Galactic Civilizations III

My biggest problem with the game is that there's no reason to play for anything other than conquest victory. The other victories are long, slow, and difficult. Once you take another civ's homeworld you immediately snowball out of control. The same is true when an AI holds 2 homeworlds. When a homeworld is held by any civ other than it's original, it should receive a large penalty that reduces its production values so that it's similar to a regular colony. The malevolent ideology tree is over powered, the benevolent ideology tree is comparatively useless. for example: Benevolent tier 5 ability: +50% approval on all colonies Malevolent tier 5 ability: immediately spawn overlord-tier ships on every single planet you own Another balancing issue is the fact that silicon and synthetic based life forms have a massive advantage over carbon/aquatic-based life forms because the land tiles that can grow food are completely random. Synthetic life forms should still be affected by morale. Simply call morale something different for synthetics, such as: maintenance. The game has spotty information about it's own mechanics. For example, many of the civilization abilities don't always show the exact bonuses or perks they provide, I must check the wiki for this information. I absolutely love this game, they added many quality of life features that the 2nd one lacked. My favorite part is the civilization creator. I absolutely love the idea of creating my own civilization from scratch and being able to play against it as an AI or upload it to the steam workshop. Once stardock irons out these gameplay balancing issues, which I hope they pay close attention to for gal civ IV, the sequel will be GOD-TIER

Very quickly becomes boring. I keep playing because I cant afford to buy another game. So I just try to make my own scenarios.

This game is such a confusing mess, you will spend 10 hours in a game and feel like you made no progress, the tech tree feels like cutting down a real tree with a spoon, the artstyle is uncomfortable and you can so quickly mess up without even knowing why, like I have tried the TUTORIAL multiple times and follow it to the letter and I loose via a crashing economy. If somebody who likes this game reads this, please, explain what I am missing I truly want to know.

This game has removed all of the more interesting government and planetary management tools so that every single game I play feels like I'm being treated like a toddler. Tedious and slow compared to more complex games like Stellaris.

Love it, I'm a big fan of 4x games going back to Masters of Orion and before that, Spaceward Ho!

I don't see myself continuing with this game. It's got a lot going for it, to be sure. And I enjoy it, I suppose. It isn't a bad game so I can't give it a bad review. Regardless of my game, inevitably some space monsters from beyond the galaxy show up, or pirates show up... nothing I do lets me play a peaceful race. It's just a matter of time until everyone declares war on you, or the game just magics up a space monster race to crawl inside your @$$ and throw a rave. Designing my society and interacting with the other races is a blast. But again, just a matter of time until even the peaceful people who love you just one day decide to burn your house down. No options for a peaceful player. Can't even set truce turn limit to start game. -- Edit. Having spent time now with the 4th game (which is terrific), my opinion on this one has improved. Some basic QoL stuff that I really enjoyed here like hyperlanes was relegated to late-game tech in 4. Also, the 4th game puts heavy emphasis on personality traits that were available in this one but not as highlighted. In retrospect, I could have enjoyed this more had I been setting up my games with a better understanding of the cultural and personality aspects with various races. Regardless, GalCiv IV has the best elements of 2 and 3 along with several new layers of complexities I didn't know I wanted. Going back to this will be difficult. However, the complete GalCiv3 is a fraction of even the basegame in GalCivIV, much less the latter's lifetime pass price. So, there's great value and a great game here.

I lost this game with out any indication that i was going to lose, i was the second highest in most things and the highest in culture. But suddenly i have lost and all i can do is guess as to why as the game does not tell you who won and why. One minute everything is great the next minute game over and it wont even let me play on even though it has a play on button, it did not work. Terrible, Terrible way to end a game.