Or maybe they should ad another victory condition: Build one or more megastructures. For example there could be a technology to unlock the building of a Dyson Sphere. It would be a special type of Starbase and require a gigantic amount of production. Or you could build a huge generation ship that your civ uses to cross the huge voids to another galaxy.

That way, there would be an option to use overpowered production planets in order to win a game.

What would help is if we can have 'orphaned' shipyard. Have your outlier worlds have a shipyard,  but have them linked or specialized and feeding  (to another shipyard). If you need protection you would then be able to 'switch on' the orphaned shipyard and rush buy if needed some ships. 

Just offering suggestions without calling for nerfs. 

It has nothing to do with a lack of understanding, we are not asking how to play the game - most of us already know how to play. We are simply providing feedback. Any constructive disagreement is welcome, however.

Specialization is a core part of 4X games. The benefits of having a balanced planet are already there - for example, you are less venerable to loosing all your military production just because one planet was invaded. The incentive of specialization should be greater overall productivity at the expensive of flexibility. I would have liked to see the game balanced around multiple ships/buildings per turn from the get go. It's particularly frustrating when upgrading buildings - on many of my planets it feels like I have twenty+ upgrades that will never finish because of the per turn limit - it just doesn't come across as elegant or well designed. If there are design reasons behind this, I would be interested to hear them. It's not like things are particularly balanced now anyway, with the way bonuses stack into infinity. It seems the AI already does not utilize the current systems very well, so it is very easy to power ahead of them in terms of production or research. I don't know if balance is reasonable concern at this stage. It would simply make things more fluid because less micromanagement of the production slider would be required.

I also agree with the comment above that large ships should truly eat up way more production than they do.

That's nonsense. This is a release quality game by an independent developer. There's still plenty of room for fixes and improvements, but the game works, it plays well, and the cracks only start to show as players get more advanced.

Most of the beta things in the game are due to the limited budget of an indie developer. Stardock has been really successful but they can't throw $10-50 Million at a game even if they wanted to.

And most of those things aren't going to get fixed. The UI is generally a mess, but it's not going to get the complete head-to-toe overhaul players would want. What we're going to see are tweaks here and there. Which is fine.

What I really hope is that these kinds of threads spur Stardock to really think about what it means to make a game moddable. If they make it possible to mod in multiple build-queues then those of us in the forums that want them can have them. And if they make the AI moddable as well, then the modders can make the AI aware of multiple queue strategies.

You want to keep the thread on topic, stop saying stupid stuff.

Civ4 most definitely had multiple productions at a time*.  There are quite a few 4x games that were built for this and I was always disappointed to find ones that did not,.  It is usually that to get to that point or to see it you would have to either be building something really small (cheap) or have specialized to a ridiculous point.  If you stacked the wonders in civ4 just right, yeah I was able to build multiple ships a turn from two different cities and that was actually part of my strategy.

For GalCiv3 I think it is important for two reasons.  One if I want to build smaller ships for any reason, one at a time is silly, when i can build larger ones one at a time, smaller should come in batches.  And more importantly, those building upgrades.  If I am forced to upgrade all of those buildings every time I discover something new, God forbid if I colonize a new planet...that thing will be building forever.  <build 5 factories, build 5 upgrade 1, build 5 upgrade 2, build 5 upgrade 3>>>that is 20 turns and if this is the stuff I fill after putting all of those terraforming options, I might have incredible production on that planet already.

*I will note that I played heavily modded Civ4 and it is possible that it was modded in.

"The devs will do whatever it takes to maintain consumer support..."  

Lately, since 1.0, I have a seen a large increase in this forum of statements with essentially no evidence or for that matter experience to back them up.   It's the talk show theme of "it feels right to me and supports my attitude, so it must be right".    My experience during the Alpha-Beta testing period was that people beat the heck out of stuff to see what was actually happening, not just toss off their latest mood.  But that's not the key issue here, just the setup.

Anybody reading the forums before release or watching the developer streams could hardly fail to notice the very strong statements about the vision that Stardock has for the game and that there are things that they are simply never going to do.   Great flexibility and responsiveness about how to implement the vision, but no compromise about basic features.     And I will add my experience (not imaginings) of 30 years or gaming mmos, rpgs, 4x, and etc.:   the companies that stuck with their vision despite whatever the vocal backlash might have been were the ones that made the best and most interesting games.   Start with Everquest, for heaven's sake.   What an uproar about so many features.   But they stuck with their vision, and it was ground breaking at the time and successful beyond anyone's expectations.    (400k people pay $15 a month to play a game?   Are you crazy?) Didn't guarantee it, but taking a poll (in essence) and doing what the vocal public seemed to want (or at least the participants in the poll seem to want) for the core elements of the game is suicidal.  

I have done a bit more in my life than play video games, so I am willing to make a more general statement about creative endeavors.  Good or great works are made by satisfying the creating parties desire to express or capture something, not by catering to the masses.   In video games, that latter approach gives you Farmville.   I have supported Frogboy for sticking to his ideas - not that he needed my help - but because that is the only way to have a chance for a great game.

Here is a reality check for you.  Brad has actual usage statistics.  Real empirical evidence.  You badly overestimate the percentage of customer base that ever touches the forums.  I know you don't want to hear that.  Forum residents often think they are representative of the people.  None of us are.  By any reasonable measure at all we are the fringe, not the mainstream.  And we are loud only in our own ears.  Stardock can recognize what does and does not truly represent their audience.  You might try giving them credit for some smarts.  Also, you might try doing some actual statistical analysis.  It is very eye opening.

Yes, we need a Doom Star hull size to deal with these massive production overflows in the late game!

The majority of minorities are vocal, and majority of majorities are not. This is because being vocal vastly depends on not being content. And majority that is not content is a flint for disasters. Disasters such as genocide or revolution.

However, it's the not the content people who act as an engine of progress either (nor is it lazy ones, if anyone still humours that claim).

Of cause whether or not the progress itself is a good thing is debatable.

Nope. Even without capitalising on adjacency and special buildings you'd still get to deal with waste management. Just the base building bonuses and specialisation would be enough to get you there.

Sure, let's make a complex and enjoyable game mechanic and then slap everyone who dares to use it properly.

1. Certain types of maps (tight cluster with default frequencies, for example) put enough planets within proximity of each other that just about any piece of land worth defending end up near a planet that can pump out more production than it can use for SM and a single shipyard.

2. ( A + B ) * ( C + D ) > A * C + B * D

Yes, I'm repeating myself, but come on people, it's BASIC math. How the heck can that be hard to understand. It's simply inefficient to split your multipliers.

In the simplest example of splitting it half here half there you'd end up in a situation where (with planets of equal potential) two focused planets provide same results as Four "split" planets. Split it 3 ways and you get 3 focused worth the same as 9 "split". And that doesn't even account for maintenance and unchangeable bonuses such as +10 manufacturing of home world (via ideology) or +50% research of a ghost world. Though compared to the mathematical inefficiency of splitting these are just gimmicks.

And before anyone corrects the mistake I didn't make, let me clarify - I'm not saying that anyone has to use the efficient strategy, I'm just explaining why it is efficient and just how much more efficient it is to anyone who cares for an explanation in the first place.

Right back at you. THAT is nonsense.

"Release quality" and "room for fixes" are contradictory concepts. It is of cause a fact that the value of "release quality" has taken a plunge, but that fact itself is no excuse for keeping it drowned.

It's one thing to keep working on a product once it's finished it's another thing to "ship it" before it's finished.

I still respect SD's work ethic in general, but after elemental and now this it's hard not to start wondering and not to start loosing that respect.

What I'll never respect though is Bethesda's work ethic, so let's hope that SD will keep making games and not just "make your damn game yourself" toolkits. Or to put it in simpler way - I hope that they never give up on making their games themselves.

uhhuh, And that worked out "SOOOOOO well" that those who didn't "experience" it find it next to impossible to believe in. The whole qualm here is about the fact that it needs more testing yet, not about the amount of testing it received. The concepts of "not being there" and "being far away from something that is not there either" are in no way contradictory.

Oh, goody, THAT makes you extra valuable, because CLEARLY the rest of us here have never done anything except play games all our lives. I hate being so offensive, not to mention being off the topic while I'm at it, but I can't help it when seeing statement like this. If you're going to brag about the validity of your claims and your deeply rooted life experience then at least have the decency to to do it in a less "self-exceptional" and more (seemingly) meaningful way.

Back to the topic...

Success is about sticking with the right ideas, failure is about sticking with the wrong ones. For every person who sticks with his ideas and succeeds there's more than one who sticks and fails and more than one who changes and succeeds. Such is the nature of mistakes and difficulties, you know. Mistakes are common, and so is the practice of correcting them. And difficult things are called difficult because it's rare for them to be "done" easily and on the first try.

What's REALLY worth admiring is the ability to stick with the RIGHT ideas, but that is an indeterminable quality. For if we could easily tell the wrong ideas from the right ones the whole concept of making mistakes would vanish.

Though, there is one obviously opposite quality that is easy to spot and easy to shun. That's the combination of spinelessness and foolishness that constitutes the habit of always sticking with the opinion of majority. But despite of how fundamentally wrong it is we still tolerate it and even build political regimes around it. But that's an entirely different topic...

Funny thing about sarcasm is that sometimes it lands on the truth and thus doesn't work.

It's not a "greener grass, higher trees, younger gals" effect. It is in fact how that happened. Most of the games "at release" nowadays, even the good ones, can't hold a candle to "your average junk" of old on the subject of completion.

I've got stacks of old games collecting dust that are not worth replaying that were nevertheless functionally complete and barely ever bugged at release (and barely ever patched afterwards). And I've got "less old ones" in my digital storage that I replay even today, that are never the less heavily bugged still. Not to mention the numerous  "day-one buggers" that did eventually get to a release-worthy quality but only long after the actual release.  Of cause it's not a 100% thing, (just remember fallout or even arcanum for example) but it's a trend that only a (not literary) blind gamer can fail to notice - back before the raise of digital distribution to it's current power people used to care a lot more about quality "at the time of shipping".

Nowadays, if you want a "smooth ride", wait for a path or five. THEN go read the forums to see if it's worth waiting for 2 more.

One of the reasons for this is the much higher complexity of the game. Look at the complexity of GalCiv3, the hundreds of options and mechanics that are at work and that need to work together. Just take the topic of this thread - give the option to build more than one thing per turn would be something that you can easily pour several months of development and testing into - and you still would have some bugs and exploits. It's not just a line of code somewhere that you need to change, you need to consider the impact on every other mechanic and option that is in the game.

However, I think at the end of the day these are games and you shouldn't take it to seriously. You want to have a good time playing them. The important question is, is the game fun or not? If it is, you can live with the imperfections. If the game is not fun, even ironing out the flaws will probably never make the game fun for you.
What is the point about getting a hard attack because there is something you can't do in the game? Sure, post your feedback and critique, I did that myself. But keep calm, it's just a game.