People with fancy new monitors make me mad. That's because I don't have a fancy new monitor.  But Paul Boyer, the UI designer behind GalCiv II has a new one.  See the screenshot there? That's from his monitor. There's been so much going on.  I didn't get to bed until 5am last night.  The number of touches, tweaks, and enhancements to make the game "fun" has been immense. For me, I'm been working on balance. Making sure the game is fun and challenging.  This has...

So much of a strategy game, particularly a single player one comes down to little things like pacing. If things cost too much, it's too slow and boring.  If things cost too little, then things move too fast and nothing has value. That also holds true to the difficulty levels. How hard should it be? How aggressive should the computer players be?  For me, what I've tried to do is make it so that I can beat the game at "Intelligent" (for the AI players) but just barely. At higher le...

The hours are starting to get to us.  Stardock, as a company, is 7/8's a Windows desktop software developer and 1/8th game developer/publisher. At least, that's how revenue in 4th quarter came out to be.  It's not that the games do so badly but rather our other products are so popular. But right now, nearly everyone in the office is on Galactic Civilizations II.  One thing that really hurt us is turn-over.  In all the years we've done games, we've never had anyone...

It's been a productive holiday season.   The AI that existed in Beta 5 (public) is dead. It's gone now. And it won't be remembered fondly. Not by me at least.  It functioned.  But the fact is, in a game that has no multiplayer the standard of quality on AI should be very very high.  It isn't enough for a game AI to be challenging.  The AI needs to be more than that.  It needs to play like a human being.  Much of what I've done this holiday is go through an...

When I play strategy games against the computer I am always amazed that no one does a simple for loop through the enemy units to see if they're literally just outside my city, base, planet, whatever ready to attack. That's what we humans tend to do.  The most lethal strategy in these kinds of games is usually to line up our units, ready to attack and then WHAM, knock down the AI in a couple of lethal turns. In GalCiv, there is also the influence attack -- building influence base after...

One of my biggest disappointments in the GalCiv I AI was how it fought its wars militarily. The computer players in GalCiv I were given a lot of kudos but that mainly was because they were so efficient in how they handled their resources and on-the-fly military decision making. But when it came to the overall strategy of war, the AI was disappointing.  It wasn't supposed to be that way, it's just that the best laid plans can fall apart when things get complicated and there's not much ...

GalCiv II has a new diplomacy AI.  It's a complete rewrite from what was in Galciv I.  The AI literally calculates how much it should like a given player based on a broad range of factors.  Some of these factors are displayed on the "report" dialog on the foreign policy window. During the course of the betas, the kinks in the new system have shown up and this past week I've been going through and addressing them.  For example, the AI tended to go to war with way too many p...

"So what did you do over your Christmas break?" "Rewrote several key modules of the artificial intelligence engine in Galactic Civilizations..." Galactic Civilizations has always been known for its strong artificial intelligence.  Since the game is designed to be a single player game, it bloody better have good computer players.  Most people reading this don't know me very well but I'm actually a multiplayer fanatic.  I was one of the top ranked Starcraft players on Ba...

As I get older or at least busier, I have a lot less toleration for micro management.  I just don't find it fun.  I know lots of people do but I personally hate it.  When I play Civilization IV, for instance, those workers go on A (auto improve) right away.  And I think it works fine.  I'm sure the workers aren't optimal but they're well into the "good enough for me" area. That said, I've always resisted having any micro management issues resolved by computer AI. ...

The weapons in GalCiv beta 4 aren't well balanced.  We're moving towards the point when it's time to start thinking about how to balance the weapons and defenses. In general, the idea is that defense technologies will be somewhat cheaper to research and be somewhat cheaper to put on your ship than weapons. But they'll both use up costly space. So what's more important? SIZE or COST?  Cost is the pain that keeps on coming because the Maintainance cost on a military vessel is 3% it...

For Beta 5 (December) we're going to be adding a new invasion system.  I won't give away too many of the details but we still want to factor in some very simple, straight forward advantages. Here's what we've got: Advantage Description 5 Invading Army's Air Superiority 1 Tech Advantage 1 Tech Advantage>2 1 Tech Advatnage>4 1 Tech Advantage>8 1 Race is Neutral Aligned 1 Planet has Invasion Defense built ...

In the original Galactic Civilizations on OS/2, playing as good, neutral, and evil were considered to be pretty innovative concepts for a strategy game.  Depending on which moral alignment you chose, different ships, technologies, and plantary improvements would come into play.  Moreover, how races interacted with you would heavily depend on it as well. In Galactic Ciivlizations II, released over ten years after the original OS/2 version, such moral issues in strategy games are no l...

So how are the different civilizations in Galactic Civilizations different? The easiest way to illustrate the difference that I can think of is how each of the civilizations would deal with the scenario in which they are driving a car down the road and there's a turtle trying to cross... The Drengin would swerve onto the shoulder in order to squash the turtle. The Arceans would run over the turtle if it were on the road, otherwise they would drive past. The Humans would swerve ...

This week we're starting to work on the Civilization Manager.  Galactic Civilizations I didn't have a Civilization manager and some people thought that was definitely something we should have.  And we agree.  BTW, the screenshot doesn't have anything to do with it, just wanted to have something pretty to go along with this blog entry. So what does the Civilization Manager have on it?  Four things: Civilization Summary This is a screen that displays in brief informat...

The relations system in GalCiv 1 was dynamic but hard to understand.  The AI would look at where it currently was in terms of how it felt about you, go through a load of calculations, and then adjust its relations.  The problem was that it was often hard to understand. So this time, I've started making it so that the AI calculates its relations with you from scratch each turn rather than adjusting up and down. Different situations given different points for and against you. ...