Designer Callum McCole (GGTheMachine) faces off on the Atwater map against one of the community's top players, Rebellions.

Managing designer Callum McCole showcases the second mission in the Genesis Campaign on the Much Harder difficulty.

Video games normally take liberties with the size of the universe.  We know the universe is big but we frequently trivialize the immense size of the galaxy.

Even scientists seem to trivialize this with questions like "Why haven't we detected aliens?".  The answer might be because our radio signals haven't even reached a trivial distance of the milky way galaxy.

Our solar system out to Jupiter.

Zooming way way out to our local neighborhood.

Now this is zooming out to about as far as we can go and still name stars without skipping over lots of them.

NOTE: Our radio signals haven't even come close to leaving this area yet.  Also, we only know the distances of these starts within +/- 8 light years.  A lot of people think we have nailed down where all these stars are.

And all that fits in the dot within that box.

and that last screenshot fits within the red box in this screenshot.

Now, in the new Star Control game, we are going to do our best to mix accuracy with gameplay.  But hopefully you get the idea of just how insane the scales really are.

The Aurelian Republic is available for free right now on the Steam Workshop in Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade.

Get the Aurelian Republic: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=919651553

This video highlights one of the custom mods available on the Steam Workshop in Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade.

Get the Lytherian Synot: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=942428789

Hey guys!

Lots to talk about here. Last month I was at Stardock headquarters in Michigan, USA all the way from Australia. I had an incredible time, and while I was there we crafted up a roadmap for the rest of 2017. Here's a dorky photo of Brad (Draginol) & I.

##Upcoming 2.4 Update##

Check out the video below to hear all about the update! If you crave more detail, keep reading. 

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Microsoft Surface Pro love

I got GalCiv III to run on my Surface Pro 4 by manually updating the video drivers to the latest ones by Intel.  The official drivers from Microsoft are a year old and those drivers claimed to be DirectX 11 capable drivers (they were not) and so the game would crash when trying to do a DirectX 11 specific call.

If you have an embedded Intel video adapter, do yourself a favor and head over to Intel's site and download the drivers.  I had to download the ZIP file and then extract it and then manually install the driver as it isn't digitally signed.

The biggest issue I have with my Surface Pro 4 is that it throttles. Badly. It would play GalCiv III like a champ if it weren't running at 860Mhz.

 

Balancing Thoughts

There is no perfect balance because what is balanced is in the eye of the beholder.  That said, we are looking at adding more options (such as disabling espionage) to allow players to customize their game experience further. 

Population is going to be tweaked so that 1 point of population = 1 raw production. This will require some balance changes on morale and farms and such but this is the most elegant way to make population be more powerful.  Planets will tend to start with 1 population.

Ultimate asteroid field: Don't hate the player, hate the game (please don't hate the game!)

Tourism will eventually be tied to your cultural influence. We are starting to keep track of how many tiles you control and how many are congruent to your capital world.

Minor races are going to be getting friskier in the future (as in, provide opportunities for early game limited wars).

AI won't offer to trade with you if they don't like you (results in weird offers)

AI generated offers are awesome when relations are decent.

 

Cultural conquest is coming along nicely.

 

Polish Polish Polish

Right now, much of our work is on polishing the UI, making quality of life fixes and fixing bugs that we get reported.  We are also trying to make modding a lot easier so that people can enable subscribe and unsubscribe from mods more easily.

 

Your Civ's racial abilities will show up on the stats screen

AI

The AI is something we continually update as we get new saved games from players and just play test over and over again.  Each time we play, we see something that we think can be improved on.

I'm in the debugger now.  So more to come.

The v2.3 update for Galactic Civilizations III updates both the base game and the recently released Crusade expansion. This update brings AI improvements, new missions, and more!

To read more about what's new in v2.3, visit here.

 

 

GalCiv III: Crusade + the GalCiv community = unlimited strategic replayability.

In preparation for v2.3, I'm testing out the various new gameplay features and improvements. And what better way to do that than to put myself up against 9 random civilizations from the Steam workshop...

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Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade is the future of Galactic Civilizations but we haven't forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of players who play the base game.  We are busy working on version 2.3 which should be coming out soon as part of a major update to both the base game and Crusade.  This article details some of the highlighted areas we're focusing on.

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