GalCiv III Status as 2014 ends

Greetings!



First off, we are incredibly excited to have you guys with us during the final months of GalCiv III's development. This is when things really start to come together.



On a personal note, this game series has been with me now for most of my life now. I wrote the original Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 back when I was a college student and I never dreamed the series would ever grow to where it is today!



Now, here are some of the things we're working on. Stardock is closed during the holidays but I'll be around so feel free to ask any questions.



## Combat ##



This is what the team is very much focused on right now. It's a pretty big undertaking to try to make this system both visually and mechanically impressive.



The combat system is something we'll be talking to you guys a lot over the months and years. It's the part of the game that is arguably the most extensible because we want to leave the door open in the future to a lot of iterating.



In essence, the combat system is being designed such that your ship designs really matter. One of the things I personally want to see (probably not in 1.0 but we have many years ahead of us with this game) is to have a casual and hard core mode. The hard code mode would introduce things like firing arcs and make placement of engines and weapons really matter. That won't be in 1.0 but I wanted to share that with you so you get an idea of where we'd like to take this in the future (hard code mode would be optional).



## UI ##



There is a lot of UI work left to do overall. It is a lot harder to do UI for GalCiv III than GalCiv II because we want to create a game where players might have >100 opponents in very large galaxies.



This also helps push us to make sure that the game doesn't fall into late game tedium. Right now, in the beta, the late game is quite tedious imo because we do not have sufficient automation for planet handling.



## Hundreds of players ##



I am very aware that most people won't want to play in huge galaxies with dozens or >100 players in them, I am very passionate that we create a game that can support this because I think we could really get some interesting emergent gameplay.



## Economics and Influence ##



We are still very much playing around with how we want asteroids to be utilized. In fact, we would love to hear from you guys on this.



In GalCiv II, you had a space miner that just went around and built mines on asteroids. It was kind of lame to be honest. In GalCiv III, we would like to see starbases handle this duty but we want to do it in such a way where the player feels like they are really building a..well a galactic civilization. So expect to see some iteration in this area.



## AI AI AI AI ##



The AI currently in the game isn't very good. That's because right now, they're still putting in the worker functions that the AI will use. It does play the game and actually does a pretty decent job handling colonies (arguably better than GalCiv II did already).



Where the AI is weak right now is in diplomacy, culture, and war making. These are very important areas but after we get back from break, this is where a lot of the attention will start to go.



The underlying diplomacy system is vastly more sophisticated than anything we've done before. It should be a modders dream as different actions by the player will have a lot more depth in how it affects different players and how they relate to each other.



A lot of the reason we can do so much with the AI now is because of multi-core CPUs. In GalCiv II, your PCs had one core. Now, people typically have 4 and that's just the AI gift that keeps on giving!



## Multiplayer ##



I think in January we'll actually have match making in. No promises on this. That's a QA call but it's getting pretty close. The 1 on 1 matches will be on arena maps (you can do custom games however you'd like of course).



Under the covers, the multiplayer is being built on a shared platform that will include things like replays and data sharing so you guys can see how different people play the game.



## Did I forget anything? ##



If there's something you'd like to know, let me know.



Thank you so much for joining us. I can't even begin to express our excitement to be building this game with you.