I cant believe they are releasing it so soon!

Beta 6 is suppose to give us a look at the finalized product. I hold judgement until then but personally this game seems almost finished to me aside from various small issues that every game I have ever known has at initial launch (including not working for everyone's computer). It will not be a SOTS ][ launch to be sure.

I keep getting amused after reading so many posts here expressing concern over the state of the game and it's impending release. Everyone is basing this on the build they have, 5.3 (.83), yet this is not even the "release candidate" that is feature complete... Why don't you wait until you/we get to play with beta 6 before expressing your worries? From everything I've seen/read beta 6 is so different from what we have that you can't compare them. Give SD a little credit too. It's in their best interest to put out a decent release as it reflects on them greatly. I think Brad and company also learned a valuable lesson with the Elemental saga and don't want to repeat it. They are quite confident that the May 14th date is doable. So I'm holding all judgement until I can play with the full featured beta before I start to express any concerns of my own. I'm funny that way.

There will always be improvements to be made, at some point you just have to say "It's good enough to be released", and then include anything extra in patches. If they waited until the game was fully 100% complete, it would be at least another year before release. Some people might think that that'd be worth it. Few games are ever released 100% complete, and I'm not talking about the unfinished unplayable messes out there.

i agree with all 3 of your points.  Especially your first. (which is being addressed pre 1.0).  Just understand that here will always be things people want In the game. The question is whether the game is ready to go 1.0. After release we can look at cool new things to do with fleet management, more sophisticated invasions, and lots of other requests.

i think your build is the first one with proper, IMO, obsoleting of ship designs (was driving me crazy bc I only use my own designs).

I would love to have this go one step further which was missing in Galactic Civilizations II, upgrade all ships in this fleet or of this type in this fleet...

The down side about upgrading all ships of certain type in the galaxy was if you had 200 ships of one type, then upgrading them maybe hundred thousand credits, and you can only afford to upgrade 10 ships, problem solved click on fleet, click upgrade all ships.. or all ships of type in fleet.

There are many knowledgeable people on these forums who have followed GC for several years.    Been involved in feedback, modding, testing, etc.    That is clear.   What is also clear is the the Mr. Frogboy has been planning and coding this thing for ... TWENTY years.    Four iterations actually.

Got to think he's got a fairly good feel for when the right thing to do is.  I might mention, his company has shown if they do somehow mess up, they will do the right thiing by their fans.

OK enough of that! Get that Dang Beta 6 out, you hear me?!     

Very well said Bamdorf

I admit to being one of those who has voiced concern based solely on the state of beta 5+ .. so if i may second your request..

OK enough of that! Get that Dang Beta 6 out, you hear me?!     

Come on Brad, we have to have good AI, look what happened to beyond earth

While I do share some concerns here, I would remind all that the phrase "Perfect is the enemy of good" is considered a truism for a reason.  First and foremost, the question should be "Is the game stable?"  Not even "bug free" because that's pretty impossible in modern gaming, but "stable".  If the game is stable and not going to crash to desktop every 30 minutes, that's already ahead of the game in many respects.

Right behind the first question is "Is the game fun?"  Well, that's pretty subjective but I'd say as long as the empire size penalty issue on maps with a very large number of planets is dealt with, then yes it is.  Broadly speaking.  

The third question is, "Is the current feature set (as of Beta 6) a complete enough package for release?" Again, a subjective question, but, again, I'd say so.  There are plenty of things I'd like to see, but sooner or later you have to release the damned thing.  Since Stardock is saying it will be adding new features via patches, never mind DLC and expansions, I'm not too worried on that score.

Will some complain that they are paying for an "unfinished" game?  This is the internet.  People will always find something to bitch about.  Especially on that wretched hive known as Steam. . (I kid because I love. :p)  

Sure, having more time to fully test things for balance/fun purposes would be ideal.  If it were me, I'd probably want a full six weeks hammering at the Beta 6 rule set to look for problems/exploits.   But, then again, I don't have Stardock's bottom line to worry about either.  They do have to release sooner or later.  And there will always be something that could do with more looking at.  Plus they have to worry about the schedule for their other games/their competition.  Like it or not, but GC III does not exist in a vacuum.  Even if it would be ideal if it were.

Still, as long as the game is stable, fun to play, and feature rich, that should be enough for release.  Then they can spend the next seven years polishing and adding to it.

I agree with what you said, and I think you might be right about insane type maps with the penalty issue.    But I just wanted to mention that I discovered in my current gigantic game (I have about 30% of the map controlled)  that the approval stuff one can build on starbases is very handy.    Strange though to be building up a SB and start with three factory items (for a manufacturing colony) and then add a recreational facility.  Guess that's how to attract workers!   Like I say, though, on a bigger map, or with more common habitable planets, even that may not be enough.  It should be damped down to account for map size a bit, no doubt.

Listening to Paul they have a month of work to do in 3 weeks.

I expect a very very tired Paul by launch.

Yep.  Very handy. But since they are flat bonuses and not percentage based, it won't matter one jot if you have over 100 colonies.  Or over, say, 200, after the various ideological traits and techs/improvements are factored in (I'm right now in a mad rush to build ideological buildings so I can get to the 50% bonus to Approval from Affinity IV [only 330 points away at the moment ]) .

Approval relics help in the short term, but there's something very buggy going on with them, as once I passed 100 colonies, their effectiveness plummeted. At Colony #99 I was rocking a 100% Approval empire wide. At 100 it dipped at a couple of planets, and by 105 it had tanked empire wide. That can't be a coincidence as I've piled on numerous relics since then and have only seen a marginal improvement in my overall Approval (109 planets and an empire wide Approval of 41).

Yes, I've submitted a rather detailed ticket on it.

Still, as you say, those bonuses absolutely help on maps that are only very large as opposed to, well, insane ones.

And too many significant game design decisions have been made at the last minute. I'm not sure the game will be sufficiently polished and balanced on release day. Stardrive 2 had this problem, and yeah, people said it was enjoyable at first, but they're deserting it now because these issues can't be ignored... I'd just rather not see this with GC3.

But this is the main problem.  What exactly is "sufficiently polished and balanced"?  Especially the word 'sufficiently'. This is partially a rhetorical question and partially isn't.  Mostly because I don't think it has an answer.  For me, the comparison would be Civ: Beyond Earth.  Now that was a pretty bad game at launch.  OK, fair does, it's Civ.  It's usually rather, shall we say, weak at launch.  But six months in and it hasn't improved that much,

GC III blows C:BE out of the water right now when it comes to being polished and balanced. Might be slightly unfair as they are fairly different games.  But I still think the comparison is an apt one. 

When it comes to bugs, the most glaring things are tool tip problems and the current(already fixed) issue with planet icons.  The most glaring problem, balance wise, is anomaly pirates, and that's already been dealt with.  Most other things are, as you said, a matter of taste.

Now don't get me wrong.  All things being equal, I'd like at least six weeks to hammer away at Beta 6.  But all things aren't equal.  Which really was my overall point. 

More simply, one has to decide when to draw the line.  Slightly less simply one also has to decide the consequences of when the line is drawn. 

IMO sufficiently polished means all the gameplay mechanics are well thought out and serve a purpose.  In glaciv 2 there were a number of features that just felt sort of tacked on or broken (proprietary trade goods, terror stars, espionage, most of diplomacy in general, and even some of the victory conditions felt redundant.)  From the sound of things, diplomacy is still broken, and after playing crusader kings that's a big deal to me.

Hehe, when I saw him on the Friday Dev Stream I went "how does that man have time for this, give him a nap!"

I also play CK2. But from what I recall, diplomacy is extremely simple. It is not a great deal more than declare war and demand surrender...

One thing I would say though, is that Beta 6 should be released asap, given the huge number of critical bugs it fixes.  The games launches in 3 weeks, and there are many critical bugs in beta 5, and to be on the safe side, we need to hammer critical crashes/freezes right now, so they could release a beta 7 before 'gold', worst case scenario, then a day 1 patch for other issues.  Right now, I have issues I don't know if they are fixed or not.  If I don't report them and they aren't fixed, maybe it has to do with my particular hardware and it looks bad on release.  If I do report them and they are fixed, I waste a programmer's time.

I saw him on one of the streams --- at the outset waiting for the audio and the game to start up, he looked liked he was two steps from the grave,  Truly.  But an amazing thing happened.  As soon as the game started up and he start to play and demonstrate, it was like some ethereal spirit seized hold of him and he came to life like a little kid opening presents on Christmas morning.   We can talk all we want about this feature and that bug and blah blah, but I will tell you one overwhelming truth:  this guys LOVES what he is doing and his heart and soul are in it.  

I have noticed a lot of 'coming soon' text on buttons! not to mention the complete lack of tutorials AND help encyclopedia/files

Finalized under Beta 6 (released on Tuesday).

Tutorials and Wiki are setup to be released upon launch.

beta 6. OK. 2 days

Ok as I have tried the old google and the current GalCiv Wiki that always pops up seems to be for #2.

The third one will be opened up to the public on official release.

From SD's viewpoint: They've committed to plenty of updates (there'll be one downloadable on May 14 IIRC), a fair amount of DLC and at least two Expansions. Sorry I can't quote exact figures but you get the idea. It's not logical for them to spend too much time on getting things done for Launch Date. There's a long, looonng game update calander ahead, no point running yet.

So there's less need to have GalCiv3 tip-top, game features for Africa, pretty perfect art, AI etc on May 14. For instance, I'd have really liked it if they'd had Espionage available now - or at least were going to add it into Beta 6. But early on the announcement was Espionage would not be available in the "Base" game but would be included in one of the DLCs. My personal preference would be to have added in the Espionage now and left the Ship Designer/Race Designer and other pretty stuff for the DLCs but that's just me. Anyway, I'm okay with the decision SD made because I trust that:

A: SD want Espionage in the game - otherwise why say anything about it.

B: SD want that Espionage to be good - however many if any ideas we've come up end up in what they define as Espionage who knows and anyway, that's what modding's for.

C: SD don't want to release a half-assed, inept Espionage. Hence the wait.

More Cynical D: Those Expansions will be chargable to those who aren't Founders. May as well make the buyers feel like their bucks were well spent ie "Damn good spend of $20, this is much better!" over "Um, been playing for four hours, game's still really good of course but precisely what new or better stuff did my $20 get me?" I'm not so cynical as to suggest large errors, ommissions or mistakes will be left in: "Ah, so the Drengin still sell their best planet that's next to the player's ZOC for 1bc and the huge Pre-cursor ship the player finds self-destructs when it's near any other Player ships, leave fixing it till DLC 1!" type attitude.

Guess Im just old fashioned but at release I kind of expect all the core of the game to be there. Don't mind if they say 'no espionage' or 'no space princesses this time' or whatever but an in game help system and feature complete AI for us single player nubs I kinda expected. Not that I hold Stardock above other devs or anything. I expected the same from Civ:BE and got a stinky AI/diplomacy system that is barely there, Total War also has the same issues on some releases .

edit: not saying the games a bust. Guess I'm just surprised that the BETA tags coming off in May.