One of the things that I tend to fixate on is the shape of my territory.  Anyone else like this? In GalCiv III: Crusade, I re-wrote how the territory expands.  Crusade comes out this Spring.

Stardock has released the final update for its political strategy/simulation game, The Political Machine 2016.  The new version adds “Election Integrity” as an issue, updates the Probing HIllary’s emails issue and provides some new random events such as Internet Revelations, Foreign interference, Internal party revolt and more. The most recent AI vs. AI simulation of Trump vs. Clinton has the Democratic candidate up by 4 points nationally with the top issues including “Securin...

Stardock has updated its popular strategy game, The Political Machine 2016 with new issues and new candidates to run with including Jill Stein, Bill Weld and Tim Kaine.  In addition, new issues like the National Anthem protest have also been added into the game’s simulation. In The Political Machine, you run for President of the United States. You can run using existing candidates such as Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or create your candidate.  One recent update allows you to si...

Ever wonder how popular a given game really is? How many times have you read on a forum about how some game is way more popular than some other game.  Is there a reasonable objective way to tell? Actually, yes. www.steamcharts.com Here are some Stardock games: LH: http://www.steamcharts.com/app/228260#All Sins: http://www.steamcharts.com/app/204880 GalCiv II: http://www.steamcharts.com/app/202200 There are a lot of metrics you can come up with to t...

Been playing a lot of Company of Heroes lately.  One feature I really really like is the Automatch  vs. AI feature.  So it gathers a random group to go up against a set of AI players. It’s remarkably fun. Anyone have this yet? What are your thoughts?

  Hi all! As some of you know, Draginol is my “alt” handle here for Frogboy. Anyway, this week I was on PolyCast, a popular Civilization-related podcast and this episode focused heavily on the upcoming Civilization V expansion “Brave New World”. Feel free to check it out here: http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season7/episode176.mp3 You can see other episodes here: http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season7.php

GameSpy’s Katie Williams has a terrific blog on the real misogyny that exists in the game industry. You can read it here: http://alivetinyworld.com/2012/11/27/too-many-reasons-why/ In the article she writes: I’ve been watching the #1reasonwhy hashtag on Twitter with an anxious kind of understanding. Like, part of me wants to jump right in and post a dozen of my own experiences, but I’ve also learned what happens if you say that shit publicly: you’re berated,...

Stupid Thanksgiving sale.  It’s too late for me.  Save yourselves!

Despite only a handful of reviews (average review score 4/5), it is in the top list of games being played by Steam even though the people most likely to buy this type of game got it for free as a non-Steam game (so it won’t count).  I think it’s safe to say that Fallen Enchantress is the start of a beautiful new fantasy game world.

Smarter developers than myself (Which would be most of them) have told me that there are “Tricks” to making DirectX 9 support multithreaded graphics.  Unfortunately, they’re beyond my capability. DirectX 11, by contrast, natively supports a process spinning off a graphics related job into a thread (as opposed to it being in the same thread as the main message pump thread). When I joined the Fallen Enchantress team as lead developer (the first time I’ve held that position in over a...

Came up with a bunch of good names for future games --- so good that they were already taken, somewhere at some time. And because we’re such a litigious society, people will sue over even partial names. I remember getting a threatening letter because we had a technology in Galactic Civilizations II called “Space Marines” and that they had a trademark on that name. We renamed it to Stellar Marines (sounds better anyway). In recent times, companies have had to resort with coming up ...

I discovered something interesting. Unless I’m mistaken, large address aware 32-bit games may be able access up to 8TB of memory.  I don’t know what tricks the OS is using to do this (a 32-bit process should only be able to see 4GB) but a cursory look indicates when running on 64-bit version of Windows 8, a 32-bit process that is using large address aware is “seeing” 8TB. Take that with a grain of salt since my guys are skeptical about whether you can actually use any of that.  ...

Real-time game streaming service, OnLive was a phenomenon when it debuted a couple years ago.  I think my precise opinion of it was “It’s doomed”.  More nuanced comments can be found here: http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/03/25/stardock-ceo-speaks-about-onlive/ My opinion hasn’t changed on it even though it is a marvelous technology. I was hoping they’d got bought out or something to be incorporated as part of a larger solution. See more here: http://mashable.com/2012...

It was twenty years ago this week that I started playing the Civilization series.  I remember it well as I got enough birthday money to buy a copy of it.  I played and played and I discovered something fascinating – the birds start to sing in south eastern Michigan at around 4:30am.  The game changed my life.  Civilization was the first “4X” game I ever played and I’ve been hooked every since.  It inspired me to become a game developer.  Two years lat...

Why are computer players so often so dumb? The answer is that we expect computer players to make complex, intelligent decisions super-fast. When we make computer games, we know that players have a very low tolerance for waiting for computer opponents to “think”. Historically, that has meant that computer players either cheat like crazy or are play terribly (or both). In one of the minor video game history footnotes, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations was the first commercial compute...