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'''Colonies''' are the basic economic unit of Galactic Civilizations III, which are basically comparable to a city in a traditional land-based 4X strategy title.
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== Basics ==
Each colony is a single planet. It has a certain number of tiles available to build improvements on, which is represented by its Class rating. It may have a special bonus associated with it, like a Shielded World's additional resistance to invasion, or may have one or more Trade Resources present. Individual tiles may also have tile bonuses that increase the level of improvements built on and adjacent to them. Each colony can sponsor one shipyard to construct starships, and simultaneously build one social improvement or project.
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== Planetary Class ==
Every planet is assigned a class, from 0 (uninhabitable) to 26 (paradise). The number designates how many tiles are available for housing improvements. It also serves as a cap for the planet's population. Terraforming (see below) can raise a planet's class.
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== Improvements ==
[[Improvement |Improvements]] are buildings that increase the output or defense of the colony in various ways. Some, like Factories, multiply the manufacturing output by a certain percentage. Others, like Meditation Centers, don't increase output directly, but boost Approval, which then increases growth and productivity. Military improvements like the Champions Temple make the planet harder to conquer by increasing its resistance to invasion.
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=== Special Improvements ===
Some improvements require a galactic resource to construct and will consume that resource until they're demolished. These improvements have higher payoff, however. For example, the Durantium Refinery gives a +2 manufacturing adjacency bonus, as well as providing one raw unit of manufacturing itself.
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=== Wondrous Improvements ===
One-per-empire improvements like the Hyperion Shipyard are expensive, but give unique bonuses like giving all ships created by the shipyard this planet sponsors a boost to hit points.
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=== Capitals ===
Colony capitals cannot be moved or demolished, but provide a +1 adjacency bonus to all types of improvements. In the Crusade expansion they can be upgraded to support additional population and increased morale.
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== Terraforming ==
Certain technologies allow special Terraforming improvements. These potentially allow you to unlock new tiles for development, assuming there is land available for such development.
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== Invasion Damage ==
Tiles and improvements can be destroyed during planetary invasions, whether or not the invasion is successful. The likelihood of this happening depends on what invasion tactics that are used by the aggressor.
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== Food ==
Population can be expanded past the initial colony cap by building city improvements. Carbon based life forms require food to build cities. (Silicon based life forms need promethion instead, synthetics don't need cities at all). Food can be produced by building Farms and their upgrades. Food is a global resource; food produced on a planet goes into a global pool and can be used to build a city on any other planet. In the Crusade (and Intrigue) expansions, Arable Land tiles provide +1 food each and farms can only be built on those tiles. Each farm upgrade provides additional food. Improvements such as Food Distribution can raise food by a percentage multiplier and increase the yield of farms through adjacency bonuses. There is an exception to building only on Arable Land - Aquatic civilizations can build Hydroponic Farms on any tile.

2018-06-23T22:46:13Z

KaraCherry7: Add description of raw production.

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So you've started a new game of GalCiv3. Now what? This page will walk you through the various setup options available in the game. If you’re new to these types of games, it is probably best to start by playing the Tutorial. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “Sandbox mode” refers to being able to freely play the game without a pre-set story or campaign to drive it. This mode is recommended only after having a chance to experience the basics of the game.
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<h2>Race Selection</h2>
The “Choose Civilization” screen begins your choice-making process. Each race has its own unique traits and abilities and can affect how you build your civilizations and interact with other races. To create your own custom race, select the button and head to the Customize Civilization screen.
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To customize your own race, you will have to create a Leader. You can choose from a gallery of available images for your race or upload graphics of your own. The Race Overview section allows you to enter your race’s name, ship call signs, Homeworld name, beginning star system, a racial description, and logo.
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In the “traits and abilities” section, you can choose how to continue to specialize your race. You begin with five available points to spend on traits. If you spend points on lessening traits, you will be able to reserve additional points to add to other traits available to you. For racial abilities, you will have your choice of any two from a large list. These abilities don’t really have a built-in “downside” and can be very powerful.
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The “Appearance” section offers an assortment of options to customize the “look” of your race; things like ship styles, colors and textures, and race colors and themes for the interface can all be changed in this section.
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Lastly, the “Personality” section allows you to select your tech tree and modify how your race will behave when controlled by the game’s AI. This includes ideology, character traits, goals, and priorities.
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<h2>Galaxy Type</h2>
When you start a new game, you will have several options for customizing your galaxy. There are options for size, victory conditions, and allies/enemies. Depending on how long you want your game to last, you may want to start with some of the smaller galaxy sizes before moving onto the bigger ones.
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The Galaxy Options section allows you to fully customize the contents of your galaxy. Star Systems determine how frequently stars and planets will be generated on the map. When determining your Star Systems, you have several different options to consider.
<ul>
<li><strong>Star Frequency:</strong> This determines how often you will find stars, which may or may not lead to more habitable planets.</li>
<li><strong>Planet Frequency:</strong> “Planet” refers to all worlds in the galaxy, both habitable and uninhabitable. This control will allow you to choose the overall frequency of planets in your galaxy.</li>
<li><strong>Habitable Planet Frequency:</strong> These are planets you can colonize and can be valuable resources. Careful though, if you set them to be very frequent, you may spend all of your time and resources trying to colonize and not have time for anything else!</li>
<li><strong>Extreme Planet Frequency:</strong> These are planets that can be colonized but require special techs to do so.</li>
</ul>
Resources include the various types of bonuses and advancements that can be discovered. Each of these include their own drop-down menus that will set how often they appear.
<ul>
<li><strong>Asteroid Frequency:</strong> Asteroids often contain strategic resources like Durantium that you can mine. They also impede movement.</li>
<li><strong>Nebulae:</strong> Interstellar terrain that have global effects on ships as they travel through space, and also contain Elerium, a rare strategic resource.</li>
<li><strong>Black Hole Frequency:</strong> Black holes are scary, but for those undaunted by them you can mine the resulting Antimatter as a strategic resource.</li>
<li><strong>Resource Frequency:</strong> Each Resource allows you to build special, powerful components on prototype ships. Resources are:
<ul>
<li>Durantium</li>
<li>Elerium</li>
<li>Antimatter</li>
<li>Promethion</li>
<li>Thulium</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>Precursor Relic Frequency:</strong> These are ancient artifacts that when studied provide civilization-wide bonuses.</li>
<li><strong>Ascension Crystal Frequency:</strong> These are a special type of precursor artifact that, when studied, can unlock the secrets of ascending to a higher plane.</li>
<li><strong>Anomaly Frequency:</strong> Anomalies are artifacts and other unknown items that when surveyed unlock special rewards, such as ships, money, bonuses and techs.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Game Settings</h2>
In this section, you have several options to select so that you can create the kind of map that you’d most enjoy. The menu options here are:
<ul>
<li><strong>Galaxy Difficulty:</strong> The overall difficulty of the map, which includes pirates and all the races. However, you can override this individually per race by making other adjustments in your game options or in the way you set up your game.</li>
<li><strong>Game Pacing:</strong> Makes the game play faster or slower by modifying things like production.</li>
<li><strong>Research Rate:</strong> Makes researching cheaper or more expensive.</li>
<li><strong>Pirates:</strong> Adjust this to determine how many (if any) pirate bases will exist on your map.</li>
<li><strong>United Planets Frequency:</strong> This setting lets you determine how often the United Planets (the galactic government) meets.</li>
<li><strong>Galactic Events:</strong> Galactic Events are game-changing incidents that can alter the way your empire grows.</li>
<li><strong>Minor Races:</strong> Determines how many minor races will be in the galaxy. Minor races are civilizations that cannot expand into the galaxy, but can be valuable trade partners or allies.</li>
<li><strong>Disable Tech Trading:</strong> Enable this option to remove the feature for trading technologies with other races.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Opponents</h2>
You can choose a pre-set race or a custom saved race to play against. You may also choose as many opponents as you want and set the difficulty levels for each enemy individually. Please note that if you are playing on a smaller map, you may not want to fill it to the brim with a bunch of hostile opponents! They’ll be all up in your neighborhood before you know it…
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<h2>Playing a Game</h2>
Now that your galaxy is set up the way you like it, you can begin your game. At first glance, if you’re unfamiliar with these types of games, it seems very intimidating and overwhelming. The next section will cover some of the other basic things you need to know as you start your adventure across the Galaxy.
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<h3>Game Menu Bar</h3>
<h4>Victory</h4>
This screen gives you feedback on how close you are to winning for any of the victory conditions you have set for your current game.
<h4>Govern</h4>
A handy repository of information, this button contains several tabs on different aspects of your empire.
<ul>
<li><strong>Economy:</strong> Allocate your production spending and balance your space budget.</li>
<li><strong>Colonies:</strong> Provides an at-a-glance reference for all colonized worlds.</li>
<li><strong>Commands:</strong> Give orders to your shipyards.</li>
<li><strong>Trade:</strong> View and manage your trade routes with other civilizations.</li>
<li><strong>Stats & Graphs:</strong> Chart your development through the course of your game, and compare your progress with your rivals.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Technology</h3>
This button is dedicated to all things Research; your available technology projects, descriptions of what benefits and unlocks they provide, what you're currently researching, and the complete tech tree for your perusal.
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<h3>Ideology</h3>
Through the course of the game, random events will present you with choices to shape the ideology of your civilization. Based on your choices, you will be awarded points in one of three categories: Benevolent, Pragmatic, or Malevolent. These points can be spent on Ideological Traits in this tab.
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<h3>Diplomacy</h3>
Keep track of alliances, relationships and wars between races. Establish treaties with your allies or participate in galactic politics through the governing body of the United Planets.
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<h3>Designer</h3>
Play ship architect here. Improve existing ship designs or build your own from scratch. As you unlock better technology, your improved components will be available to attach to your ships here.
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There is a lot to learning this game and others like it, but I find the best method is just to explore! Below are some tips and some frequently asked questions from beginners (including myself!) to help get you started.
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<h2>Starting Tips</h2>
<strong>How do I know what to research first?</strong><br/>
It depends on what you are wanting to do in the end game. Consider your various types of victories (Ideaologic, Warfare, Diplomatic, etc.) and try to spec toward that. In order to communicate with other species you encounter, we suggest researching Universal Translator first.
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<strong>What do I build first?</strong><br/>
Some planets have special hexes or attributes that give bonuses to certain types of buildings. Keep an eye out for those as you start to settle on your planet. Building structures of the same type adjacent to one another will also yield a lot of bonuses.
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<strong>What kind of ships do I start with?</strong><br/>
You start with a colony ship, a survey ship (this ship has weapons and should probably hang around near your colony ship as you explore!), a scout ship, and a shipyard (where you can build more ships!). Each race has different names for their ships, but their types are all the same.
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<strong>What is Ideology?</strong><br/>
There are certain types of ruling styles that can give you bonuses and new options as you play through a game. You can be a Benevolent, Pragmatic, or Malevolent ruler. Each style has its own advantages and disadvantages. As you make choices based on these leadership styles, new bonuses will become available to you on your Ideology tree.
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<strong>How do I mine?</strong><br/>
In order to mine resources (Durantium, Thulium, Promethean, Iridium, etc.), you must build a starbase using a Constructor type ship that is capable of building starbases. Once a Starbase is built, there are several options for specialization “rings” -- choose “Mining Ring” in order to mine resources within a certain radius of your starbase.
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<strong>What else can a Starbase do?</strong><br/>
Starbases have several other uses. They can expand your range, bolster your defenses, or improve your offenses. Your tech tree can unlock more Starbase options.
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<strong>What is an anomaly and why do I care?</strong><br/>
Anomalies can have lots of great secrets locked away. Sometimes it comes in the form of extra money (and who doesn’t need more money?) or certain new options for Ideology or Research. Point is, take your survey ships and check them out when you find them!
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<strong>What does a planet’s class mean?</strong><br/>
Planets range from Class 1 all the way through Class 20. Class 20 planets are the best, while Class 1 planets are not as good for colonizing. You can increase a planet's class by researching terraforming technologies and building terraforming improvements, each of which adds a buildable tile to the planet. A planet's class is also a limit to the population that can live there. For example, a class 16 planet has a maximum population of 16.
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<strong>What is raw production?</strong><br/>
Raw production is the base for your planet's production. Each unit of raw production yields +1 social production, +1 ship production, +1 research, and +1 gross income. You can see these listed on the planet window in the tooltips for each production area as "Base Value" for social and ship production, "Base Research" for research, and "Income" for income. The largest contributor to raw production is normally population, because each unit of population adds one to raw production. Other sources of raw production are asteroid mines (which yield +1 if close by, less if further away), improvements such as the Central Mine, colony capitals, certain technologies (like Enhanced Production), and precursor anomalies. In addition, technologies like Interstellar Governance (and its follow on techs) and high approval add percentage multipliers to raw production. The Wealthy trait also adds +1 to raw production.

Getting Started

2018-06-23T20:47:05Z

KaraCherry7: Expanded explanation of planet class.

Tourism and Trade

2018-06-23T20:12:47Z

KaraCherry7: Added a more detailed explanation of how tourism income works.

<h1 style="background-color: #000000; color: #e3a726; padding: 2px 6px;"> Trade </h1>
Trade is one way to generate income for your empire. Trade occurs by creating trade routes between two planets.

== Creating a trade route ==
To create a trade route, you must have a cargo ship and an available trade license. The cargo ship must travel to a planet controlled by another major or minor race. Once the trade route is established between the two planets, both planets are granted trade income each turn.

Cargo modules can be built once Xeno Commerce has been researched. This allows you to build trade ships. You can also obtain a free trade ship (and one free trade license) from the Pragmatic Ideology tree.
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== Trade income ==
The trade income from each individual trade route can be viewed by going to the Govern Civilization screen and viewing the Trade tab. Trade routes that you have established will be listed on the top half of this screen, and trade routes initially created by another race will be listed on the bottom half of this screen.
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== Calculating the value of a trade route ==
The amount of income generated by a trade route varies based on multiple factors.

First the base value of the trade route is determined utilizing:
<ul>
<li>The value of the planets which have the trade route (including luxury trade routes from pragmatic ideology), which is calculated as the sum of the population of the 2 planets that are trading.</li>
<li>The distance between the two trading planets.</li>
<li>The age of the trade route. Age increases with time.</li>
</ul>

After that, several multipliers are applied:
<ul>
<li>The overall trade bonus of your empire (race traits, technology, ideology - pragmatic 3rd row, trade resources).</li>
<li>The buildings on your trade planet like Trade Capital (100% boost) or Trade Outpost. </li>
<li>The boosts from starbases, which affects planets that are in the zone of control with trade routes.</li>
</ul>

<h1 style="background-color: #000000; color: #e3a726; padding: 2px 6px;"> Tourism </h1>
Tourism is a feature of Galactic Civilizations III's economic model, which passively provides wealth to an empire every turn based on their cultural accomplishments.
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== Basic Features ==
Tourism is a method of earning wealth; it is an important source of income to keep your economy afloat. The idea is that factions earn tourism money by being attractive places for visitors who spend their credits locally.
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== Unlocking Tourism ==
Tourism becomes available when you unlock the Tourism technology (through research or trade). Once you have the technology, you immediately begin earning credits; you do not have construct any special buildings. The Tourism technology Interstellar Tourism, is found in the technology tree in the communications->commerce branch and can be reached during the Age of Expansion. Since income is at a premium early in the game, researching tourism should be a priority.
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== Tourism Amount ==
The amount a faction receives depends on what fraction of the galaxy that faction controls. Thus, in a large galaxy with many opponents the initial return will be smaller than in a small galaxy with few opponents. As you expand to control more of the galaxy, your capacity for tourism income will increase.

The contribution tourism makes to your income depends on the number of tiles (also called hexes or parsecs) within your zone of influence (ZOI). If you can follow a path from any given tile to your capital planet where all tiles in that path are within your ZOI, then that tile is considered "connected" to your capital. A planet's contribution to your tourism income is then a percentage (determined by improvements such as the Port of Call) multiplied by the sum of the number of tiles connected to your capital plus the total number of tiles in your ZOI. Each connected tile thus counts twice, making it important to expand your capital's influence through improvements such as the Consulate. Once a planet starts generating tourism, if you mouse over the Tourism Income line in the planet window you'll see a tooltip that shows the number of parsecs controlled and connected, and the income calculation.
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== Increasing Tourism ==
Tourism can be increased by constructing certain buildings. For example, once Tourism is researched, the Port of Call building is unlocked. Like all colony improvements, this building can be placed on planetary bonus tiles that increase tourism to achieve larger benefits, and can also benefit from adjacency bonuses. As you move deeper into the research tree, more buildings that give additional tourism bonuses become available.
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== Advantages of Tourism ==
Tourism has some different advantages for earning credits compared to trade. It doesn’t require the building of freighters and the necessity of sailing long distances and it is not subject to diplomatic issues. For example, if you don’t have an open borders arrangement, sailing a freighter through another faction's territory -- which is necessary to connect a trade route -- will involve a diplomatic problem with that faction. Also, unescorted and defenseless freighters are subject to pirate attacks. However, remember that you earn a diplomacy bonus for connected trade routes, which you cannot get through tourism. This should all factor into your strategy.
Tourism is an important source of income and should not be neglected. Gaining the tourism technology can often be a significant turning point at which your empire can more easily balance its budget, especially after a prolonged period of running "in the red" early in the game.