Most of my week on Galactic Civilizations II was spent doing game-balancing.  That meant messing with the various .XML files that determine how long technology takes to research, how much different weapons and other ship items should cost and how powerful they should be.  The result was that a ton of changes were made to the values of these things.

For example, the weapons used to scale way too fast IMO.  You could quickly end up with ships doing 300 damage and that starts to become problematic to game balance.  Instead, weapon series go up very gradually.  Example: Lasers do 1 damage, Plasma weapons 2 damage, Phasors 3 damage, Disruptors 4 damage and so on.  The difference between Laser I and say Laser IV has to do with its cost and how much space it uses.  So the benefit is that your ship might be able to fit some other goodies on it (such as better defenses) rather than just having ridiculous kill-power.

It also didn't take long to realize that the current technology tree we had in there just wasn't workable.  It took way too many clicks, wasn't very fun, and was confusing for new players.  What we really needed to do was to rethink the technology tree.  Technology trees aren't bad, they just have to be organized. GalCiv I's tech tree was a total mess because it was a hold-over from the OS/2 version.  If we could go back and re-do it from scratch and have it more logical, it might not be such a bad idea to have a tech tree instead of whatever it is we were trying to have this time around.  Getting back to the screen itself, the tech screen was also a pain because you had to press "research" in order for it to research. The newer system is much more streamlined.

Old vs. New

I also began working on the computer AI with more vigor.  The current AI is pretty brain-dead and it's still not very good. But it's definitely non-trivial getting the computer players to design decent ships or even figure out what they should build on their planets.

Speaking of planets, we've started simplifying things on there.  We're going to get rid of the concept of "unemployment".  It just complicates the game without adding any fun to it.  Perhaps in the future we can look at finding a way to have employment rates matter but for now, it was just a hassle.  The new morale system is much more straight forward -- entertainment units per capita with the tax rate providing an overall affect on approval/morale.  In GalCiv I, morale was basically a voodoo type thing.  Now morale will be very straight forward to understand.

The other change we're working on is going to take some play-testing.  If you're not building anything on a given planet then by default only half the resources going in that area (such as military) are used.   You will be able to build improvements that will bring that down to the point where you might only have a couple of resources being used if you're not building something.  We didn't want to get rid of it entirely, fact is, whether you're building something or not, you still have to pay your employees.  But this way, it turns it into a game mechanic.  One can imagine a galactic wonder that cuts the "Wasted" spending down to 1/4th or something on all your planets.

So that's all for this week.