Greetings!

I just wanted to give you guys a quick update on where things stand with Galactic Civilizations III.

Internally, the game is fully playable at this stage (except the AI is really stupid at this point as we won’t really get started on that until January). 

While this isn’t a promise, we anticipate the Alpha version being made available in late February.  Those of you with Founder’s Elite access will receive a Steam code around that time and be able to download it.  We expect the beta version (the standard Founder’s Edition) will go out in the Spring.

The Alpha version will be very rough still, as you can imagine. Here’s what it WILL NOT have in it:

• Ship Design
• Different tech trees per civilization
• The cool reporting stuff
• Multimedia (i.e. no cut scenes, etc.0
• No fleet battles (battles will be handled automatically on the main map ala Civilization or GalCiv I)
• No diplomacy (it’s war all day, all the time).

In many respects, it’ll be a very different game since it’s a pure war game.

However, the Alpha WILL HAVE:

• Multiplayer
• The core game mechanics (minus the ones I mentioned or ones related to the ones I mentioned)
• Some basic AI intelligence at war fighting

Now, in the past, we tried to make the betas not fun.  However, this time around, we are striving for the alpha to be playable even though it’ll be extremely limited. But we are going to try to treat each phase of the game’s development as a test of the game’s fun. We are not going to treat it as a painful crapfest (which is what we’ve done in the past with our other games). 

In other words, the alpha is not designed as a technology preview. The Founders should absolutely post their complaints on game play and fun levels as long as they keep in mind that the other stuff (fleet battles, diplomacy, trade, culture, etc.) are on the way.

Cheers!