Gal Civ 3

[VarisNox]

So far the game is enjoyable. I've played a few games to completion, and had fun trying out new strategies and messing with the game mechanics and start settings. Getting around some of the quirks to be "fully productive" and some UI issues have been my biggest complaints so far.

Quirks I've encountered:

• Must keep production 1% manufacturing and 99% science/money for maximum production of a non-manufacturing planet - you get a flat 10% increase if you do one of the projects in the build queue as long as you have at least 1 production going to that project.
  
• As Sullla mentioned, some of the ship building can really break the game if designed correctly.
  
• Once you research a "government" in the tech tree, that's it. You're set on that government and that bonus. I've not found a way to change out of that anywhere in the UI so far, but the obvious "govern" tab is a no go.
  
• With Tech Trading on, you can get multiple specializations. I'm not sure that this is intended, but since its a research, you can trade it like anything else. Find two other races with the specializations you didn't choose and you get the best of all worlds. Really, tech trading should be turned off. Not only for the above reason, but it's just much better in this game when everyone has to research their own techs
  
• The AI seems to build and prioritize terraforming above ALL other improvements first. I've seen a newly colonized class 20 planet the AI took immediately start on Soil Enrichment, and have conquered planets that just built their first factory despite being active for 30+ turns, but have no terraforming to build.
  

A few , mostly UI related, things I've come across in the games I've played that irritated me the most:

• Starting with 5k is a pretty odd forced option. I wish it were a setting like everything else to set how much you could start with, say from 0 to a 5000 cap, and defaulting to 5000 for the first time, or the previous setting for all other games. That would've satisfied everyone.
  
• The sliders are pretty finicky when you're trying to set planet manufacturing. The "social or military" focus slider can be hard to drag around at times, and the Wealth/Manufacturing/Science slider can certainly be difficult to set to "true" 100%.
  
• Another planet UI annoyance, a global toggle to mass enable/disable Auto-Upgrade improvements would be very welcome.
  
• Tooltips are also incredibly unclear in some cases, to the point of bad information. It doesn't really say anywhere that bad approval negatively affects raw production rates, and very high approval gives up to a 25% bonus. If I hadn't played Gal Civ 2, I wouldn't have even known about that.
  
• Another annoying lack of information from tooltips has to be research. Why in the world would you only measure techs in turn completion time over beakers or even both? Just seems like a silly oversight. This missing information is especially silly if you have tech trading turned on. It only tells you a relative cost of a tech on that screen, and it's even sillier if you happen to not be doing research at the time - everything on the trade screen is listed as "N/A" with 0 research, so if you're not super familiar with the techs and their tree position, you're going to get robbed more than usual.
  

For race attributes, I noticed that none of the starting races use (in my opinion) the most broken one: Patriotic. That attribute causes the morale penalty for large empires to disappear. That's just amazing, and gets even better the larger the map or more planets you have in your settings. Synthetic is also pretty nice since you can just take negative growth points for free traits as growth is disabled for the Synthetic ability. Intuitive is probably one of the most poorly explained abilities out of the set of them - the ability says it gives you free research. That's all it says. It doesn't tell you "The first 5 research projects you choose are free" which is much more helpful as a description.

Finally, I haven't encountered many bugs or overtly broken mechanics save one:

If you play as a race and make a custom design with, for example, the basic laser and a have a ton of miniaturization and/or ship mass capacity increases, that design is saved and can be used any time you play that race. Seems working as intended so far, you might want to use that design if you ever play that race again. However, the game only takes into account the parts needed to build the ship, and not the tech needed for capacity increases/miniaturization tech. So you can build a tiny hull with like 50 basic lasers and have it from the start for example with 180/28 mass used. Bigger exploit for a giant starting sensor ship or a super constructor ship with a bunch of constructor modules. If I replay a race, I make sure I avoid this exploit.

I see myself playing quite a few more games, and I'm hopeful for good changes with the first few patches.

[Sullla]

Hey Varis! Good to hear from you again. Your post is absolutely spot-on and agrees with my experiences in GC3 thus far. Let me put some quick thoughts in a list:

* The tech trading for multiple specialization techs is apparently intended. The designers are aware of that issue and have said they don't plan to change it. I can't say I agree with that logic - what's the point of making a choice at all if you can simply trade for the other options? In my limited experience, I also find that GC3 plays much better with tech trading off.

* The interface needs some real work. I have the same issues with sliders getting stuck, the Rename Planet tab getting hidden, the game claiming a new turn has started when it actually hasn't, and other weirdness. The fact that the interface does not display the beaker cost of individual techs is maddening. They really need to make it more obvious which planets are doing research on the little overview screen in the bottom right corner as well. I have to make notes to myself because these planets keep displaying as "queue empty" and there's no way to tell which ones are sitting at 100% research and which ones are genuinely wasting their spending.

* I read the description for Patriotic and thought "that sounds impossibly broken - surely it can't really work that way?" Umm, I guess it does? Well, I won't be playing on any map size much larger than Standard, but the Patriotic trait would be an absolute joke on those gigantic maps I keep seeing people posting about online.

I think this game would have benefitted from another month or two of polishing before being released. It's a bit rough around the edges here and there. Still, the game is so massive that there's a lot of fun to be had at the moment, even without the balance being all that great. Looking forward to seeing what they do with patches.

[BRickAstley]

Yeah once I get some spending money together for it I'm definitely jumping on this.

I also have a feeling once the game has been out for a little while, gaining some bug fixes/balance fixes, and maybe goes on sale to jump the userbase up a bit, there shouldn't be any problem with trying to run some SP adventures and getting interest going on here.

[VarisNox]

Good to be here again Sullla, been awhile since the League days!

It's pretty crazy hearing some of the things they intended with the design. Hopefully they listen to some feedback as they make improvements to tweak some of the more... interesting choices.

I know what you mean about the overview screen. I usually can tell because I name all my planets with little tags - P for production, W for wealth, S for science, I for influence, etc. That along with the special projects (research, wealth, culture, etc.) can usually give me an at a glance look at what each planet is specializing towards. If they're doing anything but a special project, that usually means I haven't "flipped the switch" and changed it from production to its regular specialization. If I haven't tagged it, it's still not been assigned a specialization and is building it's core only (1 factory, 1 farm, 1 hospital for regular planets, +1 factory on a negative production planet like aquatic, -1 hospital on really small planets like size 5-6). Usually if a production planet of mine has switched to ship building, I'll be doing the "birthing subsidiaries" project, so at least I don't have to look at queue empty all the time. Still though, tagging plus projects at least means I don't have to keep notes elsewhere most of the time.

Speaking of another interface issue, one thing that drives me crazy is the lack of "instant updates" to information when you make a change. Add a sensor to a starbase? Well better wait a turn to see what new vision you have. Change production? Well, better move the queue or add something to update the turn length for building something. Select a ship? Oh totally, that ship will take 1 turn (green movement line) to reach its destination, oh wait now it takes 2-3 turns as it moves. Very silly stuff like that just makes me wince every time.

As a note, if you're planning to increase the difficulty, know that the AI gets a unique advantage on it's last two difficulties, Genius and Godlike, because they start with the map revealed on those difficulties. I plan on playing on Medium/Large most of the time, but I might spin up insane just to see how 50 races play out, and if the game can even play at that level without crashing. I really wish there was a random opponents button.

If there is any SP adventures, I know I'd probably do them, so +1 for interest.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

how good is the AI? Any experience on that yet?

A good AI is one of the most important aspects for me when it comes to 4X games. I've just been burned badly with Endless Legends in that regard, and don't want to make the mistake of buying a game with horrible AI again (which wasn't get improved by patches either). It's hard to find out from reviews alone, but I trust RB on this.

Oh, and hi all!

[VarisNox]

Hello!

Personally, I don't have quite enough experience to weigh in on one side or the other. I crushed the "Normal" difficulty with trivial ease my first game, and the next step up at "Gifted" was surprisingly more adept than I expected. I still was pretty easily able to win though, but I was actually challenged in some aspects (namely, I didn't get every single planet on the galaxy map). Now that I'm playing on the higher difficulties, I hope to get a better feel for it. Additionally, a lot of the map aspects seem to influence the AI differently, and since there's so many to set, I'd have to experiment more to get a complete outlook.

Really, certain AIs just seem to do better, and I think that's because of the priority system. Certain priorities are stronger than others I would guess. Most notably for me, the Krynn always seem to do very well, while the Iridium always just do awful and die quickly or just become a minor part of the game. Anyone who's played experience trending races that seem to always do well or die horribly?

As a funny side note, I found another bug in my last game. There seems to be a hidden "point value" for everything up for trade, with important stuff like planets and bases being given more value. Well, in certain games where the AI is doing pretty well and has a good amount of stuff, the trade point value overflows. It goes from "X planets and X bases and X money - No Way!" 100% negative; then, you add one more item that hits the integer/decimal/whatever code number limit they have on their trade value, and boom the diplomacy overflows and goes 100% positive. They can't beg you enough to please take all their planets, ships, credits, bases, resources fast enough! It was pretty funny to see that happen - way more likely to happen on larger maps when the AI has more chances to get more stuff, and definitely likely if tech trading is on.

[Sullla]

Here are some more thoughts after another weekend with this game.

* The tech tree makes more sense the more time that I spend with it. Each of the four separate trees starts out with a handful of cheap, general techs that do a lot of different things at once. For example, the first tech in the Engineering field is Interstellar Travel, which grants +1 moves to all ships, the second tier of engines (more moves on the galaxy map each turn), the second tier of scanners (more vision), and the second tier of life support (more range for ships). Then as you get deeper into the tree, the techs become more expensive and get more specialized. For the third tier of engines, you have to research a separate tech, and the third tier of sensors / life support also have their own techs. And that's the basic pattern for each tree, some initial cheap techs that do a lot of things and then fork into more specialized routes further down the branches.

Needless to say, after you can get over the shock of being overwhelmed by so many techs (there are roughly 300 in the game), the opportunities begin to open up. While it's pretty much always a good idea to get the basic stuff in every field, there's a major incentive to dive deeply into one of the different areas and specialize your empire around that goal. You can have awesome production and terrible research if you want, or ridiculous trade bonuses and horrible military. You can specialize even further than that, however - it's possible to go nuts with something as specific as engine speed while skipping ship range techs almost completely. The amount of different things that you can do with starbases alone would be enough for a dozen succession game ideas. I'm actually kind of sad that we don't have the Single Player-focused Realms Beyond community of ten years ago, which would have eaten this game up.

* I love the way that military invasions are handled in GC3. It's the closest thing to the original Master of Orion that I've seen in a modern game. The invasions are pretty basic: you have to research an early midgame tech (appropriately called "Military Invasion" tech) that allows your empire to build transport ships. They get loaded up with population from your worlds, and then they fight the defending population of the enemy planet when they arrive. Of course transports are typically undefended, so you'll have to guard them to reach the target. While there aren't missile bases in the classic Master of Orion sense, the defender can stack ships on the planet's tile to protect it from invasion. Planets can hold double the normal capacity of your empire, which means that if you're currently stuck with a limit of 4 ships in a fleet, a planet can hold 8 ships together in a fleet. (In GC3 bigger ships are essentially always better, but of course you have to research the larger ship sizes at increasing cost in beakers, so it works out.) It's also possible for the defender to build anti-invasion military structures, although like city walls in Civ4 those are normally a waste. The invasion combat is simple and direct, with a modifier for the attacker and the defender. Whoever is higher will win unless the numbers are really close.

This has been getting criticized online for its simplicity, but I completely disagree with that point of view. The simplicity of the system is its greatest strength. Other space-based empire games always try to over-complicate this aspect of gameplay. (Master of Orion 3, as the worst game in the genre, naturally had a ridiculously complex and micro-intensive form of ground combat.) Space-based empire games should be about the fleet versus fleet battles - keep the ground invasions simple. Note that invasions in GC3 require sending population off your planets for the attack, just like in the original Master of Orion, and losing them has a real economic cost. Even with high morale and hospitals, it's hard to grow more than 0.3 pop per turn on a planet. When you send 5 pop away for an invasion, yeah, you're going to feel it in your domestic economy. Having a failed invasion shot down without reaching the target is painful.

They tweaked the defender bonus in the 1.02 patch notes (it was a little too easy to capture planets with just a few attackers) and now I think the system is in excellent shape. But knowing modern game design, they'll probably ruin this in an expansion with "marine" units and "space tanks" and "tactical planetary invasion battles" or some nonsense like that. I hope not. Stick with the KISS principle here.

* GC3 also has an Alliance victory option that reminds me of the Galactic Council win in Master of Orion. If relations are high enough, you can ally with other races, and if everyone left alive is part of the same alliance, you win the game immediately. It reminds me of securing votes in the Galactic Council and then cashing out with a deserved win. You don't need to research all the way up to the United Nations or whatever if the other races still alive love your leader. Of course, even one surviving dissenter will stop this from happening, so it's not a total cheesefest path to victory either. I love the idea of hunting down and destroying your enemies without having to turn on your allies.

* One thing that the game really could use is a way to destroy an enemy colony from orbit, again like Master of Orion has. I'm not saying blow up the planet itself (not in the Terror Star sense) but I'd like a way to destroy the colony and wipe the planet clean of settlement. Right now, the only way to take over a planet is to conduct an invasion, which can be very tedious during the mop-up phase. While there are major advantages to doing so, such as capturing most or all of the planet's infrastructure intact, sometimes I'd just like to use my invincible fleet to wipe them out from orbit and move on to the next target. If you can establish space superiority over the planet and bring enough force to the target, it's shouldn't be necessary to invade each one individually.

* Final point: this game's interface is still very much in beta. There are bugs and inaccurate information all over the place. For the life of me, I don't understand why they didn't wait two more months to finish polishing this game before releasing it. What made a release date in mid-May, of all times of the calendar year, so necessary? GC3 is clearly rough around the edges at the moment. Stardock is getting a lot of negative reviews for their not-quite-done product, and deservedly so. It baffles me why they would damage their game's early reputation to squeeze it out the door slightly faster. (It's not a publisher making the call, they publish their own games. Strange.)

[Tyrmith]

... It baffles me why they would damage their game's early reputation to squeeze it out the door slightly faster. (It's not a publisher making the call, they publish their own games. Strange.)

Funny thing is that the game was in alpha/beta for ages on steam, it's not like there was some huge build up prior to release...

[Kylearan]

Hi Sulla,

I'm actually kind of sad that we don't have the Single Player-focused Realms Beyond community of ten years ago, which would have eaten this game up.

That quote alone hast just increased the chance of me buying the game tenfold.

Any thoughts on the quality of the AI? To me that's one of the most important aspects of a single player game. (And I don't want to get burned by a horrible AI again, like in Endless Legend...)

[T-hawk]

I'm actually kind of sad that we don't have the Single Player-focused Realms Beyond community of ten years ago, which would have eaten this game up.

Who says we don't? Let's try it. Give it a month or two for some more patching, but then let's run some Imperiums.