What a difference 4 days can make.  So as I mentioned in my last journal, I was concerned that the visuals of Galactic Civilizations II wouldn't be where we want them to be.  But if you can compare these in-game screenshots with the ones I did just 4 days ago, you can see how much just a few days can make. And bear in mind, we have nearly a year of work to do. So you can imagine how cool this stuff will be when the final graphics are done.

The planet interface still needs some artistic help but the mechanics of it are working very nicely. One of the things that I really like, that wasn't in GalCiv 1 is that I can queue up stuff very intuitively right here. That is, I can literally go onto a planet and go from usable tile to usable tile telling it what I want to build and it'll just put it in the queue. So it's a true win-win scenario. The planets will have much more depth to them and yet require less micro management than the first game.  I think of all the features in the new game, this is one of my favorites.  To be honest, I felt that GalCiv I's economic system was a joke.

Let's be real, in GalCiv 1 the planets had these arbitrary magical planet classes that just by landing on them gave you tons of benefits. Everything you built on there just added bonuses.  That meant that the AI had a real advantage because if it could just land on the good planets, you're screwed because there's very little skill involved in getting a lot of benefit from high class planets.

But now, planet classes simply mean how many usable tiles there are on a planet to start with. A given factory won't produce 20% more shields. Instead it'll  produce 5 shields. Period. Want more production? Build more factories. Oh..no more room? Too bad. But now it's up to the person to actually make full use of their planets. If you only have 10 usable tiles, that means that you'll have to make some tough choices. Is this planet my tax revenue planet (lots of farms to increase population?) or is this my industrial world? In other words, there's actual skill involved.  Whereas in GalCiv 1, come on, let's be honest, late in the game we just set the governors to build EVERYTHING.  Why not?  No skill in that.

Now there's tactics and skills. And this means that good players will be able to really shine. Moreover, it gives me, the AI developer a chance to show off my stuff too. I used to get pretty fed up with players claiming that they lost to GalCiv because the AI "cheated".  But in GalCiv 2, it'll be obvious that the AI won because it planned out its planets better for its overall strategy.

Since you're not able to play the game yet, I can't really communicate what a cool thing this new system is. Normally something that requires more skill means more micro management.  But here you get to demonstrate your skill without it getting tedious and I think that's just great.

I'm totally jazzed about the zoom out features.  If you zoom out enough, this screen turns into a tactical map. It still needs work (guys the colony ship you start with shouldn't be big, tinier icons please).  But it's really cool.  Here I've just zoomed out and moved the camera a little. We also now operate in a truly 3D space in the sense that stars and other debris have "paralax" scrolling but it's true 3D - some things are simply further away than others.  The screenshot doesn't give it justic.

Not that everything is happy.  The first screen has "Start a new game" that doesn't quite fit right. The "Please wait" dialog has a done button even when it's waiting. My turn button is still missing. And there's of course tons of missing features (the mini-map is useless IMO right now).  Plus the unusable planets need more variety and the default ships look crummy (Alex, get me more cool looking ships!).  The alien setup screen needs work.

For instance, there should be two connected buttons or something for each alien that says "Active" or "Inactive" with whichever button is selected being very highlighted.  Right now, I have to double-click on an alien race to choose it which isn't going to be intuitive.  We also need to have more obvious highlighting (probably some animation) so that people know which races are already selected.  The new system is very nice though compared to the old.  We'll have more alien races than you can actually play against this time around.

But like I said, look at this journal and the screenshots from my last one on this topic.  4 days and they were able to make these huge improvements.  And we haven't even started with the beta yet. That won't be for another month and a half. Lots to do there.  At least the performance is good. It plays much faster on my ThinkPad laptop than GalCiv 1 did.  BTW, if you have an older Intel integrated video adapter on your computer, you're going to be out of luck. GalCiv 2 won't work on it. Sorry. Nothing we can do. They don't support true type fonts in games and we need this DirectX 9 feature too much to go without it.

There's still a lot to do of course.  I'm not convinced that the mega nebula look is the way to go. The background stars are still too uniform. And there's not enough of them. But we'll see what players say. Stay tuned!