After the recent Beta release I finally decided to try out GalCiv 3 to see if it was playable.  Here are my thoughts, impressions and bug reports:

Things I like in this version:

• Ideology versus alignment
• Colonization Events tweaking attributes (Ideaology and planet) is a nice touch
• Nebula/Blackhole for "terrain"
• I like the "load" mechanism of colony ships.  Thought, race ability to % increase that?
• "Adjacent" bonuses
• Strategic Resources has potential, but they seem hard to use and I have not run into a situation where I need them

Things I don't like in this version:

• The research Screen.  Trying to find a prerequisite tech for what I wanted to research long term was impossible
• "Specialization" Techs.  If we are allowed to research all of them what is the point of making them sub techs?  Just make them top level techs

Bugs:

Note that my resolution is 1920x1080, UI Size "Small", "Enable Gel UI", and language English.

• Lots of textual bugs where the text would not fit in the space allowed for it, overlapped with other text, or jumped as I moved the mouse.  I started making a list, but after a while I just accepted it as "broken all over"
• I turned off Ascention Victory condition and ascention crystals still show up.
• Sometime around turn 43 performance really started degrading.  I tried saving and reloading to force clearing of memory which worked for about 2 turns.
• After saving and loading (trying to improve performance) the trade route line disappeared.
• Confirm Battle dialoge has all of my strengths negative and my hit points "oints:4292819813/42928198".  After clicking autoresolve it seems to correct itself.
• Some ships are duplicated in build list (Cutter-L M0)
• While the view battle existed it was a bit of an unpleasant experience to use (changing cameras seemed to swap to the most unintuitive place possible) and having the ships just move towards each other seemed like one of the less well developed battle views I have seen in a Space 4x.