Galciv 3

This one is a credible improvement in the series, even if the hyped up ship model building doesn't mean much (the actual ship design process and results are really unchanged from galciv 2, what's new there are just more cosmetic options).

The big meaningful changes are in the planetary economic model. Buildings are located in specific hexes on a randomized planet map, with adjacency bonuses that make clusters of related buildings important. Since even excellent planets have more unusable than usable hexes, it adds real depth to growth planning. And shifting all building bonuses to percentages makes the base population more important and population buildings as desirable as production or research or money.

The new scheme for shipyards is also a good idea that meshes well with the revised planetary economics, and the full integration of racial tech tech trees and the cleaned up alignment system work really well.

All that said, the game pace and flow are pretty similar to the rest of the series. Since my biggest complaint with galciv 2, even after the expansions, was how very blandly similar every game felt by mid game, with many hours left to play, I approached this one with low expectations.

I'm happy to say that I've gotten more out of galciv 3 than I expected; custom races and the variety of victory conditions have kept it interesting for several games. I think it will still eventually have the problem, but getting old after 100 or 200 hours is a very different beast than after only 40.

And one thing that's definitely great about Stardock is the quality; what was sold as a finished game really was finished, with no obvious bugs or horrible play problems.