Stardock Entertainment has announced some big changes planned for Galactic Civilizations III in early 2019.
The developer teased a bevy of updates for the sci-fi 4X strategy game, including balancing improvements, further AI updates, better UI navigation, and more.
There’s a lot to unpack here so here’s a rundown on all ten changes:
- Fewer clicks with the UI to get things done.
- Making really big maps more enjoyable to play on. It’s one of our strongest features and they’re annoying (IMO).
- Bringing back beloved alien species.
- Pacing. There is a lot of…emptiness between turns 25 to 75 which is a turn off for many new players and really needs to be addressed.
- Multiplayer. While few people play it multiplayer, we think some of our other changes will make the game a lot more skill based.
- AI. If you got 3.2 you probably noticed a substantial AI improvement. But we have other improvements in the works. I really want to write up a full on doc on the challenges of AI. Nearly every suggestion we get from players on AI is something the AI already does. The AI does “all the things” but because it doesn’t “cheat” (contrary to what some people say) it does not always have the information that players think it has and makes poor choices.
- More strategic choices. What I mean by this is that there are certain strategies that are just plain “better” for winning. Rather than nerfing those paths, we are implementing new, equally powerful paths towards success. This is harder than it may sound because we have to code the AI to effectively use these paths.
- Tech tree overhaul. This will only be in the expansion because if it were put into the base game a lot of people would get upset I suspect. There are a lot of new techs but most of the “specialist” techs are being removed. Why? They’re just not very interesting. A 10% bump in something is enough enough to justify the clickity click click of the tech. Every tech should have meat to it.
- Visual pass. We have a lot of good graphics in GalCiv III. And we have some terrible, terrible graphics. Our procedurally generated planets might have looked good in 2012 when they were being developed but…oye. They hurt my eyes.
- Fleet battle viewer updates. First, we are hiring game developers. Send us your resume. We have a lot of projects at Stardock and a lot of the time, we can’t put engineers on something simply because there are no people free. The fleet battles area of the game is something we really do want to improve but we can’t because of lack of developers free to work on it.
Galactic Civilizations III is currently available for Windows PC (via Steam). In case you missed it – you can find our review for the game here (we highly recommend it!).
