Galactic Civilizations II v1.3 BETA 1 change log

Target availability: 7/27

Published on July 26, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

The 1.3 builds of Galactic Civilizations II will be in beta for longer than some of the previous versions. It's not so much that we think it's buggy but the fact that we don't want to do a 1.3, 1.31, 1.32, 1.33 and so on. Plus, if there ARE bugs in these builds, we can say "Well it's a beta". After all, weaseling is what sets us apart from the animals...well...you know..except the weasel.

The 1.3 builds are designed to extend the playable lifespan of the game. To eliminate annoyances and pet peeves that players might have that would eventually turn them off. That includes things like UI annoyances being eliminated based on player feedback, amping up the computer AI further, and adding more difficulty levels so that players can fine-tune things.

If I were a better game designer, I'd just have the difficulty levels be a slider with a 1 to 100. Dark Avatar will have that (ironically the original OS/2 version of GalCiv back in 1993 had this but what did I know then?). But for 1.3, we added 3 more difficulty levels and just generally cleaned up that area.

Below is the change log of BETA 1 of 1.3. It will be available via Stardock Central tomorrow or Friday unless there's some disaster.

It should be fine to run. Most of the embedded spyware, hard drive formatting, and other malicious code that all our software includes has been reduced by over 14%. Just ignore the hard drive crunching...

+ fixed first turn after load zero production behavior!

+ AI better at managing colonies

+ More difficulty levels: Dunce at the lower end, Godlike and Ultimate at the higher end.

+ AI intelligence levels above and below "Intelligent" adjusted in difficulty (so i.e. Normal will be tougher than it was because there's a new easier difficulty level and Incredible will be easier because there's two higher difficulty levels).

+ The overall difficulty levels have now bee tweaked to have a 1 to 1 relationshipo with the AI intelligence levels so "Challenging" means all AI intelligences set to "Bright" rather than a weighted overall value. Many higher level players would find that they set the difficultly level to Crippling only to find that 2 or 3 of the players would be set to "Fool" (and do very little) while the others played very well.

+ Difficulty setup screen tweaked to work better.

+ changed size of TriStrontium so that it's bigger than TriStrontium2; previously the definitions were identical.

+ fixed error in translation code for raceconfig (homeworld)

+ fixed error in translation code for UP issues.

+ fixed bug that reset the cheater's flag, allowing cheater games to be submitted normally.

+ fixed some exploits in raceconfigs for metaverse games

+ fixed missing image in Rename Ship dialog

+ fixed error in AbilitiesBonus.xml file that didn't show 20% bonus to Loyalty

+ reduced the Custom Race's default value of Loyalty to 15% so that it would not cause negative ability points

+ added code to clear the planet/shiplist between games so that it wouldn't keep old pointers (should prevent a memory leak and potential crashes due to bad pointers)

+ made it so that you can select a race by clicking on its icon on the Foreign Treaties screen

+ made it so that the seleted planet or ship in the planet/ship list is saved so that changing the sort variable or filters will still keep the selection.

+ added code to let you right click on a tech to bring up the tech description dialog when the tech tree window is maximized

+ fixed error where fleets of ships could still attack freighters protected by galactic privateer

+ Reversed direction of the moon revolution (yes, Earth's moon now rotates around the Earth the right way)

+ added a check in the Direct 3D code for vertex and pixel shader versions

+ added code to make foreign policy window try to select a non-dead civ

+ made sure that the civ manager only has to parse the entry definitions once

+ made planet screens refresh after removing or adding troops

+ fixed numerous typos and spelling errors in various files

+ changed it so that the difficulty on the OpponentWnd slider changes all of the selected races' intelligences

+ changed it so that when you enable a race, it automatically sets its intelligence to be at the level of the difficulty

+ Fixed bug where lines on Treaties screen would point off-screen if you were a custom race playing against 10 enemies

+ D and T buttons will now toggle the details and rally point screens on/off instead of queuing up multiple instances of them

+ Kills some battle related processes as soon as they are finished so they don’t stay in memory when no longer needed

+ When running in full screen mode (Release build), the mouse will be clipped to the game window to prevent accidentally clicking outside of the window. You can still use ALT+TAB to activate other windows.

+ added function IsProtectedMiniFreighter to check for valid target

+ added code to clear selected rallypoint from minimap to prevent crashing when the rallypoint is deleted

+ added code to clear rallypoint destination when rallypoint is destroyed

+ Added a debug assert if the required technology for a ship type is not found

+ Fixed bug where ships on auto-explore that were put in a planet would immediately start auto-exploring once launched from the planet

+ Fixed a graphical bug where if you had 1 ship with moves and it attacked a planet with a fleet manager, the fleet would remain on top of the planet if the attacking ship was killed.

+ fixed memory leak caused by too many references to ship design listbox entries

+ fixed possible crash when saving std::strings in save game

+ cleaned up code in PropertyBucket class to make it more efficient.

+ Fixed a crash in the scene graph

+ Added ref counts to scene nodes in battle processes to prevent “random battle crashes”

+ Kills some battle related processes as soon as they are finished so they don’t stay in memory when no longer needed

Comments (Page 3)

Evil Muppet

on Jul 27, 2006

Still no "fresh shipyard per game" feature...

Lord Nova

on Jul 27, 2006

Considering how easy the Tech Tree is to mod (or any of the xml files really) why doesn't someone release a techtree mod that fixes those imbalances? Heck I would edit my own techtree to make the game better if someone gave me some balanced vaiables on what I should set those weapons/defences to.

samit-

on Jul 27, 2006

Great stuff, thanks

Dahrkstar

on Jul 27, 2006

Kudos to the developers for continuing to improve and tweak this already oustading game! Many companies don't see ongoing support and improvemetns as worth the return on investment. You're doing a great job to retain a loyal fanbase for years to come.

(Note, this post was autogenerated by the trojanware installed during Stardock updates and will cease to be generated once the 3.1 upgrade is applied).

Narakir

on Jul 27, 2006

Great stuff as always ! Is it planed to make the GC2_Conversations.xml file working in the data\mod directory ?

Frogboy

on Jul 27, 2006

Thanks for the kind words.

As for users who don't agree with the "balancing" of weapons and tech, that data is in an XML file. Feel free to change them to whatever you want them to be.

In the \data\english\ directory.

Mr Nice Guy

on Jul 27, 2006

Great work!

Can't resist throwing in some requests wether it's for this patch, future patches, or the expansion...

+ Autolaunch: I like gigantic galaxies and setting up all those rally points can get tedious.
+ In the planet/ship list, it'd be nice if you could bring down a sort list to choose from instead of scrolling through.
+ In the starbase list, make it sortable by race and actually show the race of the base w/o have to click on it to find out.
+ Make the starbase list show if it's still upgradeable or full at a glance.
+ During the news where it shows what was constructed during that turn, a tooltip or something showing what ships are in orbit would be good so I'd know if I wanted to change my shipbuilding there.
+ Fleet movement: add a hotkey to select all ships in a stack and move them together at the speed of the slowest ship in the stack.
+ In the fleet manager window, have health be shown at a glance so I can decide quickly which ships to move around.
+ In fleet combat, the track target option would be way better if my ship didn't almost constantly block the view of my target.

S1Genocide

on Jul 27, 2006

Could you guys post when the 1.3 Beta is available? Or is my Stardock Central just not working right?

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Jul 27, 2006

Mascrinthus - there will always be something. Every user has their own set of things they wish were changed or worked differently. Sometimes items are removed because of balance. We have literlaly an endless list of such tweaks but only some can be added at a given time.

Thanks for responding Brad! Being a developer with almost 2 decades experience, I understand about setting priorities and making trade offs. I would give priority fixing bugs that impact gameplay; I don't care about trivial matters such as which way the Moon rotates around the Earth or whether the cities on my planets are lite up at night.
I would have set priorities for 1.3 as such:
1) fix the save/load bug - this has been address, thanks!!!
2) resolve the issues in the XML for the tech tree - this is easy once they have been pointed out, see post #29 by ignuss
3) fix misleading descriptions - many new and veteran players rush to get the government techs thinking they will get the major bonuses to production, research, and their economy; I think the true bonuses of 10%, 20%, and 30% to economy are appropriate but the description needs correction

As for UI changes to allow "Dynamic Game Difficulty Level" and "Link the Techs in the Trade Window to the Tech Tree", they are probably beyond the scope of 1.3 but I hope they will be considered for the expansion pack. Players frequently complain that the late game is boring because if they survive until then they are way ahead of the AI. Having the difficulty level increase over time will help keep each game interesting until the end.

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Jul 27, 2006

Considering how easy the Tech Tree is to mod (or any of the xml files really) why doesn't someone release a techtree mod that fixes those imbalances?

If you are playing a Metaverse game you can't use any Mods, so we are dependent on Stardock to fix them.

Kosty

on Jul 27, 2006

Thanks for the kind words.

As for users who don't agree with the "balancing" of weapons and tech, that data is in an XML file. Feel free to change them to whatever you want them to be.

In the \data\english\ directory

Won't that pop the cheater flag on a metaverse game?

ignuss

on Jul 27, 2006

Frogboy:

That's no excuse. The few games I do have time to play are metaverse games. I can't fix it, you will have to do it. I could easily do a mod but then I wouldn't have any use for it myself. It will at most take a couple of hours to fix all the bugs in the xml-files so it's not as if it's gonna take a huge amount of time. I sincererly have no clue why this hasn't been done in either 1.1 or 1.2.
And I have to say that calling the things I and others have pointed out as "balancing" is bs. I don't think anyone enjoys researching stuff that's worse then the things that came before, for example. Which you have to do to get to later better things.

I too like what you have already done in the patch but as you said, "The 1.3 builds are designed to extend the playable lifespan of the game. To eliminate annoyances and pet peeves that players might have that would eventually turn them off."

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Jul 27, 2006

Now that the players have done the hard part of finding the problems in the tech tree's XML, it is trivial to correct the XML. Why would you address the issue of the Moon rotating around the Earth the wrong way before fixing this XML file? Playing Metaverse games restricts players to what Stardock thinks is appropriate, so it is our hope they will make the necessary adjustments. I think (ignuss and many others appear to agree) the values for the Manufacturing Center and Industrial Sector in v1.1 were more appropriate than v1.2 and the Banking Center should cost 1/2 its current price. Brad, please review the issues pointed out in my posts, ignuss's post #29, etc. GalCiv2 is a great game but could be made better, in some cases with trivial effort (i.e., editing an XML file).

Thank you for listening to the players and addressing most of their complaints/wishes in your quality updates. Other game companies should follow Stardocks lead!

bradikus

on Jul 27, 2006

Regarding the moon, I just assumed that we were looking at earth from the south pole.

.PoNeH

on Jul 27, 2006

Can't wait. I just got a new laptop with the Quadro FX 2500M card. I can't wait to try the game out with Anti-Aliasing.

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