Gal Civ 3

[sylvanllewelyn]

I wrote up a full report about my Thalans game that I did on Livestream a couple weeks ago. I'm still enjoying GC3 despite the bugs, poor balancing, and terrible interface. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much interest at Realms Beyond, judging by how dead this forum has been, and everyone at the official forums is either playing gigantic maps, or modding the game heavily, or both.

Does anyone know if there's any other place online people are playing GC3? It doesn't seem to be very popular from what I can tell.

I haven't logged on for SIX years? Wow...

And you've been streaming for over a DECADE... we're old...

Anyway, GalCiv3 freezes too much, under too many conditions. What can their tech support possibly do? And I play with a lot of buggy games. Too much stress. I'll just wait for patch 1.3, try it again, and if it freezes, wait another 3 months until patch 1.4. I'm not wasting time until the game is complete.

And they SHOULD make it complete, I already paid, so they have the money to do it.

Which is a shame, because I do think this game is good for multiplayer. Especially the whole "easy to take out planets" thing. The AI can't play that game but it's great for multiplayer. And it's fast paced.

[Kylearan]

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much interest at Realms Beyond

I haven't bought the game yet, still waiting for AI improvements. Following the official forums and now reading your game report, I'm starting to doubt that they will put much work into the AI. I see Frogboy defending the AI and more or less stating that it plays a good game.

After getting burned with Endless Legend I refuse to buy a game which horrible AI just on the promise that "It will get better!". I still have hope, though.

I'm really starting to hate "Early Access", Kickstarter and all that crap. Makes it much harder to get reliable information about the state of a game, and I suspect it also leads to different development priorities I cannot agree with.

[VarisNox]

I wrote up a full report about my Thalans game that I did on Livestream a couple weeks ago. I'm still enjoying GC3 despite the bugs, poor balancing, and terrible interface. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much interest at Realms Beyond, judging by how dead this forum has been, and everyone at the official forums is either playing gigantic maps, or modding the game heavily, or both.

Does anyone know if there's any other place online people are playing GC3? It doesn't seem to be very popular from what I can tell.

I know I still play and enjoy it, despite the issues I have with the game. I can definitely understand if these same issues cause other people to not play it, and are likely the cause of the lesser interest. There doesn't seem to be much of any community beyond the official boards.

I enjoyed that report, and I enjoy the streams as well, so thanks for those!

[Sullla]

Thanks guys, that's more or less what I thought. I looked for other GC3 communities beyond the official forums, and I couldn't find much of anything. I truly do think that Stardock messed up this game's release with the endless Early Access followed by the... whatever we have right now. It's hard to avoid the impression that GC3 is stuck in an endless unfinished beta, and that's not a very attractive selling point. If they had just waited another six months and took that time to polish and refine the game before releasing, I think GC3 would have been a much more popular game. Too late now.

If there's ever enough interest here, it would be fun to do a succession game or two. We'll see what the upcoming patches bring.

[Sirian]

If they had just waited another six months and took that time to polish and refine the game before releasing, I think GC3 would have been a much more popular game. Too late now.

I can't argue with that.

From what I can tell, there was no beta period at all, and polishing only occurred on the features that were in place during the early access period. As soon as the last feature was coded, the game shipped. They had polish time on bits and pieces, but none whatsoever on the whole. Some bits that came in late got little to no polish, either.

Still, it's that polishing of the whole, once all the features are coded, that games today tend to be lacking. I think it may be time for our community to accept that Civ4 was a serious outlier, and that it's process had more to do with Soren than with Firaxis. Soren's new game in production is getting a serious period of polish with all the features in place. It's not a TBS game, but it is MP, so thee may quite a few hungry gamers here would get a thrill from it.

GC3 lacks the smoothness of GC1, so I must confess to not having played much of it lately, even though there are parts of it that I do enjoy, and despite my hunger for a space empire game I can get in to.


I need to play more Distant Worlds. I picked that and its expansions up on a Steam Sale, and only played a couple of short games so far. Its biggest problem is the real time nature of it has me sitting around waiting or speeding things up -- the equivalent of hitting next turn a lot, except it takes more time and attention to do. But there seems to be a good game under there if that can be tolerated.

I also got my money's worth out of Endless Space, and it has some new content since then. That might be worth a revisit.

GC3 has a fairly low user score on Metacritic. I've found that to be a useful metric, much more so than the reviewers metascore. The game has untapped potential and could be brought up to speed, but will it be? And even if it is, will people still care about it at that point? I guess time will tell.

I feel like most of the industry has gone in to a funk. I agree with K about early access, crowd funding, etc. I don't want to get attached to a game and have them change everything about it that I liked -- among other things. So I avoid most Early Access like the plague. I'm not personally interested in "projects": games with potential that you hope some modder can pull out of it later. I want a finished game.

Xenonauts has been the most fun strategy game I've played in a while. It's almost a clone of the original Xcom, but that's not necessarily a negative -- and for anyone who missed Xcom, it's a must-buy. The other games that've gotten a lot of time from me this summer are Dungeon of the Endless and Gemcraft 2.


- Sirian

[Hail]

not that anyone cares, but there is an expansion announced for GalCiv3 GalCiv3:Mercenaries!

every game needs more stuff! Only by adding more content can one achieve depth!

[Sullla]

If anyone is still interested in Galactic Civ 3, I've posted some concluding thoughts on my website. While I enjoyed the time that I spent with this game, I don't think I'll be purchasing another Stardock game any time soon.

[MJW (ya that one)]

If anyone is still interested in Galactic Civ 3, I've posted some concluding thoughts on my website. While I enjoyed the time that I spent with this game, I don't think I'll be purchasing another Stardock game any time soon.

Trip actually contacted you.

If I had to guess Trip thought that MP, having much better graphics and fixing obvious holes from GalCiv2 was almost enough to justify a new game. So he had to add one more thing and picked the tight city management of Civ3 which he loves too. Now this micromanagement doesn't depend on avoiding overflow but other things that started in GalCiv2 but were not important to that game but were another feature that Frogboy tacked on. This makes at a perfect "one more thing".

Ether Trip flaked out or sensed that things wouldn't work out with Frogboy and ditched. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt because he's seemed to have learned his lesson of not trying for too much like Civ5 and he found somthing perfect which is actually impressive.

I don't think GalCiv3 matters or has mattered--one reason: being able to stack engines too much which the AI cannot handle. This breaks the game alone. I don't think it will ever be patched because too much time has passed and even if it does I'm sure Frogboy's shenanigans would make something else break. This is why this post is almost all about the drama and not the game itself. Tactics>>Strategy in the GalCiv series expect maybe the first game without the exp packs because your options are so limited.

I'll just admit that I've been tracking your website every week or so because I'm sure that you would do an amusing article on this game. It's not like you to just drop something and the shenanigans in the forums would give it a lot of meat. This feels like a great stopping point until a month or so before Civ6 releases (before that point is not worth anyone's time) so don't worry.

[VarisNox]

If anyone is still interested in Galactic Civ 3, I've posted some concluding thoughts on my website. While I enjoyed the time that I spent with this game, I don't think I'll be purchasing another Stardock game any time soon.

Good article Sullla - it's pretty much my exact feelings on the state of the game, and why I've stopped playing. The patches definitely moved mechanics in a direction I didn't like for a game like this. I've been a fan of the GalCiv series since the first game, so it's a shame to see it continue like this. I guess I'm going to have to stick with the older games and play more Master of Orion if I want to have my galactic empire 4x fix.

Honestly, it sounds like Brad wanted a paradox-like grand strategy game from his statements, so it makes me wonder why he didn't direct the company to produce a game like that instead of attempting another standard 4x game. Most 4x games are inherently micromangement heavy, since there's usually few optimal ways to play, and he seems to reject that as a concept - being "too gamey" for his liking.

In any case, it was fun while it lasted, and I'm sure it's still fun for some people. Unfortunately, I am no longer one of them.

[Sullla]

So I don't know if anyone still cares about this game, but Stardock actually increased the coercion threshold from 25% to 50% in the patch that they released this week. (This is the patch associated with their $20 expansion; how they can justify releasing an expansion while their base game has unfinished stuff everywhere is still beyond me.) Increasing that coercion threshold to 50% completely breaks the game for any kind of planetary management. You can't set *ANY* of the spending sliders above 50% without getting gigantic morale penalties. The negatives are now so high that they aren't worth doing. As a result, all three of the sliders have to stay in the narrow range between 30-50%, making planetary mangement pointless. I found the game completely unplayable when I attempted to run an opening under the new patch. You might as well just let the AI play things out at this point; the gameplay fights you for attempt to implement strategic decisions. Stardock seems determined to recreate Master of Orion 3's gameplay, where the player is not supposed to make decisions about their own empire. I never thought I'd see anyone go down that road again...

This post on the GC3 forums pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Increasing the coercion penalty to 50% just lost me to Galactic Civ forever. It's now a game of moving ships around lots without any real strategic input into running an empire. My wife and I were willing to play with the .ini file patched to keep the wheel. We didn't like, but stayed with the 25% coercion penalty, but 50% breaks it. Galactic Civ is done for us now. It's quite literally the only game I've played where the majority of patches have made the game successively worse and given the player fewer options to manage their empire, and seemingly all because the designers don't like people who think useful micromanagement is a gameplay strength, not weakness. Ah well, back to infinitely better strategy games such as Civ 4 for us, I guess.

Does anyone know how to load older patches through Steam? I might be interested in going back and playing this again if I could go back to version 1.1 or something along those lines. I agree that this is the rare case of a game that actively seemed to get worse as more patches came out. (Or if not worse, then clearly transforming into a very different game than the one that I paid money for.)