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.

For those of you interested in game development, this will be part of a series of how we address “stupid” AI mistakes.  What I’ll be showing in this series are AI mistakes along with what I did to address them.  Feel free in the comment section to include saved games and other examples that you think are worthwhile. 

Just to be sure, “stupid” means exactly that.  Stupid != “non optimal” (“I can’t believe the AI chose a factory over a research building as their 5th improvement on Centi III” is not stupid. But “I can’t believe the AI gave me its home planet in exchange for some beads” would be).

Case #1: Space beads

What’s happening?

When you add an item to the trade screen, the game appraises the value of it.

In the case of a peace treaty, it simply looks at my power vs. their power.  This is a good start but it needs much much more.

So what kinds of things should the AI take into account?

1. Who started the war.  Which it does (the grudge factor).
2. The faction power difference. It does this but its weight isn’t related to the weights of things like tech.  This is a very tricky balancing act of course.
3. How long they’ve been at war.
4. The personalities at war (are you their primary enemy? if so, they are a lot less likely to want peace).
5. Do they currently have you by the throat? By that I mean, do they have transports and war ships in your territory? If so, that should matter.

This is, by no means, a complete list but a pretty decent start.

So my first change here is going to be that I don’t want to look at My power minus their power alone. I want to look at the RATIO.  Even if I have 50 and they have 100, a 50 difference doesn’t seem like much. But it is a 2X difference.

However, you can’t go by ratios alone because early game, you can easily get “double” or more of someone else’s power just by building a couple impressive ships.  So we need a combination.

We also need to look at relative costs too.

In this example: Me asking for peace is worth –180 points.  That is meaningless without knowing how much other stuff is valued.

But the tech is valued at 750. WOW! The crappy ship is only 77.

The techs are probably pretty well balanced at this stage and crappy ships really aren’t worth very much.  It’s the treaty that isn’t valued enough.

So let’s go look back at the treaty valuation.

First I’m going to add:

FixedDecimal primaryEnemy = m_primaryOpponentID;

This way, I can penalize the player if the AI has really dislikes them.

then:

In the file GalCiv3AIDefs.xml (anyone can monkey with this) I’m going to change the NegativePeaceTreatyRelation value from 12 to 120.

Why?

The Drengin’s power is 254. Mine is 193. That’s a difference of 60.  Ultimately, the cost on this gets modified by a derivative of that value which ultimately comes out to 3 which is why it’s only –180.  They declared war on us, they’re more powerful but they don’t really hate us.  But given that a crappy tech is worth 750 we need to put these values into their place.  Or in other words, –180 should really be more like –1800. 

It also turns out that the Drengin don’t consider me their primary enemy (which is nice) so they should be willing to give me peace for a price.  They just shouldn’t be willing to give me peace cheaply.

Moreover, peace treaties need to be weighted to be similar in value to other items as a starting basis:

So instead of the mod value being 1 I’m changing it to 10.

So let’s make these changes…

Ok. Better. We’ve been at war for 45 turns and I’m not their primary enemy.  3 techs should be enough to buy him off.

But..

but…

“Your gift will be gladly received.”

No.

The Drengin would never say that.  This is where modders will have some fun because this is all data driven. So let’s go fix that.

Open up Flavortext.xml in an XML editor (I use visual studio). Find that corny text.

So that’s the generic response if I’m giving them stuff that is worth more than what they’re giving me in return.

Let’s add some new ones right now.

So if they’re stronger than I am, they’ll have a bit more arrogance.

But still, we’re at war and this is the Drengin we’re talking about. Let’s go further.

Okay, so now the speaker is stronger, and we’re at war so I’ll have them be a bit more cocky.

Still…

NOT Drengin-y enough. BTW, you can make your own flavor texts and share them. These fields that you see here auto fill.

Just create a file called say “MyOwnFlavors.xml”  with this at the top:

We include that .xsd file in the game directory to help modders.

Anywhoo…

Let’s make this text even better.

There. And I even gave it 2 different text options to draw from. I could add more but I’m lazy.  But modders can and I hope will go crazy with this stuff.

We're nearing the end of the pre-release development of Galactic Civilizations III.  While dev will continue on this game for at least the next 7 years (hence, the choice to require 64-bit, etc.).  I want to make sure you guys are happy with the 1.0 launch!

To that end, let me know what your bugaboos are. That is, things in the game that you would like to see fixed before release.

Below is MY list of bubgaboos I've already started working on:

1. Stupid alien conversation stuff.  Aka "pap".  When I talk to aliens, I want them to feel unique.  
2. Lighting. Some things are just too dark. 
3. The fleet window.  I double click on a fleet, show me the whole fleet, not just 3 represenatives.
4. AI not terraforming enough.
5. AI doesn't have "cheap" versions of their ships.
6. Minor races behaving not so minor

What are some of yours?

greetings!

I'm on a plane back from showing GalCiv III ff to the game sites.mgreat fun! 

This week, I want to nail down remaining stupid AI behaviors.  if you see something, comment here on what it is and link me to a saved game.  I'll then look at it and then report how I fixed or changed what it does so you and others can comment.

thanks!!!

Introductions: The oldest actively developed space strategy game series

Galactic Civilizations is the oldest actively developed space strategy game in the world.  The last version, Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor, was released over 7 years ago and remains to this day the highest rated (by Metacritic average) space strategy game of all time.  The series has sold over 5 million copies since its inception back in 1992.

Suffice to say, Galactic Civilizations III has a lot to live up to.

The Premise: What kind of civilization would you make?

In the year 2178 humans have built a colony ship that has left Earth. Galactic Civilizations asks the question: “Now what?”

Earth has developed faster-than-light travel and a constructed a colony ship.

As the leader of a now space-faring civilization, you have a lot of interesting decisions to make.  For example, the galaxy isn’t empty. You will have to contend with other civilizations who have their own agendas. 

Will you build up a strong military? How much should be invested into R&D? What about your culture? Do you want to trade with these aliens? Do you want to help them fight their wars directly or give them stuff and keep your hands clean? When you find new planets, what do you do if there’s already a pre-industrial society living there? What about dealing with disease carried from new worlds? Galactic Civilizations puts these questions in front of the player.

Every game is different. It is the ultimate sandbox game.

The basics

• Title: Galactic Civilizations III
• Developer: Stardock Entertainment
• Release Date: May 14, 2015
• Genre: 4X strategy
• Platform: 64-bit PC Windows 7, 8, 10. DirectX 10 or better.
• Website: www.galciv.com
• Price: $49.99

What’s new in Galactic Civilizations III?

While a lot of work has been done to make Galactic Civilizations III approachable and familiar to those who have played the previous game, the new version is completely new from the ground up.  The effort has focused on making the game a richer, more immersive game experience without making the game feel overly complex.

The major new features over previous versions include:

1. Ideology. Rather than rhetorically ask “What kind of civilization do you want to be?” GalCiv III also makes it a game mechanic. Your choices will give you access to ideology based abilities. Your benevolence or at the other end, malevolence greatly affect what your civilization is capable of doing.
2. Much Much Much better colony management.  In previous games, every planet had a planet rating (a number). This number determined how many improvements you could build on that planet.  In GalCiv III, where you build your improvements matters due to adjacency bonuses. This often involves making some tough choices on what you want to build on a particular tile. 
3. A whole new scope.  Previous games supported up to 16 opponents.  Thanks to the move to 64-bit and multi-core AI design, players can now play on map sizes that are up to 8 times larger than the previous size and play against up to 128 opponents.  Multicore processing has allowed these AI players to take their turn in less than a tenth of a second each.
4. Multiplayer. For the first time ever, Galactic Civilizations can be played multiplayer. The game will include several balanced multiplayer maps, saved multiplayer games and many other features that make the game quite enjoyable for online/LAN play.
5. Prototypes. The galaxy now has strategic resources that can be claimed and enable the construction of “one of a kind” ships, improvements and other unique abilities that can give that player a significant advantage.
6. More sophisticated fleet combat. Galactic Civilizations III introduces the concept of “ship roles”.  Players can (optionally) design their ships, choose what role they have (support, assault, escort, etc.). These roles have very specific rules in how they act in combat.  Players can view the battles and watch the subtle (or not so subtle) ways ships behave based on their role to better design new ships and assemble better thought out fleets. 
7. Play as any civilization with their own tech tree. While the last GalCiv II expansion introduced this concept, GalCiv III takes it to a whole new level with each civilization being a vastly different gameplay experience. Unique technology trees, colony improvements, ships, AI behaviors and even the ability to create your own civilizations and ships that you can share with others.

Ideology tree

Other improvements

The minor list of features is really too long to list.  A lot of the improvements in Galactic Civilizations III stems from the general improvements that games have seen from better hardware.  So for example, the game is much more sophisticated in terms of the number of factors that go into a stat (like say planetary approval or population growth) but is actually more approachable because of the use of “chicks” (smart, clear, tool tips) that make it clear how a given stat is derived.

“chicks” are advanced tool tips that allow the player to conveniently see what a given item does. This allows us to make the game a lot more sophisticated while keeping it approachable.  In GalCiv II, we had to keep everything very straight forward in order to keep the game from becoming too complicated.

Overall, many of the minor improvements can be lumped into a much better user experience.  It is the best Galactic Civilizations game yet.

A Game Play Example

Earth expands

Heading towards Alpha Centuari

When I originally designed Galactic Civilizations I was (and still am) a huge fan of another 4X game that often ended with the player sending a colony ship out into space.  Back in 1991, when I started working on this, I wanted to know what happened next.  So in our example, our colony ship is heading off to Alpha Centauri. 

Now, I could have chosen to play as any of the other alien races or made my own, for this example, I’m playing as the humans of Earth.

A year later, my colony ship has reached Proxima Centauri.

However, another civilization was once on this planet.

So what should we do? Let’s be pragmatic about this. The researchers who volunteer know the risks.

Proxima. Where I choose to build matters. For example, the tile selected has caverns on it which would make the planet a lot better to defend against invasions if I place a military improvement there.  This early on, I don’t have one. But on the other hand, it’s adjacent to the colony capital which means anything I build there will get a boost. Do I save that tile for later or use it now to get a short-term benefit?

By choosing the pragmatic path for our researchers, I gained enough ideology points to choose an item on the ideology grid. I choose the one that gives me some constructors.

Turn 5: Exploration

It is time to research technologies. Each race gets their own scientist and tech tree. One big change to GalCiv III is that we have technology ages.  This gates different techs without us having to have a super complex tech dependent tree. For example, you can’t just b-line to planetary invasion anymore because invading another planet is a pretty big logistical and engineering feet. So planetary invasion is in the Age of War which requires 12 total technologies to have been research prior.

I turns out aliens don’t speak English after all.  The Altarians look suspiciously similar to humans.

Humans found a second colony around Tau Ceti. It is called Kryseth. A swamp planet.

We also decide it’s time to research a Universal Translator.

This opens up the opportunity to trade.

Turn 20: Economics

Earth has sent its first freighter to an Altarian planet. The ship, filled with the spice “ginger” is much appreciated.

The GalCiv III economy system is all new. Much deeper and yet more straight forward.  By having trade, I can turn down my taxes.

The humans have also started mining a rare material from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Turn 30: Diplomacy

The next alien race we meet are called the Thalan. Their leader, Hithesius, thinks humans look disgusting.

The Thalan have a lot of weaponry. The Earth has never even considered arming its ships yet. Is this a mistake? Worse, the Thalan don’t want to trade us weaponry.

Now that there are 3 civilizations in contact with each other, things start to get..complicated. Right now, everyone is getting along fine.

Our pragmatism is a major issue for the Altarians. But otherwise, the humans and Altarians get along well.

Turn 40: Tension & Challenge

The third race the humans meet are called the Drengin Empire. They will not be our friends.

Technology allows players to create new tiles. Where you place them is important. In this case, adding a tile in India will allow for a factory to be biuld that gains the benefit of having 2 other factories and the Terran capital adjacent to it. 

As a side note: The game randomly decided that Hong Kong is the capital of future Earth for this game.

Thus, when a factory is placed here, the adjacent factories gain a level and this factory is instantly a level 3 factory.

By being level 3, it produces 15% more goods than it would have otherwise.

Only 12 years after the start of the colony race (2200) the 4 major space-faring civilizations meet about establishing a United Planets. With the Thalan’s support, the Terran Alliance becomes the home for this new organization.

The Drengin Empire is already interested in conquering.  The Earth passes on this so-called “opportunity”.

The Earth and its colonies have focused on building a powerful economy rather than a military. As this graph shows, the humans are the leaders in total production.

The notification system keeps us up to speed on galactic events. Thus, the Terran Alliance is aware the Drengin are attacking our friends, the Thalan and their shipyard is busy building attack ships.

Speaking of shipyards, one of the cooler new features of Galactic Civilizations III is that ship construction has been separated from planets. This means that having a large empire of colonies doesn’t mean a bunch of tedious ship building prompts. You can build a few shipyard and have your colonies feed them.

A shipyard has sponsors who send manufacturing resources to it. The Terrans get to have a lot more than other races (normally you can only have 5 sponsors). This greatly reduces micromanagement late game.

Turn 75: Paths to victory

While conquest is, admittedly, the most common way people try to win.  For this example, the Terran Alliance are going to try for a cultural victory.  This is where your culture spread so completely through the galaxy that your soft power becomes irresistable.

Early on, the humans found a relic of the Precursors. This relic gives the possessor an intangible effect on ones culture. Since this is a game, it results in a 10% bonus to all cultural improvements which is pretty huge.

Terran mining operations continue to grow.

To pull of this strategy, the Terran government, in a meeting in Hong Kong (of course) agrees that surveillance of the various wars is needed.  To that end, a new sensor beacon is designed and built to be sent out to watch over everyone.

Earth has built up nicely.

Turn 100: Cultural Conquest

GalCiv III is serious about having its other winning conditions be viable.  Cultural conquest is not easy.  Here’s why:

First, if you are focusing mostly cultural influence you are not going to have a big military. Therefore, gaining points at diplomacy matters. There is an entire part of the tech tree dedicated towards building diplomacy points. You must gain these faster than their annoyance with you.

Second, you must research technologies that give you more influence and place them in the right spots. Getting back to one of the improvements in GalCiv III are the chicks showing why my influence per turn is 2.0 and how that grows over time. You can see the various elements that contribute to it clearly.

Third, you literally have to advertise your culture by building cultural starbaes in your target’s territory. This will expand your influence but will make them that much unhappier. Thus, the pressure remains on that civilization to keep improving their diplomatic skill.

As you can see, the Drengin is now well within my sphere of influence and is slowly rebelling.

Thus, putting resources on improving ones diplomacy is crucial. But that’s also effort not being placed on weaponry.

Another change from GalCiv II is the careful balancing of what exactly is power.  Even though the Terrans have no military power, they are still looked upon as the most powerful in the galaxy. How is this?

This is why.  Would-be opponents will measure one’s potential military power and make a guess on how quickly that potential could be turned into actual power.

Once a civilization becomes close to another civilization, they are open to becoming an ally.

Turn 150

We still have a ways to go to win. But progress is rapid.

I’ll leave it here for now.  What will happen? Will the Drengin Empire allow me to simply dominate the galaxy due to my diplomatic smoothness? Should the Terrans use their new-found alliance to try to defeat them? Can I convince the Altarians to join the Thalan and the Terrans in an alliance? Or will something unforeseen plunge the galaxy into war?

The Drengin don’t like us but our diplomatic skill has been enough to keep them at bay (along with our implied potential power).

With our alliances, the Terrans could have become a formidable military power as well through technology trading.

How will you rule the galaxy?

The Terran Alliance have chosen a path of pragmatism and diplomacy.  Other paths could have been taken. Military power. Technological victory. Ascension into a higher state of being. Diplomatic Alliance (which the Terrans are pretty close on).

That is what has always made Galactic Civilizations unique. It is a strategy game but it is also a sandbox game designed to let you create your own epic story on what your civilization would do.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments section.

It. Is. On!

Our story so far…

As an AI test, I see how well the Drengin do in what would normally be a multiplayer game. I have this map where I play as the Terran Alliance run by those crazy primates from Sol 3 (aka Earth) from the year 2245.

My opponent are those brutal, skin eating bastards from Drengi who recently wiped out their own sub-species the Korath because, they’re just that nasty.

In the previous tests, it’s been a sad sad story of me just wiping out the stupid AI.  But now a month of heavy duty AI coding has gone in.  Let’s see how they do.

Notices

First off. I’m turning off FOW.  I’m doing this to better view what they’re doing.  So we can all see what’s going on.

Second, I’m playing on normal. So the AI gets no advantages, bonuses, etc. whatsoever.  So overall, as the human, I have a slight advantage.

Starting Locations

In this corner the humans get their watery planet that they have ironically named Earth.

The main stats:

• Manufacturing: 7.7
• Research: 8.3
• Net taxes paid in: $6.7
• Approval: 50%

Now, let’s look at that polluted crap hole called Drengia.

The main stats:

• Manufacturing: 12.5
• Research: 10.8
• Net taxes paid in: 0
• Approval: 40%

So they’ve already adjusted their spending and rush built a work camp.  The Drengin are naturally disconent because, again, their home is a crap hole.

Turn 0

This is the whole map.  The AI cannot win through attrition here. It has to play intelligently.  There’s no opportunity here for shenigans since I can see everything it is doing every turn.  The goal isn’t to be fair but to see how well the AI plays.

Early Choices

I am going to play as Benevolent.

I chose to rush colony ships a bit faster than the Drengin so I take an early lead in planets: 4 to 3. 

The AI makes a mistake: Tries to colonize Mars.  I don’t have an API yet that lets me make a good judgment (without hard coding which we’re avoiding) on whether a planet is too far in someone else’s influence to bother with.

Expand: Complete

By turn 30, all the planets are filled. How we doing?

They’ve caught up in power.

And in total production:

Exploit and Exterminate:

But I have planetary invasion and in fact, I have 9 techs they don’t have. They only have 3 I don’t have.

I am also going to see how much I can exploit the game’s influence system.  Have we balanced this properly?

AI mistakes

The AI should be able to take notice that I have invasion tech and start putting defenders in orbit. Instead, they’re building constructors

Which is a shame because I’m totally going to exploit it.

And so I do. And they die.

Where did  they go wrong?

That’s easy. We intentionally make it easy for a player to see what techs other players have. It’s vital. And the AI simply didn’t respond to the fact that I had invasion tech.  They should have switched to building some defenses. If they had done that. It would have been a very different game.

UPDATE: THE REMATCH

The rematch

After a day of coding I think I’ve gotten them to be much better in the area of situational awareness.  I am confident I can beat them in a fair fight but I expect to have to work a bit more.

Let’s find out:

Turn 0:

This time I’m optimizing from the start so it’ll be even harder on the AI.  I’m going to b-line to warfare and conquer them.

• Manufacturing: 6.7
• Research: 17.7
• Net taxes paid in: 0
• Approval: 50%

vs.

• Manufacturing: 12.5
• Research: 10.8
• Net taxes paid in: 0
• Approval: 40%

Now, the thing to remember here is that the particular game I’m playing is not representative of a normal game. I am b-lining in tech so I have my tech way up at 18.  Plus, the Drengin tend to focus more on manufacturing. 

The other thing to remember is that the Drengin are not as good as the humans economically but are really good later game with their fleets (they pay slightly less in maint). This means that in a short game, I have a slight advantage by picking Terrans.  Once I’m satisfied with the AI, I’ll probably do Terran vs. Terran games.

Exploit and Exterminate!

I got invasion in only 36 turns. I bought up research centers instead of taking an extra planet.

This means we both have equal numbers of planets (4 to 4).

and this time..

The Drengin have started building token defenses just in case.  The system is actually reasonable accurate in that it can tell whether I’m in range of their planets (i.e. if someone is off on a huge map they won’t care as much).

He’s definitely keeping an eye on me.

Here we come…

The Drengin have a Mark II defender class ship (they call the Tho-Altha) in orbit. That…is unfortunate.

Let’s take a look at the home worlds..

• Manufacturing: 17.3
• Research: 18.2
• Net taxes paid in: 6
• Approval: 58%

The Drengin are putting some effort on getting some money.

• Manufacturing: 23.1
• Research: 11.8
• Net taxes paid in: 1
• Approval: 51%

We are relatively even.  The AI is being punished a little because approval doesn’t currently matter as much as it probably should. The AI is taught to keep its approval decent.  I think eventually high approval will translate to production bonuses.

Too late

He saw the threat but was too slow to do anything about it.  He had defenders on his border planets but not back at his core worlds.  Admittedly, lack of FOW made that possible.

I won’t be able to get Kona though.

Meanwhile, I took one of his other planets.Not sure what happened to that ship that he had.  I know the AI can get a little aggressive in decommissioning “old tech”.

What he does have are pretty decent ships. His battle cruiser is giving my battle master a work out.

However, and this is where GalCiv III shines: I have a Prototype ship called the Sherman. Prototype ships are the result of owning special resources. In this case, I have an anti-matter resource.

Anyway, it’s only a matter of time.  I need to get the AI to surrender at this stage since it’s hopeless.

What mistakes did they make?

The first one is something that might be a bug. One of its shipyards lost its sponsors because they were in my territory.

The second issue is that the AI probably should have a cheaper defender ship. It shouldn’t be about having a great defender but rather an inexpensive one that does the job. Will have to think more on it.