Initial Thoughts of Gal Civ 3
I love the graphics and the general look of the UI, the ships and starbases have a more realistic feel and the target reticule when selecting a ship or planet is a nice touch. It's the little things that please me.
The dust clouds and nebulae are a great addition and I hope to be able to hide a fleet in them to surprise my enemies.
The Suns look better and the hex grid plays better than the square.
The lists are clearer than they were in GalCiv 2, it’s easier to find the information I need, especially with the planets, what they’re building, income and population.
Issues
When adjusting the “Govern Planet” setting the “Manufacture Queue” doesn’t update until you exit and re-enter the planet screen.
Survey ships can try to survey the same anomaly.
Tech Tree
To give the game a more realistic feel it would be nice to have the option of "blind research" and "semi-blind research". Blind would be a random tech from your race’s tech tree but semi could work on a research type.
A research type could represent space weapons this would lead to some subset types mass driver, missile and laser. These in turn are totally blind where you would know how many levels of laser there are.
As you research a type there could be a random chance of discovering something totally different, for example while researching propulsion you could discover a new way of firing mass drivers. Or techs like “Fleet Battle Tactics” or the “Zalon Defence Matrix” can only be discovered by accident.
This would hopefully give a more realistic approach to discovery where you look into a problem without quite knowing what will come of it.
Diplomacy
The ability to build a “Federation” or “Empire” with other races, major and minor would be nice. Why conquer the galaxy when you can get them to join you, this could be linked to the culture victory. If you can get your culture a percentage higher than another race they will ask to join you. You could then negotiate how they join, maybe gain some of that races abilities.
Alternatively you could crush the other race and subjugate them gaining a different bonus, maybe a food bonus for besting the Torians or a production bonus for enslaving the Drengin.
War
I’d like the chance to have more control of the battle, while the cinematics of GalCiv2 were great to watch, you were left a little helpless to alter the outcome of a battle.
Map
I'd like to see a map that didn't have edges as such but instead allowed you to circumnavigate the universe. This way every race can claim it's the centre of the universe.
All in all it’s looking really good so far and there's a lot of promise in such an early game.