Twilight of the Arnor raises the stakes.  I really don't like the concept of nerfing. If someone is too powerful, then I tend to like to correct this by making everyone else subsequently more powerful.

Those of you who have played the beta so far can attest that if the civilizations from Twilight were to go up against the same civs from Dread Lords that the Twilight civs would utterly destroy the Dark Avatar civs.

But what we're working on right now is just going to be so much fun in this next beta as we begin to get into serious balancing.

I am starting to think that we may not make the date we want. I really want to have adequate time to work over the AI.  I've learned a lot of new tricks and strategies over the last few months and it's going to take quite a bit of coding to incorporate these ideas into the game.

I will give you one spoiler: The base speed for ships is now 2 instead of 1. I did this so that some civilizations (notably the Arceans) could have a negative speed ability (so they move at the same speed as below).

I also wanted to move things along a little bit to support the Immense sized galaxies.

Also, when you're playing these betas, you absolutely, positively must let us know if you run into any out of memory issues.  In fact, if you really want to help us, play the game in a window and keep the task manager open (ctrl-shift-esc) and look at the galciv process.  If it grows beyond 1.5 gigs then we have a BIG problem and you should look to sending us your saved game so that we can profile it.  The whole 2 gigabyte limit on process memory is going to be a big deal in PC gaming.  As someone who desperately wants to play games in which there might be 10,000 ships and 10,000 planets, it annoys me to have to deal with these kinds of limitations. 

Anyway though, there's just so much cool stuff in this expansion pack to play with. We're having a really fun time with it.  I'm working on the Thalans tonight (yea, New Year's Eve but I'm partied out ). 

The Thalans are the most interesting civilization in the game. If you get Twilight, you absolutely must spend some quality time with the Thalans (especially since they're going to be a major factor in GalCiv III someday).  They have significant unique tech trees that depend on your choice of good, neutral or evil (i.e. xeno ethics is really important with them).  It also means that a lot of their techs won't show up by default on the tech tree until after you pick a ethical path.

Incidentally, be sure to read a lot of the back story on the Altarians which are slipped into the tech descriptions.  There's preview info on our fantasy strategy game that's in development in there. (I am dying to talk about the fantasy strategy game, it has, and I kid you not, the most advanced 3D engine for strategy games that has ever been developed. Smooth transition from a whole world down to an individual leaf. And while it uses lots of DirectX 10 goodies, we're doing a lot of special coding so that it looks amazing on DirectX 9 and the whole game brings new meaning to the concept of modding -- the modding engine is PART of the game and we are using it to build the game ourselves and we use it to submit content into the master database which the game then uses -- and so will players who want to come up with really cool stuff).  The fantasy strategy game is really the kind of thing that strategy gamers usually don't see because only an insane indie game company would make a turn based strategy game like this -- i.e. the kind of technology and budget usually only seen in high end RPGs or first person shooters but instead used to cater specifically to strategy gamers. You'll see what I mean when the time gets closer.

Anyway, good times ahead. I think Twilight of the Arnor is the work I'm most proud of since getting into game development.  I just hope people enjoy all the next text and subtle tweaks.  12 unique civilizations to play with mean 12 different cultures to explore.