I played probably over a 1,000 hours of Galciv2 and loved it, one of the few complaints of the game was the slider for research, military and social construction. I thought it could be improved. I bought Galciv3 in a bundle with all current expansions including crusade so I have not played the base game. But from what I gather if the wheel I hear of was like the slider, thank you for getting rid of it. Crusade kicks a... Keep up the good work!

Well please do hint at it at least.

Minors Gone Wild DLC?   

Just get'm drunk and they'll do anything you want.  Anything!

frogboy, you've got to get over this "living is my favourite form of existance" thing...

It's holding you back. We,  your faithful forummers, can see it plain as day.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

I'm hoping it's something to do with politics and negotiotions - nice ones and "Oh, that 20bc on the desk in front of you. It was there when we walked in the door. No, I insist, you have it!" ones (one Politician Citizen from your party to a Politician Citizen from another? I see a very interesting way of doing Cabinets, multi-party governments and I suspect it'd be very interesting but way way too complicated...anyhoo) -and revolution etc ie planets not flipping to another race, just breaking off from yours... Something that makes being a Galactic Ruler of those ungrateful damn colonies a PITA some turns ie Brexit-type, Scottish independence-type stuff...Nuke 'em all and let God sort 'em out!

Brexit

Someone asked on Steam a while back for promotion ideas for citizens. I think it was supposed to be for a mod that never materialized. I was pretty proud of some of my ideas so I thought I'd include them here.

Commander:

- Military Scientist: 25 Prometheon, allows the construction of a stable wormhole between two places on the map

Celebrity: 

- Becomes philanthropist: 15 Prometheon, reduces by half the morale bonus offered but increases social production by 20%, Celebrity is spent.

- Influential author: increases the influence production of a planet as well as morale

Spies: 

Political Infiltrator: Permanently reduces an opponent's interior morale by 5%, spy is consumed.

Military sabotage specialist: 20 Prometheon, will steal the best ship from X faction and deliver it to you within ten turns

Economic sabotage specialist: 20 prometheon, X factions credits are reduced by 30% for 25 turns

Cartographic espionage specialist: 10 prometheon, reveals to you only special surveyable items in non-friendly territory that pay out larger than average bonuses

Military Intelligence: 10 prometheon. Reveals the location of all of X faction's ships for 10 turns

Diplomat: 

- Multi-lateral talks: 20 Promtheon to automatically declare peace between any two factions for 50 turns (including yourself), consumes the diplomat

- Ear of leadership: cost dependent on relationships, convinces a faction to go to war with another faction of your choice.

- The man from UNCLE: 10 prometheon, diplomat converted to spy

- Arms deal: 30 prometheon, generates 5 midpower ships that become a gift to a faction of your choice, does not consume the diplomat

- Seize Governorship: 25 prometheon, consumes diplomat: non-capital planet or starbase belonging to another faction switches allegiance to your faction

- Vassalize: 40 prometheon, consumes diplomat: faction pays you 5% of their credits for 100 turns. If they surrender during this period, they will surrender to you.

- Cultural attache: 10 prometheon, increases by 100% the influence generated by a given planet or starbase for 25 turns

- Ambassador: 10 prometheon, allows you to establish free-trade, research and cultural treaties with X faction, even if you don't have the requisite relationship level

Entrepreneur:

- Lengendary Trader: Immediately establishes valuable luxury Trade Route between planet on which the entrepreneur is stationed and X planet.

- Become Smuggler: Must have pragmatic or malevolent, 20 prometheon, consumes citizen. Produces a small amount X resource every turn as if it were being mined from one of your planets

- Raider: Must have malevolent, 20 prometheon, consumes citizen. 15% of all trade route value generated by X faction goes to you instead

- Libertarian Governor: Consumes citizen, 10 prometheon. Credits increased by 50% but morale reduced by 10%

- Deep Space Architect: 15 Prometheon, consumes citizen. Allows for the construction of a super-powerful economic starbase with double raw production, consruction and economic bonuses.

- Tech Company Founder: 15 Prometheon. 50% of planet's credit production also contribute points to research

- Modern Day Explorer: X Prometheon, 5 antimatter: brings back X of Y resource where X equals the amount of prometheon spent. Resources are not returned immediately, it takes X turns for them to arrive.

You are quite a teasor Frogboy, aren´t you! Looking forward to it.

BTW What´s up with that Dread Lords DLC you promised in the meantime? Hopefully it was not this Mech part tiny bit  

I am sure you are wracked with frustration. 

Compared to knowing and not being able to share, not knowing and not being able to share is worse. 

Most of the expansion pack stuff will have things I think should have been part of the game from day 1.

With GalCiv III v2.5, we tried to brings a lot of Crusade stuff back to the base game and we got absolutely hammered by the Steam reviewers.  So I'm not sure how best to handle things with the next expansion because there are certain elements I really think should be part of GalCiv III v3.0 as a free update.

Look at it this way.  You've already been hammered.  Now forge ahead with more good stuff.  It can't get any worse. 

Oy!    

I'm curious to see what the next expansion holds. I want to like this game. It just hasn't been happening. I'll make sure to comment of what I think once we get to the big show and tell.

You may need a higher difficulty level or play a less militaristic race for conquest to not be possible. I managed to get an alliance with a civ that considered me "ripe for conquest".

I was playing Cybernetic, Xenophobic Dogs in a ludacris but sparse galaxy with slow production and a difficulty higher than I'd played before. The first two civs I met, the Galactic Federation and the Council of Ricks declared war because I was ripe for conquest. With my poor production it look a long time to surpass their fleet strength, but then I met the Ricktatorship who had three times my strength! I was outside their range though, so I sent diplomats, trade ships, tribute, and accepted and request and worked my way up to being allies we were opposing ideologies too. I could never beat them but diplomacy neutralized the threat. I paid for peace with the Council of Ricks and did the same with them. Now I can take down Tammy and the GalFed if I can just get a big enough fleet built that can hit fast enough to avoid losses that take forever to replace.

Definitely a tough choice there. I noticed from looking over that period of review scores that the majority of those who took issue with the 2.5 update were long time players who were somewhat 'set' in their ways with the game. While I vehemently disagree with a lot of their complaints, it is kind of understandable given that, until Crusade, the overall fundamentals of the game hadn't actually changed all that much since its launch in 2015. That's a fairly significant time horizon in video games these days.

2.5 added a lot of great things (imo) to the base game, and I think it speaks well of a company that wants the vanilla experience to be fresh even if you don't have the expansions. However, I observed that when taken in the broader context of reviews scores, the recent reviews scores that were negative were a comparatively small number compared to the life-time review scores, which are quite strong. Since I've been supporting GalCiv 3, we've seen recent reviews scores vary quite wildly at times, and it has had the tendency to bounce back into the blue. This has been a similar phenomena I have observed for other 4x titles, and I think an unfortunate aspect of being a relatively niche genre and steam reviews in general. I know this does not help you in terms of maintaining visibility on the store.

So, in my relatively uninformed estimation, I might ask you the question: how big and fundamental would the changes you would look at porting from Expansion 3 to the base game be compared to 2.5? 2.5 changed a lot economic aspects of the base game, and a bunch of players stuck in their ways responded negatively. I might wager a conservative players may respond better to a feature add to the base game, rather than a feature redesign if you follow my distinction. Maybe you could focus on releasing the expansion, wait until initial buzz and sales die down, and then approach the base game with another refresh?

I'm noticing among the community recently, that people are appreciating and commenting about the continued support that has been put into the game. Even I've seen people who don't particularly enjoy the game acknowledge this quite positively. It may not always be immediate, but I think these things do tend to work out in the long run if you have a fundamentally good game (which GalCiv 3 is).

Keep up the great work! 

I reviewed the game in 2015, and updated it recently.

I think this problem is solved easily enough. Simply release the new expansion pack and leave the base game untouched. That's what the Civilization series does. If you owned Civ 5 and never bought the GnK or BNW expansion packs, your gaming experience wouldn't change. 

These are people who paid for a product and got what they paid for. You don't owe them any more than that. When you release an expansion they can pay for it or not. If they don't pay for it, you're under no obligation to modify their game. Just leave it alone.