I blew most of my writing wad writing this article on Windows Vista today.

Yesterday I did a lengthy audio interview with Apolyton.net. We touched on what features we had to cut out of the game that we wanted to have in there.

Two of the features I wanted in were asteroid fields and dedicated legions of troops.  The dedicated legions of troops involved having to raise armies. In this way, your planets would be populated by different aliens and that their approval and productivity would be based on different races and how you were getting along with any major civilization led by that race.  There was a bit involved in it but I would have enjoyed seeing scenarios where players might be governing a planet full of Drengin or wanting to populate a planet with Yor because they were more productive or moving Torians around because they had a higher population growth.

But like many features, it boils down to balancing and making sure the computer players can make use of those features. It's something that comes up time and time again -- features are easy, putting together AI that effectively uses it is hard.

As I joked on the podcast (Which we'll announce when it's public), every critic who posts always starts out with "I've been a programmer for 20 years.." and then launches in to how easy such and such would be to code.  Look at how obnoxious it's proven to get the AI to build improvements on its planet effectively. You'd think that would be trivial to get right. I know I thought it would be. And when I play the game, the AI always uses its planets seemingly with perfection. Yet I'll see a screenshot of someone who has gotten a planet where the AI built nothing but entertainment centers or embassies. How the heck did that happen?  Like I said, features are easy, making a smart AI to use those features is not.

That's one of the reasons the asteroid fields weren't put in too.  How do you balance them? How do you get the AI to mine them effectively versus building starbases versus making freighters versus making defenders versus building fighters versus building ships to escort.  And people think tactical battles would be great.  Sure, it would take a few hours to program in tactical battles but a good month or two to get a solid computer AI to use them well (that is, once we added in features to make tactical battles worthwhile in the form of other types of modules such as ranged weapons, battle engines, tractor beams, etc.).

Many of those things are the kind of thing that would possibly be held over for some future sequel. We'll have a better idea based on the sales of the expansion pack. The general line of thinking is that expansion packs do around 20% of the sales of the original game. And that expansion packs are typically half the price of the original game.  So you're talking (at best) 1/10th the revenue of the original game which means 1/10th the budget of the original game.  In our case we are currently planning on making it a digital release (download only) since digital sales of the game have been so strong. But there is also some talk about maybe having it available at a single retailer.  What we don't want to do is have a scenario where a retailer is bumping GalCiv II off the shelves to put up the expansion.  We'll see.