Brad- Can you confirm if the AI has to actually search for planets, or if they will have knowledge of, and will bee-line towards the good worlds from the outset, as in GC2?  This is one thing that always bugged me.

Heh, .NET ain't that new any more and you missed it only by couple years (initial release 2002). Although you are right, it has matured since then. In some cases a lot, and in some others not so much. Anonymous delegates, the async programming and the linq queries are some of the newer aspects I feel handy. I would worry more about the DirectX or what ever they are using for, because those tend to make your life very painful. 

Mature or not .NET threading can be messy especially if you rely on it to handle all of your allocations. For goodness sake it has a hard time cleaning up when you have multiple dbs connected to it asynchronously so I would think they are relying on some manually handling this stuff to be efficient.  Especially in a game of this nature a couple of errands threads could cause memory leaks.  And since they are running on seperate threads that is going do be no easy task to properly manage even with some assistance from the language.

I too am interested in knowing about workarounds if they are using .net.

Still sounds like a roaring start and I cannot wait to taste the fruits of this labor.

In GalCiv II, the AI didn't know where the good planets were, it just knew where the stars were. It had (and did) scout them out.

One of the things that I have not considered cheating in the past is the AI making use of undocumented patterns.  I'm not going to go into this here as even mentioning this will mean some players are going to figure this out but I have tended to make sure the galaxy seeds things in a non-random way so that if you have N stars in a particular pattern, you know that a particular star will be yellow and therefore probably have a good planet around it.

If you load up GalCiv II and look very carefully at the "random" stars you'll discover there are patterns.

Now, you could argue that's not "fair" but we also don't explicitly say that yellow stars will likely have good planets. That's just a pattern that many players came to recognize. But there are lots and lots of other patterns in the game from the way asteroids are done to the positions of anomalies to the positions of resources. There are relationships between everything. The more sophisticated the player, the better they get.

I'm going to regret giving this away as some of the more clever players will likely put up a guide (or if they're smart, they'll keep it to themselves).

OMG, the stars, the stars!!

Listen, I don't mean to sound like a jerk or anything, but what's the point of these patterns?  Are "good" players supposed to memorize these patterns in order to game the system?  What is this, Super Mario Brothers?

No, they help program a more efficient AI without explicitly giving the AI benefits like extra resources or beneficial modifiers.  Basically, they are extra data points that the AI has access to when making its decisions that the player may or may not have access to (depending upon how much they look for and/or already know the patterns). 

Yeah well, I don't think I'll ever look at yellow stars the same again.  Did everyone know they had better planets?  I never realized that.

[quote who="Wetballs" Listen, I don't mean to sound like a jerk or anything, but what's the point of these patterns?  Are "good" players supposed to memorize these patterns in order to game the system?  What is this, Super Mario Brothers?[/quote]

On the other hand, these patterns ensure a reasonably fair distribution of resources (But not planets, GRRR) which is something you will definitely need with multilayer.

With regard to the AI knowing where the good planets are,,, i use that against them! What i do is, i send out colony ships and park them near planets but don't colonize them (especially lone planets in isolated systems). I then wait for AI colony ship to turn up then i colonize the planet under its nose (but doesn't work against the Yor, obviously). Because it cheated and new where the planet was, it has now wasted all those turns on a wild goose chase, sucked in!!

If i was to have colonized the planet straight away, then the AI colony ships would have magically known and turned towards other planets and gotten there much faster, possibly faster than me!

He didn't say "better planets", but "good planets", which is accurate. The best planets are around purple stars.

Joking aside, I thought yellow star habitability was common knowledge, as Brad said. Searching in the forums (Galciv2) for it brings up a number of threads that I remember. I think it wad mentioned in the manual as well, but I can't vouch for it.

The single most annoying thing wasn't the AI knowing where the stars were, it was knowing where all the resources were as it claimed all of them if you were lax.

Now, I'm starting to suspect something about those as well... 

EDIT: Ok, Brad, maybe you shouldn't have said anything....

I didn't know about the patters or intentions, but my gut feeling always has said that programmers make the yellow sun look like Earth's solar system (I realise that in truth the Earth is not on all yellow suns, and that the gut feeling is stupid at best).

Gah!  Don't tell me that!  Now it'll be impossible for me to forget!

I remember the Dread Lords spawned in my galaxy, and after I stopped their reign of terror I found out that their planet "Amalda" was a native class 60. After I took control of it, my planet quality abilities and PQ improvements made every single tile available. I was beside myself with joy; I seriously have never seen anything like it since, maybe it was a bug?

Then there was a time I found a planet with a PQ of 1, or a blue star with five "Purple water" habitable planets or that time my game glitched out and spawned a solitary planet without a star.

Hopefully the the planet-generation system in Galactic Civilizations 3 is more random and less deterministic than its predecessors; the outliers and the exceptions make the game more fun in my opinion. Things like rogue planets, binary stars, more varied planet environments and the like would really add a lot of personality to the game.

Here' hoping Stardock can make it happen

Wait, what memory leaks? Are you talking about some unmanaged libraries used in the threads that cause the leaks, or can you provide a example code where such thing happens? By memory leak I assume you mean memory that is allocated but never released, but such thing shouldn't happen in the C#. On the other hand, if you are talking about accessing indexes not existing any more.. Now there is a real dilemma, but not without known solutions for most cases (and it depends on the data and requirements).