This next week we hope to release the first of the 1.6 Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar betas.  This will be the first major update since release as we look through feedback to see what new features we can look at adding, what play balancing we can do, and what sorts of game play issues we need to address.

One of the requirements we've made is to make the game run a lot faster on lower end hardware.  We have this working internally and the results should be pretty significant even in the first beta. The big thing we did was add ship stacking -- only the top most ship on a tile actually will get drawn and ones underneath will be representated by a symbol. 

For some people, the improved graphics if Dark Avatar come with a price -- slower performance. It shouldn't affect most people (I did all my AI work on an ATI 9800 Pro without problems).  But for people with lower range video cards playing on very large galaxies, all the extra polygons do eventually add up.

We're also looking through suggestions on the computer players. As many of you know, for me, computer AI is the core element of the game.  So finding new ways to improve it and make it more challenging is what makes the whole thing worth doing for me. 

You could even go as far as to say that if it weren't for the constructive AI suggestions we've seen, there'd be fewer updates since there'd be less motivation to do the updates.   I love a good idea from people playing the game.

Internally we've started migrating some of the engine tools from our unannounced fantasy TBS into GalCiv II:DA 1.6 which allow us to optimize performance a little better.  Going forward, some of the dual core and quad core drawing routines may make their way into the GalCiv II engine too (though it really depends on sales since such work would require increasing the after-release budget).

This weekend I hope to work more on the AI.  I'd like to add more text to the alien dialog in this update but there's an expense attached to that since it requires translation into a bajillion languages.

I also would like to add some new custom maps and scenarios but would like to hear if anyone plays those like I do.