Our story so far 

If you’re reading this, you probably enjoy historical strategy games—I certainly do. Several years ago, my company, Stardock, recruited talented individuals from Firaxis and other studios, establishing two new companies; Mohawk Games and Oxide Games. We split key leadership from Sid Meier’s Civilization IV and V across both studios. 

For a while, my day job involved running these companies alongside Stardock. For their first titles Oxide and Mohawk intentionally avoided historical strategy games to explore new directions. Oxide developed Ashes of the Singularity and Mohawk created Offworld Trading Company. Having brought over Jon Shafer (Civilization V) and Soren Johnson (Civilization IV) to Stardock, with Soren leading Mohawk, we chose not to tempt fate by immediately producing another historical title. However, both studios were eager to dive into historical strategy projects. 

Eventually, running two studios became complicated when early builds of Old World (Mohawk) and Ara: History Untold (Oxide) appeared simultaneously in the same office space. My day typically began reviewing Ara, then I'd walk over to discuss and play Old World with Soren. To avoid any conflict of interest or perception of favoritism, I knew it was time to step back from directly managing both studios. 

4X games in development 

While Ara and Old World were in development, I was back at Stardock overseeing Sins of a Solar Empire II, Galactic Civilizations, and a (sadly) canceled historical strategy/simulation game. Occasionally, I'd check on Ara and Old World to see their progress. 

Old World released first, blending elements of Crusader Kings and Civilization beautifully - it remains a fantastic game. Ara, meanwhile, was still under development, aiming to offer a fresh take on historical turn-based strategy. Creating a 1.0 version of any game is challenging. Every developer knows how hard it is to "finish" a game, with new ideas always tempting further exploration. Ara was full of intriguing concepts but hadn’t yet come together as a commercial game. 

By early 2024, Microsoft and Oxide asked me to step in and help complete Ara. The game had impressive foundational elements and enormous potential but needed significant refocusing. Initially, Ara functioned more as an intricate social simulation—each character was fully simulated, with detailed lives affecting immigration, health, diet, and culture. It was impressive, but not what players expect from a turn-based 4X strategy game. Meeting player expectations is critical. No matter how innovative, games must align with player desires. 

So, together with colleagues from Stardock, Oxide, and our partners at Xbox Game Studios, we dove in and reshaped Ara into a fully realized, turn-based strategy game in just a few months. This rapid development pace had consequences. Even now, screenshots circulating online depict a game significantly different from the final release. While systems like supply chains, crafting, and the Living World excelled, areas like warfare, diplomacy, and micromanagement needed attention. 

Despite these challenges, finishing Ara: History Untold was among the most rewarding experiences of my career. The integration between Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, Oxide, and Stardock teams went beyond mere collaboration - it was seamless. Ultimately, Ara shipped to positive critical reviews and notably stable performance at launch - a rarity for modern games. 

However, due to the late-stage gameplay refinements the game wasn’t ready to “show” its gameplay until just weeks before release, resulting in a quieter release. Nonetheless, Ara has cultivated a small but enthusiastic community of players. 

The Path Forward 

Historical strategy games uniquely benefit from ongoing development. The last game I designed, Galactic Civilizations II, still receives updates 20 years later. Stardock has a long-standing passion for supporting and nurturing gaming communities. Our cofounding of two dedicated strategy game studios demonstrates this commitment. 

We continue to enjoy our great partnership with Microsoft. Collaborative brainstorming sessions between teams from Microsoft, Stardock, and Oxide have been incredibly fun, tackling everything from gameplay mechanics to visual improvements. With Ara’s future firmly rooted in direct community engagement and rapid iteration - something Stardock specializes in - it made sense to transition the day-to-day publishing responsibilities to Stardock. 

What's next? Currently, we’re releasing v1.31, a minor maintenance update. Behind the scenes, substantial work on version 1.4 has been underway since January. This update addresses community priorities: Warfare enhancements, micromanagement improvements, AI refinements, and user experience upgrades. After 1.4, we’re targeting Ara’s first anniversary for version 2.0, essentially a comprehensive reimagining of the game. Version 2.0 will retain Ara’s strengths while fully realizing the vision of a turn-based 4X historical strategy game, aligning closely with the original goals before the game's development shifted toward a social simulation. 

I look forward to sharing these updates and continuing this journey alongside our dedicated community. 

Some screenshots of what's coming to v1.4:

Version 1.4 is going to introduce a new mode: Live Strategic Mode.  This is where Living World elements like armies scale up as you zoom out to help players see what their units are doing and better visualize what they are doing.

Version 1.4 maps will have twice as many regions (at least) per map size as 1.3 does.  This means more room to manuever and generally just more readable maps.  The Earth map has been updated to support this.

Battles will be displayed on the map.  You can still zoom in to get more detail but at a glance you'll see your armies battling it out.  Battles, in general, are also going through a lot of iteration for v1.4.

Greater visual distinction between nations.  Different nations units are somewhat unique looking.  Here you can see Aztech units looking somewhat different from what you'd see from other units of the same class.

More details to come!

Just a quick head's up that we have Ashes of the Singularity 3.3 now in QA.  We'll have more news on it shortly but it's a pretty massive balance update.

This UI was made by AI.  

So was this:

We are not quite at the point where AI can make the actual WindowBlinds skins themselves. Certainly not in real time. But I think we are getting close to where skinners will be able to make skins much more easily.

We have been working on a balance, performance and localization update for Star Control: Origins.  Expect it out in May as a FYI.

We don't generally allow politics on the forums.  With the obvious exception of The Political Machine. The Political Machine - The Power of the Presidency Can Be Yours! Forums

But the world trade situation is probably something worth discussing provided people can avoid assuming "the other" are stupid or evil or greedy or whatever.  

Now, I'm a child of Michigan USA.  Detroit area.  That means cars.  And I can say, regardless of political association, the topic of unfair trade has been discussed endlessly here.

I won't get into the issues with the UAW and Unions and whatnot.  But I will say that the global trade situation is more nuanced than most know.

To side-step the USA vs. China stuff, I want to instead talk about UK.

Last UK blast furnaces days from closure as Chinese owners cut off crucial supplies | Money News | Sky News

The United Kingdom is about to close its last steel plant.  I.e. for the first time since the Bronze Age, the land of England will stop being able to make metal.  That's a bit hyperbolic but the point is the same.  Losing the ability to make certain basic civilizational goods is a problem.

If we lived in a world that would never have any supply disruptions and could avoid having any wars, then it would be perfectly fine for the US, UK, the EU, etc. to just switch to a pure information economy of services and leave the production of physical goods to other countries.  But we don't live in that world.

When COVID hit, Americans discovered that most antibiotics and N95 masks were made elsewhere and no longer readily available.  This is a problem when there is a disruption.  

I don't know what nations should do.  I do know that it is probably a very bad thing if the UK, for instance, can't produce steel anymore.  Similarly, I think it's bad for the world in general if a single country produces virtually all the manufactured goods (whether that be the USA, China, or whatever).

Just my 2 cents.

Today we were finally able to get most of the forums back from the dead.  2 weeks ago we didn't think we would be able to bring them up.  And to be honest, we probably will never get everything back.  

Fun fact: These are (one of) the oldest continuously running forums on the Internet.  When we wrote the forums, back in the late 1990s, we had to do everything from scratch.  We built these to replace Usenet.

So a few things:

If you're forum account is "new" (as in the past few years) there's a good chance you'll need to create a new account.  We didn't lose the posts and we didn't lose the user accounts but we did lose some of the blue that pointed a post to the user account.   So if you are having trouble and you're not an old timer, you'll probably need to create a new account. 

We apologize for the inconvenience.

I recently got back into Virtual Machines and found the performance terrible on Windows 11.   

I couldn't figure out why.  There was noticeable input lag and even moving windows around was sluggish.  

I looked on Reddit and elsewhere and got advice about installing tools or configuring the VM differently but eventually just had a feeling that it had something to do with security on Windows.  So after a lot of trial and error I found this option:

Now, I am not recommending you disable this.  But on my home box, that is behind firewalls and I am using myself in relative isolation, I felt comfortable turning this off when doing VM work.  Doing so brought VM speed back to where you would expect it.

Hoe this helps.

Nearly a month ago now I got a call early in the morning. It was from our IT lead. The Datacenter...was gone.

At first I thought we were under some sort of DOS attack. Then I feared the worst, some sort of Ransomware? Were we going to find out that everything was encrypted and gone? We soon learned, no—but in some ways, it was worse. Everything we had at the Datacenter was wiped out. Everything. 34 Terabytes spread across a dozen+ servers of various ages with unique configurations dating back decades. Some of this stuff had been brought over from OS/2 back in the day. Some of the configurations were originally set up on NT 4 for PowerPC! Gone.

We have near real-time backups to dedicated servers at the datacenter but they were wiped out too. For legal reasons, I can't go into anything more specific than to say everything was gone.

We also do nightly backups off-site as well. But these are the kinds of backups you don't really expect to ever have to use. They're the equivalent of the old tape drives we used to use back in the day. You back up to them but you don't really anticipate ever needing them. But here we were.

The backup was a single, 34TB file. We debated how to get the data back fastest. I mean, couldn't we just put them on a removable HD and ship it? Well, not so much. The NAS or whatever it used at the off-site service has a USB 3.0 connection. Getting the data off would take many days and then have to be reuploaded via the USB HD.

Ok, so transferring it is. We have a 10Gb/sec net connection, how long could it take? The math made it out that we should be able to get it in just a few days. Nope. Weeks. It took weeks.

And once we got it back, things didn't look good. While the raw data was there, it was not obvious how all this would hook up again. Remember, we are talking a hodgepodge of servers that have been around decades. You can't just spin this stuff up.

I talked to Jafo and LightStar and others and I told them I didn't think we'd be getting WinCustomize back. Even if we got the skins and themes back, the spaghetti of the skin library databases would not so easily be brought back to life. Even now, it's not clear how well connected the various files will be.

Near the end of March I wrote:

Dear Artists, Skinners and Designers,

For 24 years we have created amazing things together. I am sad report that we suffered a catastrophic data loss. This data loss also consumed all of our on-site backups as well. While we did have many offsite backups, the sheer size, complexity and fragility of the data has made it impractical to restore them. As a result, we have made the painful decision to close WinCustomize.com.

We have enjoyed the near quarter-century of collaboration, conversation and creation with you. I am sorry to see it end. It is, indeed, an end to an era.

Farewell,

-Frogboy

But the team didn't want to give up. Pat, myself, Jillian, and others from the 2001 era are all still at Stardock and the team was desperate to save WinCustomize.

And so tonight, as I write this, we're...almost back. The site definitely is worse for wear. We are going to need your help to rehabilitate the site and we will be grateful for as much grace and patience that can be sent our way as we still struggle to bring it back. But I am happy to report that WinCustomize has survived—and we couldn't have done it without the incredible determination of our team and the loyalty of our community. It's going to be a journey, but it's one we're committed to taking together.

Over at Reddit I saw this post.

Now, so far this year, the best book I've read has been the new Bobiverse book. But what about you guys?

So you want faster internet speeds, eh? So did I.

Let me tell you about my journey.

It all started with Xfinity offering 1.4Gb/sec internet speeds. I wanted some of that. So I upgraded but noticed that my speeds were still maxing out at around 800Mb/sec. That's pretty good, but a lot less than 1.4Gb/sec.

The first thing I did was get a new cable modem. It has a single 2.5Gb/sec output.

My router actually had a 2.5Gb/sec input port. Victory! Or so I thought. Turns out every single output port on that router maxed out at 1Gb/sec. Well, crap.

So I upgraded my router. This time, I went all-in and got a router with three blazing-fast 10Gb/sec ports. Problem solved, right? Nope. These were SFP+ ports. If you're wondering what SFP+ ports are, join the club—I had no clue. After some Googling, I learned about SFP+ transceivers. Bought some, plugged everything in, and...nothing. Zero connectivity.

Turns out my cable modem absolutely refuses to negotiate anything other than exactly 2.5Gb/sec. And even though those transceivers promised they'd work at 10Gb, 2.5Gb, or 1Gb speeds, they flat-out wouldn't talk to the cable modem.

Fine.  Ok.  I wanted to use an enterprise grade Router but I finally caved and grabbed a consumer Wi-Fi 7 router. Thankfully, this one came with two good old-fashioned 10Gb RJ45 ports. And finally, success! It connected perfectly to the modem at 2.5Gb.  But the other ports on it were slower.

So, what's next? Yep, yet another upgrade—this time, a 10Gb switch to connect everything at the speeds I'd originally envisioned.

So here we are after a week of fiddling, swapping, and reordering networking gear, I finally hit that sweet 1.4Gb/sec speed. ..or as someone around here put it: my internet is now imperceptibly faster.