We're glad that people are liking what we've done with Galactic Civilizations II v1.1. 

We plan to keep doing updates for quite awhile that add new features and functionality to the game.

The last poll showed >90% of users were happy with the changes we made. But around 8% said they were having some technical issues with it and the team investigated this and found that the extra use of memory to speed up performance on larger galaxies has had some negative side effects on stability for those users. This was especially true on (ironically) saving games where a huge memory allocation is made to speed up saving (which for some people resulted in massively longer save times and then it crashing).

So this week we plan to release a v1.11.  The goal being to keep the speed ups but do it without using up extra memory which in turn will hopefully elminate the problems users with small swapfiles ran into.

There will be a full log of what's new in v1.11 before we make it available.  We will take the opportunity to incorporate some new AI strategies based on our playing, er I mean, intense, professional analysis of the game's underlying mechanics.

It also has a new option that users can set to have the AI make use of more advanced algorithms that are more CPU intensive for users who are willing to wait a bit longer between turns. This won't be used in v1.11 yet since those new algorithms still have to be written (but I have a good idea of what they'll be).

Once v1.11 is out, we continue on our way to v1.2 which we still intend to get out this month (May).  The main new feature of v1.2 has to do with modding. We want to make it trivially easy for users to make use of "total conversion" mods from within the game. 

The other significant change to gameplay in v1.2 will be the combat system.  Previously, the attacker took their shot and IF the defender survived, they could fire back.  This turns out, in practice, to be very de-balancing. On paper (i.e. in the design) it seemed like a good idea. 

In v1.2, we're going back to our original GalCiv combat mechanic -- attacker attacks and then defender gets to shoot back and then it looks to see who died.  The attacker still has the advantage of being able to pick the time and place of battle but it's no longer quite so overwhelming an advantage and will encourage ships that have (gasp) defenses on it.

Once v1.2 is done, we will start on v1.3. The feature set of that hasn't been thought of. We just read on the forums and see what people would like added.  I'm partial to a Galactic Encyclopedia feature. But we'll see what users want.

The point of these updates is to ensure that your hard-earned purchase results in a game that remains fresh and new for as long as we can.

Stay tuned.