GalCiv III is in for some though competition

Yea, there are a number of areas that if you start with GalCiv II as the base, you can take it up to the next level.  For examples:

1. The UI in GalCiv II is pretty dated, GalCiv III has a really good tool tip system that gives you a lot of helpful information.
2. We were able to expand the economics and diplomacy via an ideology system and a new United Planets system.
3. We've been able to make the warfare more sophisticated by having ship designs matter more and letting players have some options at the start of a major battle.
4. The planet economy is more sophisticated, we got rid of the ambiguous morale system and replaced it with adjacency bonuses.
5. We've created strategic resources that certain key types of ships, improvements, wonders require in order to be built so capturing and controlling them matter.

That's just off the top of my head.  :)

Upon reading this my body is squirting fluids I didn't even know it had!

A month is too long!

One issue I've had in other games: sometimes tool tips can be TOO "informative" - the text that comes up is useful, but covers other potentially useful information onscreen. I'll be sure to whine about it when it becomes a problem, but is there a proactive way to address this sort of issue? Maybe designing into the game an anti-tooltip feature? Maybe something like "hold shift to make tooltips go away, let go to have them reappear"?

I am starting to suspect that i might have a idea what the combat will be like. In another place you described it like MTG. You have also repeatedly said that you wouldn't have direct control over orders. link that with that you have said here as well as how combat worked in GC2 and I am thinking I can guess something close to the ballpark.

I am betting it will be like this. Where when battle starts you have to lay your ships down on a grid across from your opponents ships.

            Y <----------- Routing ship

      O O O O O

      O O O O O    O <-----Flanking ship

 Y   Y  Y  Y Y  Y <--- front lines

      Y  Y  Y Y  Y <---- back row

Each ship will trade fire with the ship directly in front of them unless they have an ability that modifies that. Such as long range missiles that allow a ship in the back row to shoot into the front line, or a heavy sweeping laser that fires on every ship in the front row so long as the ship it's on is also in the front row. The position ships can take would be decided by ship upgrades or by logistic upgrades. Upgrades like high speed engines or cloaking fields allow you to palace a ship in more places. A ship with high grade thrusters can be placed on the flanks and directly attack the back row, unless they are matched by another ship with flank. A cloaked ship would be able to placed in the rear position allowing it to directly attack the back row regardless of any enemy flankers.

In this system, you could allow for a lot of depth in how you build and design your fleets. Maybe you want to be really efficient so you build defensive blocker ships to hold the font line well the real damage comes from the glass cannon ships in the back. It would be the most efficient setup, but it would be weak to flanking and cloaked ships that can bypass your front line. If your facing a very sneaky battle, you might elect to go with a more uniform fleet limiting the effectiveness of flanking by giving flanking ships no where weak to strike. You could also build other more exotic fleets like a fleet consisting of one really big sweeping laser to defend a fleet composed of dozens of small ships.

Of coarse this is all totally just guessing.

^I really marvel at how some users of Stardock forums are statistically very likely to go around plastering convoluted wall of text consisting of pure guess-work.:p

I always thought the Galciv 2 UI to be very solid. The thing I find most "Dated" about the game is how it does not scale very well to new high resolution displays.

Well, it did have a few things, like the Planet/ship tab. Seriously I pretty much never use it. I manage my planets with the Colonies tab in the Civilization management section, it is a lot more useful than the lesser version in the planet/ship tab. The latter could have been completely omitted and instead the civilization management section would have had a Ship tab using the same template as the colonies one.

I'd try and deal with this by having "timed" tooltips.
Essentially, it functions as a multi-level tooltip.
Hovering your mouse over something will give the level 1 tooltip, immediate information.
Holding the mouse over it for a period longer will then bring up level 2 information (either attaching it to the previous information or cycling though it), which is generally the stuff you have stated you don't need to see like other "relevant" info.
If there was a need, you could have a Level 3 tooltip that adds stuff like "fluff" ect.

Players can manually adjust the timer (or turn certain levels off entirely) to tailor the tooltips to the level of information they require.
Example: setting level 1 to 0 seconds, level 2 to off, and level 3 to 5 seconds would mean when you hover your mouse over something, you will immediately get that important information, leaving the mouse there for 5 seconds would then bring up a little box of fluff, annexed underneath and the level 2 "related" information wont appear at all.

Then you can have the level of information you want, at the speed and frequency you want it :D 

Don't knock it till you try it. It's fun as heck.

Can't wait to see how this is.

People are already intrepreting this. Is it like Endless space. Can't wait to see what you've done hear. Going to have to change my stance on warfare in the next game a little.

If it is not too much information what?

I guess I'm really guilty of this. I can see that I was a little wrong on how they will do battle. At least some of my questions get answered this way. I don't know why, but some of this just drives me nuts all day until I put it on the posts then I move on to something else.

I have to say that I do the reverse while I use the Planet/ship tab; because it is better to my opinion on changing the build Ques for my whole empire.

Good idea it never ocured to me to think of this!!!

I wonder why you say that, I find the complete opposite. In fact there is no advantage to the Ship/planet panel Vs the Colonies Tab which give you all the same options along with more detailed information.

The only exception to that is the Planet/ship panel allows you to switch camera to whatever planet you just clicked on so it might help you get your bearing.

You can still do this with the colonies tabs but its a bit more complicated as you need to close the menu to see the planet.

There were a couple sorting options on the planet panel completely absent from the colonies tab. The most important of which was the ability to sort through uninhabited and enemy planets. I use both extensively and probably spend more time on the colonies tab than the planet list, but if I had to do without one I'd lose the colony tab with no hesitation at all. Anything you can do on the colony tab can be done from the planet list, but the reverse is not even close to true.

Fine if you use the Unhabited/enemy planet sorting option but personally I never really found any use to it, except maybe in early mid game as a lazy way to find uncolonized planets. But it seems we play the game much differently, interestingly. I am curious as to what is this extensive use of those options you do. Something tells me you use this as a loophole to spy what the enemy is building without the use of espionage funding.

There is definitely one useful thing you can do in the colonies tab that you cannot in the ship panel, it is setting your economy focus on each world. Which I definitely use.

But more to the point, the Colonies tab is built using a mostly standard way of presenting data on computers. With columns that you can sort with ascending or descending order by a single click.  The information is also much more concise and dense and color coded and I find it WAY more  useful and easy to check my colonies status at a glance. At least compared to the convoluted sorting scheme the ship panel uses.

And then what's more is that whatever info might be in the Ship panel that is not in the colonies tab could have easily been integrated in the same template as the colonies tab. For a better overall experience IMHO.

Sorting by planet quality to prioritize colonization. Sorting by habitability to prioritize colonization by sector (i.e. claim the Aquatic worlds in the Torian area, but leave the Toxic ones if they don't have that tech yet). Searching enemy planets by population - the AI determines the value of its own planets solely by population, so freshly colonized planets can be bought dirt cheap.

Searching for resource starbases; I send a fleet of constructors that way and pay people to attack anyone who has a resource I want. I get the resource without being in a war myself.

No, that's a totally separate exploit. And it does require at least some espionage spending.

Something I do very rarely from that screen. I tend to fine tune production, which involves more than just refocusing.

But it lacks the single most important type of information: location and context. Knowing Mars is building a transport is nice, but without being able to see the area around it that datum is pretty irrelevant. Since my preferred maps tend to have 400+ habitable planets, I can't memorize the surroundings of each one.

See above. Not being able to see the map is a BIG handicap. But for things I don't need to see the map while doing, I do use the colony tab because the layout is better. It's just that the better layout isn't always worth the cost of not being able to see my map.

I dont know I guess the fact the ship/planet screen is one easy click while the colony requires two clicks is minor. A number of times I need to check my whole empire, and go to the build screen while going back to the planet screen for every planet I have. If I'm checking every planet I have, and usually have to change ever y ship I'm building. I couldn't figure out how to quickly do this from the colony screen. Not to mention to ,ake sure I can out build I sort by population, social production, military production, overall production, name, class to name my main sorts. Not to mention the convience of checking planets and ships at the same time. Espionage done it that way. Sometimes the espionage screen is better other times its not. Checking multiple systems at once the planet screen is nice. Being able to see the planet you are looking at is sometimes nice. When I can't find a resource starbase, or a certain ship this is nice the planet/ship list. Again helpful when you need to upgrade a type of ship, and can't afford to do it in one turn. If I could remember my class, and type of every planet I have I might would use the colony screen instead, but when you can look at a planet to find out the type, and have the class listed then the planet/ship screen is more helpful. These are the reason's why I like that option. Not to mention the button is in a convinent location. Not to mention if I needed to know everything at once I probably would not use this screen, but on the things I spoke above like need to know the planet with the most population, all the planets with maxed out populations, or planets with the most turns to finish a social project. I need to have a list of multiple of these in case I can afford one option, but not the other. The top social production for building multiple wonders.

If there is no morale anymore, then what is keeping your population in check (besides the amount of farms, I mean)?

I see what you did there 

Hmm, admittedly I did not know that. Its a pretty cheap trick to pull on the AI, I ought to try it ( You need every cheap tricks you can when you play at Masochistic + ) 

Honestly this debate is starting to feel like SNES vs Sega Genesis so im out. Maybe I underestimated the Ship/Planet Tab, but I still feel more comfortable using the colonies tabs.

It seems we play different type of maps. I kinda like large maps but with small-medium clusters and limited habitable planets. It makes the map feel more "space like" than a densely star peppered map.  Ship speed, sensor range and range also matter a lot more.

What? NO MORALE/APPROVAL?!?

You mean the inner weakness of the big empires is gone and in Galciv future every inhabitant is content?

I will reserve my judgment for the final version, but this makes me rather sad...was looking to revolt outbreaks, sapping enemy morale with spies, major powers forced to make peace with minor ones, because the population was rioting againts war losses, and this is all gone?

I am curious what the final system looks like...

P.S.: The same sadness for two building queues...but here, I believe, you have balanced that right.

One of the shots in the vault shows an empire-wide approval stat, but the planet shots do not. It appears that approval won't vary planet to planet, which is indeed a major bummer.

I'm apparently one of the minority that doesn't care much about the single queue change. I rarely had planets building both at the same time, so I guess it just doesn't bother me that much.

It looks like the answer to this is in the "Playing the prototype" thread in reply 30 and beyond.

Glad to hear the approval system is not gone. I guess they do that because of the Ai. Because I never heard even one complaint about approval. The planet per planet, and the empire wide approval was fine. This at least gave me a reason to build influence improvements. If anything bring back revolutions.

Well my friend, I am afraid that they said it IS gone. Which I would consider a major drawback, unless they substitute it with something even better.

Even city management in FE (much simplier) had approval in form of Unrest. The Galciv system was more sophisticated and I liked it a lot. I hope they have not taken some kind of shortcut like in FE, i.e. "unrest is dedicated directly from your production".

That would be by no means sufficient, for a grand strategy game :/ 

I thought I heard them talking about replacing per planet approval with empire approval to make it more flexible and interesting. So you could have things like pleasure planets.

Did they? Well, I checked the Vault and was not able to find any signs of approval in the latest (pre-alpha) screenshots...

Only empire wide approval? Is that it then?

I think moral in Galvic2 serves a gameplay value.

It forces you to limit your population unless you have proper infrastructure, tech or ressources. If food was the only factor that would make it a lot less interesting Imho. All of this is directly related to the amount of taxes you can collect.

Furthermore, planet level approval allowed for some conquest strategy where you could use your enemies low moral against them.