I'm weary. Weary to the marrow of my bones. It's been a long time since I've been this fatigued.  Part of it is obviously getting this beta out but things have been really busy elsewhere with Windows Vista ready.

This whole year really is absurd. But November to January in particular is just out of control.  Windows Vista ships in January and is already starting to perkle out there.  Nintendo Wii this month. Playstation 3 this month.  There's just SOOO much going on that the noise is deafening.

And as I work on tweaking the AI and trying to get some semblance of balance in the values, I feel the fatigue taking over.

So here's my review of the Dark Avatar beta (I'm biased but my work has been purely on AI lately):

1. I think most people are going to like it a LOT if they remember it's a beta.
2. It's pretty stable. No crashes on me yet tonight.
3. The new graphics are very nice. I notice all the explosions and such look nice.
4. Some of the new weapons effects are really nice (big shout out to Stefan who donated some new effects there too -- thank you!)
5. Agents. Wow. This is going to be tough to balance. Very tough.  How much they cost, how much they affect the game, etc.  I think at a certain point players will need to recognize that they will probably have agents on their planets and that they'll need to live with that unless they are dominating.  At first, I tried to eliminate every agent placed on my planets by the alien players but eventually I realized that I could "live" with a few on my planets as long as they weren't on key structures. Otherwise I'm just spending way too much of my economy battling them and not using it to do harm to my opponents.
6. The AI needs a LOT of work still.  I've got a huge list in front of me. There are more new strategic elements going from II to DA than there was going from Galciv 1 to Galciv II. Spies, asteroid fields, planet environments, lots of new techs, treaties.  It really is a whole new -- better -- game.
7. I don't like the pacing yet.  It needs work.  We've made some changes to things -- factories produce a LOT less to make the asteroid fields matter more and to encourage fusion power plants and the like.  But that also means the AI needs to get a lot better at asteroid mining, starbase building, etc.

Stay tuned...