I am having a serious migraine today.  Or I should say, in about 20 minutes I'm going to.  I only get migraines around once a year -- if that.  I have a prescription that can knock down the effects dramatically but unfortunately, I'm at work and the pill is at home. If you've never had a migraine, let me describe what they're like.  For the first half hour, you get a weird vision effect. It's like different parts of your vision are trying to uncloack ala Star Trek Klin...

It might be argued that for an update we kind of went crazy with changes.  But as pleased as we are with all the editor's choice awards that 1.0 has received, we have tried to listen and write down features you guys want, tweaks you wanted made, and new content where necessary. Below is the full v1.1 change log to let you know what's new.  It's by no means complete as we didn't include every minor tweak or change. But it should give you a good overview of what has been changed..&nbs...

Prologue What is a game of Galactic Civilizations II v1.1 like? What has really changed for the regular player over what was in the original retail box? And why did we make it? v1.1 of Galactic Civilizations II isn't a "patch". It's not designed to "fix" things. In the course of making it, was certainly "fixed" bugs that we found and tweaked things that players didn't like, but the point of it was to listen to what players liked and didn't like and add those features to the game.  K...

Last week I wrote about whether strategy games need multiplayer.  There are definitely strong feelings on the matter. In the article, I referred to blogs written by top reviewers Bruce Geryk and Troy Goodfellow.  I want people to understand something specifically -- I referred to them because they are top reviewers in their field. They did not take any points off of GalCiv II because it lacked multiplayer. They were putting forth the reason why many people are passionate about...

Over the past several months we've been hiring a lot of people.  So this weekend I decided to put together a little orientation power point that our HR people can eventually use to help introduce new people to the company. One of the things I wanted to put in there (and did) was our overall philosophy. "The Stardock Way" if you will. I've posted about it before but I've modified it as I've learned more on business and life in general. Here's the 10 rules we use to guide ourselves by: ...

In the world of skinning, the # of creators to consumers has, over time gotten to the point where it's nearly all consumers and almost nobody is creating the content. I'm seeing a little of this in blogging. Joeuser's traffic has been improving at a pretty good pace as the servers have gotten faster again and the reliability has improved. But there's fewer new blogs to read through.  Of course, weather is getting nicer and we don't promote JoeUser for new bloggers, but it's still an i...

Is multiplayer a required feature in a strategy game? Galactic Civilizations II does not have multiplayer.  And while it has averaged 4.5 stars out of 5 (or better) on the major game sites/magazines, most of the reviews have lamented the lack of multiplayer. I talked to Bruce Geryk at length on this issue. Bruce reviewed the game for both 1up and Computer Gaming World.  He and I have talked about multiplayer for a long time and in fact he and I played head to head The Political Mach...

Like many people who play strategy games, we have a lot of ideas for cool features to have in a strategy game.  They come up all the time. Space mines, orbital bombardment, tactical combat, heroes, special agents, asteroid fields, special powers for races, and dozens I won't mention right now. It's not that these aren't good ideas -- they are.  I want many of those features too (except orbital bombardment <g>).  For me, PC strategy games revolve around having good op...

Galactic Civilizations II: 1.1 BETA 4A This is what is new over beta 4 of 1.1.  This, in theory, will be the last public beta of 1.1. + Optimized fleet manager screen for faster response times Implemented  + New Option: "Hide Nebulae and Stars in Ship Preview Windows". This option fixed some compatibility/crash issues some users ran into (video card related). + Only thumbnails for ships your civ can use are pre-loaded Fixed bug where UP would vote to change to Democracy, b...

Do as I say...not as I do... I preach, regularly, that you shouldn't rewrite code. Instead, you should try to learn how it works and fix it or extend it. But sometimes, in rare cases, I find the need to rewrite something. Often it's something I did myself.  I've done a lot of rewriting this weekend. A lot. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and today I pretty much did nothing but work on the AI.  No, it's not work. It's for fun. I mean let's be real, I'm working on a video game.  Any mo...

At some point we want to do an expansion pack.  And by some point, I mean, we have a pretty good idea of what, when, and what would be in said expansion pack.  But there's a lof of "Stuff" involved in deciding what will be in an expansion pack and when it would be launched and how it would be packaged. First a little primer:  Unless you're mega publisher, if you want to be in the stores for Christmas, you have to be released by September 30th. That's the magic date.  Secon...

One of the general areas I have been looking to keep improving on the computer AI is its overall strategic overview.  It's a tricky thing since even in multiplayer games, many tactics simply work well. For example, "rushing" in on-line games is an age-old problem.  My job is to take my online experience and translate it to having computer players that "feel" a lot like human beings (except minus the disconnects and a couple of specific game-related features such as your  "d...

Over good Friday I spent a few hours playing video games. Galactic Civilizations II actually.  With 1.1 nearly done, I wanted to make sure the rest of my AI tweaks started to get in. Moreover, I wanted to try a game where the AI is at its most vulnerable: A game where planets are rare.  The fewer planets there are, the tougher it is for the computer players. That's one of the reasons why metaverse scoring rewards those who play with more planets available. In this test game, each...

JoeUser may be a neat site but it hasn't been IMO a very reliable site. Down times, slow speeds, flakey behavior, bugs, etc.  On the one hand, it's free, so how can we complain? But on the other hand, it's still been down, slow, flakey, and buggy and that just because you're free doesn't mean that you're above criticism. But in the past few days, we've finally started the full upgrade process on our entire server farm.  Shortly after GalCiv II shipped, we did some emergency updates ...

This version basically fixes bugs that were introduced in the 1.1 betas to prepare for the final 1.1 release: Note, your saved games may not work with this version. + Saved games now load MUCH MUCH faster on new saves + Fixed bug in Ship Designer where auto-place would not create a slot icon for modules such as colony, trade, troop, etc + Fixed bug in Ship Designer where auto-placed modules could not be removed from the ship + Fixed crash when trying to buy AI ships from trade...