Game development is a constantly changing pattern of thoughts and ideas, people get bored with the same old stuff and the inevitable Clones that we are bombarded with such as WW2 shooters, warcraft, and doom mutations. Thats not say the previous games did not do one thing to near perfection that should be over looked but instead embraced and tweaked to fit into new games, after all this is the very basic idea of evolution towards perfection.
Galactiv Civilization in my opinion is a great game, but it could become legendary if it incorporated some ideas from other very succesful 4xstrategy games. One complaint I had abotu GalCiv was the actual game map, stars were only a hop and a skip to the next star 'hyperdrive' just added a nother movement turn onto a ship and in my opinion it really held the game back from feeling epic in size, sure the map was big but it never quite felt like my ships were using warp drives to propel across the solar system into another one, it was more like a casual drive on the highway to reach the next town.
Another problem I had was that the game promised a huge unimaginable tech tree of goodies to research but the honest truth was, it fell terribly short and rather bland in comparrsion to games like Space Empires. the terror star was a gimmic joke and nothing more. it represented no real technological marvel but just a place to dump massive amounts of research and money at nearly end game just to play with it.
The thing Gal Civ has done better then all the other likeness games is the AI, its leaps and bounds mroe realistic then its competitors. for example space empires ai would declare war on you just because its mid way through the game regardless if you have been the closest and most trusted of allies through the first part of the game, just because it could.. It made litterly no sense at all and completely destroyed any sense of depth to the diplomatic aspects of that game. So here are my suggestions I hope the development team of Gal Civ 3 at least looks over and talks about.
The game needs more immersion, the stars need to 'Feel' like they are an epic distance from eachother, I would suggest a form of turn based warp like Sins of a Solar Empire, it could take 3 to 1 turns to warp from one system to the next depending on the technological state of warp drives, even possibly bypassing neighboring systems to warp across several systems in a few turns. This would give more weight to the engine tech tree rather then just 'Oh i can move another space per turn' let down. You would simply select the ships you wish to send into hyperspace, scroll the map or click the minimap to the destination (should be previous discovered to ensure a safe exit from hyperspace) and click hyperdrive, they could even add a little wormhole effect Stargate hyperdrive style.
Better control over ships in combat, as they are its just toss them into the ring and cheer them on, I dont suggest fully tactical combat of micromanaging orders, which would be okay with me. But even a system of dictating thier behavior in combat much like Space Empires did with priorities of ship combat, what they would target first, what distance they would try to keep from enemy ships, when they would launch fighters from bays or even when they would retreat from combat. This opens doors for other space empire's golden inovations into the gen like caputring disabled ships and attemping to reverse engineer technology or repairing them and using thier own tech against them (which should be at reduced effectiveness since it is alien tech)
The biggest change needed is to give us an actual indepth tech tree, take many suggestions from Space Empires, the majority of the game was overwhelming to most and the AI was junk, but the tech tree was phenominal, they went for actual worm hole tech trees, gravitational weapons and even the ability to make unmanned space craft with modules aboard that could distabalize a sun and cause it to implode into a blackhole, and even further down the tech tree be able to synthetically force the blackhole to collapse into a big bang to create a new star with new random planets. Of course this tech was at the very end of the most advanced and hard to reach trees and considered god tech level science but its not unfounded technology or gimmicy ships IE terror stars. Much of the Tech Trees from Space Empires, the feel of an expansive epic scaled universe like Solar Empires and Space Empires with the much more indepth AI and graphics of Galactic Civiliation would unduobtfully make a king of all space startegy games.
Keeping combat turn based and not real time, while adding orbital space yards able to work on several ships at once, In fleet repair frigates, larger fleets as opposed to 3 to 7 ships at a time, there has to be room for a support frigate, a captial ship, carrier and a few cruisers to compromise a fleet or its just a couple ships flying around together wtih no way of maintaining fleet integrity. While keeping it turn based it would be a dream for turn based email style play, if the universe map is large enough even possibly compromise of several Galaxy sized maps that can be traveled between once a race researches drive engines capable of reaching between galaxies or even alternatives way like unmanned explorer ships that travel to the very edges of your races galaxy and enters deep space, where it disappears off the map and is unaccountable for so many turns based on engine tech of the ship, maybe possibly taking 40 or 50 turns to reach the other galaxy in which it can build a stargate big enough for frigate or colony sized ships to pass through but nothing larger to keep it from being used as an easy back door for dreadnaughts and destroyers to just jump into a new galaxy.
This style of map could open the possiblity of large scale multiplayer games, everyone taking thier turn at the same time with events played out in on turn completion in an order dictated by various circumstances, with ships or fleets moving in the same system of space as others, the faster of the ships or fleets would move before the slower ones. This could open the possiblity of 12 to even 20 human players competeing in a single game along with numerious npc controled AI races, possibly even more. Not everyone is always avalible to make thier turn in which case they have a set ammount of time when the majority of players have made thier turns, uploading email updates to the other players they would have one day or so to finish thier move or it would skip them and an AI governer would make thier move for them, that you could also set on its priorities and personality much like Gal Civ already has. This would ensure the game continues even if a few players are unable to take thier turn.
A blend of Gal Civ's AI, a few ideas from Sins of a Solar Empire and the amazingly indepth tech tree of Space Empires with special tech trees only avalible if you select it as a special ability of the race to the indepth variety of weapons, and shields some that counter act eachother and the technolgical god like powers of collapsing stars for the race who advances that far, while still offering smaller maps and single player campagins to keep a broad player base of both hardcore and casual players this game could very well dominate all competittors in the 4x space strategy generation.
