Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Draginol's Articles » Page 2
March 17, 2017 by Draginol
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.
March 16, 2017 by Draginol
What kind of people are you? I think the biggest reason the Galactic Civilizations series has been so popular over the years has been because each game is your own epic story. In fact, the biggest request we get is to make the galaxy feel move alive.  With this Spring's mega expansion to Galactic Civilizations III, we hope to do just that. With Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, we've been able to use the new, 64-bit, multicore game engine to create a much more lively...
March 13, 2017 by Draginol
  ## ASHES OF THE SINGULARITY IS EVERYWHERE ## We just came back from the Game Developer's Conference.   It was a great week for the Nitrous engine (the underlying engine used in Ashes of the Singularity). Big News: AMD is bundling Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with more and more CPUs   The hardware bundling keeps a steady stream of new players coming into our community. Moreover, the AMD Ryzen chips, which are 8-cores, really show off the power of th...
March 13, 2017 by Draginol
  ## ASHES OF THE SINGULARITY IS EVERYWHERE ## We just came back from the Game Developer's Conference.   It was a great week for the Nitrous engine (the underlying engine used in Ashes of the Singularity). Big News: AMD is bundling Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with more and more CPUs   The hardware bundling keeps a steady stream of new players coming into our community. Moreover, the AMD Ryzen chips, which are 8-cores, really show off the power of th...
March 8, 2017 by Draginol
Spying on Aliens Galactic Civilizations is a game that asks the question: What happens after we start colonizing other planets? For our purposes, we are going to assume that we will come into contact with alien civilizations. Alien civilizations will have their own histories, cultures and ideals that we can only fathom.  In Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, you will be able to train your citizens to learn more about these other civilizations and, if necessary, do very bad th...
February 23, 2017 by Draginol
4X strategy. You may have heard of the term. It stands for: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.  They are a specific genre of strategy game.  Today we are going to talk about them and how Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, aims to innovate the genre. Besides 4X, there are other genres:  Real-Time Strategy games (RTS), such as Ashes of the Singularity and StarCraft, focus on harvesting resources to build units in order to destroy the enemy with it all happening...
February 16, 2017 by Draginol
By definition, there can only be one singularity. Ashes of the Singularity and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation are being merged.  There will be only one game: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Everyone who already has Ashes of the Singularity will also have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.  To understand why we have decided to do this a little background on the development of Ashes of the Singularity is needed... Once upon a time... Ashes of...
February 16, 2017 by Draginol
By definition, there can only be one singularity. Ashes of the Singularity and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation are being merged.  There will be only one game: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Everyone who already has Ashes of the Singularity will also have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.  To understand why we have decided to do this a little background on the development of Ashes of the Singularity is needed... Once upon a time... Ashes of...
February 15, 2017 by Draginol
Sliders. Knobs. Checkboxes. Such is the spread-sheet roots of strategy games. Let's fix that. Going back 15 years to Galactic Civilizations I for Windows, players managed their economy like this: GalCiv I: Sliders.   In Galactic Civilizations I, you would set your tax rate. Your tax rate affected the approval rate on your planets.  You could then decide how much of your GDP the government would take control of with the spending slider.  From ther...
February 14, 2017 by Draginol
Overview Years ago, Random House asked me to write a book around the Elemental universe.  As a first time author, I was assigned an editor, Dave Stern, who soon became a good friend of mine. Over the course of writing the book, now sold on Amazon , Dave and I would go back and forth on the story along with Random House's requests to ensure that the book was commercially successful.  I will be the first to admit that my vision of the story may not have been as comm...
February 9, 2017 by Draginol
Galactic Civilizations games have had ship building in them for almost 20 years.  And ever since, people have used it to create all kinds of amazing designs from robots to their favorite Sci-Fi ships. Ship designer from Galactic Civilizations II With Galactic Civilizations III, players were able to share their designs with millions of other players via Steam Workshop.  Suddenly, players could download and play with almost any type of ship imaginable. As much as players loved...
February 6, 2017 by Draginol
Our story so far... Stardock loves real-time strategy games.  Our customers love real-time strategy games ( Sins of a Solar Empire remains our best selling game of all time).  And we want your opinion on something important to us. When Stardock sold off its digital distribution business to GameStop in 2011, we took that capital to help found a number of new studios including Soren Johnson's Mohawk Games , Mothership Entertainment , Stardock Towson and Oxide Games ...
February 6, 2017 by Draginol
Our story so far... Stardock loves real-time strategy games.  Our customers love real-time strategy games ( Sins of a Solar Empire remains our best selling game of all time).  And we want your opinion on something important to us. When Stardock sold off its digital distribution business to GameStop in 2011, we took that capital to help found a number of new studios including Soren Johnson's Mohawk Games , Mothership Entertainment , Stardock Towson and Oxide Games ...
February 3, 2017 by Draginol
Greetings! February is here and there is a ton of stuff to talk about. [..] ## VULKAN ## We have been working diligently on Vulkan support and I am pleased to tell you that we have it...mostly working.  We are tentatively scheduled to release Escalation v2.1 (Ashes 1.51) on February 16.   Unfortunately, Vulkan won't make it in there as it needs a little more time to bake. ## REPLAYS ## We have this.  It's not super stable though so we're still ...
February 3, 2017 by Draginol
Greetings! February is here and there is a ton of stuff to talk about. [..] ## VULKAN ## We have been working diligently on Vulkan support and I am pleased to tell you that we have it...mostly working.  We are tentatively scheduled to release Escalation v2.1 (Ashes 1.51) on February 16.   Unfortunately, Vulkan won't make it in there as it needs a little more time to bake. ## REPLAYS ## We have this.  It's not super stable though so we're still ...