Gal Civ III Beta Update: Watch Your Fleets Burn

Have you been playing the Galactic Civilizations III beta? If so, you may be excited to learn that it's been updated to include some gratuitous-looking space battles. Try not to sear your retinas with laser beams as you watch this short trailer:

What you've got there is the Battle Viewer, as seen in previous GalCiv titles. As is traditional it's not interactive: once your fleets are committed all you can do is watch them blast or burn. Still, at least you can pause, rewind, zoom in and out... you know, really get some spacewar porn into your eyeballs.

This all comes as part of Beta 4, which has also added extreme worlds - new colonization opportunities unlocked by pursuing certain tech tree branches - gigantic and immense maps, and a revamp to the ideology system. The latter is a new feature in the GalCiv series, replacing GalCiv II's old alignment system and replacing it with something that sounds a bit like Civ 5's social policy system. That the system has been entirely revamped suggests that Stardock are still working out how ideologies interact with the rest of the game's systems. That's to be expected, of course - why, it's part of the reason the Early Access system exists.

The full patch notes are on the GalCiv 3 forums, if you're interested in which other balance tweaks and bugfixes have been made in this update.

If you ask me, space warfare isn't terribly civilized. But then no one does tend to ask me about such matters. They just let me quietly get on with my hobby: building a gigantic death ray beneath Brighton Dome. One day I plan to implode the galactic core, leading to the creation of a supermassive black hole that will devour all life, light, matter, energy and hope. I think I'll call it the Eye of Terror. Despite all this... nobody asks me anything. All they do is blow one another up.