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 likely notice some subtle but important changes.
First, more food. There are a lot more fertile tiles in general that you can use either for farming or plow away to build other things.
There is also an Administrative Center that you can have 1 per planet with. It gives you 2 admin points but it's also useful because it enhances adjacent structures.
There has also been a slight tweak to the costs of planetary improvements (on Retribution). You also end up with a fuller set of choices.
Not only have asteroid fields been made bigger but Durantium is more common as well.
Technologies have been tweaked so that more administrative points are handed out and a lot more trade routes are handed out. For instance (Retribution), Xeno Commerce now provides 5 trade routes instead of 2.
Early game changes
Resources like Promethion are somewhat more common as well.
On the other hand, while we've added more asteroids, we've reduced the amount of raw resources mining bases give from 1.0 to 0.50. As many know, by late game, a disproportionate amount of raw resources ends up coming from the asteroids which was not the intent.
Instead, because food is so much more common, players will tend to have much larger populations which do provide, over time, more production.
Planets themselves have gotten a bit of a make-over. More interesting layouts and more interesting cosmetics.
Even Mars.
And this is all in the first 20 turns or so. We will discuss more as we get closer.
Highlighted feature
A lot of users have asked for the ability to turn OFF the colonies auto-upgrading structures.
Coming in v4.0 in May!