–RELEASED 12/11/2014–

Galactic Civilizations III Beta 3 is now available! See below for details on the mechanical Yor race, the first pass at combat animations, cinematics, and more:

Features 

Added the Yor with their own line of spaceships, star bases, techs and general non-organic life weirdness. They aren’t exactly the best neighbors to run into when exploring space, but they do provide a fun opponent to go to war with.

Added the Sentient Machines faction ability for the Yor. The Yor have no need for food and traditional growth. Growth bonuses or penalties on planets do not affect them. They don’t need to use tiles for farms. Conversely they don’t have any natural growth. Instead the Yor have a planetary project that allows them to create new Yor, which they have to do in place of building planetary improvements. So rather than relying on natural growth the player has to decide between making that research lab or increasing her population.

Added a wide variety of weapons effects. Watch your fleets battle with whatever missiles, lasers and cannons you have outfitted them with.

Ships now have damage states so they look different based on how much damage they have taken. That smoke and flame shooting out of your warship is probably a bad thing, you may want to let it go through some repairs before starting the next battle.

Added the Likeable and Unlikeable race traits (modifies the starting attitude of other factions towards you).

New colors for the Iridium ships. We removed the purple because it was to easily confused with the Yor colors and just let the Iridium be that mirror-like silver and gold lights and it looks really good.

Added lots of new sound effects. Objects in space have 3d positional sounds (if you zoom in my a sun you can hear it), ships make sounds as the move and activate thrusters, UI sounds have been added for key events (such as notifying the player that it is their turn)

Fixes

Lots of Crash fixes

Fixed a render issue in the Altarian leader scene

Fixed an issue where the "act of war" popup doesn't come up if you right-click an object that you can't see anymore

Fixed some multi-player desync issues

Fixed bug where shipyards were not ejecting non-defender ships

Fixed bug where only ships with destinations waiting to fleet up would try to upgrade

Fixed bug where fleet that gets scared and tries to run away won't do it until the next turn if he has a pending move order

Fixed bug where defenders sometimes wouldn't defend planets

Fixed lots of events that weren't applying their bonuses correctly

If you don't have the Universal Translator you will still be told that another faction is declaring war on you (rather than simply having them come up and say garbled text to you and not realizing you are now at war)

Fixed an issue where a ship design wouldn't save if there was a tab in the ship name

Balance

All weapons, range, rate of fire, defenses all redone. Defense in particular were changed to a new system where they can run out (if you blast shields enough they will fall and your beam attack can start getting through).

Reduced Galactic Event frequency slightly

Faction trait rebalance. In general less, but more specific traits, every faction (except Terran) now have a negative trait)

Terran gain Likeable +1 and Productive +1, but lose Influential +2, Productive +2, Resilient +2 and Traders +1

Drengin gain Discontent -2 and Courageous +1 but lose Adventuresome +1, Courageous +2 and Fast +1

Altarians gain Content +2, Fast +1, Influential +1 and Fragile -2 but lose Content +1, Economical +2, Fast +2 and Influential +2

Iridium gain Adventuresome +1, Clever +1 and Productive +1 but lose Adventuresome +2, Clever +2, Influential +2 and Productive +2

Krynn gain Fast +1, Fertile +2, Unlikeable -1 and Militant -1 but lose Fertile +1, Handy +2, Militant +1 and Organized +2

Approval calculation changed to smooth out the steps

Increased the number of stars slightly on all maps

Reduced Maintenance slightly

Better distribution of Ascension Gates and Relics

Blackholes are distributed more evenly throughout the map

Changed the Open Borders treaty threshold to -4

Changed the amount of Goods and Services provided by Capital buildings

UI

We now support color defines per faction, so your UI will be different if you are playing the Yor compared to the Terran

Tons of new icons (if you were on the fence about buying GC3 I know this will push you over the edge!)

Added 12 new cutscenes for first time events like the first time you colonize a world or invade a planet

Added lots of new art for colonization events

Added a new Battle Initiation window

Improved choose sponsor window for setting planets that are providing resources for a shipyard

Starbases, shipyards, and rally points now name themselves after the star system they are near

Changed ship drawing order in fleets so most important ship is shown first

All the trade categories in the diplomacy screen now start expanded, and made the height of the trade list area taller and dynamic to deal with very small and very large resolutions

Added a description field to the planet tooltips to add a flavorful description for the planet

Added an indicator for the turns remaining on the queue on the planet context screen, planet list entry, planet tooltip, shipyard tooltip, shipyard context screen and the shipyard list entry

Added some advice on the diplomacy screen letting players know they have to meet other players before they can start diplomacy (if they haven't met anyone else yet)

Added descriptions to the race traits tooltips explaining what they are

AI

Added high level objective planning to the AI (so it knows what empire goals it is currently pursuing)

The AI now considers UP voting according to their personal agendas

Added personalities to all the AI factions. Personalities like Cruel or Scientific don’t give game bonuses but influence how that leader makes decisions. It means that Lord Kona won’t play the game like Akari Malara.

The AI now builds and Upgrades starbases

AI now does a better job of defending its empire (figuring out what is worth defending, and how much resources should be allocated to defending it)

In general the AI is slightly less conservative when attacking

Changed defender behavior to race towards planets and ignore everything else.

Changed fleetup behavior to wait for as many reinforcements as possible, but always attack if fleet is full.

War Endurance is now set per faction, so AI players have different thresholds for when they like to declare war (hint: the Drengin are bad neighbors)