Love the post Larsenex, I may complain about things, however, I do so to try to get things better, if I have an issue, I make sure to submit bug reports and jump through the loops to get the issue resolved.  This is what a lot of negative reviews are based on people not trying to make the game or improve the game or try to get their issue resolved but, instead just tear it apart and hope it fails.

Personally if I pay money for a game, I want that game to succeed and improve and I feel Stardock won't let us down.

Well then lets make sure this doesn't happen to a great game

Mine's in

Frogboy,  I know you probably had very good reasons for releasing when you did that made sense to you guys at the time.   In hind sight would you do anything different? I mean 1.02 is quite a bit better than 1.0 and 1.1 will resolve several big complaints.  Being a bets customer for a long time, the actual release date was obviously no issue with me (and all the rest of us) as we would be playing on with a smile.  The difference of 4 week or so would likely have resulted in a big shift in the reviews.  I know, no matter how long you held back, there would always be that group expecting absolute perfection and i get a kick out of those that complain the game is not something it was never intended to be i.e. tactical combat,  or complainers griping no windows 10 support.  But honestly, i think you will be the first to admit many complaints are valid.   Yes ya'all are doing a hell of a job addressing many of them but you may have fell a little short in the managing expectations department. 

This would be sad and wrong in so many ways!

I think the things you have done are amazing.  Hope you know none of what i said was a shot, just asking and an uninformed observation  

Incorrect it did break into the #2 spot briefly on opening week.

I agree there abouts

Is there a possibility to add maybe a trail version, with only the first level of the campaign and tutorial. And maybe limit it to just a small or tiny map with limited race selection and no custom races. That way people can try it out and can then see for them selves that half the negative reviews are unfounded. Tho I guess the argument could be made that then your not getting the full experience and that in itself might taint people's views. But trails are really a positive gateway for most people into a full purchase.

Of course you have to consider the effort and possible bugs that itself might introduce... but still i think might be worth a look

Nobody should take metacritic seriously from users. It is an example of the worst aspects of people. Give people who are barely literate and seething with righteous indignation over (one minute detail that ruins the game for them) a platform and Metacritic is what you get.

Look no further than the number of 0's a game that is clearly a 7 or 8 will get for no other reason than the end user is upset the game didn't fulfill their exact specifications.

purely playing devil's advocate here......

I think the point for some may be the fact that some of the 'things you've added' probably should have been 'included' (ie. general bug fixes and stability fixes etc.).

bug-fixes, stability improvements, optimization are all things long-term consumers of digital entertainment absolutely expect and even look forward to as solid post-sale support these days; it's just something to think about when the list of bug-fixes / stability-fixes is so long so soon.  Easy to see how some may look at that as a product coming out of the oven too soon. 

Again, just my opinion regarding the reviews of the game, forum posts around here lately etc. etc.

Nobody gave it a 0 that I can find. The lowest score is 4. Still I'm inclined to believe players are better judges than gaming review outfits which are in business to make money protecting the game companies. 

Look Im not saying its a terrible game or a zero I'm sure as hell not putting it up on the shelf with Skyrim or Bioshock or Doom 2 or Crysis or Master of Orion. It certainly has the Master of Orion feel yes, but it is Gal Civ. I think Gal Civ 2 was better than Master of Orion finally. But, coming from Gal Civ 2 which I think was a pretty deep and expansive game I just dont feel that the current build is really all that efficient cpu wise, so that's a point, the game has no real diplomacy polish at all, that is a point, the 3rd version while tightening up mechanics and going in a slightly different direction and adding multiplayer, which has been argued against for years as a let's never do this, it just doesn't add up to great or very good or 90/100. I just don't get it. Evidently standards are so low at PCGAMER or IGN that the game can get a prompt from Windows saying your program has stopped responding at times when it lags up between turns. 

My experience with previous versions were that the AI does it processing while you take your turn and then when you click that button it is speedy and responsive and there is a short delay but not a few seconds where Windows thinks it's going nuts.

As far as multiplayer is concerned, lol, maybe it has an appeal for a very select group as argued in the past, but the implementation isn't really deep either. 

Just had another look at the reviews and it looks far better now with around 9/10 player reviews that you see as you scroll down being positive.

When I looked before and posted there were a dozen negative reviews in a row, pretty much all complaining of crashes which did not look good.

I am happy GC3 sales are doing great, I am a big fan of the GC series and have been playing GC since GC1.  I am looking forward to GC3 going from strength to strength.

Personally, I have had no crashes or major problems with how GC 3 runs but I avoid massive maps.  I would say GC3's rating of 74% does deserve to be higher, should easily be 80%+.

I think the majority of players who beta tested and professional reviewers will have far superior machines and setups, plus they will be more patient and understanding then the average gamer.

Okay, some of this post has gone negative and not constructive.  The game is great and getting better, do I have complaints along with some of you, yes, do I feel the game is crap, no, I believe the game right now as it sits is a little below Galactic Civilizations II.  

Like Frogboy stated they have fixed a lot over the last 2+ weeks and will continue to do in the future.  Along with those fixes he noted balanced habitable planets for larger maps, not a fix, sorry, that was a slap across the face saying if you don't like it mod it attitude.  With that being said that is my only negative thing to say about it.  As I stated above things will continue to improve as the process just started.

As far as the game being not ready for release and maybe should have had another 1-3 months.  The snap comment about have you ever produced a game before, poor, I understand posts like this can be frustrating.  My argument was in another post on this matter.  To sum it up was this.  Modern game developers rely on the first several weeks to put out patches and fix problematic issues.  Going back 10-15 years, when hard media was purchased and not everyone used the Internet as heavily or had as reliable Internet more concern was put into it for the game to be more stable and better performance prior to release.

As always I along with most others in the community are very proud of Frogboy and the entire Galactic Civilizations III team and appreciate all the hard work you and your team does.   Thank you

I'd avoid comparisons with Civ 5, tbh - the complaints of the hardcore fans were largely vindicated when Jon Schafer did his post mortem and basically agreed with every point they'd made, even the critique of 1 unit per tile (which they said ruined the game, since everything else ended up being balanced around it - which Schafer agreed with entirely). As far as I can tell, there's not a single concept that Schafer put into Civ 5 that he hasn't admitted was a bad move in hindsight - even though a lot of people pointed out that they were bad moves beforehand.

As to the game site reviewers just having better rigs... no, I don't really think that's it tbh. I suspect it's more just that they're attempting to look at it objectively, and what they see is a very polished product. Could use more polish (ALL games can always use more polish ), but still, compared to 90% of the games that fall on a reviewers desk, Gal Civ 3 is in better shape.

The negative user reviews mostly fall into 3 basic categories:

1) The Disappointed Gal Civ 2 fan. He wanted exactly the same game as Gal Civ 2, only more like it was in his head. Maybe there's one superfluous feature from the previous game that's missing. Maybe there was one thing he didn't like in Gal Civ 2 which is still present. Either way, he'll give a bad review, because only a complete idiot wouldn't see that this was the most important thing in the universe and removing/failing to remove it conclusively proves that Stardock are a band of incompetent cowboys who will be the first with their backs against the wall come the revolution. He will invariably end the review with a recommendation that you go buy Gal Civ 2 (even if he's complaining that they kept a feature he hated).

2) The Guy Who Hates One Feature. This dude will undoubtedly start his review by stressing how much he really, really wants to like the game, but he can't because he hates how the lasers look in tactical battles and that has TOTALLY RUINED EVERYTHING EVER. He can't concentrate on any other aspect of game play because it preys on his mind so much. He won't start battles, because then he might have to see the lasers (never mind that they can be played automatically, he wants to watch, but CAN'T BECAUSE OF THE HORRIBLE LASERS). He can't sleep at night anymore, because he's so consumed with how much he hates the laser graphics. He's quit his job and his wife has left him. And this is all the fault of those stupid laser graphics.

3) The Guy Playing On A Pentium 3. This guy can't get the thing to run and doesn't know why. It crashes all the time. It might not even start. Sure, he's playing on a laptop he bought in 2005 which tends to overheat if he has two Excel documents open at the same time, but that's no reason why he shouldn't be able to play on insane map sizes with 250 opponents, or launch the game while he has 5 instances of Revit open and is trying to run a SAP server in the background. This review will be 1-2 lines long and will just say something like 'crashes lots, 0/10'. 

These three categories largely sum up the negative reviews on 99% of good games.

The professional reviewers don't have terrible rigs, don't regard one bad feature as the end of days, and don't wish to draw comparisons with the previous game if they can avoid it because they're trying to measure the game on it's own worth, rather than in relation to some other game. 

Being an ex-Game designer myself i can honestly say most people out there really have NO idea whats actually involved in making a game. You think you do.. but you dont hehe