3.00 from 51 ratings
1346 members have it in their collection · 6 playing now · 858 backlogged · 21 wish listed
Review V1CGaming 2/5 · Sep 11, 2021
Lots of races, ships customization, good visual for an old game, but it suffers from repetitiveness and slow micro-management. It tends to be fun at the beginning and less enjoyable when you have played for many turns. You'll have to manage lots of planets, colonies, ships, science, money, resources and so on at a slow pace.
Review anarchistica 3/5 · Sep 9, 2019
GalCiv3 is a shockingly amateurish product made worse by nonsensical design choices. It's also quite good and interesting and for the most part an improvement over GalCiv2. But i still wouldn't recommend it:
Half the time i launch the game it simply won't start. I also had to reinstall the game because it kept crashing during one of my games. …
GalCiv3 is a shockingly amateurish product made worse by nonsensical design choices. It's also quite good and interesting and for the most part an improvement over GalCiv2. But i still wouldn't recommend it:
Half the time i launch the game it simply won't start. I also had to reinstall the game because it kept crashing during one of my games.
This game has been out for 4,5 years and has had a bunch of updates and DLCs. But there are still spelling mistakes that should've been fixed before it left beta.
The main menu doesn't have a "Continue" button. Despite this being 2019 you have to click "Load" and double-click the top save. It's pathetic.
Another problem is that virtually nothing is explained. You can research different treaties (trade, research, influence, etc.) but in the description of the research tree it doesn't even say what they do. A research treaty gives both parties +25% research, they could have easily put that in there. This goes for basically everything, you constantly have to look up what things do. And the wiki for GC3 is quite poor and lacks a substantial part of the basic information.
There's a dearth of menu options. Want ships to move faster? No option for that. Want to disable auto-upgrade on every planet? You can't. Aside from a ton of graphical options there's very little to fix little gameplay issues. There isn't even a button to make all you ships move according to their currently set paths.
The music keeps starting different themes seemingly randomly. On the map theme A plays. You open a planet and theme B starts. Go back to the map and theme C plays. Open a planet and it's theme B again. It's maddening.
Buying a ship with a survey module costs you an administrator. This is to balance the big rewards that anomalies give. But upgrading a ship with a survey module to another design that includes one also costs an administrator. Wtf? Do they just blow up the old one?
Building a constructor costs an administrator. Basically this administrator is required for the starbase you build. But if you get foreign starbases in a trade they don't require administrators at all because... why exactly?
Legions (armies) are even worse. You can't land a transport on a planet and load a legion. You can't land a transport and unload a legion. You can't land a transport and decommission it to unload a legion. Apparently they just blow the ship up instead, with your armies in them. But you can build a legion on one side of the galaxy and instantly load it on the other side of the galaxy. Makes perfect sense.
Some citizens can be recalled. Others can't. There's seemingly no logic to this, and the game is riddled with bizarre design like this. You can kill an enemy citizen on a transport, but if you blow up much of a planet with Core Detonation enemy citizens will survive and work for you now. Because reasons.
Oh yeah, did i mention there's literally no mechanics for conquered populations? They will instantly convert to your own people. Even if you're a bunch of robots.
The economy is so poorly designed that only tourism is relevant. You can invest lots of time and space in trade and wealth and it will be a footnote in comparison.
Invasions are tedious and utterly pointless. You click a bunch of times to drop all your legions near the closest city and that's it. There's no strategy involved and you can't even deploy multiple legions in any way.
Constructors will only show the basic range for a starbase. If you researched ranged upgrades you will have to save the game before building a starbase because you have to guess if all resources/planets are covered when you build the upgrade. It's just amateurish design.
More in the category of nothing is explained: When you engage in diplomacy there is a cooldown. The cooldown isn't shown anywhere or indicated in any way. I still don't know how long it takes before you can talk to someone after you entered into a war with them.
There are far too many kinds of resources (metals, plants, etc.) and sometimes galaxies will miss one or more of them. In my last game the entire galaxy had no Harmony Crystals, which meant that no one could build anything from the Influence buildings tech tree. The custom race i created had the "Bureaucrats" trait that gives them a special type of building that boosts all adjacent buildings. But it required a special resource. Which wasn't in that game. It doesn't even make sense for a trait-limited building to cost a rare special resource in the first place.
TL;DR: Don't reward Stardock's excessive laziness. GalCiv3 is an unfinished product made by a company that has no intention of even fixing typos but instead churns out DLCs by the dozen.
