Yea, sorry about all of that.  Proper documentation is something that Stardock has said is a goal of theirs for this game.  Most of the people in the GC3 beta are old-school GC2/1 pros, thus most of us "know" how to play intuitively already, and there hasn't been a big community push for better documentation.  However, as stated above, there will be better documentation before the final game ships.

I'm sorry to say, but GC2/1 has even worse documentation (ie none and no tool tips, rather than just none with some tool tips), so that won't help you very much.  The GC franchise has been well known to have fairly steep learning curves from the get-go.

That all being said - they are also some of the most rewarding games around, and welcome aboard, these are great games!  Personally I don't do much beta stuff, and have only spent a handfull of hours with GC3.  If you want a more polished game, I suggest GC2, as it's finished, similar to GC3, and is kind of a defacto roadmap of what GC3 will expand upon and the universe within which it resides.  That all being said, GC3 will/should be the best of the series - but it's not quite there yet.  It looks a lot better than GC2, for example, but the AI is still very poor, and the balance/polish isn't there yet.  Whereas GC2 has a wicked smart AI (that doesn't cheat, unlike most AI's), and has excellent balance/polish.

cheers, and welcome.

-tid242

Such insight is important, noobies are honest and unbiased.

Play the game...Ok Ill start some suggestions and others who are better can add...

Take your first colony ship and DO NOT settle your small world near your home planet, instead set it off on one path and see if you can find another planet to colonize that is larger and farther away (thus extending where you can search/look and colonize!)

Take your scout and go 90 degrees from where our colony ship is going in that direction if stars are present there.

Take your survey and go opposite of your scout..(again 90 degrees from colony) trying to pick up artifacts and space junk with this ship!

On your home planet drop down a factory or two and if you have tiles that give benefits hold off on placing there unless you have the building to put there. Set your planetary focus circle to be down, only Production and research. This will expedite the building of stuff on your planet.  Other players mileage may vary. 

For your first techs, I prefer planetary improvement or the one that give your Farms and Hospitals first. 

For your shipyard guild either a cheap colony or a cheap constructor if they are in your templets. I prefer a colony. 

Continue along colonizing as many planets as fast as you can. At some point you will need to get weapons techs and ship sizes. This will allow you to build ships to defend and attack. 

Larsenex that's to much for the lad, he needs to know how different things like morale and budgets correspond.

When you start a game you choose victory conditions, play according to them. If you want to win through war, research weapons. Diplomacy, them diplomacy techs and build from there.

research is always important as it allows you to unlock the techs you need. You can unlock better factories to build things faster, research buildings as tech prices go up as the game goes on. And economic buildings that increase your money. However population is the core of the game, the higher the population the more effective the previous three building are as all they do is multiply your population.

Also remember this is a beta, try to bring into your strategies pushing as many different buttons as you can.  A beginner can be very helpful at this time, he likely to push buttons in an order seasoned players would not.  Pvthudson welcome to the game, forgot my manners earlier.

Sorry for the Thread Necromancy but I thought rather than starting a new thread I would hijack this one.

I am also a total Galciv Newbie though I've been playing Strategy games since the likes of populous and maglomania and my game catalogue has had only Strategy and RPG's in it in the 25ish years since. Even so I have found myself somewhat at a loss for how to proceed with GalCiv3 thus far, as I have no ideas upon the value of things such as currency/research/colony policies/planetary development etc and the ship builder leaves me clueless, also factors like if I need to defend myself early or not and start building combat capable vessels or not. Resources - OK I need to develop star bases to capture them but they take many turns to build so I need to know what to prioritise, also it seems colony ships are absorbed when you colonise a planet so I'm guessing I am going to need a lot of these babies early game?

Actually there's a big point what is early game, I feel I'm playing this game too slowly as I'm used to  playing Total War games (pretty much any of them), AoW3, FE,LH, HOMM 3-6, Warlock, xcom, Civ5 & Endless legend for example and these games feature a constant flow of events and information that is happening turn by turn and in which 50 turns is a huge amount of time to have transpired with a huge amount occurring, while I get the feeling Galciv is Much slower and it will be often times better to set a string of actions in motion and just end turn until something happens - Is this about right? At the moment its this pacing that makes me feel most unsettled as it's alien in feel to me at the moment.

Do I start spending my cash to get things build instantly or should I keep it in case of emergencies or to cover economic issues of rapid colony expansion? If I spend where should I prioritise?

Why cant I add any weapons to ships I build? Other races talk in languages I cannot understand ( I know this is tech based but it needs pointing out!).. What should I be building on planets? Is there a starbase to colony ratio I need to pay attention too? Are there limits to my fleets? Colonies?? What planets should I develop? Do I need more than one Starship constructor? Do constructors have other purposes? How do I build Xeno modules? Do I need to defend my colonies? Star Bases? What do the various resources do and how important are they early game/mid game/late game - what is early/mid/late in terms of game turns/time?

I don't have a clue how diplomacy works, what ideologies do or how to select them/alter them at the moment. While I realise this is still a long way out from release and thus a tutorial is not going to be coming any time soon some guides to the current beta either you tube or a developer diary type thing would really help us newbies become far more engaged in the game at this early stage.

Thanks for your advice crimsonsun

First the easier questions, Crimsonsun

For weapons - you have to research them; even the basic ones. They'll be under the 'warfare' branch of the tech tree.

You also have to research 'Universal translator' to be able to talk to other races - I know, that's a bit weird. But it's a cheap tech, honestly. You can get it within the first couple turns if you want.

What you should build on planets - well, it depends. About the only really necessary thing is a few basic manufacturing tiles to help you make other stuff more quickly. Food to boost your population cap - population contributes to your manufacturing, wealth, and research output. Approval buildings if the approval is getting low - approval drops as population climbs, generally, and that has negative effects on your output. Research buildings. The game's pretty open-ended - you can choose to specialize your worlds (like, make a super manufacturing world or a totally research-based one), or you can do a little of each on every world, taking advantage of tile bonuses wherever. The difficult thing is judging what you're short on.

Planets - the higher numbers are better to go for. More tiles to use!

Fleets - maximum number of ships in your fleets is governed by your logistics cap. That's another number that can be upgraded via research.

Shipyards and colonies - early on, keep your initial shipyard and sponsor every colony to it. Later on, when you start to have built up worlds further out with some manufacturing capability, you'll want to give separate regions their own shipyards.

Constructors make shipyards, starbases, and upgrade those too. You can research the capbability for your starbases to increase local economic or trade bonuses, to mine resources - some resources are required to make certain ship systems. Keep an eye out for that durantium and antimatter and stuff like that.

Diplomacy I think is a bit bare bones at the moment. Researching things in the 'governance' area will open up more options for negotiations with your neighbours.

Ideologies - the events that keep popping up offer choices that'll give you points in benevolence, pragmatism and malevolence. If you open up your ideology tab you'll see the total score you've got in each of those to the upper left of the screen. Get a certain number of points, spend them to unlock new tiers of bonuses in each area - it's pretty basic.

Also, now, a general note comparing Gal Civ 3 and some of the other games you mentioned.. okay, this is a philosophy thing. Lots of things pop up and happen in a number of those games that the player's pretty much put on the defensive reacting to. Gal Civ.. and heck, a lot of the older-school turn based strategy games, are a bit different: they basically require a player to be a bit proactive.

There are still things to react to, yes - but if you're finding yourself just hitting end turn and watching, start thinking about how you'd like to win the game. Is there a weak neighbour who looks easy to take out? Are you bleeding money, how can you fix that? Bunch of ascension crystals nearby you should start collecting? Is somebody attacking your trade partner? Is somebody going for a tech victory?

Pay attention, formulate your plans, and execute 'em!

It depends greatly on the size of the map, but generally:

Mainline (manuf/research, eventually strong military).  A conquest-type path (or defense against the other guy's conquest of you).

Phase 1.  Build up planet tiles.  Plan ahead for hex and adjacency bonuses, but generally go for some +manuf (to speed up the build-out), then the planet's specialization (whichever you choose).  Your homeworld probably must split between manuf and research, because for a while it will be your only planet.  Anyways, very soon your planet will hit a point where it can finish 1 tile per turn and still have excess to dump into research or shipyard.

• Research things that help you build: entertainment for approval, manuf/research for positive feedback, farms/terraforming for growth.  Don't bother on weapons or ship stuff; you will not engage in any weenie fights.
• I prefer to utterly ignore wealth during Phase 1, and just survive off the "yolk" of 3,000 bc, plus whatever credits your survey ship randomly recovers.  I do this because I believe I can build up to Tourism tech + several colonies long before my yolk runs out, after which wealth ceases to become a constraint.
• Corollary: Do not Rush-buy anything.  Gambit (i.e. gurus can experiment with this): rush-buy a few critical things early.  The only time I rush-buy is when the queue lied to me last turn and stuck me with a "0 bc" nigh-done project, in which case I rush it for free and swing all of my manuf to other things.
• Explore with your ships.  Try spiraling outward with the scout + surveyor.  Your survey ship should pounce on every survey-able item ASAP.  If you're lucky, Space Junks will give you extra ships.
• Trick: His Head Explodes.  Before surveying each Artifact, always switch your current Tech research item to a brand-new item of the most expensive level you can afford, for the 1-in-N jackpot of the instant tech level for free.  If you don't get it (or get only the booby prize of +25% to your current tech project), just switch it back to whatever you were researching.This has zero opportunity cost except a few mouse clicks.  (Warning: those 25% tech grants will gradually decay as you finish other techs and its cost goes up, so maybe finish it next.)  Repeat for every Artifact you encounter.
• Colonize as needed, i.e. as you find fallow worlds, build colony ships and send them.Trick: If you find a jackpot system of 2-4+ worlds in single starbase effect, build one ctor with just enough range to get there, send it first, build a starbase.  Follow it (even while it's still en route) with default-range colony ships.  This exploits the ship range game mechanism that range means controllability, i.e. the region in which you can click to assign a movement target.  Since your starbase effect area is, by definition, within your empire's range, you can always send your ships any distance from your shipyard to your starbase's area, regardless of any void over which they cross.  This basically saves you 1-3 life support components per (custom) colony ship, which makes them cheaper, which makes them quicker to build.
• Building starbases is a gambit/tradeoff.  Each one requires at least 1 single ctor (to build) + 1-2 slow double-ctors (to build up) to reach a decent bonus.  Hence they are best used when you have 2+ colonies within starbase effect, to leverage their bonuses.  Economic Ring starbase with all +manuf, +research, +approval modules is always a decent boost.  Do not worry about building 2+ starbases for overlapping effect until you've played a few games through.
• Later colonies can specialize for either manuf (eventually with a shipyard), research, or wealth.

Phase 2.  Build up combat ships.  Research Warfare weapons, Engineering ship improvements, etc.  Commit to one type of ship weapon, but try all 3 defenses.  You must learn Ship Designer now.  You don't have to make it pretty; just slap components on to fill the mass limit.  You could ignore this phase for 100+ turns, then spend 30-50 turns here before you have any serious combat strength.

• The Beta 3 AI is still a placeholder, so it doesn't fight like a human playing chess.  Still, maybe garrison each shipyard/starbase/planet with a docked weenie ship or fleet.

Diplomacy and United Planets is a cross-cutting aspect that could happen whenever.  It depends on how quickly you encounter other races, which depends on the size of the map, your relative aggressiveness, and random placement.  I have no recommendation there.

Other strategies exist that are totally different (but in every strategy, you will probably need some fleet strength to not get weenie-invaded).

• Cultural Influence amends the above by building Consulate or similar +Influence Growth items 1st.
• Technological or Ascension Victory might depend on randomly having certain galactic resources in your ZOC, which could entice you to shift to those endgame goals.

1. Don't rush-buy anything until you've played a few games up to the point of Phase 2, where you have specialized bankworlds and your net income is positive.  Consider how low your yolk ran before you stopped bleeding cash.  In later games, you could spend that much on tactical buys.  (Note: Rush-buys are at the rate of 15 bc to 1 mp, whereas simply building it is at the rate of 1 mp to 1 mp.  Even on a bankworld with ridiculous +900% wealth bonus, you'd be better off setting 1 bp to make 1 mp and build 1 mp with it than to make 1+9 = 10 bc and pay that 15-to-1 exchange rate.)

2. You start the game with no weapon techs (and no defense techs).  You must research them in the Warfare subtree.

3. You start the game without Universal Translator.  You research it in the Diplomacy subtree.

4. See above.

5. All starbases are optional; you can run at a ratio of 0 forever if you like.  Fully upgraded Economic Ring starbases do give nice bonuses to all planets in starbase effect.  Mining starbases are nonesuch; there is no other way to mine resources, and eventually you might want/need them to augment your weapons/defenses, or as trade goods.  Starbases also provide range extension, which lets you puddle-jump your way across large voids in space.

• Tactic: Weenie Storm.  When you first encounter a warlike race (say, Drengin), probably you'll both have weenies that face off in space, but neither side has the range to reach each others' backfields.  That's a subtle race.  You can win it by sneaking in a (defended) constructor and building a starbase near your range limit, for the sole purpose of range extension.  Then suddenly your weenies can reach his shipyards, and he still can't reach you.  Defend that starbase, and sweep all your weenies forward to overrun his space.  For yuks, look for a minable resource nearby, and make your range-extension starbase also oh-by-the-way a mining starbase, haha.

6. Ships and colonies are unrestricted in number.  Other effects may reduce the joy you get from them, e.g. maintenance costs and time demands on your attention span.

7. Planets range from 4-25 usable hexes right away (and up to 40 hexes with max terraforming techs).  All planets are generally self-supporting, so there's essentially no harm in colonizing new ones and setting them to pay their own costs.  Generally, prioritize them by descending class (number of hexes), but also consider proximity (since multiple planets sharing 1 loaded starbase trumps a single big planet with no starbase), location (a planet that lets you project ZOC closer to unexplored regions, or to an AI, is more useful than a dead-end corner planet), and planet bonuses.  Specialize your planets based on their bonus, colonization event choice, and what you need.  Don't forget some bankworlds before your yolk runs out!

8. By "starship constructor", I'm guessing you mean "shipyard".  You don't need to ever build more shipyards, but you'll eventually find that it's much faster to have a frontier planet build its own shipyard and then build ships thereat, than to build ships at your homeworld and make them walk the gap between them.  Generally, you specialize a forward planet (closer to the frontier/action) to be a manuf planet because you intend it to eventually build a shipyard and pump ships out.  Hence, late in Phase 1 you will have several shipyards, at least one per forgeworld.

9. Constructors have only three purposes: (a1) build a starbase, (a2) upgrade an existing starbase, or ( build a shipyard.  ( is more expensive than having a planet build its own shipyard directly from its social queue, but with the tactical benefit that you can fly your ship way far to the frontier and then pop the shipyard thereat, for instant builds (and you just pay the ghastly long-range sponsor distance penalties because it wins the game, or something).

11. Defense depends on the AI's fitful stage of development.  Eventually, you will need some defense.  It is rumored that the AI dumbly ascribes high avoidance to any weenie defender, so having 1 defender in a starbase, no matter how weak, can deter the AI from ever attacking it.  This will surely change.  Play several games, and if the AI beats down your defense, then that amount of defense wasn't enough

12. I dunno.  Early game = Age of Expansion techs ~= turn 80-90.  Age of War used to last to turn ~160, by which time you might be fighting several fleet combats every few turns along a frontier of equilibrium.

space junk usually gets you credits

ship graveyard will get you extra ships and upgrades for current ship

i start off in manual control for both survey and scout, however i get lazy about 50ish turns in and automate the scout and then when i have about 5 or more survey ships i just automate them

survey-avoid wormholes

scouts cannot claim anomalies
an anomaly is pretty much anything in space but its broken down into several types
space junk- free money
ship graveyard -upgrade current ships in fleet (range/moves/sensor)  or a free ship(colony/constructor/scout/survey/war)
artifact - tech research 25%/100%, free building closest planet 

you dont need to "survey" a world any ship that gets in range will cause the world to show up

The Release version will come with a manual booklet/PDF.  For Beta, it is not yet written, and so we just learn as we go.  Some things are not intended to take you hours of trial and error, but they can.  Don't be afraid to ask.

Beta games should churn quickly (which means you play many different ones).  Don't invest too much effort trying to play the "perfect" game in your first 5 (or 50) games.  Just use them as throwaway trial-and-error experiments, learn what not to do, and then restart.  (You'll restart a few times anyways, just to test different races and galaxy settings.)  If you lose some turns putting a starbase in the wrong place, or researching the wrong line, just shrug it off (but remember it for your next game).

For focused testing, you can search the Forums for the Debug Console command list, and instantly-unlock all kinds of cheats, e.g. all techs, unlimited money, large battles.

Check your Power status.  It's on the top right, third tab over.  The higher the power, the more military might you have.  If there's a significant difference between yours and your opponents' I would suggest building up more military some more first.

Also, anyone who's allied with whoever you attack will become your enemy.  if the race has unlocked certain Pragmatic Ideologies (no way to tell), then everyone that isn't allied with you will become your enemy.

You'll also want transports or carriers to carry your troops.  Once you've gotten rid of all the ships orbiting a planet, you need some of those to actually take over the planet.

The only way I know of to see your logistics number is to click on a fleet.  The number after the / is your total available logistics (logistics governs how many ships can be in a fleet.  Each ship can have a different logistics rating)

A lot of diplomacy is disabled in beta.

By resources, do you mean the mining, or the precursor artifacts?  Green ones provide a boost to economy, orange increases manufacturing, dark blue is research, light blue is influence.  I can't remember if yellow is still present, but it would be approval.

For mining, the different materials let you build certain things.  Like, some Ranger models require Antimatter (yellow circle icons, found near black holes).

Yeah we can colonise extreme worlds and eventually even toxic ones.

Thanks for your help, I figured out logistics kinda though it's a bit clunky at the moment as we really need to know the values of each ship so we can better organise our fleets, the only way I was doing so was trial and error swapping ships about, so that's a def suggestion for the developers.

Slight bug, quite often I found the last Ship/Star base destroyed in the combat viewer does not actually blow up and this leaves all the ships left and the non destroyed target flying around each other normally with some missiles that missed early whizzing around the screen as well! I was like whats going on there!!

Wow I can see planetary invasions a pure place holder currently, as right now it sucks! Not a clue regarding what's going on other than I stomp them into the ground..

Glad to see Starbases can take Interceptor modules, they will really help create a strong military star base once you have various weapon, shield and Armour upgrades..

Carriers are awesome surprised there was no template however but fairly simple to strap some modules on a Large cruiser type ship.

Thanks about the resources, I was talking about mined ones but that at least clears up what they do - can you point to where I can see such information...

Many thanks