When I say “Learn to code” I really mean it because man, ever since Covid hit we have just been behind the eightball on getting things done in a timely way. We need more engineers. Star Control: Origins on XBOX Series X is in Certification, Galactic Civilizations IV is about to get a major overhaul, Sins of a Solar Empire II just had a technical alpha update and we have a huge new game in development that hasn’t been announced.  And this doesn’t even count f...

I don’t know if this will be my last AAR of Galactic Civilizations III.   As I type this, the game is about to turn 6 years old and is still going strong. We’ve been working on an update for the game for awhile and are hoping to get it released before the anniversary (fingers crossed).  This AAR will kind of act as a retrospect on the game, mention some changes we’ve made and hopefully be entertaining. I am playing as the Terran Empire.  ...

We aren't ready to announce anything specifically yet but I wanted to give you a sneak preview of some of the things we have going on around here. First, there probably won't be a lot more journal entries for GalCiv III.  There will be more updates to GalCiv III but they will fall under bug fixing only.  The team has been staffed up (and we're hiring more) to focus on "GalCiv Next". So what are some of the broad strokes?  In no particular order these are the things that...

Galactic Civilizations II (not III) was released a long time ago.  Since then, most of the people who worked on the game have remained at Stardock but not everyone.  However, over the past year or so, we've been lucky enough to recruit and or contract back some of the original members to return working on new Galactic Civilizations efforts.  

It's hard to believe that GalCiv III was released over 5 years ago.  Since then, we've had a few major expansions and a lot of DLC. As we enter 2021, we have finally reached the stage where GalCiv III won't be seeing any new DLC but will continue to get updates in the form of balance, fixes and performance improvements as we find them.  Updates will be less frequent as QA time is particularly precious right now. We are very proud of how Galactic Civilizations III evolved.  W...

Galactic Civilizations III launched in 2015 just a month or two before I joined the team at Stardock. From my first day here, this particular title was my training ground as I navigated my new job and learned all of the products the marketing team is responsible for.  It feels appropriate, then, as I pass my 5 year Stardock anniversary, that I take a look at GalCiv III and all of the expansions and DLC we’ve released over the years to continue making it a vast, enjoyable, exciti...

I think most people are fairly well aware of this fact, but in case you aren't, there's something you need to know about Galactic Civilizations: it's been around for a  really  long time .  The game's development actually started in Stardock CEO Brad Wardell's dorm room at Western Michigan State University back in 1993. It was just a hobby at first, until IBM heard about the game's development and sent Brad better tools and other goodies to work with. Galactic Civilizatio...

Kzinti Patriarchy by Airmaster The race of cat-like aliens originally created by Laren Niven and brought to life for GC3 by Airmaster. This faction pack includes the unique race itself and a wide selection of ships to choose from. The Kzinti, a large canivourous cat-like species from a world known as Kzinhome orbiting star 61 in the Ursae Majoris constellation. Based on the Larry Niven sci-fi novels Man-Kzin Wars. The Kzinti Race Civ is a full playable custom civilization that alr...

With so many choices in games available these days thanks to digital distribution, it can sometimes be hard to settle upon a choice of what to play when you happen to have an afternoon free to yourself. 4X is an extremely popular genre, and there's no question that there are hundreds of 4X-style games available on Steam and other platforms. Today, I want to talk a little bit about what sets Galactic Civilizations III (called GalCiv from here on out for brevity) apart from many of the other 4X...

So we are on the road to v4.0.  It's hard to believe that GalCiv III was released five years ago.  We've made a lot of changes since then. Version 4.0 is designed to do a lot of different things.  I won't go over all the changes here but instead will take you on a bit of a guided tour. Most of the changes are for users of Retribution which is the latest expansion.  If you don't have that, I highly recommend getting it. Turn 1 On your first turn you're going to...

I found a magic planet. It’s not that it is a class 20 planet – it only started as a class 14 and I’ve upgraded it since.  It is that it had 6 fertile tiles with 5 of them ready to have something amazing placed in the middle.  In this case, Kimberly’s Refuge.  Combined with the planet being a fertile world the result is that this one planet produces 34 food.  Of course, having the time to build this up required relative peace to be the nor...

The first impression of gameplay in a 4X strategy game tends to be what the opening choices are.  And this is something we have tried our best to optimize in GalCiv III. In version 3.96, we are giving players the shipyard again by default (which we used to have back in 1.0).   The presence of the starting shipyard has everything to do with having meaningful starting decisions. For example, here is v3.96 without the shipyard as an option now: We added a n...

We're putting the finishing touches on GalCiv III v3.95 which includes both balance changes and new game options and some quality of life updates. Originally we were going to go right from v3.6 to v4.0 but we've broken the tasks down into smaller chunks, hence v3.7, v3.8, v3.9, v3.91 and now v3.95 But we've also been working on v4.0 which has a heavy modding emphasis. Now that the major expansions to III are over (we will still be releasing DLCs, but all new FEATURE changes will happen in ...

This is part 2 of a 4 part series on the villains of Star Control DLC for Galactic Civilizations III. You can see the...unpleasantness that took place in part 1 here . Mistakes were made. In Star Control: Origins we wanted to make sure that humanity's opposition wasn't simply a set of cartoon bad guys.  Each opponent has a pretty strong motivation and a rationale...except for the Xraki.  The Xraki are insane.  They're not "evil" they were driven insane by events in ...

Greetings! For this After Action Report I'm going to be playing Galactic Civilizations v3.9 with only the Heroes of Star Control civilizations.  I'll be pointing out notable and interesting things as I go along. The Setup I'm going to play as the galaxy's classiest cannibals, the Phamyst. The Phamyst have the Ravenous ability which results in them receiving food after every battle which can be used to build cities.  However, this food spoils after 25 turns so use it...