Galactic Civilizations 3 has received a sizeable polish update that fixes bugs and gives the AI more brain power. Players of Galactic Civilizations 3 are too good at Galactic Civilizations 3, so the AI will respond by building more specialised planets, and uses governers to organise empires more efficiently.
"We started looking at how these experts were playing the game," Stardock explains on the GalCiv 3 forums. "Sure, stalking YouTube players may seem wrong but then again, people openly posting their strategies are fair game right? And with GalCiv III being a 64-bit multi-core game, we can toss a lot of computing power at the problem. So we did."
According to the patch notes in the forum post the AI does a much better job of building worlds, and will manage budgets more effectively, decommissioning ships if their empire starts to overspend. It will also make better use of star bases. None of the improvements sound scary in and of themselves, but we're assured that as a result of the changes, "the AI is now much better at using Resources to kill you".
The patch notes also provided an opportunity to show off this giant hair dryer someone built in GalCiv 3's ship editor. There are loads of great builds on the Steam workshop, which reminds me to do a round-up of the best ones at some point. Until then check out the S.S.S. Hot Air 1, an X-Wing and, inevitably, the TARDIS.
Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
