It was twenty years ago this week that I started playing the Civilization series.  I remember it well as I got enough birthday money to buy a copy of it.  I played and played and I discovered something fascinating – the birds start to sing in south eastern Michigan at around 4:30am.  The game changed my life.  Civilization was the first “4X” game I ever played and I’ve been hooked every since.  It inspired me to become a game developer.  Two years lat...

There’s a show on National Geographic called “Doomsday Preppers”. I’ve never watched it. But I have read a number of blogs from people on the subject and I’ve become convinced that most people, even those into “prepping”, haven’t thought through what would be the likely, and even predictable, steps our society would take as it self-destructed. The doomsday scenarios I have seen discussed revolve around one of the topics below: Economic coll...

Good gravy is this cool: Follow @draginol

Why are computer players so often so dumb? The answer is that we expect computer players to make complex, intelligent decisions super-fast. When we make computer games, we know that players have a very low tolerance for waiting for computer opponents to “think”. Historically, that has meant that computer players either cheat like crazy or are play terribly (or both). In one of the minor video game history footnotes, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations was the first commercial compute...

As a business model, I very much like free to play. Free to Play is a direct response to the digitization of PC gaming. It’s no coincidence that free to play is a PC-centric phenomenon.  If we still had a handful of major PC game publications and a major retail presence, there’d be no free to play.  The market adapts, the consumer benefits. Let’s define free to play: Free To Play is software that is fully functional and useful/fun in its free form. It&rsquo...

64bit operating systems (like Windows 7-64bit) pave the way to expanding games in interesting ways.  Bigger worlds, more players, more unit types, more stuff.  It wouldn’t be fair to those who don’t have 64-bit OSes to have to pay for features and content they can’t use. So the question is, would you support the creation of future DLC that is only available to those who have 64-bit? To vote, go here: https://www.elementalgame.com/journals    F...

Generating about 2.5MWh per month in power.  Far more than I use.  DTE buys the excess energy at 11 cents per KWh.

In our local school district, it’s $7,600 per student. Mind you, this is just the state’s contribution to it. That doesn’t count other sources (local and federal for instance). The total amount is allegedly $12,000 per student. Next time someone yells about the “Slashing” of a few hundred dollars per student, we’re talking a tiny percentage cut. If you paid a teacher $100,000 per year to teach a class of 30 students, that would be $3,000 per student.  There are, cert...

As some people know, the initial release for Fallen Enchantress will not have multiplayer enabled. It was decided early on that 100% of the design and development focus for Fallen Enchantress would be on delivering a world class single player experience. But after release, lots of things become possible.  Advocates of multiplayer tend to be vocal. To gauge genuine interest, how many Fallen Enchantress players would be willing to pay a dollar to support the development time for a multipla...

Let’s look at 3 web stats that tell us a little bit about the demographics of who visits us. First, we’ll use our homepage: Stardock.com. Then, we’ll look at our most popular game, SinsOfASolarEmpire.com And lastly, we’ll look at our most popular desktop utility, Fences. These stats are for the month of April, 2012. Who visit Stardock.com? By Browser: Firefox (34%), Chrome (32%), Internet Explorer (24%) By OS: Windows 7 (58%), XP (34%), Vista (6%) T...

  If you’re looking for a non-politicized (just the facts) site for global temperatures here’s a good one: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ All it does is use the NOAA satellite data to measure the atmospheric temperatures. No more. No less.  As a result, it doesn’t rely on readings ground stations which have tended to be somewhat inaccurate or affected by ambient temperature changes due to man-made construction (i.e. as an area gets ...

We just finished a Star Trek TNG marathon.  Let me first say that a lot of TNG episodes don’t hold up well. Burrrr. Some of them are really bad. But in general, TNG still delivers and there are some truly amazing episodes in there.  Below are my top 5. Please comment below what your favorite ones are. Inner Light Yesterday’s Enterprise The Best of Both Worlds (I and II) Darmok Chain of Command Ironically, had I put this together back in say 2000...

Listen to me bitch and moan while I play Beta 3 of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.

What television series would you recommend to someone to start from scratch? For instance, I’ve never watched Lost but I don’t think I could handle 7+ years or whatever it was of shows mainly because I heard the show ended up like X-Files where the creators were kind of winging it. Any suggestions?

I wrote awhile back how the death of Steve Jobs affected me . This is kind of an update on how things have progressed since then. Now, I don’t consider myself in the same league as Steve Jobs. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some of the titans of our industry and their force of intellect has been humbling. Capability aside, certain types of people are motivated by very similar things. We all have our demons. In my case, I grew up with very little. I never felt I was good enou...