Intergalactic Trade. A Daring Escape. Guns for Hire.Galactic Civilizations III: Mercenaries Releases on February 18, 2016!
The human race is fighting a desperate war against the remorseless Drengin Empire.Both sides have become increasingly desperate, leading them to turn to the galactic underworld and their elite mercenaries.
Convinced already? Of course you are.But, just for fun, here are additional reasons to get the Mercenaries Expansion:
Visit the Galactic Bazaar and hire dozens of MercenariesDiscover Galactic Bazaars and choose from dozens of mercenaries for hire! Is that anomaly a little too dangerous to risk your own life and limb over? Pick a mercenary suited for the job and order them to do your bidding. Your bones are fragile, after all.
New Campaign! Lead the Torians to freedom from their Drengin oppressors Hire mercenaries and use them to help lead the Torians to freedom from their Drengin oppressors in an exciting new campaign. Rebuild your shattered empire from the ground up and thrive in the face of adversity.
Tons of New Ship Designs Every mercenary has their own unique ship for traveling across the galaxy in style. Speaking of style, there are lots of new ship parts to enhance your own customizations and styles!
Play as an Ancient Race of Warriors The Arceans, an ancient and honorable civilization of warriors and long-time enemy of the Drengin Empire, make their debut in Mercenaries! The Arceans have new racial traits and abilities and a unique tech tree to boot!
Play as an Old Familiar Race from Galactic Civilizations II The aquatic Torians are back and ready to fight! ...Well, sort of. They're ready to hire a bunch of mercenaries to help them escape their enslavement from the cruel Drengin Empire. The Torians are at the center of the Mercenaries campaign and also have new racial traits, abilities, and tech trees for you to explore.
Galactic Civilizations III: Mercenaries will be available for purchase on February 18th.Keep an eye on the forums and over at www.galciv3.com for updates and notice for when you can purchase!
So I just watched the trailer. I see these all (at least in the trailer) take strategic resources as well as money, imo they'll need to be rather powerful to be worth that price, especially the elerium/antimater ones
Also is there a maintenance cost in money? The UI doesn't seem to show one.
I like that they aren't all combat ships, and they look really cool.
I hope they give us options that let us do things we couldn't normally do, like a colony ship that could colonize a planet you don't have to tech for yet, or a constructor that can build in a nebula.
Edit: or a colony ship that could colonize a dead planet
Edit 2: Watching it again I see that the colony ship can be hired in the first tech age but can colonize tier 1 extreme worlds so that's cool.
Will the AI know how to hire mercs?
Expansion looks very nice.
AND
You culinary barbarian. Torians are best eaten raw, and the enjoyment is maximized when listening to their screams while they are still alive to see you eat their limbs.
Seriously? Its well known that Torians' flesh delights the palate best in sushi rolls and is second only to their caviar.
BUT,
My last session with GalCiv3 ended in a rage quit when a vanilla AI colony ship with stacked engines snatched up a planet in my ZOI that I was 1 turn away from colonizing. I don't stack engines or sensors and I can no longer bring myself to play the game as is. If and until it's addressed I won't be purchasing content for GalCiv3.
Many of the Mercenaries improve your economy, technology, morale, construction etc. They are actually not mostly about sheer combat. You can, by all means, focus on recruting mercenaries for your military but I suspect the ones that improve your worlds and starbases and shipyards will be more popular.
Seriously? I would say that Civ style games are not for you then.
Racing for good spots for new colonies/cities/etc. are a key gameplay mechanic of these games.
Yep. It also does so intelligently so you can use what mercenaries they hire as a guide to what strategy they're trying to implement.
Hey frogboy, I'm really excited for the expansion. But what do you say about adding the option to have a diplomacy modifier that makes the Ai more hostile towards you if you get too powerful or close to a victory? I was thinking, as I described in my realm divide thread, it would greatly help with the mop up phase.
That was a controversial mechanic in GC2. Some people thought/felt it was too "gamey" to have everyone just gang up on you toward the end. Some said it showed a lack of good AI. I believe I read way back in the early Alpha stages that they didn't want to do the same thing in GC3 and try to make it harder in the late game in other ways. As most of us know, this game is and will be a work in progress right up until the end when it's no longer supported. So fasten your seat belts, we're in for one hell of a ride!
The AI seems to have returned to gang-up-on-you-ness a bit since 1.5. Not as bad as it was, but it still seems to daisy-chain ... when one declares war, another seems likely to follow, and another, even if they don't share an ideology (and even if one or more of them share your ideology). At least that's been my experience with the couple of post-1.5 games I have played. They also seem a bit more stupid as to judging whether its time to get out of a war they initiated -- the first AI that declared war on me, I started steamrolling. I was readily able to wipe out their fleets with a single fleet of my own, and took half their planets, and still they expected me to give them something for peace.
Why would you consider it a bad thing that the AI made a good decision? If you want to hamstring yourself by refusing to use engines, you have to expect that the AI who does use them will have an advantage over you. I guess if you think ships move too fast in general, you could mod engines to be much more massive and expensive for everyone.
I don't know how many of you have 6000 credits lying around in order to purchase one large ship. By the time I have that many credits I'm building huge hull ships in one to three turns. Conclusion: like most costs in this game mercenary ships are out of scale and will rarely be used because it's not economical.
I'm sure playing as the Arceans and Torians will be fun for the lore buffs out there and for those looking for a change. If this campaign is anything like the original release one, it will not be worth playing, even for story reasons. Hopefully they were able to really devote time to a rich and immersive campaign experience this time.
For me personally, what will make this expansion awesome is if they make the game more manageable for larger maps, like with the previously proposed constructor/starbase changes, shipyard sorts, filters, and bulk-obsolete, bulk upgrade and decomission, and bulk planet focus-changing. So I will wait until after the expansion release to see if they have accomplished these before I decide whether to purchase.
P.S. Is there no simple ruler capability to measure the distance between two hexes? I'm tired of counting hexes all the time.
It's probably worth noting that the 6,000 credit ship in the screenshot appears to be locked until a later age, so you're probably expected to buy it at the same stage where you're pumping out large ships. But yeah, I could easily scrape together 6,000 credits in the relatively early game, if I felt like it was worth it. You can get that much by selling your excess resources, or in one round of tech trading with all the races. Selling exploration or research treaties is ridiculously lucrative, as well, and you don't even give up anything in the process. That might be difficulty-/settings-dependent, though. The AI probably tends to have extra cash on hand on the higher levels compared to normal, and having lots of minors on the map definitely makes this easier.
Will the mercs be modder friendly? Will we be able to add more on top of the base ones or will it be restricted to switching them out?
On the roadmap you've listed 1.6 as "hoosekeeping", can we get a better idea of what to expect from the patch.
i... don't understand why your not stacking components.. thats like saying you dont want to install guns on your ships as your playing a pacifist and then get upset that the AI has guns and declared war on you. Or getting upset that your AI has better research and tech but you have decided that you will only build one Science facility on one planet as you don't like science.
its a game-play element, sounds like you just need more practice. or if you really want to complain just save scum and go back a few turns and cheese the AI.
Speaking of mod friendly, im wonder if the mercenaries designs of the ships can be auto gathered from other player designs in the workshop(then ship components auto added to the ships in game), or at-least have it as an option later in a patch. Would be really cool to play a game and find some really exotic or strange looking ships appear in the list. Would really add flavor to the mercenaries system, although i haven't played it yet so maybe it would suck who knows lol.
Also have the problem of bad ship designs if people made them or ships that have to many parts adding performance issues. But is an interesting idea i think and was the first thing to come to mind when i saw the screen shots and heard the words "mercenaries system" .
^ From one of the gaming sites Wardell mentioned that initially there won't be any workshop support for the Merc system, but they hope to add it down the road.
From the same article it sort of answered my question. My initial thoughts were it was just a fixed list so I was wondering if there would be a UI restriction to adding more to it. However, instead of a fixed list the merc list is cobbled together at the start of the game from a pool of designs. In theory it should be a simple task to add more options into the pool.
For those interested Gamespot posted a video showing the Mercenaries expansion in a bit more detail link below.
Sadly it doesn't show Torian/Arcean traits/abilities (hint Stardock )
I'll also highly likely be doing a Let's Play for GC3 Mercenaries within a few days or so after release on my YouTube channel Macsen Lets Plays
https://www.youtube.com/user/MacsenGaming
If you're looking for something else GC3 related to watch before Mercenaries release you can check out my currently ongoing Let's Play below.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHMuUHsmNFlRVIyIEnO1RKtccGjM5sfzR
Terran Resurgence (Custom Race available on Steam Workshop), Godlike difficulty "Worst Possible Racial Traits!"
After thinking about it for a bit, one thing I'm curious about is how will purchased mercs be generated on the map. On small to medium size maps, where they get placed when purchased probably won't matter a hell of a lot. But if they are forced to one spawn point (homeworld, planet hosting a/the galactic bazaar, whatever) their utility might be more compromised on larger sized maps. After all, if they have to spend 15 to 20 turns to get where you need them, I might not even bother to buy their services.
If, on the other hand, they can be (somewhat) reasonably generated across the map (say if a planet has a bazaar as an improvement?), their utility might be much higher. Possibly in an exploity way.
Guess I'll find out soon enough once the beta drops for elite founders. Still, be interesting to see just how this is handled, as this might be something that works fine on tiny/small/medium maps, but less so on huge/gigantic/immense (and larger) ones.
There are new ship parts, which is very nice. More toys to play with. I wanted to ask: Will we at some point get completely custom colors for ships and races, as in GC2? Right now one only has a few predefined color schemes. There is a mod where you can add more color schemes, but one has to "guess" if number xyz results in a blue color etc.. Will we get a full color slider as in GC2 in either this expansion, or somewhere down the road?
BuckGodot, I would suggest the implementation will be that once you purchase a mercenary from the bazaar, you're able to place them where you want them - same as improvements/buildings on planets.
Why would you pay a certain amount of bc for a mercenary (who you've hired for a certain job) just to have him/her/it randomly appear somewhere on the map? Especially when that random spot is a fair bit away from the job he/she/it has been hired to do?
Unless the mechanic for purchase is basically "I live here, I can do jobs at Points A, B and C for 500bc. Any Points beyond that, I'm 1000bc and I'll take x turns to get there." In other words, you not only have to hire a mercenary who can do a certain job but you really want a mercenary who can do that job and is working/hanging in a bazaar planet in the job location's general vacinity.
I'd imagine my first suggestion would be easier to implement and less annoying for players to work with.
[...]BUT, My last session with GalCiv3 ended in a rage quit when a vanilla AI colony ship with stacked engines snatched up a planet in my ZOI that I was 1 turn away from colonizing. I don't stack engines or sensors and I can no longer bring myself to play the game as is. If and until it's addressed I won't be purchasing content for GalCiv3.
Stacking engines is a perfectly valid option, and I have no issues with the AI using that.
I do have a problem with ridiculously high research speeds and then the AI even ignoring its own tech limitations by building ships that it hasn't got the tech to build yet, though. In this day and age, a non-cheating AI can be expected, I believe.
As good as this looks, will there be a way to turn off mercenaries? I of course intend to try this feature out but if it turns out I don't like it, but still want to have the other benefits of the expansion such as the Torians and the Arceans, will there be an option in the game creation screens to turn off mercenaries when starting a new game?
I don't like sounding negative, but this honestly just sound pretty dull. So we get a new way to buy ships without having to build them and a couple of new races. Are these suppose to be a groundbreaking new features?
I think this is definitely gamechanging for me and other people who like building up a mostly trade and diplomacy or even research focused civilization. I now have the option to greatly expand my use of credits and resources and to an extent, keep up with the more warlike factions at least until I have time to buildup a force of mine. I'd be interested in knowing mercenary respawn rate if they're destroyed.
This would be a nice feature
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