units and spells that you need to know beforehand in order to pull it off.
I mean any enemy hero with archers and spells will give you losses.

ROFL. I also forget to mention that you can do it on "impossible" /Dr. Evil.
Since it seems you do not possess the capacities to come up with this on your own, I will sell this info to you for a measly 100 brofists(you can do that by brofisting my 100 posts).

Yes and and master of orion ai is the new sky net according to you.
Look nostalgia is great but,the older strategy games didn't have amazing ai and modern ai is actually worse but not by 100 percent like you make it out to be.
In fact civ5 ai is the same ai as in civ4 but with one major issue,it has no way to unify multiple units under a stack and therefore it looks worse then civ 4.
If you removed stacks and added denouncing to civ4 you would get the same ai.
Also i guarantee the kings bounty thing is either an exploit or a bug,or possibly both.And i doubt your exploit applies to every single 3d bounty game.

Also can you name any example of the ai actually being worse in the tactical or sim city aspect instead of the "we added a new feature without adjusting the ai",because that seems to be mostly what happens with modern strategy ai.

 

[whatevername]

Yes and and master of orion ai is the new sky net according to you.
Look nostalgia is great but,the older strategy games didn't have amazing ai and modern ai is actually worse but not by 100 percent like you make it out to be.
In fact civ5 ai is the same ai as in civ4 but with one major issue,it has no way to unify multiple units under a stack and therefore it looks worse then civ 4.
If you removed stacks and added denouncing to civ4 you would get the same ai.
Also i guarantee the kings bounty thing is either an exploit or a bug,or possibly both.And i doubt your exploit applies to every single 3d bounty game.

Also can you name any example of the ai actually being worse in the tactical or sim city aspect instead of the "we added a new feature without adjusting the ai",because that seems to be mostly what happens with modern strategy ai.

Those are blatant lies and stuff, but what I'm interested in is: are you going to buy the blatant lie bug exploit bug-exploit strategy for 100 brofists or you can't afford it?

 

[Turjan]

They are still in the process of changing this game around.

DEV Diary: Galactic Civilizations Fall 2017
November 28, 2017 12:50:00 PM from Demigod Forums

Spoiler

Winter is coming. And so is Galactic Civilizations III v2.7. This version has been in the works for a long time as a general, all around, polish pass on everything in the game.


New Data Manager

This is a boring feature that most people won't care about, but for those of you who have a lot of custom civilizations, you will find game load times to be much faster. This is because the data management used to be handled by an external process that was single threaded. This caused some headaches because some anti-virus programs would flag this behavior. The new data manager integrated with the game and multi-core.

Procedural Planet AI first past

This is a feature we've been working on for a long time that is finally starting to get integrated into the public version. Essentially, the AI looks at the state of the galaxy, its empire, its planet, and uses this data to prioritize what should be built on its planets. The AI still uses the governors.xml as a guide but is no longer at its total mercy.

Bug fixes

As we've added bigger map sizes, more modding support, and more steam workshop support, we've also uncovered bugs that these features expose. Thus, the vast majority of the work on 2.7 has been put into fixing things that would come to bite players way late in the game. This also has a significant benefit for multiplayer fans who will find the game a lot more robust in late game MP.

Fan Service

Features like being able to toggle between turn number and date, making planetary improvements more destructible, more AI focus on farm production, and balance updates have been added based on player feedback, plus lots of other little touches.

Future DLC

Since the game's release over two years ago, we've released 9 DLC and 2 expansion packs for the game. The DLC does do pretty well, but they cause us a lot of PR grief.

Expansions are made by the engineering team and take about a year to do each. DLC is made by the artists so that they have sufficient work to do during this time.

Some of the DLC has to do with providing more story based campaigns to fill out the game universe. In order:

1. Rise of the Terran Alliance (basically the GalCiv I story)
2. Altarian Prophecy (remainder of GalCiv I story)
3. Revenge of the Snaithi (pre-GalCiv II story)

We had planned:

• Dread Lords (GalCiv II story)
• Dark Avatar (rest of GalCiv II story, would bring back the Korath)

But like I said, we take a lot of grief online because people just see a bunch of DLC and think the game is just incomplete or something.

So for now, we've made staffing changes and we are currently in full development towards the next major expansion. We're pretty excited about this as it lets us do some really interesting things.

The next expansion

We will be announcing the next expansion in January. It will focus overwhelmingly on politics and governance. It will also have some goodies for those who have Mercenaries and Crusade.

The Crusade & The Apocalypse

Most people play Galactic Civilizations because it provides a deep and engrossing sandbox experience. When I wrote the first Galactic Civilizations game 25 years ago from my dorm room, I thought it important that the game not have random, generic species to go up against. I was a big fan of Sid Meier's Civilization and my love of history allowed me to instantly connect to the Mongols (those bastards), Gandhi, etc. Thus were born the 5 core races that make up Galactic Civilizations: The Drengin, the Arceans, the Altarians, the Torians, and the Yor.

I wasn't able to do much work on GalCiv III itself but I did provide the outline for the first half of the story I wanted it to tell. When I took over the GalCiv III project, I called my version "Crusade" (hence GalCiv III: Crusade). The second part of the story, which hasn't been told yet, is called the Apocalypse.

If you've kept up with the GalCiv story all these years, you know that the Terran Alliance is a contradiction at times. The Drengin have routinely commented that the humans are hypocrites because they hold out the velvet glove of diplomacy but underneath it is an iron fist. For GalCiv I and GalCiv II, the humans tried really, really hard to rise above their more brutal tendencies. And what was their reward? Betrayal, and near-total destruction at the end of GalCiv II.

Thus, GalCiv III begins with our main character returning from a pocket universe brimming with Precursor weapons. The humans are outraged and have the means to exact total vengeance. Thus between now and when GalCiv III is "completed" - in the sense that it won't have a dedicated dev team on it anymore - some day in the future, the second half of that story must be told.

Next up

Galactic Civilizations III has reached around 600,000 units sold on Steam alone (not counting other channels like GOG and overseas). Because of the nature of digital distribution (versus the old retail model), it sill almost certainly become the most successful version of the game yet. It was also the first game made on Stardock's new game engine (Cider), which is a native 64-bit, multi-core engine. If one looks at where the game was at 1.0 and where it is today (2.61) it's a pretty dramatic progression thanks to the team getting better and better at using the new engine. We are incredibly excited about where things will go in the future with it.

Cheers!

Who knows, they probably wanted to call the next expansion "Apocalypse", too. Let's see whether they will stick with it.

GalCiv DEV Journal: You're in for an AI treat

Spoiler

December 20, 2017 12:29:00 PM from Demigod Forums


Just in time for Christmas we released version 2.71 which is almost strictly about AI tweaks based on player feedback and saved games. Now, someone might ask "Why do you need save games to make the AI do [obvious thing]?". The answer is that with so many different ways of playing the game (both in terms of game setup and in-game strategies) it turns out people play the game very differently from one another. It's one of the reasons why you have most people who think the AI is really good and some people who think the AI is a total push-over. It's not that the latter group are cheating or even exploiting, they have simply discovered a strategy that is unbeatable.

But as much as version 2.71 improves the AI, I'd like to give you a sneak preview of 2.8...



Game AI understood
Over the years, I've written a lot of different types of AI and I've generally tended to make what can broadly be called instanced adaptive AI. That is, the AI performs a series of tests on itself on the background to see how it is doing and makes a series of adjustments based on how it does on that test. This worked really well in GalCiv II for the most part

When Stardock made Galactic Civilizations III, I wasn't really involved in its design and the team chose to go with "modding" as its focus. That is, let the player have a bunch of XML files to modify how the AI works. The problem I have with that system is that it only really works if you get an AI modder who is performing the adaptation for you.

When I returned to GalCiv III for the Crusade expansion, I began working with this system to make it more adaptive. When I joined, there were 8 key areas that the "moddable AI" wasn't really suited for:

1. Exploring space that adapts to the size of the map
2. Picking technologies to research
3. Putting together a fleet based on the state of the galaxy.
4. Designing its ships
5. Choosing what ships to build based on the state of the galaxy
6. Knowing how much escort a transport needs
7. Building up its planets based on the state of the game
8. Building up its planets in the right order based on the state of the game.

Not all 8 are equally important but all 8 need to be addressed, imo, before GalCiv III can claim the AI crown from GalCiv II: Dark Avatar.

Version 2.5 of the game was the first version to start to tackle this:

2.5: Putting together a fleet based on the state of the galaxy.

2.6: Building up its planets based on the state of the game

2.71: Exploring space that adapts to the size of the map

Those 3 items make a huge difference to the way the game plays. Being able to right-size its fleet size is crucial. You don't want an endless stream of tiny fleets uselessly attacking you and it does no good if the AI waits forever to send out some mega fleet. It was version 2.5 that really addressed this and based on what I've read on forums and Reddit I think was the key AI feature that helped word-of-mouth on the game.

Today's update, 2.71 is pretty crucial for those crazies that play on really large maps. The moddable AI had very fixed ways of exploring the galaxy and as we've increased the map size over time, the AI had very limited abilities to adapt. Contrary to what people who lose the game would have you believe, the AI can't "see" the planets. It has to explore them. It has its own FOW just like you (and that's one reason the AI uses so much memory -- every tile has to hold the FOW state for up to 255 players and there's a ludicrous number of tiles on the largest map size.

Version 2.8
At 2.5, the AI satisfied most people. At 2.71, we are definitely in "diminishing" returns. But 2.8 is something I'm really excited about. Here's a sneak preview screenshot:



So this is from a game I was playing last night. That's 3 enemy fleets with with transports. On normal difficulty. Things didn't go well for me after that. Which isn't to say my work is done. While 2.8 addresses the moddable AI fleet governor (yea, there's an XML file you can mess with that says what must be in an AI fleet that no one has ever touched) to have that fleet adapt based on the player's needs, it doesn't deal with the moddable ship design template which affects the quality of those fleets (so you end up with meh enemy ships). HIgher difficulty levels can fix that and frankly, 17 "meh" ships will still wipe out most players.

The other thing about that screenshot is that each of those fleets is traveling at 7 moves per turn. This is due to the AI adapting its research path based on the state of the galaxy.

Next up is having the ORDER in which the AI builds improvements be based on its needs rather than based on modding. At this point, you probably wonder, what happens to the modding? The answer, nothing good. Moddable AIs are a bad idea imo. A good AI should work in a way that is well beyond our understanding. Not because it's "smart" but because it should be very complex.

My job, as the AI guy, is to simply come up with tests the AI uses to measure itself and adapt to it. That's how I've been doing it since the OS/2 days. The more data I have access to, the better tests I can perform and the AI makes adjustments based on that.

I don't do this for you guys, I do it for me.

Because an adaptive AI will surprise you. Last night when those 3 fleets showed up, I woke my poor wife up when I yelled "Oh shit!" because I was totally not expecting that. Until the adaptive transport fleet AI was made, the AI had never put together a fleet group like this.

After the adaptive improvement construction is handled, next up is the AI ship building being adaptive. That's going to take some time.

My Fuel
As some of you know, what motivates me is you guys. That's why I harp on the Steam reviews so much. If people don't like the game, I don't really want to work on it. If you haven't already reviewed the game, I encourage you to do so.

There is a small chance that I might get an opt in of my first pass of 2.8 before Christmas. But people are starting to go on vacation so no promises. In the meantime you can hang out with us on Discord.

Both the latest updates are mostly AI updates and balancing changes.

Patch notes:

2.71
Updates

• AI will construct more survey ships and use them to explore and find anomalies more aggressively
• AI is more likely to construct scouts while there are unexplored areas around stars
• AI is more inclined to focus on fewer enemies even if it hates them in order to concentrate its might on individual enemies.
• AI will ignore military power if necessary to go to war against enemies of its allies
• AI will now use its colony ships, freighters and constructors to scout FOW areas rather than wait for scouts and other ships to uncover FOW.
• AI military ships will act as scouts early Game
• AI ships better at exploring for potential colony targets by exploring stars over the void.
• Precursor food artifact benefit reduced
• Crusade change: Unforgiving cultural trait gives a 10% empire-wide production bonus.
• Base game: Changed unforgiving text to get 5% which is the amount it actually changes in the base game.

2.80
Updates 1/16

• Fixed AI related multiplayer desync bug
• AI better at early game administration resource and late game invasion legions
• Upgrading a ship to a colony ship class penalty increased.
• You can no longer colonize planets with empty colony ships. This also addresses a problem where the Yor AI could quickly colonize the entire galaxy.
• You can no longer launch colony ships from a starbase without population

Gameplay

• AI now will adjust how big its fleets need to be based on the assignment of the fleet. Thus, scouts and survey ships don't need escorts while mega fleets now need larger fleets.
• AI smarter at picking quality ship designs.
• AI much better at going after key technologies based on the conditions of the game
• Streamlined the base game tech tree.
• Tweaked the AI fleet governor to use defenders.
• Adjusted the culture tree to be more in line with the planetary improvements
• Set default colony ship population to 1.0
• Minimum population for colony ships increased from 0.5 to 1.
• Decreased the spacing between civilization starting positions and pirates
• Base game laser weapon now comes with Militarization tech.
• Nerfed several of the crazy Lost Treasures DLC rewards
• Navigation Center is now a Galactic Wonder
• Eliminated ship moves going up based on the level of certain planetary improvements
• Galactic Navigation Center global moves decreased from 3 to 1 (yeeesh!) ...and it now longer provides an additional 0.5 points per level! (double yeesh!)
• Galactic Navigator's Guild benefit reduced from providing 4 moves per turn to 1! ...and it no longer provides an additional 0.5 points per level in moves!
• Galactic Mainframe research bonus increased from 0.3 to 0.5
• Starport level benefit increased from 0.5 to 1
• Synthetic Race population increase Promethion cost reduced from 10 to 1
• Synthetic Race population increase Duranitum cost reduced from 5 to 1
• Synthetic Race population increase improvement increases by 0.5 instead of 1
• Changed default invasion from 1 legions to 2.

Bugs

• Base Game: Custom factions with the "Raider Ship Style" will now get the proper ships awarded by events and anomalies.
• Fixed crash in battle tooltip if privateer is stationed by itself in a starbase or shipyard
• Fixed several improvements tooltips that were saying they were both "one per player" and "one per galaxy"
• Fixed typos and sTough
• Added dialog if the game fails to start because the graphics driver fails to initialize. This is usually caused by out-of-date drivers.

Well, all the recent changes means the game plays differently now, but I mentioned this already last time. I have the feeling that some of the DLCs may have lost their shine, too. Anyway, if the game plays better now, that's a good trade-off.

 

[Frogboy]

When I took over the design of GalCiv III last year, I went through all the feedback from RPGCodex, QT3, our own forums, OO and other sites and just played and played.

I designed GalCiv II but during GalCiv III was working on Offworld Trading Company and Ashes of the Singularity. The base GalCiv III design was made by Jon Shafer (Civ V) and Paul Boyer who had a bit different vision to what I have traditionally done.

So first, we did Crusade. Then we did 2.5 which was a general balance update and game mechanic review.

Now, we're working on what will become 2.8 which reigns in some of the unintentional exploit behaviors (i.e. ending up with ships with 100 moves, fleets with a million attack, etc.). But also, the AI is moving away from the scripted design it had for the base game to one that is loosely a genetic algorithm.

 

[Turjan]

I am curious where that journey will take us. I have a bit of a soft spot for GalCiv. At least I played GalCiv 2 extensively for a very long time.


_________________________________________________________________

On a different note, here are some rather superficial observations about a test game with CalCiv3 + Crusade:

I had played a game as Terran Alliance before 2.71 came out. I played it on Normal first, so I cannot really tell much about the AI. Galaxy size was "huge", which is smack-dab in the middle (4 more sizes below, 4 above this). I let the RNG pick four opponents for me, and the result was unusally mellow (Slyne, Altarians, Irididum Corp, Krynn). The point that I went for "Neutral" alignment (before I knew who was on the map) made it even easier, as 2 of those civs have matching alignments. I tried some of the non-military victory conditions in order to get a feel for their feasibility, and that's certainly easier without Drengin or Yor present. The new "super spy" race was absent, too.

My immediate neighbors were the Slyne and the Krynn. The Slyne are neutral and were quite okay to deal with, but they are to some extent militaristic. It's funny that the alignment difference posed such a big penalty for my relations with the Altarians (they are insufferable anyway, but this came on top of it), but nothing a bit of diplomacy couldn't patch over. The Slyne and the Altarians started a war, with the Slyne obviously superior. In order not to fall back too much, I conquered the Krynn at that time. Their influence started to rise alarmingly, but as long as their military was as pathetic as it was, they were easy pushovers. Not sure whether it was the difficulty setting and/or the fact that they didn't have any friends, but they actually surrendered their remaining colonies to me. I later noticed that they had also been warring against the Iridium Corp at some point.

I got lots of requests from the Altarians to help them. While I refused, I actually gave them some relatively good military techs when they looked already rather stripped of power. While they managed to conquer one of their lost planets back, they lost control over their space soon. Not sure whether it was this kind of help, but they surrendered their remaining planets also to me when the war was completely lost. At this point I could actually activate a diplomatic victory. I found it nice that this actually worked without hiccups. In a way, both surrender decisions were kind of logical.

Going for ascension or culture victory was comparatively boring, especially the latter. I liked that the Slyne and Iridium Corp were not just carbon copies of each other. The Slyne got angry when I took Ascension crystals, when I tried to culture flip their planets, and they even put military stations in my space (I'm a bit miffed that there was no option to complain about that; placing military stations in other territory should be treated differently from others). The Iridium Corp didn't care much, even when they lost planets. They even told me that they didn't respect my borders, treaty or not. They gave lots of gifts and also wanted to have several. I noticed their power was rising, so this was not completely without danger. They constantly asked me to wage war against others though (I don't think they left anyone out). Anyway, they took the alliance offer when it was given, and they were generally no issue at all. The Slyne ended on "furious". As I had colonized a planet in their home system, there wasn't much I could do about it. They were very good at preventing most of the culture flips though. The "citizen" system is rather good at stopping this, even on "Normal".

That said, I'm relatively sure that I only won this because of the difficulty setting. The look at the planets that came to me from other civs showed me that they used them rather efficiently. I had mostly produced administrators in order to be able to plaster space with stations, and I'm still not quite sure when to "promote" them. Nobody was spying by the way. The Krynn had this secret weapon:

That's the secret behind their constant influence increase, a Krynn-specific citizen. Most of my localized citizens were now from all four other species (this is the rest):

I guess there are much more intelligent ways to play the game than what I did, so I should probably try higher difficulty next in order to get a better feel for what not to do.


I would compare GalCiv3 + Crusade to GalCiv3 alone, but alas, although both installations are on different Windows and different Steam accounts, they are on the same machine, and the Stardock client prevents the base game alone from starting, as it sees Crusade in an alleged "state of partial installation".

 

[LizardWizard]

New expansion released: Intrigue Expansion

Very creative Stardock

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

what matters is it works. does it work? i've been so bored by galciv3... might be stupid, but i suffered more was the extremely limited number of tiles available on planets. and the races not so different from each other as before. and maybe a thousand reasons more i'm forgetting because the game bored me so much.

 

[MilesBeyond]

I have heard rumours that in its current state GalCiv 3 is substantially better than it was at release, to the point of being a better game than GalCiv 2 or Endless Space. Can anyone confirm or deny this? I'm very reluctant to buy the game for myself, given its rocky start and Stardock's less-than-stellar track record.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

better? yes. still boring? yes indeed.

 

[Nirvash]

How can something be more boring than stellaris or endless space?

 

[coldcrow]

Let's say that I want a game with: Galciv3's engine, endless space 2's art/sound and Moo2/3's gameplay....

 

[DakaSha V]

Let's not

 

[DakaSha V]

I got the free version, and jesus christ is this interface garbage. Is the AI at least decent by now? Or is it another case of the AI saying a bunch of scripted shit that, for whatever reason, worked really well for marketing the "ok" AI of the second game

edit: In my search to answer this question, I came across a classic brad response: https://forums.galciv3.com/487524/new-smarter-ai-and-ships-icons-bug

 

[Hobo Elf]

Why doesn't the DLC bundle include all the expansions? With the bundle + Intrigue expac I'd have to pay 39€, which is way to steep for me when it comes to DLC. Wish Stardock had put all the individual DLC on sale so I could just buy the Expansions instead of buying the bundle that come with a bunch of trash that I have no interest in, i.e the story campaigns and the freaking soundtrack. As it is they only bothered to put one individual DLC on sale, and only for 10% off. Stardock needs to work on their sales and DLC bundles.

 

[Vagiel]

12 euros full bundle. Base game and from what I understand all DLC. For those on the fence I don't think there will be any better offer soon.

By the way it must not have sold well in order to be so heavily discounted.

 

[mastroego]

About 12$ from 97$. Huge discount.
I'm almost tempted...
Then again, of course, I highly doubt even the full package with all DLCs was ever worth 97$ (!) to begin with.
Perhaps that's one reason it didn't sell, incidentally.

So, the point is... is it worth 12$?
Or is it another well-meaning but ultimately uninspired title?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i was tempted by that offer, really tempted, but then i remembered i recently tried the *cough*cough* other version and i just couldn't stand it, starting from something odd in how slow and cumbersone the interface is.

 

[razvedchiki]

Where it is sold 12 bucks?

 

[Rahdulan]

I got Gold for 6,11€ because I already had some stuff. Have a feeling that 10€ OST still bloated the price, though.

 

[Turjan]

I should get the Gold stuff in some sale at some point probably. I'm not sure, but much of the stuff from the early DLC's has made it into the game, anyway.

Besides the "Intrigue" DLC, we also got some Star Control: Origins races as a DLC recently:



Given there seem to be 12 alien races in Star Control: Origins, that means two more possible DLC's
Anyway, I actually like the quirky additions, even if it's not a DLC that is in any way "useful". They give some character to the game. I think mods were supposed to fill the gap the loss of minor civilizations as someone you could talk to tore, but I'm not sure this worked entirely out.

While it has been rumored that GalCiv3 had already seen its last expansion, this seems not to be the case. There were some loose ends from GalCiv2 that seem to get tied up in the next expansion (source here):

"Sometime early next year, we’ll be seeing the next – and likely the last – expansion for Galactic Civilizations 3. Information is just now starting to come out about it and I’ve been given permission by Brad Wardell to share what the main features will be.

The Korath are returning!

Can you guess who these guys are?
First, let’s review the major features that are coming:

1. Hypergates
2. Cargo Ships
3. Artifacts
4. At least two new factions (featured above!)

So you’re probably asking, “well, what the hell are those things?”. I’ll do my best to answer based on the limited information that I have.

First, Hypergates are basically space roads. When your ships enter these gate lines, their hyperdrive gets a big boost. I’m unsure how difficult they will be to build or how resource intensive they will be, but it definitely sounds like they’ll be key strategic structures used to quickly move your forces – but beware, don’t put them somewhere that your enemies can take advantage of them!

Cargo ships will be ships capable of moving production from your more established planets to your newer, or less developed, colonies, thus getting them up and running much sooner. Be careful that they aren’t intercepted by pirates or enemy factions, though!

Artifacts, on the other hand, are powerful items that are present on some planets that will allow the owner to do unique and possibly-game or situation-changing things. There’s no word yet on what kind of things those artifacts will allow you to do, but the idea sounds great, as items like that would certainly create a lot of tension between empires. I know I will be invading planets for them…

That’s the extent of my knowledge of the upcoming Galactic Civilizations 3 expansion. Brad Wardell was kind enough to allow me to share this much and I imagine that he’ll have much more to say about it early next year."


Well, I guess the Drath got an overhaul, if I see that correctly. Let's see how this will turn out.