It’s Friday once again! As usual we will have our dev livestream today at 3pm EST where Adam and Paul (and me in chat) will be taking questions and playing the Galactic Civilizations III Beta……yes, BETA! The GalCiv 3 beta will be upon us before you know it, and we’ll be showing off the latest in that build and other aspects of current development.
Tune in to our Stardock Twitch channel today and join us for our live broadcast!
If you can’t make the stream, please feel free to drop your questions in the comments below and we’ll try to get them answered on-air.
After the live broadcast today, we’ll post the replay on our YouTube channel so you can catch up on the latest episodes.
See you there and have a great weekend!
edit: YouTube of today's stream is up
Will there be a way to create techs that require multiple different techs from other trees like in GalCiv 1, and will there be an option to display every tech on one screen?
When writing the new tech trees, how much do you take the techs and the lore from the previous game into account?
When you conquered a planet in TotA, all improvements, for which you didn't have the pre-requiste techs in your tech tree, got destroyed. Will this also be the case in GalCiv 3?
Frogboy mentioned in an interview a while ago, that diplomacy will be more than just trading stuff with each other this time around. If I understood him correctly, we're going to be able to exchange services with other races. He gave the following example: "I could help some guy fight some insurgency on some planet, in exchange for him allowing my cultural goods into his empire, which spreads my culture." Could explain how this is going to work?
I always look forward to these after work.
For the user of the founder elite, will we need to do anything, remove the alpha copy and install the beta copy, will steam automatically do this for us? Or will we get a view of 2 Gal Civ 3 in our steam games?
A few comments from the stream....
1. I vote hex maps...
2. make the mini-map zoomable... Hex-shaped versus square, to match the galaxy, this would make sense??
3. Starbases are a cost after 4, nerf the cost based on galaxy size please... The larger the galaxy the easier it is to make more starbases... Please.
4. When will some minor races be added? I know major races will be coming in slowly, what about minor races?
5. Paul stated that one may be able to get bonus's for invasion and limiting to a 1 time reward or such. Why not offset this stating just invaded planet/colonized no bonus's for invasion for x turns (x) being random could be as early as say 5 turns but could be as many as 50. Or even make it on a random, it may give you a bonus but may not depending on x being a percent... There comes a time where you can't get any production because one has no population on the planet so exchanging planets between a friend becomes less profitable.
6. Maybe do a contest with the founders for a minor race for the game or DLC? Have them put in suggestions and then have Stardock pick from a few and vote on? This is a silly suggestion but, I thought worth putting out there?
thoughts??
Nope, Steam will handle it all. You'll get an automatic update and be good to go.
The mini-map should be a rectangle with the same aspect ratio as the main map. The hex tiling follows the same rules as the display of the main map. There should be a default zoom that makes the mini-map show the same stars and such as the main map. There should be a standard zoom and a geometric zoom. The geometric zoom shows twice as many sectors with each mouse scroll wheel click. That should help those of us insane enough to build >8gig galaxies.
i heard/saw that you guys where planning on making something to block off areas, called the hex sector system, and i find it wasnt really realistic, in space their arent really any place you cant go if you got the range for it(except black holes), like in galciv 2, so i just found that having areas you cant go goes against the whole idea of space and everything
I thought the idea was just to block off where stars are generated, so you can make custom shaped galaxies. I don't think it prevents your ships from going there.
Even if it did prevent your ships from moving there it would still be consistent with the Gal Civ lore. Hence the reason why we cannot go explore outside the hex grid in the first place. Plus, I think the maps to which they refer are ones for custom type games and not the generic randomly generated maps. The blocked off maps are there to give a little different spice to multiplayer games.
I don't like the idea of entirely impassable hex's. You could have special hex's though that are quite nasty:
These hex's should naturally link together to cover larger areas. Basically, you can still go anywhere on the map, but there are downsides to doing so. Do I want my ships half shredded by an anomaly or do I go through the choke point that has a power star base protecting it.
I do like these terrain features. These would be nice in general to add to any randomly generated map we see. I think for AI pathing and such it is easier for the computer to just block these areas entirely, instead of teaching the AI not to go into these areas.
In other words, for a map editor, I would rather have access to making blocked tiles rather than be denied access altogether.
It would allow a map creator to create more mini-type games for a player. Imagine a spiral galaxy as you slowly go into the center in a spiral as enemies get more and more difficult. You would still be able to put decoration like aasteroid fields in the way to visually show that the player cannot enter there, but blocking the tiles entirely, force the player to play the mini-type game to the center of the galaxy you created.
By the way, I vote squares. I find the shape of the hexes more distracting for some reason when the grid is turned on, and I like the grid on. and Paul's rationale during the dev stream that hexes look more 'science fictiony" isn't a good enough reason to change IMO.
I remember when Civ II switched from squares (Civ I) to diamonds and how much I hated the change. Then there was the change from diamonds (Civ IV?) to hexes and how much I hated that change. But once I got used to each change, I decided Sid's Devs did the right thing.
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