Galactic Civilizations III

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

soooo any codexer played the game?impressions?
how does it compare to the legacy GC2 left?

Absolutely disgusting. Its not that it could be fixed - the problems are all the same GalCivII had
- Retarded rock-paper-scissors weapon system are still here. So if you invester in super laser beams and AI by chance invested in shields you are fucked unless you will refit all your ships to something else. hen AI is fucked. Battles are either one-sided most of the time or squabbles of jack-of-all trades armadas, with little sbeams, little missiles and little kinetics. Same goes for defences.
- Economy and planet developement is a mess. They added some neighborhood bonuses but anyway planets are scarce and all are smell. Don't even expect MoO2 scale - platens are like several country houces with 7 or so buildings. Oh, and you have to station fleet there - planets can't defend themselves.
It's a screaming mediocricy of a game. Dragon Age: Inquisition of 4X strategies.

You keep saving me money and bandwidth in every thread.

Bless you laddie.

 

[tuluse]

Wouldn't a GalCiv game being anything but a screaming mediocrity be the real surprise?

 

[Elim]

Wouldn't a GalCiv game being anything but a screaming mediocrity be the real surprise?

It is absolutely mediocre. Nothing special, GalCiv 2 is the better game. But GalCiv 3 has the better engine and I bet in 2-3 years it will become a solid game.
But sadly it doesn't hold a candle against stuff like Distant Worlds, but hey, DW wasn't good at release, too.

 

[MilesBeyond]

How is the AI in GalCiv 3? To me that's the big thing. I know Codex sometimes loves to hate on GalCiv 2's AI, but I've been playing TBS and 4X games since the early 90s and AFAIK there isn't a single game out there with better AI (unless we're counting chess computers). It's certainly streets ahead of any Firaxis or Simtex AI. Does GalCiv 3 live up to this standard? I can forgive other things so long as the game boasts an improved AI.

And serious questions for the GalCiv 2 AI haters, what games have better AI? I'm not looking to start a fight, I'm looking for some TBS games with amazing AI that I've missed and therefore want to try out. I mean at the end of the day GalCiv 2's AI is still AI - aka you can beat it in your sleep once you get good enough at the game. I just don't know of anything that does it better.


Also while I'm not a fan of the rock-paper-scissors set-up and wish the game had something more non-linear like MoO 2, it's not all that bad. A little espionage was all it took to keep from getting blindsided.

 

[Destroid]

It's a shame they ditched the civ style units from galciv1, they were better.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

no.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Stars!, MoO2, HMM 1-3. They are not amazing, but compared to them GalCiv2's AI is a retarded chimp with Down's syndrome that drank a gallon of fermented palm sap.

Hmmm. Two of those I'm not going to touch on - Stars! because I haven't played it enough to have an informed opinion on the AI; HoMM 3 for the opposite reason - it's one of my most-played games of all time, so while I find the GalCiv 2 AI lightyears more challenging than HoMM 3's AI, that's possibly just because I'm so familiar with HoMM 3's AI.

The rest, I'm gonna have to disagree with. HoMM 1's AI is... really not good. 2's AI is okay, but IMHO it has a few significant flaws that really keep it from being in the same league as GalCiv 2 - most notably its tendency to always target the highest HP stack. Actually, I think that's a good way of putting it. HoMM 2 has got decent strategic AI, but its tactical AI is abysmal.

MoO 2 is a tough one. I think the game has got deep AI and interesting AI. I think the game's AI is better than GalCiv 2's in the sense that it tends to have a lot more personality and is generally more fun to play against. However, I would say that it does not understand its own game as well as the GalCiv 2 AI does, and as a result does not play its game quite as well. Part of this is due to its Civ-like tendencies of assigning each faction specific personalities, which leads to certain factions simply being bad at playing the game, no matter what, because they're assigned a strategy that isn't very good (the Trilarians come to mind, poor bastards). GalCiv 2 AI does that to a lesser extent, but there's still usually some surprises (at least in my experience) as to which AI will make it to the end-game. In MoO 2, unless the player does something specific to curb them, the Psilons and the Sakkra will always, always be the strongest AIs by endgame, while sides like the Trilarians and Mrrshans are again almost always going to be in a terrible position.


I guess in a way this makes MoO 2 "better" because it means that races like Sakkra and Psilons will always pose a challenge? But to me that's not a good sort of better.


In any case, even if it did have better AI, at most the difference is marginal. Certainly none of those games make GalCiv 2's AI look like a "retarded chimp with Down's syndrome that drank a gallon of fermented palm sap." Plus AFAIK the GalCiv 2 AI's cheating isn't nearly as outrageous as MoO 2's AI at higher levels, and to me that's another big factor there. Any AI can be challenging if you give it enough bonuses (well, maybe. Civ V and BE seem to be doing their damndest to disprove that hypothesis), but GalCiv 2's AI doesn't start the really bad cheating until Masochistic - the tenth difficulty level and the fifth above Normal. "Tough" is the difficulty setting where the AI play their best and don't cheat at all, and to me the AI there is significantly better than the AI on comparable settings in other games (Average in MoO 2 and Rook in HoMM 3).

 

[Raghar]

When I moved empty transports to one planet do drag out theirs fleet and remove theirs defense bonus, it showed a window "if you'd play at higher difficulty we would attack these transports", well they didn't take bait and it delayed the whole obliteration of enemy fleet at least by one turn. (Yes I had too many transports, and too few soldiers, thus I used empty transports as a bait for rest of the military ships, to ensure these transports with soldiers that counts would have higher chance of being used successfully.)

This means higher AI difficulty basically gimps the AI...

 

[sser]

Is this game any good? Doesn't seem to be much reception for it.

 

[LizardWizard]

Is this game any good? Doesn't seem to be much reception for it.

Worse than GalCiv2 in most ways and now they're running an even scummier version of Paradox-like DLC.

 

[whatevername]

Is this game any good? Doesn't seem to be much reception for it.

It's beyond horrible.

The "AI"just sends tons of slow fleets to you and tries to destroy your economy/resource starbases while avoiding your fleets, which are built to counter the AI fleets' weapons/defenses. Mopping them all up is just one long grind like WW1 trench warfare in space.

Planet invasions are a joke compared to MOO2. You load like 90% of planet's pop into 1 ship and dump it on another planet and that's it. VICTORY!

The tech tree is the most fucked up one ever: everything is unimaginative so you research +10% to producion, then +15%, +20%, +25%........
You can get bigger ship hulls and new ship modules and lasers/missiles/kinetics that do more damage than the previous ones and that's it.


The only good thing is that weapons requiring resources do much more damage than regular weapons, so there's a need to grab resources, but the "AI" has no clue about that.


You can built lots of slow ass ships loaded with sensors an all your planets EVERY TURN and fuck up other "AI"s by trading all those ships for lots of credits and tech, adding to other empires' upkeep cost.


If you consider playing this crap instead of Stars! or MOO2 just for the graphics because it's 2015, the only graphics are backgrounds for planet colonization, 3D ships, planet graphics and alien mugshots. And cutscenes.

 

[mastroego]

It's beyond horrible.
The tech tree is the most fucked up one ever: everything is unimaginative so you research +10% to producion, then +15%, +20%, +25%........
You can get bigger ship hulls and new ship modules and lasers/missiles/kinetics that do more damage than the previous ones and that's it.

Stardock is hopeless.
I've spent my sweet time on their forums trying to explain why games require more soul and inventiveness and less spreadsheet-ty (see what I did there!) uninspired increments.
I've stopped, they just don't get it.

Someday they'll should just release a spreadsheet simulator and be done with it.
I'm sure they'll expect a big hit among the masses dreaming to imagine themselves playing with Excel...

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Eh, it's not like a spread sheet simulator kind of game cannot be gripping for a strategy fan. Their problem is rather the fact that their games are average at best on most levels. And recently they seem to require a lot of time, money and re-releases to even get there.

They also seem to do a lot of weird (and by weird I mean stupid) things PR-wise for a company specializing in relatively niche strategy titles. Like loudly announcing that GC III will only run on modern systems cause technology is awesome and fuck those losers with old hardware and then proudly releasing a game that runs, looks and plays in a very unspectacular manner that doesn't seem to be needing/using said technology in any way.

 

[CryptRat]

Now you can not buy the game on GoG too . They've also released the second one.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Shame the consensus is negative - I really enjoyed GC2 and played it a lot. I must have got bored of games, though, as I've still not played GC3, despite pre-ordering it in a froth of excitement.

My favourite space strategy game is still Ascendancy, and that was a long time ago.

 

[GuiltyofBeingTrite]

GC3 has amazing customization options, but the combat is planetary management/production management is so damn boring.

 

[Alienman]

Nice. You have a devil avatar with 666 messages.

 

[Irenaeus II]

It's better than GalCiv2, which was p. decent already. My favorite space 4x since Sword of the Stars.

 

[Spectacle]

"Mercenaries" expansion announced, to be released 18.2
http://www.galciv3.com/mercenaries

The main new thing seems to be the ability to hire space mercenaries. Something that really doesn't make much sense in a game about colonizing an uninhabited galaxy, but it might be fun anyway. Also a 2 factions have been brought back from GalCiv 2.

Features:

• Galactic Bazaar
  
• New Ships
  
• New Faction - Torians
  
• New Campaign
  
• New Faction - Arceans

 

[Space Satan]

 

[Bumvelcrow]

It's better than GalCiv2, which was p. decent already. My favorite space 4x since Sword of the Stars.

Really? I thought the consensus was that it was at best a repeat, and at worst the AI was considerably inferior. I liked GC2 a lot. In what ways is it better?

That new expansion, unless I'm missing something, seems only of interest if you like the Arceans. I never played the campaigns in GC2 as I was more interested in the sandbox game.

 

[Spectacle]

"Mercenaries" are apparently not just for combat, you can also use them to improve your shipyards and planets. So they might be a bigger thing in game than they sounded like at first.

 

[Irenaeus III]

It's better than GalCiv2, which was p. decent already. My favorite space 4x since Sword of the Stars.

Really? I thought the consensus was that it was at best a repeat, and at worst the AI was considerably inferior. I liked GC2 a lot. In what ways is it better?

That new expansion, unless I'm missing something, seems only of interest if you like the Arceans. I never played the campaigns in GC2 as I was more interested in the sandbox game.

It is better for organizing stuff better already from vanilla, like custom tech trees for each civ. The new expansion seems very interesting. A lot of times I wanted to do covert attacks on my "allies" without triggering war and hopefully I can now hire mercenaries to do it. Also, new races, techs, etc. are always welcome. Don't care much for campaigns either.

Since I'm a "founder", I receive this expansion for "free". Can't wait to try this out soon.

 

[MilesBeyond]

But how's the AI? To me, that was the big draw of GalCiv 2. The AI, while still flawed in many, many ways, was far and away the best AI of any 4X game ever made (though granted, considering this is a genre with franchises like Civ and Master of Orion/Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic, the bar isn't particularly high). Has GalCiv 3 fixed their AI? Is it as good as 2? Because if not, I don't really see any compelling reason to buy it.

The biggest issue I had with GalCiv 2 was probably that it ended up feeling a bit spreadsheet-y at times. I mean technically all TBS games (and most RPGs) are just spreadsheet management when you get down to it, but GalCiv 2 didn't do a particularly stellar job of masking that, with the fluff often feeling kind of half-assed. One thing SMAC in particular did quite well is that it understood that the names and descriptions behind the techs did a good job of helping the player forget that it's really just a competition to try and get the highest numbers. GalCiv 2 kind of went the opposite way and seemed to just say "Screw it. The numbers are what really matter, so let's not have any pretensions, yeah?" which is a level of honesty that I appreciate on some levels, and it certainly makes the game far more intuitive for a newcomer to the genre, but it also left me with a distinct lack of immersion. Does GalCiv 3 improve on that at all?

 

[Beastro]

Someday they'll should just release a spreadsheet simulator and be done with it.
I'm sure they'll expect a big hit among the masses dreaming to imagine themselves playing with Excel...

Someone already got there first: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/