I know Stardock employees actually read posts here so I'm going to give some feedback. In all other areas of life I would be embarassed to admit this, but here it is actually an asset - I've put thousands of hours into 4X games, including GC 1 and 2, and Civ 2-5.
I like a lot of the changes in Crusade, some good work has been done, but there are a few things that bother me from a balance perspective. In Civ 4 and 5, two of the greatest games ever made, one great feature was the viability of playing either wide or tall. In GC I noticed the addition of citizens and the administration requirement was added to give tall empires a chance, but there are some problems.
-population: why is raw production the square root? In Civ 5, part of what made tall empires strong was having very high population cities with a lot of output. The square root rule makes many planets with low population beat a planet with high population in output, even if the high population planet has more population than the small ones combined. That was the wrong direction to go in. Population should be more important again, find a balance between pre and post Crusade. Maybe square root x2. Population is losing relevance, it doesn't even affect influence anymore (it really should) and it can't be used to defend a planet.
-maintenance: Civ 4's maintenance system should be considered a gold standard. In addition to paying maintenance for ships and buildings, each planet itself should have a ramping maintenance cost, so the marginal cost increases as you add more planets to the empire. That would make a hard colony rush more expensive to pull off, as the player would need to build more markets to cover the costs of expansion. As it is right now, a hard REX (rapid early expansion) is basically always the best strategy in GC 3, which is boring.
-citizens: I like the fact that leaders are in the game, their strength is flexibility, but they should pay for that by offering a reduced benefit from the other citizens. For example, scientists, workers, engineers, etc, could boost their stat by 5% empire wide and leaders boost it by 4%. The leaders offer a slightly less powerful boost in exchange for the fact that they can be swapped to other areas when priorities change. Also, citizens on planets should level up more quickly. Finally - forcing citizens to travel in undefended transports was a dumb design decision, imo. You can't even properly protect these transports because you can't add them to fleets, you need to watch them every single turn and they can be destroyed by a wandering pirate sniper - stupid and unnecessary. Just have citizens take 2 turns to transfer to a planet and do it behind the scenes.
-carriers/ship sizes: I don't know why weapons destroy defenses in battle now. This needs to be rebalanced because carrier launched fighters are just far too powerful. Conceptually there are many ways to do this, such as making high defensive values take very little damage from many instances of low attack power weapons, but I haven't looked into the coding of GC3 to see exactly how it is calculated. So I'm not going to recommend a mathematical solution to this problem, just a conceptual one - there should either be a defensive technology that drastically reduces incoming damage from small fighters, or an offensive technology that allows for some kind of splash damage (has that ever existed in GC?), or both.
-Ground combat: Why would anyone bother building expensive legions or hiring generals just to need to build station garrisons and defend a planet on the ground? The attacker can just use invasion technologies and nullify any defender bonuses. You're better off just building ships and blocking enemy transports, and if your planet does get captured, use your own transport and take it back. Defending a planet is always a losing proposition.
This wasn't always the case in GC2. If you had good soldiering and a high population planet, it might have proven too difficult to capture, and that population served a purpose, so you could defend your planets passively with larger populations.
Requiring a planet to build a legion, and then build a "station garrison" on top of that to defend itself is nonsensical. One should be able to build garrisons without using up their supply of legions. Garrisons and legions should be separate. A garrison is permanently stuck on a planet and cannot ever leave, but for the purposes of ground combat is equivalent to a legion, and much cheaper. In that case, there might be a reason to build them, although it would still always be a better option to just fight your battles in space.
-the Iconians/Xenophobic trait: When I read the description of this trait I thought it was a joke. What were you guys thinking??? Can you imagine such a trait in Civilization? It's totally broken. The AI doesn't appear to understand how to exploit it, so I haven't noticed the Iconians totally dominating my games, although they do manage to stay ahead in research for the first 2/3 of the game when no one attacks them. In the hands of the player it's just ridiculous. If you get attacked early, you're in big trouble. If people leave you alone, you win the game in a complete snoozefest cakewalk.
I don't even like the concept of this trait, but if it's going to remain in the game, it needs to be changed to something more reasonable like +40% research/social production and -25% ship production.
While these are my gripes, I want to add that you have made a great game, overall, and I applaud your efforts. It is precisely because I like this game so much that I hope to see some tweaks and improvements.
Anyway, that's my two credits' worth.
