–RELEASED 04/13/2015–

Galactic Civilizations III Beta 5.2 is now available, bringing the good news of big AI and performance improvements to space emperors everywhere. The patch will download automatically when you connect to Steam. See below for the full changelog:

I have a tie for my favorite checkins when I put this changelog together. The first is "Fixing tabbing in moon shader" just because that sounds really cool, but I have no idea where or what the moon shader is, or how we tab in it.  But my favorite was the "fixed the sympathetic explosion issue" which is that for some reason when one object in a battle exploded, other objects would explode too, hence our sympathetic explosions. The other objects wouldn't actually be dead, they would come back together and keep fighting, they just couldn't resist a good explosion (also known as the sneezing starbase issue).

Features

Added Prototype Survey Module (requires a strategic resource)

Added Prototype Elerium Weapon

Added Prototype Anti-Matter Missile

Added Hull Reinforcement module (requires Durantium)

Performance

We now only update fog of war when required (its an expensive calculation to run so this is a significant performance improvement)

We now only update the minimap if the moving object is visible to the current player (minmap updates are expensive too)

Only update the minimap during the local players turn to minimize interturn duration

Improved the speed of research progress searches (developers said something about adding a hash table, i have no idea how hashbrowns make the game faster, but apparently they do)

Improved game start speed (optimizations setting up player research)

Improved game load time (no longer uses a separate process to generate the atlas)

Fixes

Many multiplayer crash fixes

Fixed an issue where combo/list boxs may scroll out of the available area

Fixed an issue for the mood breakdown tooltip in the diplomacy window

Fixed bug where if an AI player attempted to attack an undefended player it would notify the player about transports

Fixed an issue where influence would be incorrectly calculated

Fixed a lighting issue in the ship designer and shipyard

Fixed a crash when UP voting

Fixed an issue where players cant unlock extreme worlds

Fixed the Adaptable ability

Trade Resource descriptions now fit in the field

Fixed an issue where ideological events could cause crashes in multiplayer

Fixed bug where the multiplayer lobby player faction comboboxes stopped working whenever the list of factions changed via another person joining the lobby, caused by listbox-in-combobox-in-listbox sizing not working correctly

Fixed a multiplayer desync caused by fog of war updates

Fixed a multiplayer desync after making a trade

Fixed a multiplayer desync when constructing a shipyard or starbase

Fixed an issue where players could be awarded Jupiter through an ideology trait

Fixed lots of wonky text clipping issues, now if the text doesn't fit in the area it will smoothly fade out, but fixed numerous screens so text doesn't overflow

Fixed a crash if a planet was selected when exiting to the main menu

Fixed a multiplayer crash if more than 3 custom factions are in the game

Fixed an issue with the upgrading icon not working

Fixed an issue where ideology points weren't being spent

Fixed two crashes that could occue when invading a planet

Several obscure crash bugs fixed

Fixed an issue where you could queue up a 1 per faction wonder on multiple planets at the same time

AI

The AI now terraforms

The AI now trades ships with other AI players

AI Strategies updated to support more behaviors based on the faction traits

Minor modificatiosn to the govenor strategies

When the AI wants to kill you, it checks to see if it has transports, if it doesn't it b-lines for them if possible

AI Early game strategy now ends at 20 turns

Modified various AI strategies

Modified relation weights (generally lowered the amounts)

Weaker military is now a negative instead of a positive

Modified faction AI catregory weights so that they always equal 100 total and made them more differentiated per faction

Rebalanced the power calculation such that it weighs more on ones overall production and less on influence and such. (will continue to play with this)

Modified MorePowerfulThan and LessPowerfulThan to have a 20% give either way

Added a relation modifier if you are ripe for conquest, some AI players are strongly weighted by this (the Drengin), some aren't

AI is less likely to trade ships or propose ships, starbases and planets in trades (we know you have been exploiting them!)

Added a particle script for Promethion and Thulium

Changed engine colors for the Thalan and Yor

Added a new nebula graphic

LOTS of updates to the AIStrategydefs.xml

Support for using weapon tags in the tech tags

Diplomatic modifiers rebalanced

Drengin tech tree updated to use tags

Terran Alliance is now Diplomatic personality trait instead of Scientific

Diplomatic is a new personality trait (Diplomat trait means that those players will tend to research diplomatic techs and stay out of war via their diplomacy and/or manipulating others)

Cultural trait has been added (Cultural tech means that that player will tend to embark on cultural victory and taking planets through sheer cultural might)

Krynn are now Cultural instead of Spiritual

Yor are now Scientific instead of Opportunistic

Iconians are now Cultural instead of Spiritual

Thalan are now Diplomatic as well

Updated balances to change constructor behavior

AI contact with player increased (AI contact is now roughly every 12 turns instead of every 20)

Credits the AI will ask as a minimum is now 75 instead of 150

Minor tweaks to the governors

More types of AI ship roles added to provide more variation

Lots of work with the AI ship roles

Prototype modules made into Support Modules (for now) to keep AI from being unable to build stuff

New AI Ship types include Bomber, Interceptor and Capital ship

AI now has the concept of a weapon and defense strategy

AI updated to support new AI ship classes.

There is now a slight amount of randomness in what the AI thinks is the best battle rank for a ship class (so it may sometimes build an older unit)

New ship selection algorithm now goes through the ships it could build and rolls for the best one (no longer weighted to pick the first in the list)

AI will generate a weapon and defense preference strategy (The AI will pick beam, kinetic, or missile as its preferred weapon. Once it does this, it will zero out the military value of non-conforming weapon techs)

The AI will reevaluate its choices on weapons if they get a weapon tech that is much better

AI looks at its least favorite player and will tend to pick its defense techs based on what their least favorite player's weapon;n choices are

Rebellion points now takes into account the player's resistance and approval to drastically reduce the amount generated if those things are high.

Balance

Modified the map setting means. Mainly, fewer black holes, more habitable planets.

The normal research pacing is now 25% faster than it was to speed of the pacing of normal.

Starting credits reduced to 1000

Added some early terraforming improvements so that players can upgrade planets right around the time they start to run out of tiles.

Modified relation weights (generally lowered the amounts)

Only the top 6 factions are available to vote for UP leader

Adjusted the UP voting weights

UP meetings are typically every 25 turns instead of every 12 turns

Art

We liked Saturn so much we put a ring on it (ie: some planets have rings now)

Added new Ascension and Economic relic particle FX

Added 6 new weapon models

Asteroids are now lit by stars

Reduced the length of engine trails slightly

You can see ships flying around planets now

Moons eclipse planets when passing by them

Lord Kona moons planets when passing by them

Added oribiting ships for the shipyards

Added orbiting ships for the starbases

UI

Enchanced 'rebelling planet' tooltip information to include influence ratio between colony and tile owner

Added a tooltip explaining why you cant save your custom faction if there is an issue

Added adjustable mini-map zoom increment