I agree on that.  In 2.6 you can only build 1 city and 1 metropolis.  This still lets you go from say 3 population to 11 population (more than tripling) but you won't be able to go unlimited.

As many others have stated:

1) Balance. Tons of balancing needed. Tons of small things are just not really sensible right now. Including the Mercenaries.

as I have not seen people mention yet:

2) /Ship/Fleet design is sad right now. The roles don't work as intended, the only roles that matter are Escorts and Capital (with Support for carriers). Defenses are generally pointless, more weaponry is almost always better. 

I think the game would be vastly improved if I was encouraged to create more balanced fleets, where I need a mixture of different hull sizes. Right now... my "ships" are not really fighting... its really just my "components" fighting... and what level hull I've crammed them into is basically a function of technology. There is no compelling reason to take tiny hulls or such and there is no compelling reason to mix hulls in a fleet.

I think the game should reward balanced fleet compositions... big battleships surrounded by smaller pickets who are necessary to protect you from enemy carriers and their fighters/etc. etc. etc. Realistic or not.

A lot could be done by marrying roles to hull sizes, or giving hull types certain base advantages versus other hull types. It would create another layer of Rock/Paper/Scissors to the game, that the Roles were probably meant to do, but did not.

"Why do I have to conquer a planet to get any idea of what's on the surface?"

This is one area where Crusade is superior.  If you have a spy,  you can see the AI planets by clicking on "place spy".  You don't actually have to place the spy at this point. 

One thing that probably would have helped things out would have been to wait until after a sale to come out with a major patch. 

I miss administrators from the base their seems to me not to be enough. 

I definately don't like the food system it was better in the base. I'm talking about organics. Global is not the problem, but without a percent per turn. But a flat food I just can't seem to play carbon. Go Slynn.

unknown ship style is getting annoying. I think this is caused from not all the parts going into Crusade. 

 Now lets talk about hubs I liked what they did to those the best in base. Where the hubs were different with different factions. 

Now the techs were the best in two in the way that each race had a different tech tree. Now I understand this is dictated by race types, and personality traits, but now it seems that there is not much differentiation.

I'm also missing taxation controlling approval.  

Now this I can see as a problem. 

Now I have some ideas.

Still like the idea of multiple factions combining to research the same thing. There could even be new techs offered this way. 

I would like to see where we find precursor techs that you can't get any other way instead of finishing my research. 

Would also like to see some endgame discoveries.

Now mercenaries and some of the colinization stuff could be changed where when they level up a lot of levels they increase in abilities, so this way they are not to strong to early.

Finding half the factions on the map doesn't seem to work for the galactic council on a ludicrous map, so the idea of what I thought was the rule would work better for me where the council meets 1 rear after you meet your first civilization would be better at least for ludicrous maps. 

I think this would be better if after 400 turns into the game that everything random resets with new random stuff. 

I think the manufacturing needs a buff.

I think that Epithius pollen needs to be less rare.

The Thalans could need Epitheus pollen to build farms.

We need more race types at least in customization.

I would say, keep an eye on and polish the base game, but save major changes for the expansion. To follow on that, the reviews suck, but this isn't the first time this has happened and can bounce back if you guys keep up the great dialogue with the community. I'm a regular GalCiv player, but also a regular Stellaris player. The devs over the lifetime of that game have copped plenty of flak for changes made, or a direction taken. The game director, Martin Anward, has had plenty of 'robust' exchanges on the forums. It got a lot negative attention for its initial 1.6 update, and even now after a decent drop of new content and a big patch, its recent review score has been dropping. And the guys over at Amplitude have had similar problems with their reviews too.

Also, the thing about the story elements of Stellaris is that they spent a significant amount of time developing the game around that idea. It sits in this, at times, awkward space between a 4X and one of their other grand strat games they develop and publish. GalCiv 3 seems to have been made with a new engine and sandbox in mind.

For galciv, outside of the things in the next expansion, I would like to see some more balancing and AI improvement, more mega events and super weapons.

Brad, you and your team are doing a great job!

I checked yesterday in the last opt in version and I can fill an arbitrary number of tiles with cities and farms.

Let's calculate together what the per tile benefit of a two farm - one city triangle is:

- 4 population, that means 4 social construction, 4 ship construction and 4 research and 4 wealth. 16 points of benefit minus 3 wealth of maintenance.

Let's say you have 3 research labs, those give you 5% and 5% from adjacency each, total of 30%. If you have 20 flat research on your planet that is 6 points of research. Let's say you have 3 basic factories: 5% all construction +2% from adjacency for each factory, totals at +21%, let's say again you have 20 flat production in both, that is 8.2 points of construction. Factories also have 3 wealth maintenance, laboratories have none.

Let's say the factory/research planet has 100% approval and the city planet has 40% approval, so labs and factories are multiplied with 1.25 relative to farms from the production bonus, so we are at 7.5 and 10.25 points vs. 12 points not considering wealth and 7.5/7.25 vs 13 considering wealth.

You could argue I have to consider hub buildings, but these benefit from city adjacency aswell, so no, not an advantage of factories/labs.

So now, your turn:

How are farms and cities not better? I am really curious how you reckon that.

edit: got the number on city population wrong, with 2 adjacency it is 4 not 5. adjusted above post with the correct number. The conclusion remains unchanged though.

Great thread..

I'll second some of the earlier issues:

1) slow colonization.  One of the ways this could also be done (that hasn't been mentioned) might be the use of a "claim" or "outpost" system where a planet can be "claimed" before it's colonized for less resources - but maybe others can also "claim" it too and these claims would need to get resolved prior to colonization (if there's more than one claim per planet).  This would allow for races to slow down their neighbors by throwing claims out without actually partaking in a colony rush themselves.  Also, planets could come with existing claims from minor races, primitive tribes or whatever that may need to be resolved in a specific way (ie this may also be a way to generate ideology without actually doing a colony rush).

2) ideology is mentioned as needing a pass.  I definitely agree.  It hasn't kept up with the rest of the game evolution.

...

reserving this space for an edit - I'll try later this AM.  Great thread.  Thanks for the work Frog.

Well one of the things i suggested on another forum was use class zero planets instead would you still hate them.

I keep saying a fixed jagged knife. Those ideas are good. 

I would like to have the possibility to say as an galactic imperator what happens with the resources and money of my Empire. It dont have to be the wheel but only citizen to have influence to that its perhaps simple but not good i think. 

Many thanks

I'm not sure how much better the rebalancing is ever going to get, to be quite honest.  We might be spinning our wheels in circles.  However, new campaigns using the Crusade rules would be a clear value-add.  Plus I think management would be comfortable delegating the creation of new campaigns to other people.   The campaign EDITOR, maybe not so much, but the campaigns, probably.