How will we feed our billions?

In Galactic Civilizations III, we presume that by the time we are colonizing planets, our home world has reached an equilibrium between food production and population.  But let's face it: when we colonize other planets, it'll take many years for those planets to build up sufficient farming infrastructure to produce for the kinds of populations you have on your home world.

Surplus Food

Galactic Civilizations III will be treating food a bit differently to reflect the awareness of just how important a large population is on your planets. 

When Galactic Civilizations III first shipped, players built farms on planets and that would increase that planet's population.  Because it was so easy to increase your population, our conversion between population to production was: production = the square root of population.

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One of the biggest challenges we have faced in developing Galactic Civilizations III has been map sizes and the memory they require.

On a number of occasions, we have tried to reduce the the largest map sizes down to improve performance and shrink memory requirements.  And each time we have attempted to do that, we have ended up with a very vocal outcry of anger.

But large map sizes come with a significant memory cost to be aware of.

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G'day!

**2.71**

Yesterday we launched the 2.71 update which featured a number of changes to air units and some improvements to Scenarios and Campaigns. With King of the Hill and Overlord tweaked, this now means almost every Scenario and almost every Campaign mission has received a rework over the last year compared to how it was when they launched. Sometimes I get nostalgic for how much Ashes has changed since I started last January and how overpowered certain strategies used to be (Punisher rush, anyone?).

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Farming

I'm not liking the farming mechanic.  It seemed like a good idea on paper but in practice, it's just tedious and exploitive.  Here's how I'd like to see it work:

Some planets would have a Arable land tile including all starting planets.  Building on these tiles produces food.

The tech tree would have a path for players who want to get the most out of those resources to get a lot of food.  The arable land resource be destructable -- you can destroy it (like you can any resource btw) to put something else there.   This would make food take its rightful place as an important strategic resource rather than one that is simply produced by min/maxing.

What are your thoughts?

CEO Brad Wardell is trying every strategy he can think of to repel the attacks of the Centauri Republic in Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade!

Check out Episode 6 in "Humans vs. Multiverse" today. 

Major AI improvements have been made in order to make computer opponents feel more "human-like" and to keep the base game interesting and fun for both new and veteran players. Learn more here.

Build new units, conquer challenging scenarios, and engage in massive multiplayer battles on enormous maps in Secret Missions! Learn more here.

Designer Callum McCole shares his thoughts on creating AI in games that's fun and challenging. Check out the latest episode in our Strategy Visions series here:

A gift for our community:
Enjoy these Offworld Trading Company Desktop wallpapers 

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Humans vs. Drengin. 

AI at NORMAL

In September I played (and beat) a genius AI.  Let’s see how well we do now.  This is on the standard game, no CRUSADE. Version 2.8 (not released yet).

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