We will shortly be releasing a new Beta 5 build. Mostly a stability and performance update for players.
We are starting to reach the end of the line for launch of Galactic Civilizations III and having to begin making those tough decisions on what will be in the base game and what will be in a free update and what will be in a future expansion.
Free updates: A better anti-piracy strategy
For those of you not familiar with Stardock, we like to support our games with free updates. It's our version of anti-piracy: reward our customers with lots of free additions. We're reading the forums and writing down suggestions and requests from players on things we can add after release. Much of this comes in the form of user interface improvements to make managing your empire easier. But we have other goodies as well in mind that we'll be talking about after release.
Computer AI
AI doesn't get the love from gamers that I think it should. Thankfully, we really appreciate that you guys care about it. I'm biased but it is one of the areas you will likely notice the most significant changes over the coming month. Even this week it is massively better (and faster) than what was initially in beta 5.
Tonight I'm trying to get it better at research technologies. The trick is to do it without scripting. I did make a lot of progress on getting it to build ships more intelligently without scripting which should become apparent in beta 6.
Playability and features
We're starting to get close to feature complete. Beta 6 will be "feature complete". After that, it's just bug fixing and optimization as we await release day. Getting the graphs and end-screen might be a bigger deal for me than most people. I use those graphs heavily to gauge AI performance. Similarly, the improved mini map (you can see it in the above screenshot) helps determine how well the random map generator is doing at creating interesting maps.
Performance
As I mentioned elsewhere, I've gotten AI time to less than a quarter second per turn on a reasonable system per player. The bad news is that if you have 100 players, that's 25 seconds per turn. The good news is that I think I can make this much better over time for those who have at least 4 cores on their CPU. The more cores, the faster it'll get. There's just no cheap way to do some of the AI stuff we want to do without the AI cheating like crazy.
FREE Launch DLC
We do plan to release the game with free launch weekend DLC which will go to everyone who has already bought the game and the people who buy it opening week. It's just ship design bling (nothing functional) but a special token of gratitude to you guys who have made this game possible.
Multiplayer
While most people don't play this game multiplayer. We have spent a great deal of time on it and we want to make sure we don't choke at the end. I hope to get some 1 on 1, 2 vs. AI and a 4 person FFA series of maps in that we can play together online. Some of the new Metaverse features should be making it in so that we can hopefully get rankings and other goodies out there either by release or shortly after.
The Campaign
While GalCiv III is, at its heart, a sandbox game in which the player is asked: What kind of insterstellar civilization would you make? The campaign continues the story of the rise (GalCiv I), the fall (GalCiv II) and the crusade (GalCiv III) of humanity into the galaxy.
For those of you just joining us here's a super brief synopsis:
GalCiv I: Humans develop a new stardrive technology that allows ships to travel FTL on their own which starts a space race to colonize the galaxy. They are resisted by a race called the Thalan who claim to have come back in time to stop the humans from destroying everything in the future through a violent crusade.
GalCiv II: The Drengin Empire, gradually losing the colonization race to the humans, starts seeking out ancient relics left by the Precursors and inadvertently open a pocket universe freeing super advanced aliens called the Dread Lords who begin destroying everyone.
The humans and their allies manage to defeat the Dread Lords only to be overwhelmed by the Drengin Empire who had been lying in wait. A human fleet retrieves an artifact that puts a shield around Earth and escapes into the pocket universe.
...10 years have passed...
GalCiv III: The Drengin have earth surrounded but cannot break through because of the force shield surrounding Earth. The Drengin presume, wrongly, that the humans are simply cowering behind that shield. Meanwhile, the Terran fleet that disappeared into the pocket universe has returned, armed to the teeth with Precursor weaponry.
