Okay guys, I’m doing some work on GalCiv III v3 and since this is the place I’ve been on the longest (16 years now) I thought I’d give an exclusive look at what we’re doing with v3.
A few preliminaries:
As some of you know, I designed Galciv and GalCiv II. But I did not design GalCiv III. My friends Jon Shafer and Paul Boyer were the principle designers. I wasn’t available at the time because Soren Johnson and I were off busy starting Mohawk and getting Offworld Trading Company going.
After Offworld Trading Company and Ashes of the Singularity shipped, I started to return to GalCiv and GalCiv III: Crusade was the result. That’s why it’s so different from the base game.
This Spring we are going to release a new expansion pack called Intrigue which adds governments, elections, commonwealths and other goodies. But at the same time, we’re doing v3 because we really needed to tighten the gameplay.
The premise of Galactic Civilizations is that your home planet (typically Earth) has launched its first interstellar colony ship. I won’t deny that back in 1991 when I started designing the original game, I was heavily inspired by the idea of what happened in SM’s Civilization after the spaceship launched. :)
So with that in mind, here is the tightening. A want to give some kudos to @BrianRubin. I read his stuff frequently and even if I don’t respond, I often take note of it. And one of those notes is the importance in these space games for things to be clean. We’re dealing with Sci-Fi and so we can’t rely on historical understandings of things.
So to begin:
So there’s Earth. You probably recognize Mars and you have the spaceship. Back on Earth, someone just “won” the space race. ;)
The first obvious change in 3 is the existence of “arable” tiles. These are tiles that can produce far more food than normal. They provide food immediately. This is a big change because in v2 you would have to research farms, then build farms to get food which would then let you build cities.
However, you can only get food from these tiles. So players can’t really min/maxing (and you know, 4X players would never do that…). You can still have your city world but it will require having an empire wide food supply rather than just converting some Mars like planet into all food. Also, you can destroy the arable land tile and build something else.
The next thing players will notice is that tourism is different.
Tourism used to be, well, confusing. At least to me. The new system is inspired by the phrase “tourism trap”. As the game progresses, your cultural influence spreads. Some small percentage of the people traveling through your influence will be inclined to spend money at your planets. You can build things that greatly increase that. But the main benefit is that now those tiles you own on the map can earn you money.
The next thing players will quickly notice that they can upgrade their colony capitals (without food) to increase population.
This lets players improve their colonies over time.
I don’t want this to get too long. But those are some of the things players will notice within the first couple minutes.
Let me know if you want to see more.
