Hello all,
I really like this game. A lot. I was a big fan of GalCiv2 and haven't touched the series for some time. Jumping into GalCiv3 knowing full well it's a beta - it looks great. I found a few minor things that took me a bit to get used to, and if it's not too late in the process below is my feedback for the UI:
- In the bottom corner where it says "Idle Ship", at first I thought that meant for a ship to pass its turn. Took me a little bit to figure out that is how you rotate through ships/stuff needing orders. Works great now that I now. For the full version, I'm sure this will be covered in a tutorial.
- I noticed one of the AI factions power level rising dramatically late game. I took this to mean a military build up, yet I didn't have vision in their territory so could not confirm. I was the leader of that council thing, and I enforced galactic peace so it was a moot point. AI was on beginner, so on harder levels I imagine they would drop from the council and attack anyway.
- In the colony view on the right corner, it would be nice to be able to click on what's being produced currently and make alterations via drop down menu. This would be problematic for location specific buildings, but would work great for the catch-all cultural celebration, research, etc.
- This may just be me, but when I saw all the tiles light up for soil enhancement I assumed I could spam that item and build on all of them. Not so. One UI improvement for me would be to make it a bit more clear that the terrain tile opener-upers are one shot wonders.
- Tool tips look great generally, but the text runs outside the tool tip window when hovering over certain research items.
- The game seems very responsive regardless of how much stuff is going on. Great work on this!
- I am unclear on what function the black hole is other than a dead area. I'm sure the tutorial or docs in the full game will cover this though.
The crash:
Right around turn 440-ish, it said "waiting" and never continued. I saved my game and reloaded to be greeted with a CTD. I relaunched and tried to load, also CTD. I will gladly provide this save file (just tell me where to find it and where to send it).
Can't wait to see the next release! If there are nightly builds I can opt into through Steam, let me know.