Greetings!
We are absolutely thrilled with the reception GalCiv III has released. If you haven't reviewed the game already on Steam, please do so. The review score makes a huge difference in determining what gets featured. You can review at the bottom of the page here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/226860/
Now, what's coming up next?
Note that this is subject to change, this is what we are planning. It's not a contract. 
May 2015: v1.01
This will be a maintenance update to fix bugs, improve performance, improve the AI and improve the multiplayer experience.
June 2015: v1.1
This will be the first substantial update. Improvements to the battle viewer. Steam Workshop integration so you can share your civilizations and races. First major AI update. More Multiplayer features.
July 2015: v1.2
This version will be adding some meatier galactic events. Planetary governors. More automation. More multiplayer features. More AI updates.
That's it for now. There is a lot of cool stuff in the works that I'm not mentioning (less significant features but lots of UI tweaks for example). We look forward to playing with you!
Cheers!
Hi guys,
We're less than 2 days from release! We've gone gold.
For those of you who have been playing the game recently, we could really use your help on something in particular: Steam user reviews. We are currently 79%. We've been on an upward trend since Beta 6 (we were at 66%!).
If we get to 80%, the rating changes to "Very positive". It would only take a handful of positive reviews to reach that point by release day.
Here's the URL: http://store.steampowered.com/app/226860/
Thanks!
May drops into the Ashes vault are starting to get added.
You can check them out here:
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.