Greetings!
The team is really excited to get Beta 1 of Galactic Civilizations III out there. The target date is one week away.
The Founder's Edition, which is what provided access to the Alpha builds along with a lifetime subscription to everything we make for Galactic Civilizations III (all expansions, DLC) will not be offered anymore once the beta comes out. On the other hand, the beta Early Access edition will be $5 off the list price of $49.95.
So what's up?
They got a major graphics overhaul to the ships in. It was non-trivial and I think players will agree when they see it that no game has ever had better looking ship visuals than what will be in Beta 1. A big part of the reason is that the graphics engine is 64-bit and we're requiring DirectX 10 or better and as a result the materials and lighting on ships is something we've never seen before in games (though I suspect as 64-bit becomes more common and DirectX 10+ becomes required in more games you'll see the generational leap in visuals from the legacy DirectX 9 era we're still largley stuck in).
The other thing they've been working a lot on is multiplayer. We have an Arena map in development that, believe it or not, should allow for 1 on 1 duels to be played in around half an hour. We still have a lot of work on the multiplayer front though. We need to make it easy for people to rejoin games so that friends can get together and play together on games that might take months to complete.
Design Challenges
One of our objectives is for people to have the option to play new "Immense" sized maps where there might be hundreds of empires playing. We have a lot of different ideas on how to make this work (few people are going to want to have to select 130 opponents to play against). We might use Steamworks Workshop to allow players to share their custom made players and once approved have automatically added as additional AI players into games where a player wants to play a game with a truly insanely large galaxy.
Fleet Battles
The marketing team is struggling in how to describe the fleet combat in GalCiv III. My suggestion has been to describe it in terms of Hearthstone. Your fleet is your desk and your ships are your minions that you crafted. However, where the analogy fails is that the actual "tactics" of fleet battles are handled AI vs. AI. So your skill is about how you design ships and assemble fleets. Looking closely at what your enemies are designing with their ships and organizing them and countering it will be crucial.
Diplomacy and AI
Beta 1 won't have diplomacy in. Some modder might figure out a way to turn it on but it's not ready to be shown yet. I am not scheduled to begin writing AI code until October.
In less than 1 week, these forums will likely get very very busy.
Why? Just about every space 4x from the last couple of years has claimed MOO2 as inspiration.
Erm, MOO2 was gaming heaven and Galciv 2 was pretty damn close. I had 2 main beefs: No Tac combat and the planetary invasion visuals, which were not up to par w.r.t. the rest of the game (and lets not forget the automated exploration and the fact that the AI could be pretty retarded when it came to developing planets, ok that's 4, but these were minor ones). Nothing else comes even close, that's why its the Goddamn spiritual successor...phew, of MOO2.
@ Charon, that was a nice piece, really put things into perspective for me. Man, just thinking about MOO3 makes me want to vom. Draginol was very diplomatic about it, but MOO3 was a festering sore on the arse of space based gaming. Such a wasted opportunity, what a way to kill a franchise. Anyway back to galciv: I get it, its not supposed to be MOO2 (even though it is 90%+ the same thing ) it's something else, leaning towards CIV in a number of ways and Draginol is correct in that MOO/MOO2 were just competing militaries and I'm willing to entertain the idea that this is what made tac combat a greater necessity in such a game and why its not as necessary in a more strategic civilisation building game such as Galciv.
However, I am willing to bet a tidy sum on a hypothetical situation If tac combat had been included for Galciv3 I'm sure you would have all lined up to say what a brilliant idea it was, what a logical progression
IIRC. Galciv came out a bit before MOO
I'll add you to the tac com support list I got
I just become a founder? I think
Nope I don't see it. I just bought GC3 for $99. How long dose it take to show up?
Someone has to personally process it I think and tomorrow is Sunday so...a while.
Pitty Galciv hasn't got a startrek shell, GalCiv would be a great precessor of birth of the federation.
So...Galciv is a spiritual successor to MOO2 because they are both good games? That doesn't track.Note I don't have a strong statement to make here -- never played MOO2, just played MOO3 and never even finished a game it was so awful. I fully understand that MOO2 was apparently far superior. In fact, people talk about it so much I wish somebody made a game that actually did intend to just be a faithful modern remake of MOO2, xenonauts-style.
I'm reminded of way back when Civilization III was announced, and there were vocal people arguing that Civilization II was almost the perfect game except that it should be real-time like Starcraft. Starcraft was a great game, Civ II was a great game -- they were different games and there's almost nothing either one needs to take from the other, even if they are both strategy games.
I have no doubt that a great game could be made with some similarities to GalCiv but with tactical combat. But I'm happy for Galciv 3 to be non-tactical. After all, the last turn-based Strategy game that Stardock made did have Tactical Combat (Elemental / Fallen Enchantress), and...I liked Galciv much much better. That game progressed over the years from "mind-boggling disaster" to mere "trivially-exploited buggy mess with interesting ideas and promise" over the years. Credit for trying to clean things up, but wow.
If there was any way to take that bet I would. Even when I quite like the new game, I can still miss the old one. I liked Fallout: New Vegas but I'm really disappointed that it means we're probably not ever getting a Fallout 3 in the style of Fallouts 1 and 2 (hoping Wasteland is good). It's not always like Civ IV + expansions, which I felt was pretty much superior in all ways to Civ III + expansions and therefore obsoleted them (in turns, I did not feel Civ III was superior in all ways to Civ II). Hell, I'd take a proper GTA3 in the style of GTA2!
At the same time, some of my favourite changes were clearly not logical progressions. I'd never have played any game that logically followed from the original Saints Row. But Saints Row IV was, for me, an incredibly surprising piece of entertainment. I would never have bothered trying it if not for a steam free weekend SR3.
Technically, the beta for GalCiv came out before MoO. However, as far as the actual game-release is concerned, MoO came out first.
True. Especially considering, that the original GalCiv was inspired by Civ. Heck, the best way to describe GalCiv to this day is "Civ in space", in my opinion.
Same here. I like tactical combat a lot (most of my favourite games have it), but I don't want it in GalCiv. Why? Because I don't think every game being the same is a good thing. Also, there are already more than enough space 4x games catering to the tactical crowd. So leave one of the few space 4x games catering to the strategic crowd in peace.
Quoting Michael Ens,
In many ways that's right. But one feature of the Civ series that I have always liked is you can develop your cities in many different ways without limitation. I can't remember playing any space games that don't use the tile system in one form or another. I'm not sure how it might change the game (which it surely would). but it would be interesting to play one. Maybe the new Civ title will be the one.
I thought fleet battles weren't due 'til October ?
MoO 2 and GalCiv 1 didn't use tiles for planetary improvements. Instead, the planets in those games worked similar to the cities in Civ (more so in MoO 2), but without the terrain and accompanying improvements.
MoO 1 and SotS 1 didn't use tiles either. However, I don't think they count, because how the planets worked in them was much more abstracted.
We tried to acquire the rights to Master of Orion explicitly so we could make a true Master of Orion game. That would have had tactical battles to die for. But Wargaming.net (World of Tanks) acquired it and I presume (hope) they're working on a new MOO.
I like tactical battles too but GalCiv isn't the place for them. The fleet battles in GalCiv III, however, are far far more sophisticated than what we in GalCiv II. But we don't want players having to give individual move orders to individual ships.
That isn't to say we won't, over time, provide more options for user interaction during battles. We just don't want players feeling obligated to micro manage their ships in order to play the game at the higher levels.
I'd venture to say that most of us that want some form of tactical combat are after more sophistication rather than more micromanagement per se. Hopefully that's what we are getting.
This makes me happy. I'd like to see meaningful combat choices made within combat but not necessarily to the level of micromanaging ships. Thank you Brad for the info.
Well i do think the way they do planetary improvements could be improved.
Welcome news from Frogboy. Am looking forward to being able to play Beta1 next weekend.
I just hope that the Beta1 won't C-T-D after a measly 276 turns and also that Nvdia have there latest driver sorted so that it doesn't cause blue lines across the screen [I have a GTX670] although they disappeared when I could finally persuade the Nvidia driver to rollback.
I'm also hoping that there will be sufficient AI for battles and planetary-invasion to be more meaningful then the Alpha non-existent version.
Given these bugs sorted, me, my 4-core i7 and 16Gb of Ram will be very happy, thankyou all [@ team Stardock].
.
Schaef, I think we will have a 'disabled' AI till October. Brad is the AI genius who writes the code. I do believe they want most of the features resolved and in game before he sits down and writes the code for each AI faction.
I think he did a great job for GCII and it has been hailed as a really great AI (as compared to every other 4x game at the time).
I am really looking to see how Brad makes each faction come alive in its pursuit of its goals, (Drengin war, Terran Diplomo, Altaria Tech, and others along their own lines)!
Great news!
I don't understand the Hearthstone analogy at all. Could you clarify at all? I presume you will not be deploying your ships the way you cast minions, you will start with all your ships right? And you say that the tactics will be handled by the AI, so I assume that means you don't get to choose what individual ships attack. So where is the Hearthstone parallel? Is it just that, like the creatures in Hearthstone, ships in GalCiv will have an attack and defense? What is the common ground between GalCiv III and Hearthstone? Aside from the analogy, can you give us some of examples of the kind of commands or tactics you will be able to give to your fleet?
I think the best way to describe the new ship combat is rather simple: Admiral of the Fleet.
You decide which ships to bring to the battle, then will have the ability to issue general orders to the fleet (full attack, cautious probe, full retreat), possibly during the actual combat.
But you're not issuing specific orders to control individual ships. The captains of your ships are all AIs which follow your General Orders as best they can.
I personally think this is a awesome way to do battle with 100 other lesser empires....
Imagine how long a turn would be if we had to point, click and adjust 50 different battles a turn then have all of the AI's do the same :/
Plus I read somewhere that the Captains of the ships rank up! It will be like managing a bunch of hero units throughout the galaxy. Just the shear size of it makes it very tactical!
You just lost your money. I doubt i would have preordered if i had read TC on the feature list.
For some years now i find TC combat tedious, boring and just a waste of time. Even in AoW3, where it is really good, i wish i wouldnt be forcved to use it due to the AI loosing troops left and right when i am choosing autocombat.
You can send me the money now, but i am OK with store credit.
This would be great.
Perfect!
Word
I understand why tactical combat isn't going to be added. That said, I wouldn't mind a few changes to combat.
1) Have a time constraint on combat. By that I mean it isn't endless rounds until a ship/fleet wins. It could be set at say 10 rounds per turn (just throwing a number out). After that, both ships/fleets turn is over. This allows reinforcements to come in. This would also make it very hard to kill a starbase or starport with a puny ship. If you are dinging something at 1 hp a round, you shouldn't be able to destroy something that big that easily. So if you have a lot of firepower, boom, gone in one attack. If you don't, it will take more attacks/turns to kill the ship/fleet/base/port.
2) Combat stance. For example, I may want to have some skirmisher ships with long range and high speed. They would attack at long range and retreat. If the other ship/fleet is faster or has some kind of traction beam or other tech, they can negate that. Something similar to Endless Space but without the stupid cards. I am not saying it has to visually go to a new screen like ES for battles, but the idea of fighting at range, hit and run, closing to point blank or just retreating would add depth IMO.
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