TheFunMachine

Galciv 3 for me never realised the potential of its battles from a visual standpoint. There were flashes of greatness sometimes when it came together and a skirmish *could* look epic. But it was janky, and the stats info and breakdown were pretty unreadable. I think when you go to the effort of designing your own ships and you have a wiz bang super engine for the game, you want to enjoy a bit of spectacle and to live out those epic fantasy battles like in B5, The Expase or Star Wars.

Really keen with all the big ideas going into this, and genuinely hoping it will be the next big step for space 4X. Definitely. The story/emergent narrative aspects are powerful things for these games that help piece this big systems into a more relatable context, something that Stellaris gets a lot of attention for through the anomaly and archaeology systems spread throughout the procedural generation of the galaxy state. Subsequent expac and content packs for Galciv 3 never seemed to realis