This holiday weekend my plan is to get some serious AI coding on GalCiv. I've been looking forward to it and my new home PC box has arrived. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if there just isn't as much benefit to upgrading as there used to be but the box it's replacing is over 3 years old. I used to upgrade every year and now it's 3 years. My new box is an Alienware machine. We do a lot of business with Alienware and in the past I haven't bought their machines because the...
Twilight of the Arnor has been a real treat to work on. This week, we're releasing Beta 6 of it and then, over the next week, I'll be dedicated to the computer AI in updating it and balancing the races. The plan is to do a game example for each race, documenting what things are working well and what things need to be balanced. As I post my own observations, I am hoping that fellow players will be chiming in their own ideas and input and I'll be looking forward to integrating...
Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion - if a high quality PC game doesn't sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy. Now, I don't like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well ma...
It is the time of the Twilight of the Arnor. Or, more specifically, time to start going through the AI for enhancements for the new expansion pack. Today, I'm going to play and show BUGS in our stuff as I play. Here we go. I'm playing a Tournament game for this. Now you all will be able to play Drengin-Human Wars. Bug 1 , the name provided should be based on the title of the campaign (Drengin Human Wars) not on file names. Drengin vs. Humans The Dre...
Beta 5 is now here! LOTS of changes. + NEW: Ascension Victory is now enabled! + To win by Ascension Victory, build starbases on the Ascension Crystals scattered throughout the galaxy to absorb their aura. + Each starbase on an Ascension Crystal will give you 1 point per turn towards the necessary 1000 points to win + AI will use specific ascension-based flavor text to describe why they are going to war with you if that is the reason. + AI will now list ascension as one of the reasons why ...
Every year it's the same thing. I get emails asking me if I'm going to have time at GDC to meet with them about some game, industry partnership, licensing opportunity, etc. And each year I respond "Sorry, I won't be at the GDC" (Game Developer's Conference). They're almost universally shocked that I don't attend. It's not that I'm boycotting it. I think the GDC is a great conference. I just don't see what particular benefit it would be to go. From a social aspect, I'm only ...
Lots of stuff going on at the office. We meant to get Beta 5 out this week, there's a ton of changes to Twilight that we're working through. Unfortunately, I have the flu which is slowing me down. But on a brighter note Scott (boogiebac) and his wife just had their first baby but that means he's been out this week. One of the new features we've put in is that players can choose to have the AI design ships for them. While most players choose to design their own ships, this gives new pl...
Warning: Spoilers below. The Thalan have the most unique technology tree in the game because they come from the future. Here are some of their unique technologies: Hyperion Domination (Evil Only) Hyperion Domination incorporates a number of various tweaks to ship design that results in a 10% bonus to ship hit points. Unfortunately, the work to do this is very dangerous. Luckily, the steady supply of slaves abducted across the galaxy to work on these special ship ...
Twilight of the Arnor raises the stakes. I really don't like the concept of nerfing. If someone is too powerful, then I tend to like to correct this by making everyone else subsequently more powerful. Those of you who have played the beta so far can attest that if the civilizations from Twilight were to go up against the same civs from Dread Lords that the Twilight civs would utterly destroy the Dark Avatar civs. But what we're working on right now is just going to be so much fun in ...
The Altarians do not call themselves Altarians. It is the term humans call the residents of the third planet orbiting Ara Centauri. Known as "The Altar", it has become simply known as Altaria since it is the only planet with intelligent life in that part of the galaxy. The evolutionary history of the Altarians is a story on its own. The Altarians name for their own planet is loosely translated as "Elemental". But how they evolved on this world is something of a mystery. Long ago, a sentien...
For the first time ever, my main desktop machine is also a laptop. I never thought that day would come. For the past 3 years, my desktop PC has been what I thought as a very powerful Pentium 4 based Dell XPS system. But after getting a new ThinkPad T61 laptop, I did some benchmarks and discovered that the ThinkPad was substantially faster than the Dell (other than in the hard drive area where both are roughly equal). During the holiday, I plan to work on computer AI in Galactic Civil...
Our story so far... In Winter of 2007, Stardock released the first expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords (GalCiv II). This expansion pack was called Galactic Civilizations: Dark Avatar. It expanded the game play of GalCiv II by adding special planetary environments, asteroid fields, advanced espionage, user-designed opponents, more ship components, and much more. Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar went on to be one of the highest rated PC games of 2007 and was award...
In the beginning they were one race. And they really are still one race. But the seeds for the discord between the two factions of the Arnor came in their creation. One group of the Arnor were created with the ability to perceive time. Their creator considered them superior in believing that the perception of time passing is a key to self-awareness and thus full sentience. The other group was created without a sense of time perception. It was thought that this group would e...
The Precursors were the first sentient species. They didn't call themselves Precursors naturally. They called themselves Arnor. They didn't evolve. They were made. Religion and myth have clouded the specifics of the very beginning. What we have learned (i.e. according to Precursor artifacts that have been found and translated) is that there were once 5 "guardians of the universe" who were sent to ensure that life would come to exist in the universe when the proper time came. Where they came is ...