Galactic Civilizations 3 announced

That does sound like a very interesting change to the food model and may pull me back to give GalCiv another try when v3 comes out.

Yea I too think it’s an awesome change.

Brad,

I know this is the GalCiv 3 thread (I’m to lazy to try and find the GalCiv 1 thread), But I was wondering if it is possible to convert GalCiv 1 to ios and/or android? I don’t know about anyone else but I would love to play me some GalCiv 1 on my iPad when my wife drags my ass shopping.

@Demorve Why not GalCiv2 at least? (Without the Os\2 userinterface).

Gal Civ 2 would be the “Killer App” that would make me buy an iPad or tablet again! I would play it nonstop.

That said I can’t imagine the market for that being of a substantial size.

Not really. The original GalCiv has a ton of assembly code in it.

If I were going to do an iPad version of it, I would change so many different things about it to take advantage of that platform and simplify the UX. But we’ve not had good experiences with iOS in terms of return on investment.

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.
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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.
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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.

Hells yes.

Yes. And tourism was kind of opaque for me as well.

Of course, and thank you for the shout out!

Well wow is all I can say.

My pleasure. Sometimes people write amazing things but they don’t get feedback and wonder if it’s having an impact. Sir, your words have a great deal of impact.

Continuing on:

There is a tax slider. Tom hated the sliders in GalCiv II (we had I think 5 of them) and I think we overdid it by eliminating all of them. So now there’s a tax slider.

The tax slider simply determines what % of your civilization’s wealth production you get to keep.

Having high approval = bonuses to your influence growth and your population growth. So for example, if your approval is 0 then your growth will go to 0 because no one’s going to want to immigrate your “shit hole”.

But you can see I have -3.6 morale points from unrest. That’s due to my tax rate. The higher the tax rate, the more unrest.


So you can see the effect of tourism here.

Little known fact: Inside our code, the tooltips are called “Chicks” (Tom Chick) as he was the one who came up with the idea that tooltips should be used to display detailed information in a clean way.

]
So here is a Chick in action. I have two tourism improvements that total 1.5%. That means 1.5% of the travelers in my cultural influence will visit me and give me money. This is based on the number of tiles I have total + the number connected to my civilization capital.

Thus, 854 + 428 =1283 X 1.5X = 19.2 credits per turn.

But you don’t get that 19.2 credits yourself you commie. That’s the wealth your people have earned. Your tax rate determines what % of that will go into your coffers.

Now I can see how much my colony is generating in wealth per turn:

This is why the tax rate is a bit torturous. Look at all that money.

image

Now, I could just raise taxes to 100%:

But then look what happens.

Ouch. Nobody is going to want to come to my planet. My influence growth is greatly diminished and my raw production is even hurt.

And Influence matters in so many ways.

First, once everything is claimed, your influence will be relative to everyone else’s growth which affects tourism. Second, one of these two planets will eventually be culturally dominated due to their proximity. And I definitely don’t want to lose Ashley’s world.

What I think people will notice the most is just how tight everything is.

At first, they will think they have plenty of money (Which is good) because anomalies and selling techs and such bring in money. So you can keep your tax rate pretty low and run deficits. But as things stabilize, you won’t be able to do that. Every civ will be running very tight budgets and collecting goodie huts won’t keep your economy going on its own. That’s when that tax slider beckons to you.

@Brad_Wardell thanks for the preview! One little thing that’s always bothered me is that the chicks don’t list bonuses in order. My suggestion would be to list point bonuses first and then all percentage bonuses. Within each group, the bonuses should be sorted either alphabetically or by decreasing order of magnitude. At the moment, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any order to them at all! Would be delighted to see that change in one of the upcoming updates! :-)

Ahhh competing interests in a game for me means interesting decisions!

I might just buy this…:)

Thanks for answer, I didn’t think you could but I figured that it doesn’t hurt to ask. I chose GalCiv1 because there wasn’t a ship designer in it and I thought that the ship designer in GalCiv2 was too cumbersome and disrupted the flow of the game and would be hard to use with a touch screen.

Just as an aside, I loved the tax sliders and stuff :)

This may be one the greatest things in this thread.

Yea, Tom and I have now known each other for 21 years. Yes, he really is that old. I mean, he’s SUPER old. While I am still 29 as I was back then too.

Anyway, he did a review of the game Entrepreneur and his review of it changed the way I thought of game development. But it wasn’t until Galactic Civilizations II where his feedback really came into play. At the time, we didn’t have the chick system.

To way over-simplify and paraphrase a series of discussions into a single paragraph:

Now that games aren’t 320x200 there is no excuse to demand players have to read a user manual to find out basic things. You should be able to mouse over everything in a game and understand where the numbers come from and what the item is for. If they have to look it up, then you have failed as a designer.

It was too late for Galactic Civilizations II but we began developing chick:: for Kumquat and now Cider (which is our game engine specific implementation of Nitrous).

What makes chicks so powerful is they’re almost like a markup language for tooltips. So a simple myToolTip = chick::calculate(objectID,scriptname) will put together the data (which you’d do in the background) and then myToolTip.display() will show it. You have to build this stuff deep in or else developers won’t use it readily. I.e. it has to be easy to use.

So now you know why GalCiv III, Fallen Enchantress, Sorcerer King have such well formatted, detailed “tooltips”.

That’s a very cool story - thanks, Brad!

Do you envision having techs that allow you to place new arable land tiles on planets?