In a perfect world, we could release an update every single day. But from a marketing point of view, that would be a disaster. You need pauses between releases in order to justify announcements and the like. If you're doing a daily update, a site like Blues News or Gamespot is not going to mention it, they couldn't.
I've mentioned this previously but when I play the game, I have it in the debugger. Previously, I only had my own insticts to go off on when it came to tweaking things. Now I've got tens of thousands of other people to rely on which really helps.
For instance, tonight I tweaked these things:
+ Tried to put more effort into keeping the AI from putting its rally points on its own planets which can disrupt its strategy
+ AI pickier about what it trades with each other, this should satisfy most people who feel the AI isn’t careful about what it trades with each other and the player
+ Performance tweak so that the AI isn’t evaluating putting a..ahem..starbase into a fleet. (it wasn’t doing it, but it evaluated doing so each turn)
+ Drengin and Terran AI personalities more focused on what they research.
+ Drengin tend to research more militaristic techs
+ Toned down minor races a bit. They no longer get quite as much money to start with.
+ Number of minor races is now randomized but still somewhat based on galaxy size. Generally there will be fewer of them.
+ Put a cap on planetary influence to remove cheese potential.
+ AI better at finding enemy targets.
+ AI better at protecting key home sectors
One of the things I want changed but isn't in my area is the ship upgrading. I want ship upgrades to automatically remove the space-using components and just leave the extras. I'm going to see if that can be put in tomorrow. The current upgrading thing is simply too complicated and complicated = bad on many levels (makes it hard to use, increases the odds of someone doing something no one else has done which means doing something that was never tested and so on). And besides, let's be real, we upgrade because we want our cool ship design to stay and we just want to toss on different weapons and engines and such based on the latest tech.
But like I said, we can't realistically do daily updates on Stardock Central and such.
So here's a compromise, for people who are really techie, you can download the latest internal build here: www.galciv2.com/latestbuild
Don't post comments on these builds to the forums or the support people will be really pained. But you can comment on this journal. Mind you, I code the AI mainly so some UI feature or something is out of my area.