The Early Access beta for Stardock Games’ space 4X Galactic Civilizations 3 is now available, and is far less ludicrously expensive than the alpha was. Hooray!
Rather than shelling out for the alpha price of $100, you can now grab the beta version for $44.99. So the more complete the game gets, the cheaper it is to buy. There’s something weird about that.
The trailer above was released to coincide with the new update, and goes over some of the changes and features you can expect in this latest version. Any game where I can create a wing of bizarre squid-shaped starfighters is going straight on my radar. Here’s a big list of those features taken straight from the official website:
The Galactic Civilizations III beta includes:
Race-specific tech trees – Each race discovers the secrets of creation in its own way. Look out for Drengin invasions a whole age before anyone else can pull one off.
Ideology rework – Get an entire invasion fleet for free, take control of all planets inside your sphere of influence, and more!
Huge hulls – For when you absolutely, positively, have to kill every last filthy alien in the quadrant.
New colonization events – Thirty more events will challenge your ideology whenever you bring the light of civilization to a new world.
Terraforming – Maximize your adjacency bonuses by filling in gaps on your colonies with SCIENCE!
Map features – Durantium, Elerium, and Antimatter are now on the map, waiting to be harvested by your starbases. Watch out for black holes!
So much more – reworked planet traits, shipyard queues, automatic improvement upgrading, tons of new art, vastly improved rendering (ships are so shiny now!), the list goes on.
