Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Draginol's Articles In GalCiv III Dev Journals
December 5, 2016 by Draginol
We have an opt-in of GalCiv III v1.9 already out.  We continue to update and respond to feedback on it. Here are some changes I made: Diplomacy tech affect to diplomacy ability increased from 0.5 to 1 InfluenceMinToClaim increased from 0.33 to 8 InfluenceRadius root reduced from 3.25 (^0.325) to square root (^0.5) Eliminated the Influence Bell Durve target divsor Influence fall off is increased from -0.3 to –10 Capital Influence per turn i...
November 27, 2016 by Draginol
Disclaimer: For the first series of these I’m going to put these up so that those of you who have no idea who I am don’t get too concerned that there’s this guy endlessly criticizing the game (and other people’s games) in the most unprofessional way.  Who I am: I’m the founder and CEO of Stardock. I wrote the original Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 back in 1993 largely as an AI simulator in which humans were allowed to interact.  It took off from th...
February 3, 2017 by Draginol
Ship design has been part of Galactic Civilizations games for many years.  However, with Galactic Civilizations III, the designer has reached the point where user creations are starting to rival what you would see in movies. The ship designs we included are wholly original creations based on the lore that's been developed over the past 25 years. The ship designer itself lets people put together thousands of parts to create whatever they want. A new design For the serio...
January 23, 2017 by Draginol
Greetings!  Welcome to the first season of Galactic Civilizations III AARs.   Long ago, I used to write stories regarding Galactic Civilizations II .  With the release of Galactic Civilizations III 2.0, I am proud to bring you a new generation of stories based on Stardock's epic 4X strategy game. This is just one story...your story will be completely different. We have detected something... Just beyond Jupiter's orbit, something was noticed.  Somethin...
January 13, 2017 by Draginol
I'm enjoying my time back on Galactic Civilizations.   The team is working on lots of neat things for the upcoming version 2.0 update which is due this month. Here are a few highlights: Administrators There's a new resource called administrators.  Your capital world provides N of them where N is based on the size of the map.  Building a starbase consumes one.  You can get more by researching government related techs but that means you're not res...
November 22, 2016 by Draginol
So tomorrow is my first day on GalCiv III.  It’s been a long break for me.  It’s very nice returning to my baby.  GalCiv III is the first GalCiv game I didn’t design or get to spend much time on.  A few observations The engine is fancy I basically have unlimited memory to work with.  However, it uses a lot of memory.  This isn’t terribly surprising given how complex the ships can get. But it is still a problem.  I spent a l...
April 26, 2017 by Draginol
Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade is an expansion pack for Stardock's popular 4X space strategy game, Galactic Civilizations III.  Crusade is a top-to-bottom update of the entire game.  This article will walk you through what's new, what's changed and try to explain it for those who may not be familiar with the series. The Specs Title : Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade Platform : Windows PC, 64-bit Price : $19.99 if you already have Galactic Civilizations...
April 24, 2017 by Draginol
  Crusade is the space strategy game made by 4X nuts for 4X nuts.   Let's do this. What is Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade? In 2015, Stardock released the latest entry in its popular 4X space strategy game series, Galactic Civilizations III. 4X means eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate and is turn-based.  GalCiv III was well received (81 metacritic) and has a recent Steam review score of 82.  However, coming from Galactic Civilizations II (94...
April 23, 2017 by Draginol
Galactic Civilizations has the distinction of being the longest running strategy game developed by the same company. Let's take a look at how it has changed. Galactic Civilizations OS/2 The game that started it all.  I wrote this game from my dorm room in college.    Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 (1993)   First commercial multithreaded game First commercial game to use more than 256 colors First commercial 32-bit game It was written for I...
April 17, 2017 by Draginol
In our previous entries, we've discussed specific major new features of Crusade.  For this entry, we're going to go through a guided tour of what's new in Crusade over GalCiv III in terms of features and gameplay.  Strap in! Let me preface that this is long and probably a bit full of typos.  I wanted to get this out to you as soon as possible. It's long, but I hope you like it! -brad   Prior to the age of digital distribution, Crusade would be a sequel...
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 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 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...
December 20, 2017 by Draginol
Just in time for Christmas we released version 2.71 which is almost strictly about AI tweaks based on player feedback and saved games.  Now, someone might ask "Why do you need save games to make the AI do [obvious thing]?".  The answer is that with so many different ways of playing the game (both in terms of game setup and in-game strategies) it turns out people play the game very differently from one another.  It's one of the reasons why you have most people who think the...