So it’s no secret that Jim and I aren’t the biggest fans of Galactic Civilizations II, but we try to keep it positive here on Space Game Junkie. Therefore, when we sat down to talk to Paul Boyer, the lead designer of the recently announced sequel, Galactic Civilizations III, we were honest about that, and gave Paul (OMG another Paul!) the chance to sell us on the new game. Was he successful? You decide!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:52 — 22.9MB)
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Now beforehand, I had asked folks to submit questions about the new game that we’d go over during the interview. While the interview naturally covered quite a few of the questions on its own, due to time constraints it couldn’t cover all of them, so stay tuned for a follow-up written Q&A from Paul covering everything y’all submitted to me. :) Thanks, as always, for listening, and enjoy the show!
You don’t like GC2? I think if you don’t like GC2, you’re trying too hard to dislike things.
I wouldn’t say I actively dislike it as I’m “meh” on it.
You are not alone, it never appealed to me either.
What is it with you two and not playing GalCiv2 with the Arnor expansion? You crazy, son!
I load the ultimate edition up just recently and played through it a bit. :P
Yeah, we’ve got got the Ultimate Edition. If you listen to the podcast, I voice exactly what my concerns are about it… and am informed that those devils have been exorcised from the GalCiv3 design. Paul has some pretty good ideas for making the game more sane, more approachable, and basically put it back on my “probably buy it” list.
So, I put about 6 hours into the sandbox mode in a small galaxy. I managed to figure out the economy, and it’s not so bad when you’re not playing a canned scenario – there, it’s super broken. Anyway, I was getting close to a cultural domination of the galaxy, because my economy was just booming and I was parking culture starbases all over everybody. Then I decided “Let’s research TERROR STAR to see what that is.” Hahahaha. One shot at their sun took out three class 10-17 planets. The Dregin surrendered, and the other guys in the system were quite angry and tried to go to war, but with their homeworld, mines, and second colony gone their economy was just toast. Funny thing is that they loved me SO MUCH that I built the thing right there in their system and they didn’t even blink. Stab stab stab.
The scenarios/campaign aren’t good places to start because the older ones don’t have the benefits from the later expansions, which means you’re playing a gimped version of the game. That’s why I was giving you grief over not playing Arnor. And Brian had mentioned elsewhere that he hadn’t played with the Arnor expansion after he wrote the game off.
Anyway, glad you got time in with the game ‘proper’ though the economy and sliders are definitely something of an acquired taste, but they’re not broken just … special.
Yeah, the sliders aren’t that bad once you realize you should just leave them alone for the most part. I was trying to micro them too hard. I think it’s mainly due to the complete lack of feedback about how much money each of the three budgets optimally requires. So, I kept it 33% across the board and just didn’t screw with it. But, I did play the save/spend slider quite a bit. Game definitely needs better spreadsheets for understanding what your empire is doing – and advisors that pop up to notify you that things are starting to go weird.