So why expand the expansion?

Marketing determines sequels..

Published on October 10, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

When the November beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar hits it'll be pretty apparent that it would have not been a problem to maintain the original November release date of the expansion pack had we kept the original feature set.

So the question is, why add more features?

The simplest answer is that Stardock is privately owned. There really isn't a good business justification. Believe me, we've tried to come up with a plausible marketing or publishing reason to add more features to the expansion pack but it always comes back to the same answer -- because we wanted to.

There were just a couple of things that we just didn't want to have to wait for some future sequel for. The number of new little touches that aren't even being mentioned in the bullet points will become pretty apprarent (like re-texturing starbases and components and such to look nicer). And we just wanted to have these things in there so that when we are working on other games (there will be two more Stardock developed games before we even contemplate a GalCiv sequel) we weren't feeling regretful for not getting to them sooner.

The Mega events and the unique features I think are two key ones that are pretty time consuming to get right (and balance and write AI for). I hang out on a lot of forums. I don't usually post but I read them. While most people like GalCiv II, there were a couple of complaints that came up time and time again:

After awhile, the game felt repetitive.
The alien races were generic to play as. Why play as the Drengin vs. the Arceans?
The technology tree was unwieldly and uninspired.

My view is, if some people felt that way after 8 months, imagine what it would be like after 3 years. I want to have a game that people would still be enjoying years from now. BTW -- another argument for no CD copy protection -- you can keep the game on the hard drive for years without keeping track of some CD/DVD and occasionally fire it up years later.

A word on what we mean by a stream-lined technology tree...What we don't lke about our technology tree is this:

Laser I..Laser II...Laser III...Laser IV...Yawn.

It's just totally uninspired. So what we're going to do is reimagine how the technology tree is displayed. There will be MORE technologies total. We're not nerfing the tech tree. We are just looking for better and more innovative ways to present it.

The idea we're playing with (that won't be in the beta) is the concept of Milestones.

So when researching weapons you would see Lasers. And instead of there being Laser I, Laser II, etc. It would just be Lasers and you would hit multiple milestones. Each milestone would give you the same kind sof benefits as you got from say Laser III (new components). But on the research screen, what you would see is the Laser tech slowly filling up.

Incidentally, we are also going to release a Galactic Civilizations II v1.4 shortly. Main changes will be an AI crash bug fix and some changes to morale and economics (we're going to make the morale buildings more powerful but the techs to get them MUCH more expensive).

Anyway, the goal of Dark Avatar is really to put together an expansion pack that we think addresses the key game elements that we think can realistically be added in an expansion pack (I'd put in OPTIONAL tactical battle features but that would be immensely expensive to do).

When people start getting the beta in a few weeks, I think what they'll be most surprised with is just how much better and cleaner the game looks. Lots of little touches that aren't even mentioned. If you've seen one of our game update change logs, you can probably imagine what something we charge money for has in it.

Comments (Page 3)

accidjazz

on Oct 14, 2006

So that you're telling everywhere "omg new features we don't HAVE to put in, but we DO it because we are so nice" isn't kind of marketing and therefore a "business justification"? Ohh come on!

Yes, I haven't met anyone in the industry who treats his customers better than you (grrr), but you DO use it as a "weapon" and you know it!

I just love it how you, Mr. Wardell, always plays in interviews/news posts/journals/articles the naive innocent buddy who "just does his own thing" and would NEVER use his nice treatment of customers for something profane as "marketing".

You are a clever man indeed, much respect here.

Continue playing your "game"!

Someone will discover the truth, that you sacrifce babies in your offices for your dark masters or something... something like you and your "company" here cannot possibly exist on this planet!

Where are my pills?

danielost

on Oct 16, 2006

yes hurry up and take those pills

Lord Reliant

on Oct 16, 2006

Will there be any additional tools added to the expansion to help with some of the micro-management aspects? I didn't see any and with the addition of features now there's even more that I need to do per turn which can really bog things down. When I played on a Gigantic game recently there were many tedious elements I really would have liked automated. In other words, I don't think the game scales too well in it's current form. I'd like to know if the expansion has the following features (or if I could request them, that'd be great!). For instance, in the Expansion-

*Is there a standard build list I could have all colonies queue up whenever they are
conquered? This alone would be a huge time saver! Near the end I was building almost everything the same and clicking, clicking, clicking the same items was very dull.

*Is there a way to assign a planet's ship production to a certain way point? Right now I have the ability to globally assign all produced ships to a way point and I also can change all ships in production to another version, but there's no way I can set a planet's production to go to a certain location. The waypoints are somewhat useful, but this would allow for certain planets to pump out constructs, transports, etc. and automatically send to the location I desire so I don't have to remember this every time it's produced (or globally change ALL constructs to go somewhere).

*Is there somewhere I could set an auto-adjusting budget? Some examples would be to check a box on various budget items so planet production would be reduced if income dropped below a specified value. Or to decrease taxes if overall morale dropped below a certain percentage. Or maybe just get notified about this?

*Could ship designs be "auto upgraded"? For instance, if I have a current combat ship and a new propulsion technique was researched, do I really HAVE to go into the ship yard and re-create/upgrade the ship if that's the only thing I want changed? Even though the computer only re-designs ships every half-year or so, having to change all my ship designs just to upgrade a new engine or new version of a weapon. I like ship design, but not if it's only to make minor improvements, especially with colony and constructors.

The first and last items to me would see to make the biggest impact on the annoying micromanagement in large or late games. I don't mind micromangement, but when you get over 20 colonies it really becomes annoying, slows the game down, and things in general become much less fun. Even if there's more variety, it'd be more fun to have less clicking per turn.

One last idea for Brad and Co.- How about an auto-colony system? Basically production for planets could be handled by a similar AI to what the computer uses, but the player gets to focus on war strategy, diplomacy, and ship building much more than normal. In fact, if colonies could be handled well enough by the AI, this could radically change the nature of the game! I recall a similar but different option in Master of Orion 2 where you could have ship combat auto-resolve so people could focus on strategy instead of action. This would allow the micromangement stuff to be handled by the AI instead of the player.

Who's with me on this stuff?

bonscott

on Oct 16, 2006

With the new tech tree with milestones I'd love to see a "blind" research option like in Alpha Centauri. So I could say put 50% of my research toward weapons, 20% toward starbase tech, 10% toward defense and 20% toward planetary improvement. Not sure it would work with so many branches but it would be cool to put a % of research toward a particular branch with perhaps a choice of a particular tech to reach for. Once that tech is finally learned then you have a choice or true blind research in that branch or choose another new tech as a long term goal.

Just talking off the hip here.

CobraA1

on Oct 17, 2006

Lord Reliant: Yeah, I'm with you.

BUT there are some things that are already in there

. Just a bit hidden.

a) Civilization Manager -> Governors allows you to reassign the construction of a lot colonies at once, as well as mass assign ship and planet waypoints.

There IS a way to tell a planet to send its ships to a waypoint! Open up your planet, click Build Ship, you should have a Rally Point button.

I agree with the gist of what you say, though, it's a tad annoying having to change ships for a minor upgrade. Once you have a large libary of ships buit up, though, it's a bit easier. But yeah, a tad less micromanagement would be good.

CobraA1

on Oct 17, 2006

And I dunno why it's giving me "Access Denied" errors when I try to edit my post, but I have a word about the article also.

"A word on what we mean by a stream-lined technology tree...What we don't lke about our technology tree is this:

Laser I..Laser II...Laser III...Laser IV...Yawn."

Not just that - "deflectors" "shields" "disruptors" "phasors" "photon torp" "quantum torp" etc - They come straight out of Star Trek and Star Wars!

So, yeah, a lot of the weapon names and hull designs seem to come straight out of science fiction shows, and sometimes sound a bit - generic.

I sorta wish they were a bit more inventive names.

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