Someone has to personally process it I think and tomorrow is Sunday so...a while.

Pitty Galciv hasn't got a startrek shell, GalCiv would be a great precessor of birth of the federation.

So...Galciv is a spiritual successor to MOO2 because they are both good games?  That doesn't track.

Note I don't have a strong statement to make here -- never played MOO2, just played MOO3 and never even finished a game it was so awful.  I fully understand that MOO2 was apparently far superior.  In fact, people talk about it so much I wish somebody made a game that actually did intend to just be a faithful modern remake of MOO2, xenonauts-style.

I'm reminded of way back when Civilization III was announced, and there were vocal people arguing that Civilization II was almost the perfect game except that it should be real-time like Starcraft.  Starcraft was a great game, Civ II was a great game -- they were different games and there's almost nothing either one needs to take from the other, even if they are both strategy games. 

I have no doubt that a great game could be made with some similarities to GalCiv but with tactical combat.  But I'm happy for Galciv 3 to be non-tactical.  After all, the last turn-based Strategy game that Stardock made did have Tactical Combat (Elemental / Fallen Enchantress), and...I liked Galciv much much better.  That game progressed over the years from "mind-boggling disaster" to mere "trivially-exploited buggy mess with interesting ideas and promise" over the years.  Credit for trying to clean things up, but wow. 

However, I am willing to bet a tidy sum on a hypothetical situation   If tac combat had been included for Galciv3 I'm sure you would have all lined up to say what a brilliant idea it was, what a logical progression  

If there was any way to take that bet I would.  Even when I quite like the new game, I can still miss the old one.  I liked Fallout:  New Vegas but I'm really disappointed that it means we're probably not ever getting a Fallout 3 in the style of Fallouts 1 and 2 (hoping Wasteland is good).  It's not always like Civ IV + expansions, which I felt was pretty much superior in all ways to Civ III + expansions and therefore obsoleted them (in turns, I did not feel Civ III was superior in all ways to Civ II).  Hell, I'd take a proper GTA3 in the style of GTA2!

At the same time, some of my favourite changes were clearly not logical progressions.  I'd never have played any game that logically followed from the original Saints Row.  But Saints Row IV was, for me, an incredibly surprising piece of entertainment.  I would never have bothered trying it if not for a steam free weekend SR3.

Technically, the beta for GalCiv came out before MoO. However, as far as the actual game-release is concerned, MoO came out first.

True. Especially considering, that the original GalCiv was inspired by Civ. Heck, the best way to describe GalCiv to this day is "Civ in space", in my opinion.

Same here. I like tactical combat a lot (most of my favourite games have it), but I don't want it in GalCiv. Why? Because I don't think every game being the same is a good thing. Also, there are already more than enough space 4x games catering to the tactical crowd. So leave one of the few space 4x games catering to the strategic crowd in peace.

In many ways that's right. But one feature of the Civ series that I have always liked is you can develop your cities in many different ways without limitation. I can't remember playing any space games that don't use the tile system in one form or another.  I'm not sure how it might change the game (which it surely would). but it would be interesting to play one. Maybe the new Civ title will be the one.

I thought fleet battles weren't due 'til October ?

MoO 2 and GalCiv 1 didn't use tiles for planetary improvements. Instead, the planets in those games worked similar to the cities in Civ (more so in MoO 2), but without the terrain and accompanying improvements.

MoO 1 and SotS 1 didn't use tiles either. However, I don't think they count, because how the planets worked in them was much more abstracted.

We tried to acquire the rights to Master of Orion explicitly so we could make a true Master of Orion game. That would have had tactical battles to die for.  But Wargaming.net (World of Tanks) acquired it and I presume (hope) they're working on a new MOO.  

I like tactical battles too but GalCiv isn't the place for them.  The fleet battles in GalCiv III, however, are far far more sophisticated than what we in GalCiv II.  But we don't want players having to give individual move orders to individual ships.  

That isn't to say we won't, over time, provide more options for user interaction during battles. We just don't want players feeling obligated to micro manage their ships in order to play the game at the higher levels.

I'd venture to say that most of us that want some form of tactical combat are after more sophistication rather than more micromanagement per se. Hopefully that's what we are getting.

This makes me happy.  I'd like to see meaningful combat choices made within combat but not necessarily to the level of micromanaging ships. Thank you Brad for the info.

Well i do think the way they do planetary improvements could be improved. 

Welcome news from Frogboy.  Am looking forward to being able to play Beta1 next weekend.

I just hope that the Beta1 won't C-T-D after a measly 276 turns and also that Nvdia have there latest driver sorted so that it doesn't cause blue lines across the screen [I have a GTX670] although they disappeared when I could finally persuade the Nvidia driver to rollback.

I'm also hoping that there will be sufficient AI for battles and planetary-invasion to be more meaningful then the Alpha non-existent version.

Given these bugs sorted, me, my 4-core i7 and 16Gb of Ram will be very happy, thankyou all [@ team Stardock].

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Schaef, I think we will have a 'disabled' AI till October. Brad is the AI genius who writes the code. I do believe they want most of the features resolved and in game before he sits down and writes the code for each AI faction. 

I think he did a great job for GCII and it has been hailed as a really great AI (as compared to every other 4x game at the time). 

I am really looking to see how Brad makes each faction come alive in its pursuit of its goals, (Drengin war, Terran Diplomo, Altaria Tech, and others along their own lines)!

Great news!

I don't understand the Hearthstone analogy at all. Could you clarify at all? I presume you will not be deploying your ships the way you cast minions, you will start with all your ships right? And you say that the tactics will be handled by the AI, so I assume that means you don't get to choose what individual ships attack. So where is the Hearthstone parallel? Is it just that, like the creatures in Hearthstone, ships in GalCiv will have an attack and defense? What is the common ground between GalCiv III and Hearthstone? Aside from the analogy, can you give us some of examples of the kind of commands or tactics you will be able to give to your fleet?