Galactic Civilizations III (micro-review)

About This Game

The human race has finally mastered faster-than-light travel opening up the stars for exploration and colonization. As the leader of the newly formed Terran Alliance, you will guide humanity's expansion into becoming a space-based civilization. Soon, you will discover that we are not alone. Alien civilizations with their own histories and motivations are expanding as well. Research new technology, design starships, negotiate trade and treaties, wage wars, colonize new worlds, construct starbases in the largest 4X strategy game ever made. And when you've finished that, play again as one of the many included alien civilizations each with its own history, technology tree, ship components and more.

NEVER THE SAME GAME TWICE

Each new game offers an array of options as you set it up - choose your map size, abundance of planets and resources, frequency of events, and more for a unique play experience every time. Galactic Civilizations III also removes linear victory conditions and offers you multiple objectives that you can choose to pursue in order to win, such as military conquest, cultural domination, technological ascension, or political alliances. The new multiplayer capabilities also allow you to expand your challenges and fights beyond an AI in order to face off against fellow players. All of this, topped with a rich and in-depth custom ship designer ensure an immersive and exciting experience as you decide how to rule your galaxy.

I have to admit that at first I was impressed with the game. It does a lot of things right: it has a nice resource system where you store up a wide variety of materials, rich technology tree, cool spaceship customization, etc. It even has espionage (take that Stellaris). It has mercenaries implemented in a fun way. The game even looks pretty, so what went wrong? Well, the game is unpolished and unbalanced, not to mention the AI is pretty meh. Extra research points don't carry over to the next tech. Technology trading can be very frustrating because you don't want to take a technology that make you unable to research other variants of it which you would've preferred instead. In a single war, you can conquer and assimilate countless planets without much objection from the existing population. The ideology system, which is strongly related to the morality system, doesn’t make all that much sense and seems quite imbalanced. Slowdown late game even on powerful machines. And there is more but I'll stop here.

This game doesn't require much more to be a really good game but since the game is "gold" I doubt that we will see much improvement in the future if at all.