Gal Civ 3

[MJW (ya that one)]

You can stop Steam from patching but you cannot download old patches. I remembered people begging to Steam to put that first feature in but because the begging is much less for old patches so Steam doesn't have that feature. I would guess that Steam is just picking issues that seem to be the most important and not comming up with systematic plans. They still have their work cut out for them. If you are desperate you can get some sort of pirated version. If it's just the wheel for you a better solution would be to download some mod that adds it back in and stop future patches (because they will assume that the wheel doesn't exist).

The reason why studios charge despite having not finished is that they must to avoid running out of money. When they have a choice (for example Diablo 3 was a blizzard game and AoWs 3 had an interest-free loan from Notch) they tend not to. In this case Stardock still looks bad because Frogboy should have just sucked it up and let the game be what it is.

Edit: Steam also supports multiple versions of a game if that's needed which further reduces the begging for old patches.

[VarisNox]

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.)

Unfortunately, there's no way to play a game through Steam without having it update. There used to be a way to set a game to never update, but it was changed to "update only when game launches" instead, so it's definitely going to update before launching. You also used to be able to play a game in offline mode to prevent patching, but I think Steam prevents a game from launching in offline mode now if there's an update available for the game. However, both of these options don't really apply to GalCiv 3, since Stardock has replaced the Steam download files with the 1.6 version. I tried myself to see if I could get it to run without updates, but the game itself downloads version 1.6 when you install it. I set the game to never install updates unless launched, started offline mode, and unplugged my ethernet cable to ensure I wasn't connected, and it still launched the game on version 1.6. Stardock did have an opt in for version 1.4.1 (under the betas tab), but as of patch 1.6 that seems to be removed as the unlock code no longer works. Games like this, with bad/unfun updates, highlight one of the biggest problems with digital distribution in the lack of control over the status of your games.

[asdfion]

It's up to the developer. Paradox lets you back out to older patches for CK2 and EU4 using the betas tab. So do the developers of AOE2HD.

[Brian Shanahan]

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.

Ehh... It's what you get when you believe your beloved libertardism is more important than your paying customers.

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.)

The process for Paradox games is, open your Steam library, right click on the game title itself, open Properties, go to Betas tab, and click the drop down menu under where it says 'Select the beta you would like to opt into:' and pick whichever patch you want. I imagine if the patch rollback facility is available for GC3, it's going to be the same.

[Windsor]

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.

I haven't played GalCiv3 yet(I generally don't play much space-4X. It's a terrible genre) so I'm probably missing something essential here, but here it goes:

Why is a global spending wheel paired with percentage-multipliers on planets wrong in GalCiv3? That's the same as in Civ4 where you have a global slider and percentage-multiplier in cities.

It's easy to see why the player might want to adjust the planets/cities individually, but that doesn't make it the correct thing to do from the designers point of view.

Your review reads a bit like "I used to have this really easy solution that required no thinking, now I have to actually find a good compromise rather than always just selecting the obvious".

[Ichabod]

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.

I haven't played GalCiv3 yet(I generally don't play much space-4X. It's a terrible genre) so I'm probably missing something essential here, but here it goes:

Why is a global spending wheel paired with percentage-multipliers on planets wrong in GalCiv3? That's the same as in Civ4 where you have a global slider and percentage-multiplier in cities.

It's easy to see why the player might want to adjust the planets/cities individually, but that doesn't make it the correct thing to do from the designers point of view.

Your review reads a bit like "I used to have this really easy solution that required no thinking, now I have to actually find a good compromise rather than always just selecting the obvious".

It's not the same as in Civ 4. Civ 4 has 3 main currencies (food, production and commerce). Only commerce is tied to a global slider, that further divides it into 2 "sub-currencies", which have local percentage multipliers. So, from the 3 main currencies, only one is tied to a global slider, but one that doesn't affect the other currencies (food and production), only itself. Actually, there are ways to turn each currency into the other, food -> anything (growing pop, working tiles), gold -> prod (rushbuy), food -> prod (whipping), prod -> gold (wealth), but all this are made by player decision, you are never forced to do it.

In Gal Civ, all main currencies are intertwined due to the global slider (in fact, there's only one currency, the income from the planets, which then gets divided by the slider). And you get penalties by messing with this slider.

I think Sullla explained pretty well his point that the patched design of Gal Civ gives the player less choices/valid decisions to make, which he believes is a bad thing in a strategic game. You can disagree with these points, but to say that the article is just whining about not being able to easily play the game anymore it's not really jusitfiable, in my opinion.

[Sullla]

Why is a global spending wheel paired with percentage-multipliers on planets wrong in GalCiv3? That's the same as in Civ4 where you have a global slider and percentage-multiplier in cities.

It's easy to see why the player might want to adjust the planets/cities individually, but that doesn't make it the correct thing to do from the designers point of view.

Your review reads a bit like "I used to have this really easy solution that required no thinking, now I have to actually find a good compromise rather than always just selecting the obvious".

As Ichabod explained, a global spending wheel is not at all the same system employed by the Civilization games. I also disagree that the spending wheel represented "a really easy solution that required no thinking." I explained in the article how a spending wheel doesn't represent any kind of free lunch. By spending in one field, the player is not spending in another field: that is the opportunity cost. And yes, the GC3 gameplay with the spending wheel and a whole bunch of buildings that provide percentage based modifiers favors specialization. I fail to see how that's a bad thing, however. Players should be rewarded for using the system to create highly efficient and powerful colonies. That's... kind of the point of playing a strategy game, right? GC3's current system still holds all the same benefits for specializing planets, but rips control away from the player and blocks him or her from implementing that sort of advantage. It's like the designers created this elaborate colony management system, and then decided to wall it off from the player in patches. It makes no sense at all.

But that wasn't really the point of my article. I wrote that a hands-on micromanagement system and a hands-off macromanagement system can both work just fine for a strategy game. My main argument is that you can't start with one system and then try to transform into the other one post-release:

I don't necessarily think that one style of gameplay is better than another. Although I prefer games that are more geared towards micromanagement, I don't think that they are inherently superior to a more macro-focused, simulation style game. There's a lot of different ways to do game design well. However, I do have a problem with GC3 being designed with one gameplay style in mind, and then trying to shift to another gameplay style after release. That's not going to make anyone happy, and the GC3 forums are testament to how many players have been unhappy with the vacillation back and forth on this subject. The spending wheel stands in here for the larger conflict over the direction of GC3 in general. I also think it's highly unfair to me as customer to advertise that GC3 is going to have this gameplay focused on heavy specialization and micromanagement, then start shifting to more of a simulation game after I've paid for the product. The game is turning into something different than what was originally promised.

It's unfair to people who purchased the game, and it ends up making almost everyone unhappy in the end. GC3's user reviews have been poor, to the point where Brad Wardell was leading a forum campaign to get people to consciously manipulate the ratings by writing additional high-scoring reviews on Steam. The number of people playing on SteamCharts has also been pretty underwhelming, about 1500-2000 players daily. To put that in perspective, the terrible Civ Beyond Earth game is doing about 4x to 5x those numbers, and Civ5 (which came out 5 years ago) is about 40x more popular (!) Even Endless Legend is doing better, and that's a game that came out a year earlier than GC3. This is supposed to be the flagship title for Stardock, and whatever their public posts might claim, I can't imagine that they're happy with the sales numbers.

[Hail]

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.

I haven't played GalCiv3 yet(I generally don't play much space-4X. It's a terrible genre) so I'm probably missing something essential here, but here it goes:

Why is a global spending wheel paired with percentage-multipliers on planets wrong in GalCiv3? That's the same as in Civ4 where you have a global slider and percentage-multiplier in cities.

It's easy to see why the player might want to adjust the planets/cities individually, but that doesn't make it the correct thing to do from the designers point of view.

Your review reads a bit like "I used to have this really easy solution that required no thinking, now I have to actually find a good compromise rather than always just selecting the obvious".

the release version of GalCiv3 encouraged specialization. now the player is actively punished for specializing, which remains the optimal way to play anyway.

It's unfair to people who purchased the game, and it ends up making almost everyone unhappy in the end. GC3's user reviews have been poor, to the point where Brad Wardell was leading a forum campaign to get people to consciously manipulate the ratings by writing additional high-scoring reviews on Steam. The number of people playing on SteamCharts has also been pretty underwhelming, about 1500-2000 players daily. To put that in perspective, the terrible Civ Beyond Earth game is doing about 4x to 5x those numbers, and Civ5 (which came out 5 years ago) is about 40x more popular (!) Even Endless Legend is doing better, and that's a game that came out a year earlier than GC3. This is supposed to be the flagship title for Stardock, and whatever their public posts might claim, I can't imagine that they're happy with the sales numbers.

what are high-scroring reviews on Steam? I only know of either recommend/not recommend reviews. maybe you mean metacritic user reviews?

to be fair to GalCiv3, civ:be had two free2play weekends and has been like constantly on sale since Q2 2015.
btw, Age of Empires II HD Edition has more players than GalCiv3 and civ:be combined... times two.

[Sirian]

(I generally don't play much space-4X. It's a terrible genre)

A lot said, there.

[Fluffball]

I started playing GC3 again just on a whim, and I think it's worth bringing up to other people who also wrote this game off that it has improved MASSIVELY since last I played it. It's been a very long time since I played it, so I'm not sure when specific things changed but (I don't have any expansions this is base game stuff):

- The silly sensor ship that could see an entire galaxy was fixed. Sensors don't stack very well now.
- AIs now defend their planets properly. You can still make transports with lots of moves, but you need ships to punch through the defending ships. In frontline planets you'll sometimes see large fleets in the double digit numbers guarding a vulnerable planet.
- On a related note, AI transports default to the best engines, so if you don't defend your planets, you can easily lose border planets to an undefended transporting zipping in from out of the black.
- AI in general has gotten significantly better. When the game launched it seemed like StarDock wanted you to just auto-win in sandbox mode, now the AI actually plays the game with you.
- The Krynn start with the ability to completely control planetary spending (so you can go 100% research or etc.) The other races all have a building that allows you to completely control spending. If you're feeling lazy, you can just click "___ focus" for each planet, and it will lopside towards man/econ/research. Specialized planets are back, baby!
- Resources now accumulate rather than have a fixed number, so there is a reason to actually mine things. They are also used in a lot more stuff.
- Constructor spam to upgrade starbases has been eliminated, it now costs resources and a bit of money to instantly upgrade them.
- You can mine asteroids using only money now for a small production boost at the nearest planet.
- Endless micro of planets has the option to be virtually eliminated. There are levels of auto-govern you can choose. You can pick "auto upgrade, but only when all tiles are used" which allows you to plan a planet out completely the turn you settle it, and then just let it upgrade itself, while building in breaks in contsruction to alert you to check in on it.

Overall I've been having a blast playing this game. If you gave up hope on it near launch, maybe give it another try.