We plan to release 1.1 this week which means between tomorrow and Sunday. Note to gamers: BETA means it's going to be buggy. I played a long game tonight and it was quite buggy. Hopefully we'll get them straightened out tomorrow. Most of the bugs revolve around the auto pilot line drawing so we may just take that out for the beta and keep working on it. It wasn't a hugely requested option anyway. The New options: People are going to like those. But realistically, I find the g...

This is full test-game #2 using the v1.1 computer AI.  A lot of changes have been made that will affect game play. The purpose of this journal entry is to determine what works and doesn't work and what areas still need to be improved. You WILL see bugs in this as it's our internal beta. Things that have been changed in the computer AI and game: I am making use of the "No Tech Trade" option to see how well the new computer AIs deal with that. The computer AI is much more sophisti...

When it comes to battles, size matters.  To balance that, Galactic Civilizations II introduces the logistics concept. The logistics concept was designed to prevent the age-old strategy game issue where each side just builds a single mongo fleet/army/whatever and wipes out everything in its path.  The number of ships you can put into a fleet is hence limited by your logistics ability which you can research to improve.  How many logistics a ship uses is based on hull size. In ...

In testing the computer AI's updates for v1.1, I'm also making use of some of the new features in v1.1. I'm playing on a large galaxy.  In this game, I'm playing as the Dominion. Back Story The Dominion was a commercially backed colonization effort from the year 2178.  Over 10 million humans from across the globe took part in it and headed out into the galaxy.  Over time, humans and aliens migrated to the new colony called Haven. The year now is 2225 and the quadran...

I took my son to Best Buy to get Galactic Civilizations II.  I wonder how many of his friends believe his dad makes computer games? Probably not many. LOL.

So how exactly does/should production work? Here's how it will work in v1.1 which will seem pretty much the same to people who aren't really into the numbers but will be a major improvement to people who follow stats. On your planets you build factories and research labs.  These factories and labs produce industrial units and technology units. Your spend rate determines what % of your factories and research are to be funded. In addition, the 3 sliders funnel that funding in to militar...

One of the things that bugs me and bugs others is that some of the numbers, especially for abilities, get morphed when they're factored into your production. That's from play balancing and such. But now that the game's been out a couple weeks, we have been able to play around with the values based on how people play. For instance: Abilities. The way research, social production, and military production are going to work is that players will see X% increase in their production.  Half...

Work log on AI for this weekend. 1) Adjust AI strategy for when g_pGalaxy ->abGameOptions[GAME_OPTION_DISABLE_TECH_TRADING] == TRUE 2) Regarding speed of ships.  Player ignusss writes : This is now my understanding of how the AI uses his different military shipclasses: Tiny: Fighter: No engines. Attacker. Small: Defender: No engines. Defending planets. Heavy Fighter: No engines. Attacker. Escort: Multiple engines (often see them with two). Defending transports...

The team is busily working on v1.1.  I thought I'd show you some screenshots of what we've got done so far.  Probably a beta of this will be made public next week. March 18, 2006: The 3 features here we think will make people happy. Still tweaking the wording. But basically you'll have control over whether tech trading is allowed. Blind exploration means you don't get to see the influence of a civilization until you've explored sectors that they're in. And minor races c...

It's not just that I get to make really cool stuff for a living. I mean, I get paid to make computer games for crying out loud. But that's not what makes my job so fun. It's the people. I work with some amazing people. They're not just talented, they're good people.  If I were to describe what a typical day at our office was like, you just wouldn't believe that an office environment with 30 or so people in the main office (everyone else is external) is largely free from "company politic...

Okay, don't freak out...But one of our developers figured out how to make it so that you can rotate and resize your ship parts once they're already on the ship. Yes, FREE FORM rotation. None of that crappy "rotate 90 degree" crap anymore.  And here's the thing, you can create some really whacky stuff with it.  We're going to have to put out a beta or something because some of this new stuff is too cool to wait until the end of the month.  So for our own sanity, we hope to have...

As mentioned previously, the new servers have arrived and the coding team has been working around the clock to optimize code and make tweaks. JU is back! Hopefully you can already tell a performance increase.  

Our achilles heel.  Stardock's server farm has a lot of redundancy. But it has a bottle neck that until the last few months wasn't really a bottleneck. It's a server called Marvin.  Marvin is our Stardock.net account server.  It traditionally hasn't been that busy, but as more and more sites start using it, it's gotten bad. Very bad. The long term solution is to cluster it and use replication to mirror accounts onto other machines to load balance. But that's going to take ti...

Well, today GalCiv2.com got both slashdotted, Digged, and Neowin'ed at the same time. Why? It started earlier today.  Someone over at Digg.com made an article that implied that Stardock wanted people to pirate our game, Galactic Civilizations II.  Which is definitely not true.  We need every sale we can get. But the argument was essentially that because our retail game has no copy protection that we essentially invite piracy. And since sales of the game have been so good, t...

I've been reading a lot of discussion both here and on other sites about ideas and suggestions players have for Galactic Civilizations II.  Stardock, I like to think, is reasonably well known for implementing pretty significant changes into its software well after release.  If we think something is a really good idea and it won't dramatically change the product, we'll seriously consider implementing it.  We've been doing that since the first software products we released over 10 y...