Bonus Tiles

Agreed, especially since the old icons don't always match the new (possibly multiple) benefits.  I had the old food/farm icon on a tile that had a wealth benefit.

I had a game today where an ocean tile (surrounded by ocean tiles) was listed as prairie with a bonus.  I am not sure if this is an error, but I thought I would mention it.

That occasionally happened in custom games in GC2 as well.  Still, those are the kinds of things that shouldn't happen.  

In GC2, with research opening up tiles, sometimes your new tiles were in areas where the underlying image looks like water.  That of course means you build something... like a Starport, in the ocean.  

If we can avoid this in GC3, that would be much preferred.

Totally agree--adds great depth and thought to colony layout and strategy.

Seems like there are an awful lot of bonus tiles sometimes too, relative to GCII. On one of my planets in the last game I played, I had 7 bonus tiles out of 17 total. Not sure if this is too much or not, because they are so varied.

Other thoughts on bonus tiles:

The number indicator right aligned from the type of improvement (tool tip), which to my understanding is the number of total bonuses, could be clarified. Maybe a plus sign could be attached to the number, like "+3" instead of just "3" to show that this is the bonus and not the base value.

Sometimes the bonus arrows appear when no bonus is being given. Not sure why--it seems random (happened when I had a trade center on a +1 wealth bonus tile next to normal tile--every building I could make showed an adjacency bonus toward the trade center).

Use of the word "total" both in the base value of an improvement (i.e. total = +10%) and then in the adjacency bonus at the bottom of the tool tip (i.e. total = 30%) is very confusing. Neither are totals. Maybe this should say "base" and "total bonus" (respectively) or something along those lines (probably already in the works as part of the "in-process revamp of the colony management screen," but figured I'd mention it anyway).

Yep... too many bonuses... some spawning in weird places (but that goes for the whole spawn system... you should not have your capital and starport both in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean).

But overall, the multiple effects, or affects to adjacent tiles, adds some more intentionality to building location management.  I would like to see this area of planet management fleshed out a bit more.  A simple way to create depth is to increase the types of bonus tiles with different effects.  This would make each planet more unique.  Some might be more rare than others, others more common such as a resource rich tile (it seems logical that many planets would have one part of the world that is richer in resources).  

I don't know how many types there are now.  But it seems that adding types or affects would not bee too much extra work.  And, it would really add depth.  

Perhaps thinking bigger... what if there were quite a number of "bonus" tiles, some of which aren't so much bonuses as they are creating tile differentiation.  Others of which are bonuses.  I could envision a system in which planet building management could be like a mini puzzle game in which the player must work to determine the optimal use of the planet given its bonuses and limitations.  I know this isn't intended to be a city building game, or a puzzle game.  But by just adding variety (without overkill), I think you could add a lot (of depth) without adding a lot (of work).

I think that colony management is working in this direction already. I noticed that the arid tiles, for example, cannot be used for food production (once researched, of course).

This is an awesome addition to the game, in my opinion. I think adding these types of limitations add both a touch of reality and great depth to the gameplay. I'm very pleased with how the adjacency works and with the direction planet quality improvements seem to be headed.

I got my Starport in an ocean.

Echoing people here - the new bonuses, adjacency bonuses and tile types are all pretty awesome, they add a lot of depth and thought to my colony planning already!

I've also had that odd spawn bonus, a couple of times I've had my civilisation or colony capital spawn on top of bonuses, like ancient ruins or precursor stuff with really nice big bonuses and sometimes the odd GalCiv2-esque oceans-that-are-actually-land tiles thing. I find it kinda funny how a massive ocean is apparently also a prairie

I have encountered this as well.  There seems to be disparity between the bonus icon, the mouseover and the tile description.  Take the tile with the starport for instance in the above screenshot (in the Pacific Ocean, where else? :P) ... the icon in GC2 meant a hefty research bonus; the mouseover reads "+2 to Cultural" but the feature description says "+2 Level to Influence Improvements" ... the northeastern South America/Atlantic Ocean tile's icon would indicate a decent research bonus in GC2, the mouseover gives "+3 Level to Culture, +2 Level to Research, +2 to Adjacent Influence" but the text description for the tile states only "+3 Level to Influence Improvements"

There are several bugs that have shown up in the planet features, that we will be fixing.

The Icons are all temporary, and most of the Names and Effects will be changing.

The features showing up in inappropriate places, will be fixed with the new planet surface system, which should be arriving in the next major build. 

Thanks for the update, mormegil! Love what you guys are doing, keep it up! Having colonies in the middle of prairie oceans with food bonuses is vastly outweighed at this point by all the great stuff going on in colony management, in my opinion. Not to mention the anticipation of what's to come!

Yay!

I think that having floating starports is actually quite futuristic. Stargate Atlantis pulls it off rather well. There is less of a chance for terrain destruction if a ship explodes above an ocean than nest to the colony. Ditto for noise pollution and general waste effects.

I'd think there would have to be extenuating circumstances to purposely build anything significant in the ocean when there are adequate land spaces available.  If maybe the land is volatile with volcanic activity, or is home to some fearsome and dangerous creature that happens to be afraid of the ocean... 

Otherwise, only a water loving species would deal with the hassle.  (but maybe that is just me speaking as a human and not a fish.)