If you don’t already have a subscription to Stardock Magazine, you can join at https://www.stardock.com/subscribe My Twitter ID is https://twitter.com/draginol Our Twitch channel is http://www.twitch.tv/stadock (please subscribe there or they will beat me!) Some screenshots: WindowBlinds 10.5 Stardock Launcher Fan shot of Escalation Massive AI created fleet thanks to the new AI update. ...
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...
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...
Greetings, I know some of you clicking on this email are hoping that I’m here to tell you about Sins of a Solar Empire II. I hope to be able to talk more about Sins of a Solar Empire more in the near future but today I wanted to make sure you know that we’re releasing a new RTS today that I think you might like: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. In many respects, it’s Sins of a Solar Empire on the surface of a planet. If you already know you want it, get it here: http:...
Stardock has released the final update for its political strategy/simulation game, The Political Machine 2016. The new version adds “Election Integrity” as an issue, updates the Probing HIllary’s emails issue and provides some new random events such as Internet Revelations, Foreign interference, Internal party revolt and more. The most recent AI vs. AI simulation of Trump vs. Clinton has the Democratic candidate up by 4 points nationally with the top issues including “Securin...
My desktop running WindowBlinds, DeskScapes, WindowFX, Fences, Start10 at 5K resolution IconPackager, Tiles and more at 5K resolution Object Desktop is a suite of desktop enhancement utilities designed to allow users to customize their Windows desktop to work however they want it to work. The core components of it are: WindowBlinds – customize the Windows GUI Fences – organize your desktop IconPackager – customize your icons ...
Greetings! We’re releasing the biggest DLC for Offworld Trading Company yet today. It adds a lot of new content and is, btw, only $4.99. The Campaign The Patron and the Patriot is a DLC pack focused on enhancing the single player campaign mode within Offworld Trading Company. The campaign mode that shipped with the base game operates like a competitive tournament that lasts for seven games. There are nine characters to play, each with their own set of perks...
Greetings! Today we are opening up the Founder’s Program to Phase II in preparation for alpha testing (Fall) and beta testing (Winter). If you haven’t seen the gameplay teaser, you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/K6ntg47q_cM We’re still very early in development as you can see. The creatures and other cool stuff on the planets weren’t quite ready to show yet and we’re saving the best parts for a later reveal. Feature status ...
The first significant update to Sorcerer King: Rivals it out. Most of it had to do with making the neutrals behave more intelligently (attacking enemies, building things better, etc.). We also update the UI to make the Ascension spell much more accessible to players. We also had a pretty major improvement to late game performance thanks to a customer who sent me a saved game who was running into this. The result is that late game should be much much fa...
Right now, Galactic Civilizations III supports: English French German Russian Because of the way we made Galactic Civilizations III, translation is very expensive. There are a lot of words. But nearly all of it is in the technology descriptions. In this screenshot you see the short-description. And this one shows the long description. Translation costs by the word. That long description has 38 words and each civiliza...
If you are like me you are probably the guy that people call for help on their computer. Recently, I discovered the Intel Device Advisor . It’s as brilliant in its concept as it is straight-forward in its implementation. Here’s how it works: You download it and run it. It stays in the background for a long while (as in, days). It then reports to you, based on your uses, things you might need and where you can get them. This is something Windows sh...
I had the opportunity to get a saved game from a player who was experiencing long turn times. This was extremely useful because it’s one of those things you “hear” about sometimes but it “never happens on my machine”. I was able to reproduce it and the results were fascinating. A huge part of the cost was recalculating those zones of control. This is something that has always been in there (going all the way back to Elemental) but over time, it appears to ...
PC gaming, at some point in the past year or two, has changed from expecting expansion packs to be offered as an integrated product to demanding they be released as DLC. Sorcerer King: Rivals stumbled into this brave new world. Our story so far: Last year, we released a fantasy 4X/RPG game called Sorcerer King. It takes place in our Elemental game universe and is a combination of a 4X strategy game with RPG elements. It’s a really fun game. In that game, you start ...
Greetings! Many years ago I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 in my dorm room in college. Some of you reading this may have even played it a long long time ago. Following its success, I always wanted to make a fantasy strategy game. Our first try at it was somewhat of a disaster. We made this amazing, custom, fantasy 4X engine but we couldn't quite get the game right. That game, of course, was Elemental: War of Magic. I was so disappointed in it that we gave its sequel ...
Overview Since there’s a lot of material to go over, I’ll try to be as succinct as possible. For Diary #1 we will cover: Directory Structure Quick Links How to cheat Sample Quest: Editing existing Sample Quest: Creating new one Debugging your quest Sharing your Quests Directory Structure For our purposes, I am going to refer to this directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sorcerer Kin...