The year is 2242. Humans have invented faster-than-light travel and a colony ship. This is their story

The setup

Along with the pre-made civilizations, using the in-game custom race creator, I have also made the Ur-Quan (from Star Control), the Angry Army (Angry Joe), and the Cynical Brits (Total Biscuit).

I start with Earth.

 

We are on one of the mid-spirals of the galaxy.

 

And I rolled a good Earth!

So it begins…

By turn 30 I’ve built up a decent civilization

Mars is finally colonized

 

I’ve met some other civilizations

I’m trading with the Altarians

And an alien race wants to save my soul.

I’m sure this well all end very very well for everyone…

Peaceful coexistence?

By turn 50, the galaxy is getting along just fine. We’ve even formed an interstellar organization to work out potential differences.

Peace in our time.

The United Planets convenes

The only issue we’re running into are with pirates.

Pirates harass freighters and under unarmed ships that venture into their space.

Turn 70

The galactic peace is starting to fray a little

The civilizations closer to me are friendlier. The further out, the less friendly.

The biggest problem is that we have no military whatosever.   Not even an armed shuttle.  It is probably time to address that so that we’re not such a juicy target.

The humans design an armed space ship.  It has a rail gun attached to it.

My friends are basically the Altarians and Total Biscuit.  Total Biscuit started out near Earth and we stole one of their natural expansions which has put them at a bit of a disadvantage.

I’m concerned with Angry Joe

 

War

Eventually war does come from the Angry Army.

The Angry Corvettes annihilate my gun boats

Earth’s colony, Aereon, is now open to invasion.  There are no Earth forces near to reinforce.

What’s saving me is that, in this game, the Angry army is very angry. They’re busy conquering the Iridium corporation to spare transports at the moment.

The End

The Angry army consumes the Iridium corporation who surrender to them.  Unfortunately, this means the end of us. 

I retire.

Greetings!

We're burning the midnight oil to make sure when we go gold we have the best game we can possibly deliver as 1.0.

I hope you guys have enjoyed the early access program as much as we've enjoyed working with you guys.  You've made a huge difference both in terms of making the game funner and helping make sure that what actually goes out is more like a v1.01 rather than the traditional 1.0 level of quality/stability.

Here's a run-down of the things that are on our hot-list that we hope to have to you either today or tomorrow as the last pre-gold build of the game:

1. We are testing a fix for a hang when players go to the battle viewer. It was tracked down to being the trails on the ships (oddly enough). For now, if you turn off trails in the options in your build, it'll probably go away even in beta 6.

2. We are playing a lot of multiplayer. We did a minor update last week that helped with MP but the next bulid will be a much bigger update to MP stability and just general user experience.

3. Campaign polish. I know most people don't really care about a campaign in a 4X like this. I'll be the first to admit that we mostly do it for ourselves so that our story, that we've been telling for 20 years, continues to move forward. 

4. Balance / AI.  They're the same thing at this point.  Trying to beef up the Yor and nerf down the Krynn (patriotic trait is OP). 

5. Anything that affects stability or user experience that has been reported by the fans.

On a personal note, having been developing games for over 20 years, it has been a real pleasure working with the community on this game.

I will say, candidly, that a game of this scope simply couldn't be made from scratch like this without it.  This isn't a knock on Unity based games (we're using Unity for two of our upcoming games, we're fans).  I'm saying that building a 4X strategy game engine where you can create your own players, create your own units, can support tens of thousands of units simultaneously with game sizes from tiny to figuratively insane is not a task done lightly or often...or sanely.

After gold, we move directly onto 1.01 which will be mostly addressing requests that we've gotten but just couldn't get to yet and then 1.1 which will mostly focus on feedback from players on balance, AI, and Steam Workshop integration.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll be here with you right to the day we release 1.0 and beyond.

People have been asking about the campaign for Galactic Civilizations III.  I will be talking a bit more this week about it but it is, in many respects, the opposite of what the traditional story/campaign experience is.  In GalCiv III, the player starts with god-like power and slowly through the campaign sees it get diminished.  The opening trailer for Galactic Civilizations III shows the Crusader.  You start with that ship.

Greetings!

We are nearing the official release of GalCiv III and I wanted to give a shout out to you guys for being so helpful us!

I hope you're having as much fun as we're having.  Tonight we released the build that should largely take care of MP issues and, we hope, that ugly invasion crash some people ran into.  Plus, more AI love. 

In the coming weeks I'll be talking more about this but GalCiv III 1.0 is just the start.  This 4 year endeavor to create a massive, 64-bit, multi-core 4X space game engine means that we have the next 5 to 8 years to come up with all kinds of cool stuff with you guys.  

Thank you!

Welcome to this week’s AI butt kicking. 

Who am I? I’m Brad Wardell, the guy in charge of the AI.  Me and my team are working to make sure that the GalCiv III AI isn’t just good but the best 4X AI that has ever been made.  But we have a lot of work ahead of us over the next few years.

Every so often I mutilate the GalCiv AI to find new ways to improve it.

If you’d like to see the last  humiliation, it’s here: https://forums.galciv3.com/463674

The set up is simple.

Humans (played by me) in one spot and the Drengin in the other.  I turn OFF fow for both players (because I know the map) and let’s see how it does.

Very simple map. Terrans (me) at top. Drengin (AI) at bottom

This is also the MP map I play people online with so look for me online!

By turn 8, I spot my first AI error.  The AI is setting planets not to be known by it! Ouch. I put that in to slow the AI down on beginner but I put it in the wrong spot. This, my friends, is why you this.

Fixed: Take 2

This time, much better.

The AI thinks colonizing Mars is a good idea. I think getting invasion tech is a good idea.

I have invasion. Time to die AI

Part II: The butt kicking

This is where the AI always fails and will probably continue to fail.  It just can’t react fast enough to a player who is b-lining.  On a larger map, they can do the Soviet strategy in WW II and slowly react.  But this is a particular map.

Now, to be fair: The AI has improved dramatically. It used to just let me build up and kill it.  In more recent builds, it at least tries to defend itself.

Let’s see how it does after the massive AI check in this week.

Research time is over. It’s time to die, AI.

AI makes first mistake

Mars is mine.

AI will lose a second planet because he didn’t intelligently place his defenders

Which isn’t to say the AI isn’t getting better. This fleet, rather than trying to attack me, is reinforcing a nearby planet. The problem is that it prioritized getting its most valuable planet defended FIRST without taking into account the distance.  Imagine if this was a huge map.

 

Hmmm. Well, this is new

I should have probably noticed this earlier but the AI built a military starbase near Charla. Admittedly, it had been there before I just didn’t notice. But it allowed its fleet to defeat my main fleet.

 

Another AI mistake

Only one ship defending this planet even though he has big fleets. Tsk tsk.

Another planet down

If he had just defended his planet he could have stopped this.  Now, as the AI guy on this, I can tell you, it wants to do this but clearly other things are taking priority. AI coding is…complicated.

The AI actually played well enough that I have to make peace so that I can…reload.  But he shouldn’t have let me off the hook.

Now to design ships to counter theirs: See how they’re big into beam weapons (top left)? I’ll make shields.

So I design a unit that counters the Drengin strength. Now, the defenses probably need a bit more balancing (it’s very easy to build defense heavy unit).

The AI (Drengin) has their own idea. Isn’t that adorable?

The Drengin think they can take out the ass kicker?

As you can see, all those great weapons of the Drengin get blunted by the shields.

That…was unexpected

So how did they win that battle?

I missed one item: Their ships are all medium hulls. All mine were small except for the Avalon (ass kicker).

That is good, it just means they’re getting better.

This time I have two Avalons.  They have managed to concentrate their units a bit better.

Ok, they caught me out of position. I shouldn’t have underestimated them.

They manage to take out my last shipyard so I can’t construct units here.

The error they’re making though is that they aren’t following this up with transports. Sure, they took out my shipyard and made my planets undefended but they have to coordinate that with transports.

Er…following up with transports

Transports arrive

I’m out of time for tonight

I would have definitely eventually won. Probably. Maybe. But as this test shows, the AI still has room to approve.

Galactic Civilizations is a turn-based game. Turn-based games are, well, notoriously boring to watch someone else play. This little guide is how to get the fun going fast!

Preliminaries

Make sure you got a pretty good PC

• We need a pretty decent setup. 8GB of memory to run the larger maps.
• What most people don’t realize is that GalCiv III is both a strategy game and a galactic simulator.
• Every turn, we have to simulate the goings on of an entire galaxy and that requires memory and CPU power.

OPTIONAL: Getting your own assets

In your my documents\my games\galciv3 folder there’s a factions folder. You can drop images in there if you’d like to have more logos and leader faces to choose from. We’ll be automating this from the game after release.

• Leader FG’s should be 1920x1080. Portraits 128x128 and logos 128x128.

 

So…you’ve decided to conquer the galaxy

If I had 30 minutes to form an impression of Galactic Civilizations III this is what I would do:

First 10 minutes: Designing your own civilization

If you play as the Terran Alliance, you literally start as the leader of Earth in 2242. So you start with Earth with Mars, Jupiter, etc. all there.

MY PICK: CREATE A CUSTOM RACE

Click on  “Create Custom Race”

If you added your own images to the factions folder, you can do what I did here and have a custom image.

You can customize your race description and give your new civilization its own history. (we will be allowing carriage returns in that part real soon now).

The traits of your civilization

Decide what your ships should like (we’re working on a bunch of new features for customizing this further but it won’t be ready until we have the Steamworks integration done).  But even as is, this is the most customizable ship designer ever made.

This screen shows how the AI will use them. The idea being that you can later play against your creation (or upload it for others to use too).  Once we’ve finished the Steamworks mod stuff, there will be an export button here too so you can literally share your creations to the moderated civilization library.

 

I now have my civilization ready to go.

Next 5 minutes: Your galaxy

I recommend:

1. Small galaxy, tight clusters.
2. Star Frequency: Common
3. Planet Frequency: Abundant
4. Habitable Planet frequency: Occasional
5. Extreme Planet Frequency: Uncommon
6. Everything else “occasional”.
7. Galaxy Difficulty: Normal (the AI won’t be super bright here but it’ll play a reasonably challenging game)
8. Pirate bases: Uncommon
9. Minor Races: NONE (I find the minor races to be a bit distracting personally, YMMV)

Opponents: Pick 6 opponents.

 

Next 10 minutes: TURNS 1 to 5

So it begins

TIPS:

1. Middle mouse button will let you control the camera
2. Roller will let you zoom in and out
3. Tab Key is like pressing the “turn” button. You should be able to play the game almost entirely with your left hand on the keyboard and the right-hand on the mouse.

TURN 1

You start with your home world and a few ships. The action button in the bottom right will walk you through the other things that need your attention.

 

RESEARCH:

Research screen.

There are 4 technology trees per race. The human centric one is about:

1. Colonization: Make your planets better
2. Engineering: Make your tech better
3. Warfare: Kill stuff better
4. Governance: Get along with others better

MY PICK:  I recommend universal translator. You need that to talk to aliens and since this is a small galaxy with a lot of players, you’ll be getting a lot of talking.

HOME PLANET:

Your planets are primarily about 3 things: Manufacturing, Research and Wealth generation.  There’s a lot of other things involved that lead to more of that (not even talking about influence which is a whole different topic).

MY PICK: If you have a tile that gives you a research bonus, pick that (which is what I do in that screenshot). Otherwise, I build a research lab adjacent to my capital because it gives a bonus to anything adjacent. 

IMPORTANT: BUY IT.  That will build it on a single turn.

YOUR SHIPS

Zoom out and notice the dots. These are other stars. Rush to them so you can find out what’s there. Send a different ship to each one. Use the TAB key after you choose a ship’s destination to go to the next ship.

YOUR SHIPYARD

Pick a colony ship to build. Then, once you have started buliding, BUY IT

We start the player off with 5000 credits so that they can jump-start their strategy.

Buying a colony ship is a bit of a gamble but if you don’t find other good planets, you can convert it to a constructor later.

BEFORE YOU HIT TURN…

Click the buttons at the top to learn more about the game real fast.

VICTORY

Victory Screen.

 

1. CONQUEST.  This is the traditional way people win these games. You kill everyone else.
2. INFLUENCE. This is GalCiv’s claim to fame. You can win through cultural conquest. That is, you literally spread your culture across the galaxy using starbases while trying to keep other civilizations from killing you for it.
3. TECHNOLOGY. You can research technology that will allow you to transcend. I.e. the technological singularity.
4. ASCENSION. The galaxy doesn’t really know what happened to the Precursors. These Ascension crystals give you a hint.
5. DIPLOMATIC VICTORY.  You can research techs that make you more liked by other civilizations and use those techs to negotiate various treaties that will slowly win them over to you. If you ally with everyone you win.

GOVERN

Govern

Your production goes towards wither wealth, manufacturing, and research. 

MY PICK: Early on, put it almost all on research. You have plenty of money at the start. Use it to jump start your economy and then, on turn 5, move it back to something less extreme.

TURN 2

Phew! That’s a lot for a single turn.  Don’t worry, GalCiv is designed so that lots of turns won’t be very busy. It moves at the pace you want it to.

I Rush build a second lab. Look how much research this planet is doing!

1. I send my new colony ship to a star I haven’t explored.
2. I also start building (but don’t rush) another colony ship.

TURN 3

Ok. I found a nice planet but it’s cold as Hoth. It’s an extreme planet so I can’t use it without researching Extreme Colonization.  There’s also Thulium which is a very useful resource for building prototype (i.e. one of a kind) space ships.

1. On my planet I rush build another research lab

 

TURN 4:

I have found a new awesome planet!

 

I name it Awesomo to show how much class I have as a leader.

 

Enjoy pretty cut scene. These are in here to try to bring home how big a deal it is to settle other planets.

A planetary incident. These are important too. Sci-Fi always acts like landing on other planets is like visiting Vancouver. In this case, the planet has a fungus that infects the population. What should you do?

What kind of civilization do you want?

There’s an alien fungus that is inflicting colonists that makes the planet not very…attractive for colonists to join us on this world. What do we do?

1. Be honest and let people know the risks of coming here but let people know there’s an opportunity to study a new disease. [Benevolent] (slower population growth but a slight research bonus)
2. Quarantine those who get it but not advertise this issue too much (pragmatic, slight population hit)
3. What? Buy potential colonists drinks. We need new people even if it means there will be some sickies [Malevolent].

MY PICK: PRAGMATISM

The planet has a unique ore on it that will make our ships better. Or we can trade it to other civs for something in return.  It also has a wasteland which I can rush build a factory on.

 

Hooray. I can talk to the aliens!

MY PICK: Xeno Industrialization. It provides upgrades to all my basic planet improvements

Also notice that I’m now doing 52 research points per turn.

1. On my home world, I rush build a factory adjacent to my colony. It’s now time to get my manufacturing going.

IDEOLOGY

My ethical choice earlier gave me a pragmatic point which I’m now spending

Many of your planetary improvements and unique civilization abilities come from your ideology tree. 

MY PICK: I chose pragmatic and on the pragmatic tree I choose: Free constructors!

Turn 4: I have 2 planets. I found a third that I can’t colonize. There’s 3 unclaimed resources and I have 3 constructors!

1. Elerium. Lets you use weapons that require Elerium. Huge early game advantage if you’re running around with that.
2. Thulium.  Let’s you build a Thulium Data Archive which provides a big boost to planetary research. Especially early because it provides a “flat” amount of research rather than just a %.

 

TURN 5

I got Xeno Industrialization.  Choosing the next tech is challenging because you are definitely starting to define your strategy.  The GalCiv III requires you to make choices. You won’t even come close to research all the techs.

MY PICK: Interstellar Travel because it makes all my units get +1 moves

With my first constructor, I’m going to maneuver it so that one of the resources are is within its area of effect as well as both of my planets.

Cut scene of the starbase being built.  It was important to us to convey to players that your civilization is doing some pretty big deal new stuff.

The Starbase management view. The Ur-Quan starbases look strange (every race gets their own ship designs)

Because I want to mine that Elerium, I choose the Mining Ring from the right.

We are also contacted by the first alien race, the Altarians.

 

We have been playing for 25 minutes

At the end of turn 5, you probably have been playing around 25 minutes and you haven’t even murdered an alien yet.

We haven’t even touched on…

1. SHIP DESIGN (you can design your own ships both functionally and visually)
2. DIPLOMACY (treaties, tech trade, helping your friends, punishing your foes)
3. TRADE (building freighters and sending them to alien worlds)
4. UNITED PLANETS (changing the game rules on the fly by vote)
5. COMBAT (pew pew)
6. INVADING PLANETS (building transports to invade defenseless planets)

We’ve barely scratched the surface.

So now what?

• SUGGESTION #1: Save this game and then load up a game where you’ve played a similar set up for say 200 turns.
• SUGGESTION #2: Load up a game in an insane galaxy to show how crazy the game can get to show off the wars and such.

My Last 5 minutes

Jumping 140 turns into the future I have built a series of impressive ships and am about to go to war with the Altarians who are certainly aware of what is coming.

TURN 200

I click on the Diplomacy button at the top to see what my relations are with everyone.

The Altarians see what I’m doing. They see my build up.

The Altarians attack my fleet.

The Ur-Quan take the planet Wisp and defend it

 

Open the Designer. Let’s build a ship. The red dots on the ship are places I can attach things. It’s purely cosmetic (where you attach things doesn’t matter). It’s like LEGOs® except, I guess, space LEGOS.

 

You can use the middle mouse button and roller to control the camera and rotate the ship

I’m not a big fan of this style of ships. The Terran ships are much prettier I think.

Here I’m sticking a Ion Drive onto the ship which gives this unit +3 moves per turn.

 

Then I place two Graviton Drivers onto it. This is the technology I was desperately trying to get. Each one does 8 (kinetic) attack.

Then I add some life support to the ship. This determines how far away it can travel from one of my bases.

And then I give it a name. I could spend hours playing around with the ship designer.

And now to build it…

When you want to build things fast, make sure you move your production focus over to manufacturing in the Govern Civilization screen.

Wisp gets invaded the same turn.

When someone goes to war with me or better yet, I want someone eliminated, I use diplomacy.

I click on Diplomacy again and see that I am friends with the Yor. They have the second most powerful military and they’re not engaged in any wars.  They are the ideal partner for the Ur-Quan.

The Yor might help us

So I go to the trade screen and ask them to Declare war on the Thalan

A deal is struck.

From here on out it’s up to you…

 

A few other notes in screenshots

The way you speak to and are spoke to is determined by your ethical choices

 

I wonder what human meat will taste like

 

We encourage players to surrender to avoid the “late game” slog

 

Online there is the Metaverse where players can submit their high scores and compete in multiplayer.

So you don’t want to play as the Humans? Not even the Drengin? You want your own race completely? Then I have good news for you. Galactic Civilizations III allows you to create incredibly custom civilizations right in the UI.

The marketing department isn’t happy about this. So much DLC money lost.

This guide will show you how to make your own truly custom race really fast.

Step 0: Preparations

We presume you will want to have your own unique leader image.  So you will need to do two things:

FIRST:

You will need to find your documents\My Games\GalCiv3 folder

Microsoft seems intent on making it harder and harder to find documents but I digress.

SECOND:

Inside the GalCiv3 folder is a Factions folder. Inside there you will find Portraits and LeaderFGs.  Find the images you want and save them there as .PNGs. Make sure they don’t have the same name.

Now, load up the game…

Step 1: Press the “Create Custom Race” button

 

Step 2: Click on the Picture button to choose the image you want in the foreground.

I found and downloaded an Angry Joe image.  I want to point out that he already has a publicly available image of him standing in front of a space background.  Therefore, it is safe to say that him leading an alien civilization was his destiny.

Step #3: Pick the portrait

The Portrait can be stylized or just a headshot.  I personally prefer stylizes images.  And again, amazingly enough, Angry Joe has a really cool stylized portrait. I kid you not. I did not make these, they already existed. 

Pretty cool eh?

 

Step #4: Make a description

 

Step #5: Race Overview

There is also a very small “customize button” there at the bottom you should definitely click too.

 

Step 6: Give them traits

You get points to put into your civilization. They are all over powered.

 

Step 7: What should their stuff look like?

Here’s an ironic thing: We came up with way better materials and textures after we finished the aliens. So your custom ships will likely look better than what we originally provided.  So have fun!

 

Step 8: Give them an AI

This is the feature that the bean counters at Stardock are unhappy about.  So not only can you make your own Civilization, we put in the tools to determine how the AI will use them.  Look, hey, I like DLC. My jet fuel doesn’t pay for itself.  But this was just too cool not to give players. 

GalCiv is about being a sandbox. You shouldn’t have to pay to get more aliens.  I mean, we will totally sell you more aliens too.  But we don’t want you to feel forced to.  Well, I mean, we do. We just don’t mean forced forced. Okay, they’re waving at me to stop typing.

I like the Terran tech tree but you could pick one of the others as well.  This page basically tells the AI how to play when you want to play against the Angry Joe Army.

And so I have my custom race. 

And now, once you have saved it. You can share it with others by zipping the contents of your faction folder (getting rid of the extra junk)

Here’s Angry Joe: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8051911/AngryJoe.zip Unzip to your faction directory.

And for Total Biscuit fans, I spent some time today making one for him as well:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8051911/TotalBiscuit.zip

I had to do some custom stuff for TB since he doesn’t present in front of a spaceship.

We will have an Export button in soon.  They wanted to have it in by release but we are still kind of new to the Steam workshop stuff so we’re holding off until 1.1.

Greetings!

So you’ve decided to conquer the galaxy.  Good. Use this guide to help get you started.

Introduction

In the year 2178 human beings on Earth invent a technology called Hyperdrive which allows ships to travel faster than light.  In hindsight, it might have been better if they didn’t.  Nevertheless, by 2242, the galaxy is in a rage of expansion and conquest. 

You are the leader of a civilization that is now expanding into the galaxy.  This is your story.

Setup

I recommend starting with the Terran Alliance.  However, once you get used to the game, you can create your own custom races as well to play as or against.

I recommend starting with a small galaxy and tight clusters. This should be the default.  Tight clusters means that stars are placed close together. It’s sort of like having space continents.

If you are new to the game, don’t play with normal difficulty. Play as beginner.

Space..the final something

Planets are rated on a scale from 0 to 20.  Earth is class 11.  The higher the class, the more usable the planet is.  Earth is “only” an 11 because apparently there’s a lot of water on it which reduces the amount of available land.

Mars is only class 5.

You can queue up everything you want to build on Mars from the start if you want.

In addition to things you can build, you can also tell a planet to just focus on generating money or culture for you.

1. Influence grows every turn by a certain amount. This influence fills up the tiles surrounding the planet. When those tiles get “full” of your influence, your cultural boundaries expand.  If your boundaries expand to cover someone else’s planet, that planet may eventually join you (assuming there’s people on it to side with you, the planet itself doesn’t care being inanimate and all).
2. Population is really the key thing on a planet. Population multiplies the production of everything.
3. Food determines the population cap on a planet. You will need to research Xeno farming to expand this.  Yes, we have farms on Earth but try farming on Mars. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
4. Approval. This is how happy your people are.  The amount of entertainment goods is weighed against your population. If it’s high, you get bonuses in growth, production and other good stuff. If it’s low, you get penalties.
5. Resistance. This is how much the planet will resist someone else’s culture if that planet is covered by their culture.  It’s like the amount of cultural leakage that manages to get through to your people.

Where you build something matters. Think of every improvement like a playing card. It has a classification (research, approval, population, etc.).  If you build something next to an improvement that gives a level bonus to its class of improvement, you get more production. Each level is typically worth 5% more. This really takes off when you have multiple things adjacent to each other.

If you are lazy, like me, you can click on the command button and select “Survey” on the Survey ship. This will cause it to go out and find anomalies.

Similarly, you can click the command button on the Scout and tell it to explore.

Research

Holy cow.

The tech tree in Galactic Civilizations III is broken up into 4 categories (assuming you’re playing as those sentient apes on Sol 3, different species have different tech trees).

You can click on the Tech Tree button in the botot left to see the full tree.

1. Colonization = making your planets better techs.
2. Engineering = improving your manufacturing, technological and engine capabilities
3. Warfare = killing alien scum
4. Governance = Diplomacy, Economics, Political technologies

I always choose Interstellar travel personally because it makes all my units move +1 faster which is really helpful early game.

My first turn

We start players with 5000 credits (if they plan as the humans).  Why? So you can rush buy things to help start off your particular…idiom.

I rush buy a research lab right away because I want to get my tech going.

I also rush buy a colony ship right off the bat so I can get a leg up on those aliens in getting more planets.

I click on the govern button and move my production spending to mostly be research. If you’re really good at the game, you can do it all research but I tend to keep a bit on manufacturing so that the game will remind me to build more stuff.

I also use the TAB key constantly to have the game take me to the next notification.

End of my first turn has these notifications.

Turn 2

Using the mouse roller and holding down the middle mouse button I can play with the camera distance and angle.  here I can zoom out.

If we weren’t history’s greatest monsters, we would tell you what color they are. Yellow stars are much more likely to have habitable planets.

I select my colony ship and right click on the nearest star to send it there and hope there’s a nice planet.

There isn’t a nice planet there but there are pirates. I hate these guys. Stay away from them.

Minor races are races that lack hyperdrive. We distinguish them by not having an animated version of them because, what are they going to do? Invade us? Not without FTL engines.

You have to research Universal Translator tech first to understand what they’re saying.

Ideology

If you haven’t bought the game, I can assure you that this scene is a fully animated, gorgeous CGI animated experience.

For those of you who have bought the game, I apologize for my earlier lies.

When you colonize a planet you will often have to deal with a complication.  How you deal with these situations will determine what type of society your civilization evolves into.

I chose pragmatism and as a result got to choose a new pragmatic trait for my civilization:

And here I chose to get free constructors.

Resources & Relics

On the map there are several different types of resources and relics that if you build a starbase near them, you can acquire their benefits.

Generally speaking, Relics are better than resources. They’re rarer and have a more brute force affect.  But the resources matter, especially early game, because you can build some really powerful ships early on with them.

 

When you have your constructor in position, choose Construct Starbase.

Resources in the area? Mine baby mine!

Relic in you area? Lab…er Lab? Look, I’m not the one on trial here.

Turn 20: let’s meet the neighbors (or nieghbors)

By default, we show all the civilziations. But you can choose to only look at the Majors.

At a glance, you can tell whether a civilization likes you, is neutral, is hostile or hates you based on their ring.  Right now, they’re all pretty neutral.

If you mouse over them, you can see what they like or don’t like about you.

We’ve fiddled around with this screen a lot to try to balance between it being gamey (where we placed weight numbers and colors next to the items to make it easier to come to a deal) to the opposite extreme where you just have to figure it out.

We’ve tried to hit a good middle part with the language telling you:

1. You must be joking (or something like that) = You’re not even close
2. I can’t accept this (or something like that) = You’re starting to get close
3. I don’t know, almost (or something like that) = You’re very close.
4. This is fair = exactly equal
5. Various appreciative grunts = You should probably ask them to give you money to balance it or HOPE that they acknowledge your generosity via diplomacy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I tend to use money as a way to equalize the eventual trade.

Let’s design a ship

Eventually there comes a time in a young civilization’s life when they want to make a space ship.

Click on the “Designer” button.

Different people have different preferences. The game will automatically put together ships for you.  Personally, I like to make my own. To do that, click new design.

The hull sizes in the game are:

Note that all these numbers will change eventually from balance and based on who you play as and what techs you have.

Cost, HP and Space to put stuff on are the big things.

Don’t judge me.

So the red dots are like LEGO attachment points. You can take a piece from the left and connect it to a red dot.  This is all optional as it’s purely cosmetic.

When you are ready to get to the meat, you click on the Equip tab.

The stuff you can add are:

1. Engines = How fast the ship can move
2. Weapons = how good at killing it is
3. Defenses = how good it is at not being killed
4. Modules = Unique ship items (colony, trading, starbase building)
5. Support = Special abilities for the ship.

Combat: How it works:

There are 3 types of weapons:

1. Beams (a beam of energy)
2. Kinetic  (shooting a bullet of some kind)
3. Missile (a warhead of some kind)

There are also 3 kinds of counters (defenses)

1. Shields (deflect beam energy)
2. Armor (absorb those bullets)
3. Point Defense (shoots down those missiles)

When an attack occurs, the ship rolls its weapon attack rating and the defender rolls its defense rating. If the defense rating in the right class is > than the attack rating, no damage occurs.  Of course, if you have the wrong defense, the attack just goes right on through and takes points off your hitpoints.  If you run out of hitpoints, the ship is dead.

My finished ship.  Mind you, I could have just double clicked on the various components and it would autoplace them.  The position of the weapons and other items is irrelevant (firing arcs would be cool but remember, late game, you may have 10 battles every turn and it would get very tedious to have to sweat that kind of thing).

On this ship, I put on a bunch of Duranthium resource requiring things.  I only have 1 Duranthium so I won’t be able to build it until I get more Duranthium.

The ship’s stats are:

• 8 kinetic attack
• 4 shield defense (I chose this because the pirates are using beam weapons)
• 100 HP (thanks to all that duranthium)
• 300 Manufacturing cost. Which is a lot.

When I go to save it, I can name it and determine what class it is.  Generally, the default is probably a good idea until you know what you’re doing.

The classes are:

1. Escorts. They hang back and protect support and capital ships.
2. Guardians. these are similar to Escorts except they focus on support ships. They’re really good at guarding colony ships and transports.
3. Support. These are usually defenseless ships. They will hang back and try to avoid being attacked in battle.
4. Assault. These ships go after the enemy Escorts and Capital ships. 
5. Interceptor. These guys go after the Escorts and guardians.
6. Capital. These kill everything. They’re general purpose.

When you’re starting out, you don’t really need to care much about this.  But as you get more competitive, these will matter. That’s because:

Ships have other tactical battle traits:

1. Tactical Speed
2. Weapons range
3. Accuracy
4. Maneuverability

By default, all ships have the same on these so they won’t tend to show up on stats unless they’re different.  But a new player building a mix of assault and escorts and support ships without thought will suffer as those assault ships will race on ahead while the escorts stay in back guarding the support ship thus dividing your forces.

 

More questions? Ask them in the comments and I’ll update!

Got this working better today.  The culture system is just getting so good now. 

Currently trying to win a game without firing a shot.

Greetings!

Over on Steam I wrote a really long Beta 6 notes post that you can find here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/618460171327189089/

Here I’ll do a general highlights of Beta 6. You can read the Full Change Log too.

The suffering is nearing an end

We’ve been running the Beta 6 builds for a few weeks now.  Beta 5 and its branch has done a great job in preparing ironing out the literally hundreds of issues players have reported.

UPDATE:  Apparently Steam doesn’t autosend crashes in 64-bit games yet.  So if you DO run into a crash, go into \programdata\galciv3 and please send us the ZIP file from that crash along with your autosaves.

Here are some highlights:

• Feature complete.
• Should not crash. Ever.
• Should run fast.  I demoed a pre-beta 6 build on a Microsoft Surface Pro in San Francisco as well as on a 4 year old MacBook Pro (running Windows 7). 
• The video streams you saw HERE and HERE were streamed live (at the time) on said 2011 MacBook Pro running Windows with 8GB of memory.
• New lighting system (HDR now).  We will be tweaking this before release but visually it should look substantially nicer.
• You can now “retire”.
• New planetary improvements and ship components that use special resources
• End Game screens with graphs and such.
• General balancing across the board
• Massive AI.  Beta 6 is the first beta that has significant work by me in it, should be noticeable (I hope).
• Lots and lots of UI updates (search feature for techs, lots of new chicks (enhanced tooltips)
• Influence: Hold your mouse over a given tile and it will tell you how much influence each player is providing in it.
• Lots of new options (no tech trading for example)
• You can now click on the user tab to see JUST the ships you designed.
• Obsoleting game provided designs gets rid of that class of design for the rest of the game.
• AI knows a lot more about techs and how they should work and how they are valued when it comes to tech trading
• Lots of improvements to the way influence works.
• General polish

Things to complain about

Some things didn’t make the cut.  That is, they just weren’t “Baked” enough imo. 

I am the bad guy here as I went through with a hatchet and said “nope nope nope”.  For example, I didn’t like the direction the invasion screen is coming.  We’re going to release an enhanced invasion screen in a free future update after we have time to sit down and decide what it is we really want to do here. 

Instead, Kael and I asked the team to focus on things that we felt would have a more direct impact on the enjoyment on the game (like the previously mentioned influence stuff) and making sure well known player requests that we agreed were key to enjoying the game were added in.  For instance, obsoleting ships in a way that worked the way players would want (i.e. make that type of ship gone for the rest of the game).

I also had them eliminate the United Planets victory conditions. I found this too easy to exploit and just plain not fun. We will have to revisit this in the future Political oriented expansion pack.

What’s NOT in

There is still some UI stuff that I don’t think made it into beta 6 but will be in the first update.

Examples:

• When designing a ship it doesn’t tell you the manufacturing cost of a ship part.  We have a whole new chick designed for giving information on ships because frankly, the current readout is just not enough (weapons range for example).  I actually suggested removing weapon range but the team argued that this would greatly reduce the combat flexibility if we moved out that stuff so they designed some new chicks to communicate better the key factors in a battle before you get into a battle.
• AI AI AI AI.  The AI will never be done.  But let me give you my personal gripe list of things I just wasn’t able to pull off:
• I did get the trading system to work a lot better, particularly with peace treaties but the other treaties I’m still balancing.
• There’s lots of other trade stuff I’ll be working on.  Please help in posting trade stupidities you see.
• I am really struggling in getting the AI to make good decisions between say, logistics, hull size and weaponry/defense. 
• Flavor.  We have started to do a lot more in getting the different aliens to speak differently.  I was so tired of the “your gift is appreciated” nonsense that I put in some new ones.  We will be adding a lot more.  I am pretty sure the manager who is in charge of the language translation budget keyed my car though.
• Late game balance.  This is something we’ll be working a lot on between now and release.  By balance I mean finding ways so that you have worthwhile things to build that aren’t produced in a single turn.  We’ve made a lot of progress here but we want to make sure things don’t just get totally out of hand (I mean, if you want to produce crummy low powered ships every turn that should be doable but the highest end ships should always require several turns).
• Lots of misc. bugs.  For instance, missiles appear to miss even when they hit. There will be a lot of little stuff like this that we’re buttoning up even as I type this.

 

Release of beta 6: This week!

 

Quick note:

Insane galaxy size memory use:

In beta 5, this used 9.3GB.