Stardock aren’t going to turn the series into Masters of Orion, but Wardell wants to revisit their approach. To compliment that, ship designing is ”one of the most upgraded parts.”
There was a disconnect as designing all those pretty ships led to having total control wrestled from you as they went into combat. No details yet on the changes.
”We don’t want to turn it into something like Masters of Orion, where you have like fleets of thousands of ships and you have to command every ship in the fleet and tell them what to do every turn because that would be… I know there are plenty of gamers who want that, but at some point that’s what your game becomes about,” Brad Wardell tells us.
”When it comes to games like this it’s always about what percentage of your time are you spending on what? In Galactic Civilizations, it is about your civilization. You are building fleets, designing ships, running planets, you are not telling which ship to fire at. That’s not what the game’s about.”
”At the same time, I always found it, in hindsight, the fleet battles in GalCiv II felt a little hollow. You design these ships, and you do all this cool stuff, and then you don’t really have any control over the battle. I don’t know about you but it always struck me as a bit of a missed opportunity, and that’s something we hope to make use of this time.”
The process of designing ships is getting a major overhaul within Galactic Civilizations III to the point where an advanced mode lets really passionate ship builders actually bring in 3D models from Maya.
”…ship design in GalCiv III is probably the part that’s, it’s one of the most upgraded parts. In fact it’s at the point where we’re making an advanced mode for the people who are really hardcore, and then the normal mode for everyone else because… the hardcore ship designer, you can import your models direct from Maya!” he exclaimed.
”I mean, the artist who designs our ships is now describing it as Maya for ships because now you can select your material, you can select all kinds of tools so that you can make the ship you want. With DirectX 10 and, 64-bit, with the high-resolution textures, you can make whatever you want and it looks beautiful. Like something you’d see in a movie.”
”Now the players can do all kinds of things that we’d only have dreamt of back in 2006.”
Check out our full interview with Brad Wardell. Alpha and beta access for Galactic Civilizations III is available to those willingly to pay for Founders packages, which helps shape the game through fan feedback.