Hi, just wanted to drop by to do something besides bitching about the GalCiv 3 AI (not because it's too hard yet though ).

I really enjoyed the October Magazine, particulary the tech talk about game engines. Will we see more technical stuff? I would love to read technicalities on AI development for example.

Congratz for kicking out the marketting pros 2 months ago. I wouldn't mind seeing more of your engineers/programmers writing about technical stuff they would enjoy writing about.

One thought on Stardock launcher:

Far Cry 3 was the last Ubisoft game I played, because their platform linking with steam sucked really really bad. Essentially I had to lock into steam to start far cry, which in turn would launch Uplay, which launched FC3. And I could not directly start FarCry from Uplay directly. I recently pondered buying a recent HoMM title, but then I remeber my FC3 experience.

While i can somewhat understand the reasoning behind it, another launcher really isnt something i can get exited about. Ill give you the benefit of the doubt though.

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance (Forever) player here.

I did not know this little bit of history about the bid for Supreme Commander 2. An expansion to Forged Alliance rather than the utter flop that is Supreme Commander 2 would have been awesome.

Some months ago I tried Ashes and was not impressed at all. I'm happy to hear that the Escalation expansion is targeted more towards the non-casual players and might give it a try based just on that.

Of course what I would really like to see if the FA(F) experience itself being ported onto your new fancy engine. The same mechanics, units, etc. You'd have alterations where sensible of course, but start from the same baseline. And you'd have new cool stuff such as the "smart unit groups" or whatever that feature is called. Has this, the using of a formula that has been proven to appeal to the more hard core audience, been considered? (For all I know you can't do this for legal reasons, but it's worth asking about.)

I think in the long-run, you'll see more elements.  I know what Chris (Taylor) wanted to do (we had many long talks on the subject).  The biggest issue, at the time, was the engine. It was single threaded and DirectX 9 limited what could be done with things like mountains and lighting.

What we have is time.  What we don't have is large budget in a moment of time.  SupCom had a massive budget.  And it didn't have to compete against any other RTS's at the time.  We do.

Sorry, do we have to be subscribed to get the magazine or can we download it from somewhere?

You have to be subscribed.

I am one of the people that used to buy games at full price on release.

Currently on steam I have the following 4x games:

• Age of Wonder 3
• Endless Legend
• Fallen Enchantress
• Galactic civ 3
• Civ 5
• Civ Beyond Earth
• Star Rules 2
• Star Drive 2
• Stellaris
• Sword of the Stars 2
• Warlock Master of the Arcane

Most of these were bought at full price if I remember correctly.

Civillization 6 recently released and it looks absolutely amazing.
But, it also comes at a hefty price tag; which it probably deserves to be honest.

I would really love to get it. But, I have all these other games that I want to play.
Most of them have something that makes them unique and fun.

These 4x games takes a crazy amount of time to play and I am happy with that fact.
But, you only have so much time and their so addictive

Buying civ 6 now makes no sense from my perspective.
1 year later the game is on 50% sale or more.
Chances are I am going to buy it and the backlog of games just gets more and more.

The entire steam sale truly has created this situation and I am not exactly sure how you guys can solve it.

The one advantage you guys have is that you do not loose out on second hand sales like the console market.
Recently, the same trend has started on PS4; where you get games for cheap on digital sales.
Makes sense for console as a way to retain money lost on second hand sales.
Will they end up in the same situation as the PC market?

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Opposite to this you get games that are WAY over priced like No mans sky.
That game should have released as a early access alpha game at $25 max.
If they did that and completed development over time it would have been better received.

The reason why I bring this up is because of galactic civilization 3 (not nearly as bad as No mans sky)
Can't remember now, but I think it had a very steep price for early adopters.
It really was not worth it for those people and the state of the game of that time was a bit bad.
I bought it when the full game was released, so cannot really speak for them. Just opinion.

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The perceived value of something is different for different people.
I can easily justify paying a high price for a game due to the amount joy and amount of hours of entertainment I can get from it.
But, you get a lot of other people that think games are overpriced and see the 75% as the minimum they would pay for a game.

The more "casual" gamers will only buy these games if its cheap. You will loose the sales otherwise.
I know of 3 gamers at work that fit this description.

One of those people love music and will easily spend huge amounts of money on it.
For me that is a waste of money and I feel music is way overcharged in comparison to games.

People have different ways of attaching value to something.

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Absolutely loved Supreme Commander 1 (2 was ok, just had really bad AI)
Only reason why I have not gotten ashes yet, is because I think its a worse game.
The amount of content and interesting units and gameplay seems bit boring in comparison.

The new expansion has peeked my interest and I am keeping a eye on it.
But, we get back to the whole steam sale thing. To busy to play it now. Might buy it later if its cheap enough.

The truth is the market is over saturated with games...

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I understand what you guys are saying with rewarding the new release buyers.
But, you need to be careful. That can easily result in a HUGE backlash.
People today suffer from entitlement and will go bananas if they cannot get something someone else got.

Normally the devs just gives original owners a discount on the standalone expansion and this is a good solution.

This is probably asking too much. But, giving pre-orders a season pass for free would be amazing.
Problem is all these self entitled people will complain about the game being half developed and how unfair life is and bla bla.

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I think one interesting case study regarding rewarding players is Witcher 3.

Everybody can agree that this is an amazing game with epic support from the dev team.
Amazing expansions with really good value for money.

What is happening. I have seen no other game that is more one sale than this game.
And its sad cause these guys really deserved better.

Anyway, super long post with my opinion and definitely not everyone's view.

quoting post

Some screenshots:

WindowBlinds 10.5

Which theme did you use to show off the "Photoshop" style theme?

That's the "Ice" skin which is included in WindowBlinds.

Oh, cool. Thanks!

Is there a launch option(command line argument) for skipping the Stardock Launcher?

There will be.

Is there a dark-style theme (like Ice) that allows the windows borders to touch the bottom, top, and sides of the screen? Ice's outside shadow effect means my non-maximized windows can't go all the way to the top or bottom.