And so beta 2 of Galactic Civilizations II has arrived.  We still have a lot of work ahead of us.  But I can tell you from even these early betas that we're very excited about the direction the game is heading.  Some of the new game mechanics over the first one have created all kinds of new strategic opportunities that simply didn't exist in the first one.  But before I start giving examples of that, let me talk about beta 2.

First off, the beta still does not have the finalized ship graphics in.  So if you ever wondered what cool 3D graphics look like when the textures are stripped away then the ships in beta 2 give you an idea.  Without the textures, the ships look a bit like plastic. But they do the job and allow us the time to perfect techniques (and technology) for making them look really cool (not to mention it provides something to look forward to in the final game).

We have set the release date -- February 2006.  While a lot of the basic game is done, there is so much more to do.  What we concentrated on for beta 2 was enhancing the user interface and trying to make the underlying graphics engine fast on even low end hardware.  We want the game to be far more intuitive than the first one was to play.  There's still some work there we need to do but hopefully people will find Galactic Civilizations II much more approachable than the first one.  You'll need to tell us though.  For beta testers, please be aware that the game mechanics and such are not in really very much yet.  So we know that some types of ships cost too much and we know the AI is kind of brain dead and we know that lots of buttons don't do anything or don't do what they should.  Those things are for beta 3 (scheduled for August).

For a few weeks, we'll be allowing those who pre-ordered the game to access the beta.  After that, we'll be hiding it for awhile.  Beta 2 also has product activation in it -- you have to have an Internet connection to play it. But the system is pretty lenient so if you have a bunch of machines in your house you want to try it on, go ahead, as long as they have some sort of net connection you're fine.   I'm pretty sure Stardock Central takes care of it all.   Speaking of Stardock Central, I apologize in advance for the inconveniences of having to update to new versions of it.  We are in the process of updating it in preparation for TotalGaming.net: Phase 2.  Everyone who has a TotalGaming.net: Phase 1 account (i.e. all existing users) will be upgraded for free to TG.net phase 2. 

So what's new in Beta 2?  There's a ton of minor to major changes from the first beta.  The biggest change is the UI.  You can now press a little button that is at the top of the mini map that will fold the context interface on the main screen down to just the toolbar.  The main buttons are now at the bottom of the screen so that they're always accessible.  We also think that we have the resolution independence working pretty well (I took these screenshots at 1600x1200 with 6x anti-aliasing and it was incredibly fast -- the number at the top left represents frames per second -- some screens are locked at 30).  Galactic Civilizations (I) got around 22 frames per second on this machine by contrast.

The next major change is that you can now create your own custom races.  For players of the first GalCiv, this will be one of the biggest changes.  Not only can you play as any alien civilization but you can design your own.  If you check out the gfx\race directory you can see images in there.  You will be able to add your own images in there.  You also pick your starting techs, abilities, base ship parts, etc. 

Another change is that the game, once run, will register some DesktopX classes with your system that will enable DesktopX 3 or later to edit screens.  You can completely redesign the screens however you like in this way. We're not just "skinning" here, you can do all sorts of stuff.  I think we're working on a way to let you even change the mini-map so that it can be square-shaped instead of diamond.

Other changes include a lot more screens are in.  Some of these have been blocked since we want to focus on testing only certain aspects of the game.  The computer AI now does "stuff" but not very much.  Subsequent updates will address this.  We are also in the process of redoing the research screen since we find it unintuitive presently.

Now, talking about how changes to the feature set of the game are creating new ideas let me give you a sample.  I was playing it today and found a planet I wanted that was just a couple of tiles out of range.  In Galactic Civilizations II, range is tile-based instead of sector-based (in the first one, range worked for entire sectors, you could either go to a sector or not, now it's right down to the actual tile).  That gave us the idea that you could have a planetary improvement that increases your range from that planet by 1 tile.  Since most planets in GalCiv II that can be colonizes are between class 8 and 12, that means making some sacrifices since unlike the first one where you could build an unlimited number of planetary improvements, now you can only build as many improvements as the planet class.  So some planets will be your farming world, others your research world, others manufacturing worlds and others a balance.  But with lots of other types of improvements, putting in more choices like range increasing improvements would add even more strategic depth.

Typical close up view (you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel and rotate around by holding the mouse-wheel down)

View of zoomed out all the way. You can press a button at the tip of the mini map to collapse the UI into a single toolbar.

This IS Ceti-Alpha V!  The planet class determines how many useable tiles are on the planet. So you now have to think about what you want to build on your planets.

Stardock Central getting updated a bunch (sorry) in preparation for TotalGaming.net Phase 2.