Greetings!
Can you believe it's already been 6 months since release! I hope you guys are having as much fun with the game as we've been having taking your feedback and adding to the game.
For those of you who don't know me, I'm the CEO of Stardock. I designed and wrote the original GalCiv for OS/2 way way way back in the 90s. I also designed GalCiv I and GalCiv II and consulted on GalCiv III.
One of the reasons why I love making 4X games are the people who tend to play them. Anyone who is on a lot of forums can tell the difference between a 4X game forum and a regular game forum.
Another reason is that 4X games are updated for years. In fact, we just released a huge update to GalCiv II (2) this past week and that game was released a decade ago and much of the updates in it came from the fans themselves.
With the Steam holiday sale here, we'll be getting a bunch of new players so I want to give some helpful links out here and welcome them to one of the best gaming communities on the net.
## Some Helpful thread to read ##
#1 The Wishlist thread.http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/598198173700392501/
We mine this thread regularly. We don't respond to it nearly often enough but we read it. A lot.
#2 The roadmap thread.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/
If you're new to 4X games, you may be surprised to find that we update these games as often as we can. There are actually more engineers on GalCiv III full-time than we had when we made GalCiv II. The main reason for this has to do with digital distribution but what's really wonderful about it is that when you buy a game, you can expect continued updates for as long as there is sufficient demand.
#3 The helpful links thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/620713633843484431/
This just gives you some help in getting started.
## What to expect next ##
You may hear the term "4th generation game engine". This is a technical term for what amounts to the move from 32-bit, DirectX 9c, single core designed games to 64-bit, DirectX 10+, multi-core. GalCiv III, as far as I'm aware, the first gen 4 4X. Which, in itself, means nothing other than that iit means there's really no limit to how far it can be expanded which is what we plan to do.
So let's get specific:
In the past 6 months we've a ton of new features which you can read about here:https://forums.galciv3.com/461047
The roadmap goes over the long-term plan but coming up we have:
#1 1.6 which is going to feature a lot of UI improvements. Now, UI isn't glamorous. It makes for a bad screenshot. But in a game that you may play for many hours, good UI makes a big difference between fun and tedium.
#2 The First expansion. I can't tell you what it is going to be yet but I can tell you that it is something that no GalCiv game has ever had before (or even something similar) but at the same time, it is a feature that probably should have been in every GalCiv game -- I just didn't think about it until now.
If you have any questions or thoughts, you can post here or post on the official Stardock forum where we hang out the most:
https://forums.galciv3.com/forum/1058
Have fun!