Whoah. Now that’s some real star wars. Stardock’s space 4X Galactic Civilizations 3 can support up to 100 factions in a single match, and designer Derek Paxton has shown off exactly how that works in a forum thread over on the game’s official website.
”Dropping 32bit support was a huge change for Galactic Civilizations,” explains Paxton. ”On the one hand we know that it means that there is a percentage of potential customers that won’t be able to play the game. On the other, we are able to do things we could never do before, such as play a game with 100 players, which is exactly what I did this week.”
Paxton’s game was running on a Beta 2 build of the game. After messing around a bit with the pre-game custom settings (boosting one faction to Godlike AI just to see if they went on a Golden Horde-style conquering spree) he jumped in, and despite some bugs managed to last until turn 66.
I particularly like how he mentions that there were lots of factions he’d probably never even meet during the game, restricted as he was by his faction range limits. The idea that far-off superpowers could cause economic or diplomatic ructions that would eventually make their way over to your corner of the galaxy is just so cool.
I’m eager to see what people can create with such a huge game world. Galactic Civilizations 3 is currently in Early Access on Steam.
