VS.   by Brad Wardell (designer of both) Updated: 3/11 So what is the difference between Galactic Civilizations II and the first Windows version from 2003?  This article will take a look at that and offer some editorial criticism/comparisons between the two. A long time ago... In 2003, Galactic Civilizations ( www.galciv1.com ) was released.  The total budget for the title was $600,000. But in reality, it was less than that. Far less.  The development budget for...

It's been decided that we are going to do a 1.X.2 release. Don't know when. But there's little tweaks and changes we want to make. The team fixed some glitches that have been reported on the forums. But for me, it gives me a chance to start having some fun with the AI. Stupid AI At lower levels, I want the AI to play stupidly. I don't want them to just be super smart but economically starved. There are a bunch of APIs in there for the AI that will cause it to make "newbie" mistakes.&n...

Every community, especially one as close-knit as JU's is going to have melodrama.  Sometimes, it's like watching a car wreck. You don't want to look but it's hard not to. Drama, intrigue, gossip, they're hard to resist. I tend to be a pretty plain person.  I think that's why I've stayed interested in on-line communities for so long or at least survived them this long.  Being straight forward and consistent is, in my opinion, the key to thriving long-term in an on-line commu...

Some people have argued that JoeUser makes money from ad revenue. Of course, the real question isn't whether it makes money but rather it nets money. Here's what it "made" in February: JoeUser 163,337  93  0.1%   $15.66 That's 164,337 impressions for the google ad. 93 click thrus. .1% conversion rate for $15.66. Now, I don't think anyone needs to be an IT manager to know what the net revenue is. But that's fine.  The site doesn...

World of Warcraft is one of my favorite games. I was in the beta from the start of it and when released, re-did my Paladin. And it was good.  I didn't really pay much attention to all the numbers. I knew that doing X was better than doing Y.  I didn't really know how much better it was, I just knew it was from the description.  My Paladin today doesn't resemble too much my Paladin of that initial launch (let alone the beta). A lot of that is from player feedback.  Third p...

What's new in 1.0X(.1) + NOTE: Your ship designs from 1.0D1 and before will NOT show up in this version. We have updated this version so that the ships contain their own unique version ID so that when we do FUTURE updates, your ships will still work. But we didn't implement this until now (now that we have seen the sophisticated ship designs people are creating).  So we apologize in advance for that, but it shouldn't be a problem going forward. CLARIFICATION: Your ships i...

In a perfect world, we could release an update every single day.  But from a marketing point of view, that would be a disaster. You need pauses between releases in order to justify announcements and the like.  If you're doing a daily update, a site like Blues News or Gamespot is not going to mention it, they couldn't. I've mentioned this previously but when I play the game, I have it in the debugger.  Previously, I only had my own insticts to go off on when it came to tweaking ...

Some users have suggested that we prune/moderate the GalCiv II forum.  The reason for this is because what inevitably happens is that as a software product gets out there, you end up with a lot of people in absolute numbers who have a problem, ignore pinned topics, and just make an obnoxiously titled posts such as "This game sux! bugz! Rushed to release!!11" or something to that effect.  If you have a 2% problem rate and you have 50,000 people running the game, that means you've go...

The Galactic Civilizations Experience: Quick Start Guide... This guide is designed to give brand new players a quick introduction into how they can get going in the game without being crushed. Journal Entry: Starting up the game… Alright, I’ve got the box home. Now, if I can just get the top off, why do they make these things so that it’s nearly impossible to get the top cover of the box off without wrecking the box itself?  You know, the little plastic thingy at the top. I don't h...

Oh we're all unique in how we behave on-line right? Or are we? The Flame Warrior site is incredibly insightful and has been around a long time.  You would be surprised at how well many of us fit into one of these on-line personas. For example, here on JoeUser or other Stardock sites I'm probably this: The Admin But on other forums, this is me: Tireless Rebutter Looking at many of the regulars we have all kinds of people here ranging from: Cry baby Deacon ...

Video options: Make the units look like plastic Having fun with the new video settings.  You can turn of textures and such and it will speed up the game on lower end systems but it also gives the game a pretty strange but neat look.  In this screenshot, I kept the textures on for planets and stars but took them off for pretty much everything else.  Looks kind of like plastic.

It's been another long week.  I went to bed at 6:30am this morning, got up at around 10am and worked until around 11pm.  My schedule is pretty screwed up at this point.  But I think we've turned the corner in terms of work.  GalCiv stuff... We got Galactic Civilizations II 1.0X out the door.  I certainly hope it's "good enough".  It's really difficult to tell on so many different systems. I always get worried that we'll put something out and there will be s...

There are 9 different AI personalities in Galactic Civilizations II.  Which makes debugging oh so fun.  But there are significant advantages to it as well. First question, why write 9 different AI personalities? Most games have one.  The answer to this is because in a single player game, players usually find a weakness in a given AI and then it's boring.  So we coded up 9 different ones.  They are all derived from the same base class so there are a lot of similarities...

The Dread Lord Menace At the dawn of the 23rd century of humanity, mankind was a rising star in the galaxy.  Amongst the younger races, they were in ascension. The humans had defeated the vile Xendar only 10 years earlier and many of the minor races looked to the humans for guidance. The humans are different. Having only recently joined the interstellar club, they were open to other cultures and believe in building coalitions.  This is a stark contrast with some other civilizations...

I'm feeling pretty cranky today.  This week.  This month. Part of it has to do with not having had a single day off since Thanksgiving.  I even worked on Christmas day.  Every day. 7 days a week.  A few weeks ago I pulled a 111 hour week.  The last week or so I did over 80. I'm tired. Very tired. Last week I had to temporarily take down JoeUser since the site, which is not a business enterprise, eats up around 30% of the database bandwidth of our critical ...