So what's the verdict on Crusade?

It basicly the upgrade from GC2. Not that GC3 wasnt but it lacked features that now make GC3 Crusade a straight upgrade from GC2, with extras, lots of extras.

I'd give it a 9.5/10, and GC3 a 6/10. I dont find anything anoying with it tbh (re learning the game does not count), must have the Beta Opt-In patch though (2.14) 2.13 is a bit anoying/buggy.

I have liked the game all along.  Crusade just makes it even better,  The improved AI is worth it all by itself.  The rest is just bonus content for me.  :)  But there are some very interesting additional mechanics.  Diplomacy is much better as well.  And don't forget the Fleet and Faction Builders!  

I agree with the 9.5 rating.

Will be 9.5 if all the bugs are squashed and balancing is improved and all promises are kept (e. g. individual firing of weapons) (playing 2.14 opt-in)

Apart from that it's a much better game than GC III

Depends, on what is annoying to you.

Things such as tech tree layout are still somewhat in flux. I would wait and see another month or so before giving a final verdict.

SD is taking a more conservative approach to their game mechanics now. Which is good and bad. To be honest I am actually missing the earlier version of gc3, when you could terraform all salvagable tiles with sufficiently high tech and doing other ridiculous stuff. I don't think you can still make 1k beam damage ships either for example. The upside of this is, that it is easier to balance since there is a lower potential for exploits.

I think this is the actual nature of the apparently better ai.

Mod Terraforming (All tiles is so OP though, game breaking if you dont adjust other factors, research/manufacturing ect), I added 5 new improvements givign a total of +11 tiles per planet, seems to work okay for me.

I play galciv III every now and then to check on the progress of the game.  I am waiting for the game to really feel mature before I commit a lot of time to it.

The game has improved significantly since lunch but imo there is still a lot of annoyances in the game, even as of Crusade.  Just now I wanted to try and play a campaign but cant because of a max population bug that makes all campaigns unplayable ( Check my recent replies for reference ).  At the moment my main issues with the game are not so much about the game or its mechanics but rather bugs,  UI annoyances or lack of some specific options.

Before Crusade I would have only mddded the AI to suite my needs for smarter play and have it strictly play within SD's rules (more or less your improved AI mod without the quality of life improvements). Seeing where they are going balancewise in crusade, I am actually considering overhauling half the game. Not just terraforming.

Pre crusade I used to have the feeling, that there are all these things I wanted and I had to choose from. In the current balance I may be considering more techs to choose from, but I rarely have that moment of really wanting one. Why the hell would I want that improvement, that eats my durantium and only pushes the % bonus form 5 to 7.5? Pre crusade I used tp get manu-capital and solar pp at this stage, which was really attractive to research.

Note for the original topic on the post: Above example (manufacturing tech) is one of the things we can't be sure stays as is for now, which make it hard to give a final verdict.

Yeah, there are some serious issues with cost/benefit on some stuff.  Without leveled flats, they're really not worth much to start with, and you need a huge amount of production to make the upgrades valuable in the short term.  They eventually pay themselves off, but 2.5% takes a while when you could have done Aid Research for the same cost, and not spent a resource on top of it.  That your planets are probably going to be really good at producing buildings compared to how well they can produce research just makes it all the worse.  You can do a cluster around a Space Elevator, more than double your production, and make those poor science buildings take twice as long to pay off.

Your ability to make a planet "better" at science in a similar fashion is somewhat severely restricted.  These Space Elevator clusters are also smart to build on every planet, because they greatly expand the ship production capability of the planet, are downright necessary to actually build those science structures without taking hundreds of turns, and end up farming more science or money in the end anyway.  More ship production also being a method of gaining research and money yet again compounds the issue...

The plus side is that planets don't go from taking 20 turns to produce a 1 attack ship, to single turn producing a 6000 attack ship.  I wish that were a flagrant exaggeration.  The scale up is unmanageably exploitable in vanilla GC3, what we've got is a far superior progression, it's just got some major issues at present.  Hopefully soon to be fixed issues...

Regarding terraforming (although that may deviate from the original topic a bit ;)): It would be great if we could research techs that allowed us to modify existing tiles to give adjacency bonuses.

I'd hold off a bit. The list of issues from launch has been long and while updates are coming frequently they have not addressed many of the bigger issues. For example if you planned on doing any multiplayer at all I'd hold off until they release a patch that fixes the many issues first.

It had a buggy release. Patch support has been pretty fast, and great. Still some things that need to be worked on, but all up I think it is absolutely fantastic.

I'm not playing anymore till tech stealing can be turned off, it is far too easy for techs to be stolen (especially the ones the so would take too long to get on their own)

I go back and forth on it. I enjoyed it at first, but successive games have followed a similar grind pattern. 

To ease that, I think true military action needs to be an option much earlier in the game. The early game is just a land grab for both planets and resources. If you get a lot at that stage, it's usually fairly easy to ride that to a major advantage. If, on the other hand, you get squeezed out a bit in the land grab, you'll likely be behind the most of the game since you can't just switch to an early war footing and punish over-expanders very easily. You can't invade planets or even take out starbases to claim resources until you're fairly teched up. And if your research basis is stunted by limited early growth, by the time you get there the land grabbers will be way out ahead.

Crusade adds some interesting wrinkles to the game, but it still seems to follow that same pattern for me over and over. I like the direction that the game is heading, but I don't think there is enough to hold my interest long-term (ie, I play a game through to the mid-game and then don't have a lot of desire to finish it out or restart and go through the same early-game grind).

YMMV

yes yes yes and more yes.