Hhhhhhmmmmmmmmm I am kinda hungry... DONUT it is!!!

The galaxies are big I don’t know if adding depth is going to be manageable. The largest maps already stress some impressive systems. I don’t think adding another dimension should really be what they focus resources on. 

Also I would be against wrap around galaxies. It doesn’t make sense for a logically not that a video game has too but I am opposed.

I am in favor of an extremely late game tech called worm hole founding technology that requires you to finish the entire tech tree with some stupid expensive research at the end that would let us build targeted worm holes so we can mop up large map games a little faster. I don’t want this to influence games unless the game is already over.

I don’t need to play an extra 180 turns once I’ve won. Yes I could turn on surrenders but damnit the Iconians surrendered to the Yor and I turned it off permanently after that.

So, I've been watching YouTube videos of ship combat from other 4X games, and they look suitably epic for space settings with massive fleets on both sides being visible in the same frame. By contrast, GalCiv3's battle viewer feels like it pales in comparison.

Part of it is because the battle viewer may have various camera options, but none that's centred around the midpoint of the ongoing battle at a 45° angle. The best you can do with it is the "Top Down" view - which makes both fleets look like pieces on a chess board more than anything - or the "Free" view, which is finicky to control at best.

For GC4, you guys should take a leaf from - yes, gonna have to go there - Stellaris. Take a look at this to see what I mean:

I know, the battle itself looks like a right tangled mess, but you gotta admit the angle of the camera is better than the one we currently get with GC3.

Hell, we don't even have to go that far afield; you can look closer to home, and take a leaf from Sins of a Solar Empire instead:

GC4 ship combat should hopefully look more similar to these.

On another note, please overhaul the entire Trade mechanic.

Currently in order to build a Trade route, I have to design and build a freighter ship that I would otherwise not have cause to build very often at all.

In fact, my freighter may not have enough range to get to the planet of the other race that I want to trade with. Which means I have to research Support modules and build Starbases to extend the range sufficiently such that my freighter can reach its destination.

Also, which planet in my empire should I build my freighter from, and which planet on the other side should I choose to send it to? It's not at all clear how the choice of one planet or another affects how much profit I can stand to make from the trade route.

Lastly, once the trade route is established, I get... what's practically peanuts compared with my other sources of income, such as Wealth buildings and (especially) Tourism.

It's a helluva lot of effort for not much in terms of payoff, is what I'm saying.

For GC4:

How about simplifying the whole thing by folding it into Diplomacy?

You could research a tech that allows you to set up a Trade Treaty with another race, much like the other types like Exploration, Non-aggression etc. etc.

Once you set up a Trade Treaty with another race, it could be represented by a trade route linking the Capitals of both races.

You could then make it such that freighters are automatically produced and controlled to move back and forth along the route, just like it worked in GC2.

Or to make it more interactive, you could allow players the option to build Freighters from any of their Shipyards, which would then automatically move along the trade route as well. How much you profit from the trade route is based on how many Freighters you can build and send on it, and it gives you a reason to build a Hypergate lane across the trade route so your Freighters can benefit from it as well.

It also gives more possible options on the Diplomacy front. For example, you could make Trade Sanctions a thing that players can use.

If this is about changing the battle viewer in GC3 to feature improved graphics, then sure, I'd agree. No point wasting development time updating GC3 any further at this point in time.

But we're talking about a brand new GC4 here. If you're making a brand new game, in a genre where there's now competition in the likes of Stellaris... well, it could help with the marketing, you know? Might as well take the chance to do it once, and get it right the first time.

Now as far as trade goes. I think it that trade routes should be worth more money. Since I’ve been playing they are always the least amount of money you get from anything that you are trying to make more money. Maybe different kind of routes. When establishing a route I wish they could be faster..

here’s what is going to happen if f we try to just make trade routes more money, and that’s it. Anybody remember adjacencies, or trade. I do I’ve been here since Dark Avatar. Trade 1,000,000 credits per week. I liked the manufacturing in galactic civilizations two. Now let’s describe three in the beginning. Adjancies were introduced that enhanced the manufacturing above two. They kept lowering this to balance this, and the hey swapped hub bonuses for improvement bonuses. Adjancencies eventually were made pointless for improvements. 
my point is if They increase trade, they need to lower some other economic thing to balance it, so there won’t be a lot of complaints to change it. If there s they won’t stop when it’s balanced. They will keep going. 

Good morning (for me) Brad,

I love a lot of these ideas, especially the 'sponsor' world idea. Have you thought (yet) about competing 'sponsor' mechanisms. Taking a page from from one of my favorite military sci-fi authors there might be several paths of sponsorship available to a world/child world.

• Government - directly sponsored/colonized via a Bureau of Colonization (BuCol) in which the government gets all of the generated resources, but at a lower efficiency. However this could be offset by the ability to directly manage the planet (and it's children) via the 'Citizen' mechanism.
  
  
• Corporations - which can be managed indirectly via economic or regulatory pressure from the government but not directly. This might be a mechanism whereby corporations actually are competing with the BuCol to colonize worlds, and in which the government only receives partial tax/research etc.
  
  In this scenario there are also a variety (IMO) of potential event paths leading to government getting direct control - rebellion, corruption rising to the level of government intervention, revolution, change of forms of government, etc.
  
  This could also require players to put more thought into what government policies and/or research paths they select as super powerful corporations might just decide to break away or simply stop paying taxes/resources if they really don't like the government policies.
  
  
• Private citizens - auction off rights to entire planets (depending on your form of government maybe?), or allow individual non-corporate groups to colonize planets subject to certain charters (right of free movement, minimum/maximum taxation, etc.)
  
  
• Institutional - Universities and/or schools might colonize an entire planet for any number of reasons. Medical treatments for rare diseases, specific types of research (growth, warfare, engineering, etc.).
  
  This could play into things like decisions regarding regulations - turn a blind eye to what we're doing and we'll double our output but you might have a huge PR scandal down the road affecting your next election
  
  Or perhaps subsidies traded for increased returns - fund us with 100bc for 15 years and you'll probably get a quantum leap in laser technology....but the CEO might wind up in prison for fraud and you get nothing but a headache, a toxic waste planet to clean up, and now you HAVE to directly govern the planet for a couple decades.
  
  A planetary 'Center for Galactic Medical Studies' might require a huge amount of funding but could generate influence across the entire galaxy as it might treat diseases for all carbon/silicon species and advance your own civ growth rate and health at the same time. But it might carry the risk of a virulent disease outbreak. A single species outbreak might trigger a war with another race with whom you already have tenuous relations, or perhaps a cross-species outbreak might trigger everyone to cut off trade with you and possibly collapse your economy.

I'd also love to see templates for planet development paths. The ship templates work so well for me in GC III that I rarely customize ships. But being able to define a template along the lines of 'build two of the best factories available, then build a market, then two of the best research generators, then a spaceport, etc.' would be really helpful.

Every culture has blind spots. It would be interesting if there were 'cultural' dead ends in the tech trees that pseudo-randomly developed. For example assume that in any particular game the Terrans never got the 'lightbulb' for hyperlanes. So they might acquire the base tech elsewhere, but perhaps they can never develop the downstream on their own, or maybe they can at an increased but depreciating penalty compared to other civs. But in another game the 'no hyperlane lightbulb' applies to all but one other civ. So hyperlanes have to be acquired via espionage or trade.

And what if tech trees changed slightly from game to game in that a particular branch of technology might come from different parent(s)? If this was coupled with a 'fog-of-war' limiting the tech-tree view to maybe only the next level or two it would make research choices MUCH more critical and 'play these tech trees to win the game' strategies nearly obsolete.

It seems like it could also be entertaining if there were some direct cultural/approval ramifications to entire paths of research such as we see regarding stem cell research, animal testing, fission power, or biowarfare. Simply funding R&D in that path might impact approval negatively (or positively).

Well I would be ok with make my tactical battles an option. 
i never thought research paths failed. It wasn’t a good idea to l t you research every path in the beta, and then take it away. A path needs to be a path, not a tech. If you choose a path it doesn’t recombine like it never happened.

still a fan of civ four style civics we could have tech paths. There would end up being 25+ options instead of three. 
this time let’s have more than three ideologies. This looks to much like alignments. Even civilization had five. Let’s name them better than what still sounds like good vs evil. 
still liked my idea about civs combining research. 
I like the idea of different civilizations having different play styles. Galactic civilization 2 had an editor in the ultimate let’s make a better one. 

I'm not sure if this has been asked somewhere else, but will we have an opportunity to buy a Founder's package similar to what we did in the beginning of GalCivIII?  I'd be interested in one.

Your best bet right now is the flgold edition.

Very much worth it. For one payment, which, if it's like the Founder Edition of Galactic Civilizations III, will be $100.00USD, you get access from Day 1, all DLCs and all Expansions. You also got to name a star (which explains all the non Sci-fi or Scientific or Serious star names out there!) and some cool art and founders-only cool looking goodies.

One Large Word Of Warning: If you invest in the Founders Edition, you will have an Alpha game, which Stardock went out of their way to tell us Founders would not be fun for a while. Some Founders ignored this message, which would show up on the GalCivIII Alpha Load Screen and so was kind of hard to ignore. So they'd get upset about the lack of wild fun to be had. Some even asked for refunds. I don't know if that ended well...

You trade your fun for making suggestions as to further refinements, improvement, nerfs, removals etc etc. Obviously, you aren't going to end up with a game entirely made how you'd like it as there's a lot of people's different/clashing ideas to take into account (as well as Stardock's own plans/wishes, natch!), but for all that, I really think being a Founder for III was well worth it.

The last two post said it right. What’s ROI. I very satisfactorily got the game I visualized that galactic could be. 

I love Founder's Editions but there probably won't be one for GC4.  We might do something after release where people can get a lifetime upgrade so they get everything we plan to make.