We're very pleased with the response Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar / Gold Edition have received. Well over 95 out of 100 people appear to be glad they got it based on the poll.
We've also gotten some very good feedback from players that we have turned into the first of many free updates to the game. There's a lot here to digest but some of the big changes are to how the AI plays (strategies updated are based on expert player feedback) as well as a new "garbage collection" function that goes through and removes unused AI ship designs (while crash reports have been few and far between, the one thing we've run into is the case where people have the new CPU options turned on and the AI will design new types of ships much more often which uses memory which, over time, can cause users with a relatively small amount of virtual memory to crash -- for reference, you should have at least 4X your RAM reserved as virtual memory on Windows XP or Windows Vista).
We also tweaked some of the startup settings as well as ship defense costs (which are now much cheaper).
1.5X is scheudled to be released in the next few days.
Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar
-1.5x Change Log-
+TWEAK: Nerfed both the Mega Pirate event and the regular Pirate event so that it picks a random AI player instead of the most powerful, and made sure that their fleet ability is not greater than 10 (which we did for the Mega event but not the normal random event).
+ FIX: Crash in diplomacy screen if the other race (like the Jagged Knife) did not have a homeworld.
+ FIX: Bug in combat code where the code that forces a winner in case of a tie was not considering if the defending ship was upgrading or not.
+ FIX: Bug in improvement code that was interfering with projects that were not upgrades completing properly (including terraforming imps). This is something that a lot of people have been complaining about.
+ TWEAK: Changed it so that the option to save ship designs to disk does not affect templates; templates will always be saved to disk.
+ COSMETIC: updated xml data files that need to be translated with a node that says which fields to translate
+ FIX: Bug where AI ships would attack mining bases and not declare war. Now AI ships will go around mining bases unless already at war with civ.
+ FIX: Bug where research from shared research treaties was not added to receiving civ’s tech research.
+ FIX: several alt-tab related crashes.
+ TWEAK: Activated code to display messages in debug.err if any ship templates or ship designs are missing.
+ TWEAK: fixed event text that had a period in the middle of a sentence.
+ TWEAK: fixed problem with a comment in PlanetImprovements.xml where having '--' in a comment was causing read errors for Galactopedia.
+ FIX: Old AI designed ships are removed from the ship design list and deleted when they are no longer in use by any civ (Should significantly neft high memory usage in late games).
+ TWEAK: Changed Superior Hulls description.
+ TWEAK: United Planets: now a higher chance of the 'Neutral Ground' issue being picked if it's not being enforced.
+ Decreased spacing between stars so that more stars can be fit on a given map (which means more planets as well)
+ Abundant setting produces more of whatever it is being specified for
+ Ship defenses use slightly less space and cost a lot less
+ Manufacturing capital now produces 33% bonus instead of 25%
+ Fusion, Anti-Matter and Quantum Power Plants are far less powerful (but still pretty powerful)
+ AI priorities on various technologies tweaked
+ AI more savvy at trading technologies
+ Ships are not quite as valuable in terms of tech trading at previous
+ Fixed AI bug where special treaties were valued extremely high if traded early on
+ AI evaluates value of special environment technologies based on whether they are useful to them or not
+ All AI players will tend to build more factories on planets
+ Some AI players are less likely to build orbital fleet managers depending on their defensive strategy
+ Last remaining AI personality will no longer build planetary improvements on special research/manufacturing tiles that don't match (previously it would sometimes override it if it felt it was for a good reason, all other AIs already avoided this)
+ Drengin aren't as aggressive at colonizing after the first couple game years unless it has a particular planet in mind
+ Drengin and Korath AI personalities now look at what their colonies are doing when deciding whether to research manufacturing or research technologies
+ Drengin and Korath AI personalities value propulsion techs far more than other players
+ Drengin and Korath AI personalities won't upgrade ships outside their sphere of influence
+ If AI determines it wants to go to war with someone, it will declare war even if relations are neutral
+ Improvements to the Altarian and Arcean AI personalities in making them research better
+ AI now keeps a better eye on planets defecting and why
+ AI will factor planet defections into its relations with a given player
+ AI will heavily factor influence starbases into relations with a given player if defections have occurred (tough or higher difficulty)
+ Torians now focus a lot more on manufacturing on planets than research
+ Torians no longer will build oribital fleet managers no matter what. They're living on the edge now.
+ Torians won't build farms on planets that have more than 12 food production
+ Torian researching significantly improved based on player suggestions/strategies
+ Improvements to Terran Alliance / Drath research based on player feedback
+ AI evaluates technologies for trading more individually regardless of player's diplomacy ability
+ AI slightly better at managing its economy
+ Fixed crash bug in which multiple new minors being created in a given game could cause a crash due to no available player slots being available