I have something like 80 hours in GC3 now, and I enjoy it, a bit buggy, but I find works around for the most part, not many games I had to give up.
I also played GC2 extensively.
but what gets to me as even after 15 years, the GC series, only measure up to half of what the genera defining game Imperium Galactica 2 was.
- Manual control over ships and ground units.
- fully 3D environment to build you cites in, fight the ground battles RTS style in those cites.
- RPG elements to you spies, level them up, and send on intelligent, sabotage, steal, counter-intelligent ect. missions.
- you could capture spies and make them double agents, feeding you information. really made you paranoid about your own spies.
- lie about other civilizations in diplomatic.
- WAYPOINTS. want to have your fleet move in a circle around your radar range, draw out the path you want it to follow.
- voice overs, voice overs, and more voice overs, the guided tutorial blows GC out of the water.
- galactic events, are decades ahead of anything GC has, with good (voice over) stories, follow up events, branches and decisions to take.
just to mention a few. GC has good graphics, and tremendously modding support, and I like that, that's good, but that's about it.
I really had my hopes for GC3, when they said this is going to be all we wanted to do with GC2. but if all they wanted with GC2 was better graphics, i'm disappointed.
- same boring 2D planet sticker interface, only hexagon this time.
- space and ground battles are as exiting as watching grass grow.
- getting to build a star bases is 70% of all the things you do in this game.
so there is my rant, but it's motivated by wanting something really grate. I don't get the feeling that stardock are putting there souls into this, wanting to make the huge next leap, it feels more like a, "yeah lets make a new space game now that sci-fi are popular again." this was how sci-fi died the first time...