Galactic Civilizations III: 1.9 Mega Patch (Released 12/13)

Hello,

We are happy to share our next update which has massive improvements in performance, more challenging AI, better balance, and lots of bug fixes.  Please review below!

If you have trouble running the game, please restart steam.

Launcher

Read below for the new launcher will allow us to communicate better with you, better settings support, and more.  

Introducing the Launcher

Capstone Techs

In the Age of Ascension, players can now research that provide large, temporary empire-wide bonuses.  These techs can be researched repeatedly with stacking bonuses.

Optimization

  • Memory: introduced new texture compression for planetary and ship textures to greatly reduce memory usage and dramatically improve startup times.
  • Removed legacy stopwatch code from the sound system
  • Moved old profiling junk
  • Reduced CPU usage of the particles and main graphics threads
  • Removed redundant debug output
  • Multithreaded the texture loading at the start of game to improve performance.

AI

  • AI builds scout ships later in the game to keep exploring very large galaxies
  • Dramatically reduced AI >normal economic bonuses (no longer needs them)
  • Re-designed the way the AI expands into the galaxy with colony ships so that its expansion no longer stalls on large maps
  • Dramatically reduced the amount of time an AI will interact with a player if they are not within ship range
  • AI doesn't try to bribe other players to go to war unless they and the other players have a decent military already
  • AI will no longer give tech gifts to players with a different ideology (i.e. no more Drengin giving you tech if you're a nice person)
  • AI now scales the number of similar ship projects based on number of colonies rather than a flat number
  • AI pumps up colony ship production priority if there are a lot of nice planets laying around
  • AI pumps out fewer Constructors in general
  • Re-designed the way the AI determines which planets should get a shipyard to be more (way more) intelligent
  • Updated AI's handling of adjacency bonuses to be more intelligent
  • AI values planet quality more when picking planets to colonize 
  • AI somewhat more heuristic on tech research
  • AI somewhat quicker to war
  • Auto Surveying Survey Ships will now survey extra anomalies if the ship has extra movement points.

Balance

  • Diplomacy tech effect to Diplomacy ability increased from 0.5 to 1
  • Influence MinToClaim increased from 0.33 to 8
  • Influence Radius root reduced from 3.25 (^0.325) to square root (^0.5)
  • Eliminated the Influence Bell Curve target divisor.
  • Influence fall off is increased from -0.3 to –10
  • Capital Influence per turn increased from 1.5 to 3
  • Colony Influence per turn reduced from 2 to 1
  • Removed the faction ability bonus from the Diplomatic Office
  • Removed all faction ability bonuses from starbase modules
  • AI is much MUCH smarter about detecting cultural flipping strategies
  • AI is much better about detecting fast alliance strategies
  • Colonies now instantly update when you rush build to show the effect of the new building.
  • Adjusted tech cost to increase per tech age
  • New capstone technologies that can be researched repeatedly for galaxy wide bonuses
  • Minor races will now establish trade routes.
  • Tweaked influence such that growth is now slower in general, but influence improvements and modules are now much more powerful.
  • Increased starbase spacing to 4
  • Adjusted intensity on several strategic map icons and the grid.
  • AI tends to focus more on tech (generally) than previously.
  • AI will build survey ships late in-game.
  • AI provided with a much wider variety of ship designs to choose from with the various strategies.
  • AI weights units much more closely than previously in order to not make one virtually impossible to build.
  • Opposing culture diplomatic penalty reduced from 1.25 to 1.1 if AI is benevolent.
  • Opposing culture diplomatic penalty increased from 1.25 to 2 if AI is merciless.
  • Opposing culture diplomatic penalty increased from 1.25 to 2 if AI is cruel.
  • Close to victory diplomatic penalties increased from 1 to 5.
  • Ripe for conquest diplomacy penalty reduced from 0.75 to 0.1 if AI is benevolent.
  • Ripe for conquest diplomacy penalty increased from 0.75 to 1.25 if AI is aggressive.
  • Minimum planet class to be a manufacturing world reduced from 7 to 4.
  • Max number of colony ships the AI will construct at once increased from 2 to 3.
  • Max slider focus reduced from 95% to 75% (to deal with coercion penalty).
  • Coercion forgiveness eliminated (there is always some coercion if you move off from center).
  • Maximum coercion reduced from 50% to 35%.
  • Colony Capital production points reduced from 5 to 1.
  • CivilizationCapital production points reduced from 5 to 1.
  • Influence Radius root increased from 1.75 to 4 (i.e. influence ZOC will start out much much smaller now).
  • Tech inflation penalty significantly reduced.
  • Penalty for switching a constructor to a colony ship increased from 50% to 75% (yea, you know who you are).
  • Pirates moved further away from starting location.
  • Increased the variance for the various settings (minors, pirates, etc.).
  • Modified the governor script to provide a bit more flexibility based on planet bonuses when building improvements.
  • Colony capital maintenance eliminated.
  • Colony capital hub provides a 2 (was 1) level bonus to adjacent buildings if they are population or manufacturing or research.
  • Civ capital hub provides a 3 level bonus (was 1).
  • Reduced maint. slightly on research buildings.
  • Rare habitable planets decreased from 30% to 25%.
  • Nebula and black holes and anomalies made much less common on all settings.
  • Occasional planet frequency amount doubled from 1X to 2X.
  • Common stars modifier increased from 0.9 to 1.
  • Common planet frequency amount increased from 0.75X to 3X (this also fixes a bug where common was less than occasional).
  • Abundant stars increased from 1X to 1.5X.
  • Planet Frequency increased from 0.25X to 3.5X (also fixes bug).
  • Tiny map base objects increased from 32 to 120 (i.e. tiny maps will be a lot more filled).
  • Small map base object count increased from 64 to 150.
  • Medium map Base object count increased from 110 to 200.
  • Large map base object count increased from 155 to 300 (i.e. over twice as many stars/planets/etc. in a particular size).
  • Huge map base object count increased from 250 to 350.
  • INSANE map object count INCREASED from 1200 to 1400!
  • Sensor cost components reduced slightly.
  • Cargo module cost reduced from 27 to 10 (cheaper colony ships -- but remember, planets now rely more on population for their production).
  • Tiny hull cost reduced from 11 to 10.
  • Small hull cost reduced from 25 to 20.
  • Medium hull HP increased from 100 to 120.
  • Large hull cost increased from 128 to 300.
  • Large hull HP increased from 250 to 600.
  • Large hull storage increased from 100 to 120.
  • Large hull logistics cost increased from 7 to 10.
  • Huge hull cost increased from 432 to 500.
  • Huge hull HP increased from 500 to 800.
  • Huge hull storage increased from 250 to 300.
  • Huge hull logistics increased from 10 to 16.
  • Cargo hull cost reduced from 42 to 24.
  • Cargo hull HP reduced from 10 to 1.
  • Cargo hull logistics increased from 5 to 6.
  • Made low level factories cheaper, provide smaller bonuses.
  • Reduced the size of maps while keeping the same number of objects, effectively increasing the galactic density.
  • Increased the zoom distance.  
  • Lowered diplomacy bonus of the Diplomacy Techs.

Improvements/Bugs Fixes

  • Fixed a major late-game memory leak
  • Stuck Turn fix involving battle system in multiplayer
  • Increase the opacity of the alpha on the un-owned grid
  • Escape key now prompts the user if they are designing a ship, instead of instantly leaving the view.
  • Added an option skip the upgrade notification on the starbases window.
  • Fix some bad prerequisites some hidden minor race tech tree.
  • Fix bad tech description for Technological Outreach tech, in the Torian Tech Tree.
  • Added check in Galactic Events that prevent random crashes with event that pops up twice.  
  • Fix bad prerequisite for Xeno Geology in the Arcean techtree.
  • Fix bad prerequisite for Drengin Manufacturing Stimulus.
  • Removed normal map corrections and Lean Maps from game as they didn't look good and were taking up too much space.
  • Fixed false positive on culture flipping penalty in diplomacy window
  • Fixed  bad normal map for merc textures.
  • Fixed issue in Krynn tech tree causing the Coordination Temple to be hidden.
  • Fixed some issues that were causing some of the techs at end of the tree to have the wrong cost calculated.
  • Fix text wrapping on starbase window
  • Fix for capstone alerts showing up for non-local player and for tech victory alerts showing up for non-tech victory items
  • When vram is maxed out, the game will no longer generate a massive log file. 
  • Increased the halo size on non-colonized planets 
  • Added author fields for maps, factions and ships.
  • Starbases will now notify the you that they need to be upgraded after being initially built.  
  • Fixed double counting of trade routes for AI diplomacy purposes.
  • Fixed late game crashes related to textures on large maps.
  • Fixed an infrequent crash on loading large maps.
  • Fixed bug that could cause the AI to see tiles in the opposite map position of where they were exploring.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the AI to reduce the priority weighting on colony ship production based on the # of targetable planets.
  • If a player faction is set to random in the prefs.inifile, the quick-start tooltip will no longer display an invalid faction.
  • Fixed an issue where if you changed the planetary spending wheel, the displayed. manufacturing time for improvements wasn't being updated at the same time.
  • Clicking available projects tabs no longer resets the improvement cursor.
  • Add ESC to close Ship Designer and Diplomacy screens.
  • Starbases no longer incorrectly show the upgrade option when none avail.
  • Fixed a crash related to the AI defying the UP.
199,174 views 66 replies
Reply #1 Top

Thanks for the patch - but the first try to run 1.9 resulted in a crash on startup. Never happened before to me. It offered to submit a crash dump file which I did.

 

Edit: happened on further tries aswell, but could be it's related to a (hopefully false) AVG virus alert - need a bit to check this.

Reply #2 Top

OK, set my virus scanner to ignore the files causing the alert, but the game still refuses to start. I do see the launch pic, but never make it to the main menu. I have to wait for the "official" patch it seems.

Reply #3 Top

Crashed for me in the loading screen.  I don't have AVG.  Submitted the report.  I also disabled mods before updating to the Opt-In, so it is not a problem with mods.

Edit:  Tried again, crashed again, submitted report again.

Edit 2:  Verified files - all OK. Tried again, crashed again.  debugg.err file has lots of GFX-THREAD WARNING.

Reply #4 Top

Sorry that you're having trouble.  We are looking into this

Reply #5 Top

I got it to work!

I changed from my laptop to my desktop and tried it.  It crashed like the other times.

I then told Steam to delete all GalCiv3 on my desktop and reinstalled GalCiv3 (1.83).  I ran it without a problem then exited and updated to the 1.9 Opt-In.  When I ran it, it worked without a problem.

I'm guessing there is some extra file somewhere in the accumulated files in the current 1.83 that 1.9 doesn't like.  A reinstall may fix the problem because the file is not part of the current build.

Reply #6 Top

Started up for me first time like a charm.  In game on the other screen as I type.  No mods enabled, using my usual default custom faction. It's only turn one, and I haven't won yet, but everything else looks fine.

Reply #7 Top

We just pushed a fix for a startup crash on some video cards.  You may need to restart steam to get the update.  

 

Reply #8 Top

The problems I reported in reply #3 were on my laptop.  After having them, I had changed back to 1.83 on it.  I have now changed it to the current 1.9 Opt-In.  It ran without a problem.  It also started up a lot faster than 1.83.

Thanks for everyone's work fixing this.

Reply #9 Top

No problems starting on my end. First thought is that load times and turns are much faster even on my old machine.

Also I noticed the X for notifications in no longer working.

Reply #10 Top

I have a dual-core i5-3210M @ 2.50 GHz with 8.00 GB of RAM. I wasn't expecting much improvement in speed, because it is only a dual-core. However the AI's turns take VERY little time. The computer is cycling through them every 3-4 seconds on an insane game with 50 factions! The whole turn-change time has dropped, and may be as low as half the previous time. I imagine that multi-core machines are really blazing! Thank you again, Stardock!

The bad news is, the galaxy still freezes on the load game screen.


EDIT: about half the time, the names of the AI factions do not show up next to their logos at the bottom of the screen when they take their turns. Not clear if this is correlated with any other weird behavior.

Reply #11 Top

Done with a first testgame.

The performance improvements work like a charm for me. Most notably, I used to have a period of 2-3 minutes of my pc running very slow uppon ending the game. It's gone.

Reply #12 Top

Quoting zuPloed, reply 11

Done with a first testgame.

The performance improvements work like a charm for me. Most notably, I used to have a period of 2-3 minutes of my pc running very slow uppon ending the game. It's gone.

Based on your first game, what are your thoughts on the gameplay changes?

Reply #13 Top

Quoting GalCivius, reply 1

Thanks for the patch - but the first try to run 1.9 resulted in a crash on startup. Never happened before to me. It offered to submit a crash dump file which I did.

 

Edit: happened on further tries aswell, but could be it's related to a (hopefully false) AVG virus alert - need a bit to check this.

Fixed this.  I didn't realize that low resolution textures took a different start up path from the regular ones. Realistically, even with your config, I'd go ahead and turn on the full textures.

Reply #14 Top

 The alien trait coloniser doesn't work. i don't get a free building when i colinised a planet.

Reply #15 Top

Quoting pshaw, reply 12


Quoting zuPloed,

Done with a first testgame.

The performance improvements work like a charm for me. Most notably, I used to have a period of 2-3 minutes of my pc running very slow uppon ending the game. It's gone.



Based on your first game, what are your thoughts on the gameplay changes?

Well I played vs. normal on large with 7 AIs to see if the AI changes were showing allready.

Didn't end so well for the AI - Research victory at turn 128 and two warships which put together had a higher power rating than the 7 AIs combined.

I will need to take a closer look at what happens on my usual genius setting.

Maybe one thing: The change in production from the colony capitals benefits the thalan hives quite a lot.

So far I can't really expand much on my reply 32 in this thread from before the opt-in.

 

Reply #16 Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 13


Quoting GalCivius,

Thanks for the patch - but the first try to run 1.9 resulted in a crash on startup. Never happened before to me. It offered to submit a crash dump file which I did.

 

Edit: happened on further tries aswell, but could be it's related to a (hopefully false) AVG virus alert - need a bit to check this.



Fixed this.  I didn't realize that low resolution textures took a different start up path from the regular ones. Realistically, even with your config, I'd go ahead and turn on the full textures.

 

 

Thanks a bunch for the fix, I hadn't time to play much yet, but it starts without any problems after dl-ing said fix :)

 

Also I'll try full texmaps, I had switched to lowres ages ago and never bothered to check again...

 

 

 

 

 

Reply #17 Top

Quoting Waragh, reply 14

 The alien trait coloniser doesn't work. i don't get a free building when i colinised a planet.

Weird, it works for me.

 

Reached turn 160. I feel that research is going too fast, especially considering that I have so few research buildings.

I haven't met any major civilizations, only two minors. They seem more talkative, I received a number of trade offers from them. Though I always reject them and make deals on my own terms, maybe the AI should get upset by continuously rejecting deals.

Also there is something about the relationship with one of them that is odd. I have only pluses yet our relation is going down.

Reply #18 Top

Hi,

A few things.

Research is much faster than previously and Incredible level which I had been playing fairly successfully, now seems heavily buffed which puts it beyond my scope.

When you end turn with a constructor in  a starbase it demands you upgrade the starbase. Even when you don't want to and try to queue an eject it, demands you upgrade to continue!

When you rush a building on a planet, the display doesn't update to reflect this. And when you try to cancel a project on a planet it doesn't seem to want to do so - for instance you have a building and culture queued. You try to cancel the culture and it helpfully cancels the building instead. 

The starbase distance change is obviously huge and in particular the Arceans can in principle build 18 starbases round a single planet before range extensions are available and 30 afterwards. 

I'm not very struck on the zero tolerance re the planetary wheel and coercion - the idea that every planet should be 331/3, 331/3, 331/3 seems a bit much. But I understand that Brad is determined to remove the freewheeling from the expansion anyway and perhaps coercion will be mitigated then?

Cheers,

Jon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reply #19 Top

Pretty optimization v1.90 =). and became a glitch graphics selected planet or fleet, as the game looked like TF2. 1.83 No problems
[spoiler=Benchmark Version]

The main menu screen.
Benchmark:
1.83 - 1:35
1.90 - 0:50
Result: minus 45 seconds saving time start.

CPU:
1.83 - 100%
1.90 - 76%
Result: minus 24% saving processor load.

GB Memory and Allocated MB
1.83 - 1.85, and 2545
1.90 - 1.52, and 2189

Video card:
GPU and Memory FB and
1.83 - 65% and 36% and 482 mb and 42 FPS
1.90 - 75% and 45% and 479 mb and 53 FPS

-----------------

A game
CPU:
1.83 - 68%
1.90 - 17-26-30%

Memory and Allocated MB
1.83 - 2.79, and 3860
1.90 - 2.59, and 3430

Video card:
GPU and Memory FB and
1.83 - 98% and 39% and 502 mb and 16 FPS
1.90 - 98% and 38% and 468 mb and 16 FPS

-------------------------------------

Galaxy Size: O fools (the last paragraph)

1.83 - departure and the lack of RAM memory.
1.90 - create a generation of card game and worked, on several scout around. Departure lack of memory RAM =).

[/spoiler]



Core Duo 2 E6550 2.33 Ghz. 6 GB RAM + 2 GB Virtual RAM. GeForce 8600 GT 512 mb

Reply #20 Top

I noticed see the launch of the game. First read all files Workshop \ content \ 226860 \ *. * and copy the My games \ Galciv3 \ Factions \

Large megabytes. But it's not right. If the output of the game, and once again launch a read and copy again.


I propose to change my algorithm: Date of change and the size of the file and compare My Games \ GalCiv3 \ Factions.
If the match does not need to copy anything. if not, then copy.
This is a fast algorithm.


folder 226860. Total Items: 263.

526 MB (551,826,477 bytes)
Files: 1460; folders: 945

Reply #21 Top

Optin updated 12/1: 

  • Minor races will now establish trade routes.
  • Added capstone techs to the tech tree.
  • Tweaked influence  such that growth is now slower in general, but influence improvements and modules are now much more powerful.
  • Adjust tech cost to inflate per tech age
  • Increased starbase spacing by to 3, from 2, until we get the new Administration cost stat implemented.
  • Adjust intensity on several strategic map Icons, and the grid.
  • Increased the Halo size on colonizable planets
Reply #22 Top

I found that coloniser is working but it says 15 turn and so on, but the next turn it built. Before you could se that it would be built in  one turn.

Reply #23 Top

WoW, this just keeps on getting better and better!

 

The Capstone techs were DESPERATELY needed, Thank you!

Reply #24 Top

edit: Played shortly with the recent update - re the colonizer trait: it is working for me, but first improvement  are not displaying as "rushed". They are finished next turn indeed tho.

Reply #25 Top

Quoting pshaw, reply 21

until we get the new Administration cost stat implemented

And that will be approximately when? :cylon: