Fleets of polish

The road to beta 4 continues..

Published on October 14, 2005 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

With Beta 4 less than two weeks away, things are starting to get pretty exciting here. We're in bug-fix mode on a ton of the newer features. For example, fleets are in and they're pretty fun to watch fight it out. There will be polishing on those screens until we ship I expect since making a fleet battle look cool is a lot of work.

I've been trying to tune the game play a bit as we wait to get the fleet stuff ironed out. Can't really do the AI with fleets until the regular fleet stuff is rock solid -- otherwise we'd wonder whose bug it is.

The music is starting to come in along with sound effects. Most of that won't make it into the initial beta 4.

Beta 4 and a few builds after that will be available to the public. After that, only users with "Diplomat" access or better will be able to access private builds so we don't ruin the surprises in the final game for players. Speaking of surprises, the campaign story has a pretty shocking ending which we hope people will enjoy.

Comments

magus

on Oct 14, 2005

Thanks for the update Brad. Two more weeks.

kryo

on Oct 14, 2005

Any chance the requirement for b4+ can be lowered to Veteran?

Probably not... guess I just gotta get Galactic Empires done so I have a chance at a promotion whenever the next round happens

Lord KiRon

on Oct 15, 2005

It's just my opinion but without tactical combat option the fleet battles will quickly get borring to watch over and over, so please do not forget an option to turn them off in settings.

Frogboy

on Oct 15, 2005

We already have all kinds of display settings for combat.

That said, we certainly have not found them boring. Then again, when I have played games with tactical combat (HOMM IV, MOO, etc.) I've just put on auto and watched them. I suspect a lot of other people do that as well.

Martok

on Oct 15, 2005

It's just my opinion but without tactical combat option the fleet battles will quickly get borring to watch over and over, so please do not forget an option to turn them off in settings.

I wouldn't be surprised if they include such a feature. If nothing else, I'm sure each battle will give you the choice to skip the cinematics if you don't want to watch. Just about every TBS game from the last 10 years has included this option (or something like it), so I wouldn't worry either way.

Mike C

on Oct 15, 2005

One thing that made the MOO2 auto battles nice to watch, was all of the different specials that a ship might have. Are there specials for GC ships?

Draginol

on Oct 16, 2005

Different weapons and defenses give off different effects.

Mike C

on Oct 16, 2005

Are there just regular weapons or will we see things like pulsars, graviton beams like a certain other game had

Those are what I mean by 'specials', things other then a standard type weapon.

FuzzyMatrix

on Oct 17, 2005

Well I have the best of all worlds: some nice things to test, and no diplomatic spoilers. Thx

Zoomba

on Oct 17, 2005

I answered my own question... disregard.

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