Overview Years ago, Random House asked me to write a book around the Elemental universe. As a first time author, I was assigned an editor, Dave Stern, who soon became a good friend of mine. Over the course of writing the book, now sold on Amazon , Dave and I would go back and forth on the story along with Random House's requests to ensure that the book was commercially successful. I will be the first to admit that my vision of the story may not have been as comm...
Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate. This is where the term "4X" originates. The granddaddy of our genre is, of course, Sid Meier's Civilization. Where Sid Meier's Civilization leverages our common history from the dawn of agriculture to the moment we leave the Earth, Galactic Civilizations begins at the moment we leave our home world. In Galactic Civilizations, players create their own histories. Each game is a different possibility. When we relea...
Galactic Civilizations games have had ship building in them for almost 20 years. And ever since, people have used it to create all kinds of amazing designs from robots to their favorite Sci-Fi ships. Ship designer from Galactic Civilizations II With Galactic Civilizations III, players were able to share their designs with millions of other players via Steam Workshop. Suddenly, players could download and play with almost any type of ship imaginable. As much as players loved...
4X strategy. You may have heard of the term. It stands for: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. They are a specific genre of strategy game. Today we are going to talk about them and how Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, aims to innovate the genre. Besides 4X, there are other genres: Real-Time Strategy games (RTS), such as Ashes of the Singularity and StarCraft, focus on harvesting resources to build units in order to destroy the enemy with it all happening...
Sliders. Knobs. Checkboxes. Such is the spread-sheet roots of strategy games. Let's fix that. Going back 15 years to Galactic Civilizations I for Windows, players managed their economy like this: GalCiv I: Sliders. In Galactic Civilizations I, you would set your tax rate. Your tax rate affected the approval rate on your planets. You could then decide how much of your GDP the government would take control of with the spending slider. From ther...
By definition, there can only be one singularity. Ashes of the Singularity and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation are being merged. There will be only one game: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Everyone who already has Ashes of the Singularity will also have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. To understand why we have decided to do this a little background on the development of Ashes of the Singularity is needed... Once upon a time... Ashes of...
By definition, there can only be one singularity. Ashes of the Singularity and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation are being merged. There will be only one game: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Everyone who already has Ashes of the Singularity will also have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. To understand why we have decided to do this a little background on the development of Ashes of the Singularity is needed... Once upon a time... Ashes of...
Our story so far... Stardock loves real-time strategy games. Our customers love real-time strategy games ( Sins of a Solar Empire remains our best selling game of all time). And we want your opinion on something important to us. When Stardock sold off its digital distribution business to GameStop in 2011, we took that capital to help found a number of new studios including Soren Johnson's Mohawk Games , Mothership Entertainment , Stardock Towson and Oxide Games ...
Our story so far... Stardock loves real-time strategy games. Our customers love real-time strategy games ( Sins of a Solar Empire remains our best selling game of all time). And we want your opinion on something important to us. When Stardock sold off its digital distribution business to GameStop in 2011, we took that capital to help found a number of new studios including Soren Johnson's Mohawk Games , Mothership Entertainment , Stardock Towson and Oxide Games ...
Greetings! February is here and there is a ton of stuff to talk about. [..] ## VULKAN ## We have been working diligently on Vulkan support and I am pleased to tell you that we have it...mostly working. We are tentatively scheduled to release Escalation v2.1 (Ashes 1.51) on February 16. Unfortunately, Vulkan won't make it in there as it needs a little more time to bake. ## REPLAYS ## We have this. It's not super stable though so we're still ...
Greetings! February is here and there is a ton of stuff to talk about. [..] ## VULKAN ## We have been working diligently on Vulkan support and I am pleased to tell you that we have it...mostly working. We are tentatively scheduled to release Escalation v2.1 (Ashes 1.51) on February 16. Unfortunately, Vulkan won't make it in there as it needs a little more time to bake. ## REPLAYS ## We have this. It's not super stable though so we're still ...
Ship design has been part of Galactic Civilizations games for many years. However, with Galactic Civilizations III, the designer has reached the point where user creations are starting to rival what you would see in movies. The ship designs we included are wholly original creations based on the lore that's been developed over the past 25 years. The ship designer itself lets people put together thousands of parts to create whatever they want. A new design For the serio...