BORDER GORE!!!
Whew, I had to get that off my chest. I really do like Galactic Civilizations III. It's a lot like Galactic Civilizations II, but it's got a few new interesting features, like improvement adjacency bonuses, strategic resources, and research specializations, that, while they don't dramatically change the feel of the game. do at least add some more engaging choices around the edges.
However, the initial colony rush and the AI's tendency to treat your borders as suggestions are still around, and they are just as exhausting as they were before. I know this is a weakness on my part, but I don't actually care all that much for the expansion part of the 4X genre (or, for that matter, the exterminate part. But I really like the explore and exploit parts . . . maybe I've been looking for a 2X game this whole time).
I don't know what it is, but I like to scope out the geography of my territory and find its natural limits - the whole of an island, the quarter of a continent that lies behind a bottleneck, the cluster of stars surrounding my homeworld. Then, I'll rush to the edges of that limit and try to back-fill the interior. But that strategy won't work here (and, to be fair, it barely works in other games), because the AI sees an uncolonized planet and thinks "hey, I could put a colony there right now and there's no downside." And the pathetic thing is, aside from annoying me, it's right.
Which, I don't know where I'm going with this. The GalCiv series has a very particular early game. You've got to balance early construction with rapid expansion with steady population growth and it's not so much a strategy as it is a formula. You're racing in the early game to build the foundation for a mid-game empire, and if you screw up, your opponents will walk all over you.
There was a time when I knew how to handle this. I played so many games of Galactic Civilizations II in a row that the thing where you've got to throttle your early tax income to afford explosive population growth that you channeled into a massive number of colony ships came as second nature to me, but I keep forgetting. I'd rather play around with micromanaging my planets' production queues than actually play the real game in front of me.
I don't think I'll ever change. I'm going to try here, at least a little, because there's a lot about Galactic Civilizations III that I enjoy and if I can be just enough of a non-pushover to be able to focus on it as much as possible, than I'll be pretty happy.
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