This is going to be long and go into both Escalation, the development of Ashes of the Singularity and discuss the technological singularity. Our story so far… This past Spring Stardock released the real-time strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity.  It’s a game set in the post-technological singularity future in which humans have begun to expand to other planets.  In this future, a single individual is so powerful that they can manage entire armies of...

  ESCALATE ON NOVEMBER 3 On November 3, Ashes of the Singularity gets its first expansion pack: Escalation.  It’s a stand-alone expansion which means that if you don’t already have Ashes of the Singularity, you can just buy Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and get everything that’s in the base game too.   TOTAL ANNIHILATION vs. SUPREME COMMANDER There are a lot of reasons we decided to separate the base game from Escalation.  Much of this...

  ESCALATE ON NOVEMBER 3 On November 3, Ashes of the Singularity gets its first expansion pack: Escalation.  It’s a stand-alone expansion which means that if you don’t already have Ashes of the Singularity, you can just buy Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and get everything that’s in the base game too.   TOTAL ANNIHILATION vs. SUPREME COMMANDER There are a lot of reasons we decided to separate the base game from Escalation.  Much of this...

  Right now, Galactic Civilizations III supports:   English French German Russian   Because of the way we made Galactic Civilizations III, translation is very expensive.  There are a lot of words.  But nearly all of it is in the technology descriptions. In this screenshot you see the short-description. And this one shows the long description. Translation costs by the word.  That long description has 38 words and each civiliza...

If you are like me you are probably the guy that people call for help on their computer.  Recently, I discovered the Intel Device Advisor . It’s as brilliant in its concept as it is straight-forward in its implementation. Here’s how it works: You download it and run it.  It stays in the background for a long while (as in, days).  It then reports to you, based on your uses, things you might need and where you can get them.  This is something Windows sh...

I had the opportunity to get a saved game from a player who was experiencing long turn times.  This was extremely useful because it’s one of those things you “hear” about sometimes but it “never happens on my machine”. I was able to reproduce it and the results were fascinating. A huge part of the cost was recalculating those zones of control.  This is something that has always been in there (going all the way back to Elemental) but over time, it appears to ...

PC gaming, at some point in the past year or two, has changed from expecting expansion packs to be offered as an integrated product to demanding they be released as DLC.  Sorcerer King: Rivals stumbled into this brave new world. Our story so far: Last year, we released a fantasy 4X/RPG game called Sorcerer King.  It takes place in our Elemental game universe and is a combination of a 4X strategy game with RPG elements.  It’s a really fun game. In that game, you start ...

Engineers are terrible at marketing.  We really are.  If you’re playing Ashes of the Singularity, you may have noticed we updated the game last week. A minor update with some major changes.  Under the covers, Nitrous got a pretty big boost.  But because it doesn’t add features, it didn’t get a lot of attention.  But performance wise, it was the result of months of optimization. Making the largest scale RTS of all time is a big challenge in 2016. ...

Engineers are terrible at marketing.  We really are.  If you’re playing Ashes of the Singularity, you may have noticed we updated the game last week. A minor update with some major changes.  Under the covers, Nitrous got a pretty big boost.  But because it doesn’t add features, it didn’t get a lot of attention.  But performance wise, it was the result of months of optimization. Making the largest scale RTS of all time is a big challenge in 2016. ...

Greetings! Many years ago I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 in my dorm room in college. Some of you reading this may have even played it a long long time ago. Following its success, I always wanted to make a fantasy strategy game. Our first try at it was somewhat of a disaster. We made this amazing, custom, fantasy 4X engine but we couldn't quite get the game right.  That game, of course, was Elemental: War of Magic.  I was so disappointed in it that we gave its sequel ...

  Overview Since there’s a lot of material to go over, I’ll try to be as succinct as possible. For Diary #1 we will cover: Directory Structure Quick Links How to cheat Sample Quest: Editing existing Sample Quest: Creating new one Debugging your quest Sharing your Quests   Directory Structure For our purposes, I am going to refer to this directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sorcerer Kin...

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...

Author’s note Some years ago Stardock developed a game called Elemental: War of Magic.  We loved it.  Unfortunately, it was a bridge too far.  Too ambitious and it largely collapsed under its own tech.  The name Elemental was tarnished and we moved away from using it. The original plan was to have: Elemental: War of Magic (2010) Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (2012) Elemental: Legendary Heroes (2014) Elemental: Sorcerer King (2016) Ah the b...

I run a software company.  I have for over 20 years.  Once in awhile, someone will ask me what my “net worth” is.  I have to respond, “It depends on whether you value intellectual property”. Intellectual property, IP, would be things my software company owns or has rights to such as Galactic Civilizations or Start8 or our websites and our patents and trademarks.  How much are they worth? It depends. There are a number of ways of valuing intellectual property. If the...