Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2394

The continued refinement of Galactic Civilizations III

Greetings!

Thanks to you guys continuing to buy our DLC we are able to keep developing Galactic Civilizations III with new features and improvements.

The last few updates have been focusing heavily on quality of life and the latest version, v3.8 continues that trend. Below are some of features we've recently added that we hope you find useful.

Adjust difficulty mid-game

Finding yourself doing really well mid game or struggling more than you thought?

Under the options->Gameplay you can now adjust difficulty on the fly and it will update the AI's accordingly!

UI Cleanup

We don't necessarily respond to every post (or even most) but we do read them. So many of our updates are pretty minor. A text change here. A font tweak there. Here are a few examples:

We now display a little more information about ships than we used to. For example, tactical speed is now displayed.

More information, such as research, is displayed in the planet list.

Capturing Ascension crystals now makes it clear how long it will take players to win through that means.

The shipyard list displays how much production is going to it.

Immersion

This is hard to quantify but we have been going through the game making small text changes as well as making sure the default ships from every species has a colorful name rather than simply the ship class.

Also a better use of fonts to better emphasize who is speaking and what options are.

The work continues

We are keen on hearing your thoughts! We hope you like what we've been doing!

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Is it possible to take another look at ship and sensor ranges and possibly adjust them according to the map size (the bazaar ships too)? I just started a game on a medium sized galaxy against gifted ai and the terran alliance gobbled up a quarter of the galaxy within the first 15 turns. Now I'm a fan of an aggressive ai but is the ai omniscient of habitable worlds and resources or does it need to scout? On bigger maps this super fast expansion is not so much a problem because expansion will be countered after the first push by the expanding costs. On smaller maps however the map is already filled when the costs are starting to slow down expansion.

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Quoting Belgian Bro6789,

reply 1

On bigger maps this super fast expansion is not so much a problem because expansion will be countered after the first push by the expanding costs. On smaller maps however the map is already filled when the costs are starting to slow down expansion.

I agree (playing on Crusade): the admin mechanic is not working at higher difficulties, for galaxies with less than about 20 habitable planets per AI. Judging by what I've seen the AIs send out super fast, super range colony ships all across the galaxy until they hit a planet, and these may lie well within your immediate neighbourhood, depriving the player of some of the best planets. If there are many AIs, it may be bad enough to rob the player of any opportunity to expand and reach the few planets that are left.

That early in the game the ludicrous advantage the AIs have in this area breaks the game balance because the player may not get a chance to expand - and the administrator limitation has nothing to do with that!

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I have an issue where I can't tag Civ to appear as random or not. Otherwise, everything else works fine.

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GalCivius

Join Date 11/2010

+12

Adjusting difficulty mid-game sounds really like a nice idea.

If I could throw in suggestions:

It would be cool to have some features as options, like:

- play with or without mercenary bazar to hire merc ships

- play with or without galactic market to buy resources

- play with or without hyperlanes/hypergates

I realize the devs put a lot of effort into those things, and in general I do like those additions (of the XPs I got so far: Mercenaries, yes, Intrigue/Retribution not yet, but will get them)

So it may seem counter-intuitive to put them off again. But I also think this could add an extra layer of challenge if for example you can't just buy the super scout early on, or hire mercs whenever you want/need.

Yeah, you could just decide not to do it, but it's not the same IMO.

And if I deactivate for example Mercs completely I'd also lose the other additions it brought, and I may like to play sometimes with, sometimes without some of those points.

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Maybe the Korx could be a minor civ that ask you if they can build a bazaar near your homeworld once you come into contact with them. Perhaps it should then still be an option in the galaxy setup menu to disable either the market or the mercenaries.

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+135

I think you should put the game difficulty controls in the victory status screen. You could change the difficulty while changing victory conditions. I think it would be a better home there.

As for ship names having names other than ship class, I don't like this. It make it harder to figure out a ship's class.

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

The user interface could be better still. I'm not saying it is worst than two, which it is not. I'm not saying some of it isn't awesome which it is. I'm talking about double clicking. I used to be able to double click on mercenaries to select them. I can't anymore. I pick the tech tree when I select a tech. I still can't double click on a tech when I know what tech I want to take it to the main screen. I can't double click on a improvement on the colony screen when I change my mind. I should be able to go on the square, or the build order to do this.

I could use a list of planets order by faction with their logo to find them. I'm thinking in particular traders to help prevent diplomatic incidents on the main screen.

On the ship list I use this to move my ships, and check my territory for monsters... Sometimes I build things, or plant colonies. When I do this my ship list start over. This is why this is a problem I can't memorise the names of all my ships when I'm just checking location. When you have 50+ ships this is impracticle for me. So if I have to find my previous location in the ship list this is impracticle. Instead go to the next ship instead. I'm talking about my place after I build something...

In two there were a list of events that happened. I used this when I had to remember what I did. In three this event list is missing. Now it would come in handy reporting bugs. Which brings me to my next point.

A bug I noticed seems to be affected by population. Is a choice will award a bonus to population, but it doesn't. If I knew it didn't I wouldn't select it, but since I cants check my events I can't figure out which event did this, so I can't report it either.

Ideologies benevolent is a synonym for good, while antogonist is one for evil. If you don't want to sound like ideologies then rename these, even if it would require you to change the abilities a little. Maybe four ideologies would look a little less like good vs. evil.

Can you add this as an option to bring in the jagged knife, order... As an option then the ones who don't like it can opt out. The jagged knife just couldn't manage it's planets, and the other ais doesn't act like they didn't lose a bunch of planets. This needs fixing.

Multiplayer still keeps crashing. On top of that the race type silicone civilizations change to carbon when you relode the game. It may be for custom, or not. It might be for when the game crashes or not.

I don't think the game works with a gforce gtx 1080 please change this.

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Reading about ship lists, I just remembered something: every time a fleet entres the tile of a starbase or planet, the fleet gets disbanded. If I want to move on, I need to manually select each individual ship before sending them forth. This can get rather annoying when you're dealing with high AI, high movement enemy fleets and try to steal a few tiles of movement by going through bases and planets.

Can't we have a true fleet concept where you can move and maintain the status of a fleet without disbanding upon entering an orbit?

Alternately, it would help if we could select all ships in orbit - although that may still not be optimal if you've put together a few fleets with certain properties only to find them mixed up after meeting at a base...

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Quoting Franton,

reply 8

Be able to shift-click would be nice. Currently, shift acting the same like ctrl.

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Something like a create permanent fleet button when you have a fleet. Although the game remembering merged fleets might make it more resource intense. It would be useful.

Also could we get a withdraw button if you are the attacking party. Although this is a very minor gripe it’s my own damn fault I sent the discovery ship into battle after giving away all the old copies off my escort ships in a trade for resources boondoggle.

Really that is just a band aid because you can’t fix stupid and I’m sure I’ll just make a more impressive gaffe making the whole thing moot.

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I believe the game play can be improved with a couple of simple changes on the colony build:

1- There is too much scrolling up and down, this can be improved by hiding the buildings that we cannot build.

2- On the queue when we repeat the economy help because there is nothing else to build, it will help if the repeat stop as soon a new building is available.

Thanks for your work.

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