The next update to Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion will see the shadows get another pass.  In the screenshot above you can see the current version and the new version side by side.

Greetings!

Every year Stardock sends out a survey to the millions of users in its database to get a better understanding of where the market is, what people would like to see from us and just get a better idea of who is using our software.

We also include a summary description of all the things we’ve been working on and some sneak peeks of what we’re planning to do over the course of the year.

So without further delay, here it is:

[The Stardock 2012 Customer Report]

I just checked in the first major LH-specific AI update.  Players should notice a pretty significant improvement.

I fixed a pretty obnoxious bug with regards to city leveling which was absolutely crippling the AI mid to late game (the effect was that city level choosing ended up largely random).

But overall, a few thousand lines of code were either written or modified with LH in mind.  It'll be interesting to see the effect others see.

What I was able to see was mostly in the late game where the accumulation of "poor choices" the AI made led it to becoming largely petrified. If you were a human player and could just hang in there, you'd ultimately win IMO.  This usually was most obvious when looking at the graphs.

Also, it now matters a lot more which players you go up against. They now play fairly differently from each other.  It'll help when they have more unit designs to choose from.  

Assuming progress is being made, I'll be happy to keep doing more on this angle.  I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit in there.

The number of tech companies in Michigan is…well not very high.  And I’ve noticed a trend over the past 20 years: As time goes on, an ever increasing percentage of my friends that I talk to socially boil down to one of 3 categories:

1. Lawyers.  When I started the company, I didn’t know any lawyers. The first lawyer I hired I found through the yellow pages. At our 10 year anniversary, I think about a quarter of my active friends were lawyers. Today, it’s probably about half.  A tech CEO ends up spending a lot of time with lawyers due to the nature of intellectual property. Being in Michigan means lawyers are the ones you actually see the most.
2. Journalists.  Let me be the first to tell you that being friends with journalists doesn’t equate to preferential treatment. I spend far more time worried that they’ll knock us down a point in order to eliminate the appearance of bias.  Journalists make good friends because they often share the same interests and, like CEOs, typically have to deal with a ton of different topics.
3. Other tech leaders. This is a more generalized area but one that is probably surprising to most consumers. The reason you rarely see CEOs (especially ones in the game industry) criticize other companies is because they’re likely friends outside of work.

That isn’t to say that represents 100% of my friends.  Most of my other friends are people I work with on a day to day basis.  In terms of broad generalizations, that’s what I’m seeing.

I was thinking about writing a series of articles on the history of Stardock. That is, how we got started and some of the challenges that are involved in running a small technology company.  But I wanted to find out first if there’s interest in this before I put in the time to write them.

Let me know in the comments area if you’re interested in such a series.

Stardock’s ModernMix has officially been released. Version 1.0!

I’ve been using Windows 8 as my main machine since its launch and I still can’t believe Microsoft is forcing PC users to run the new Windows 8 “RT” apps (aka Modern UI or Metro) in their own separate, full-screen environment.  It’s amazing how useful these new apps can be if you can run them in a window on the desktop while you’re doing other things.

To get ModernMix go to www.stardock.com/products/modernmix

Also pictured is Start8, the best way to get the Start menu back on the desktop: www.stardock.com/products/start8

As some people know, Stardock’s main business isn’t games. We make games because we enjoy making them.  Lots of individuals do this every day – they spend their “off hours” doing what they like and their day jobs doing what needs to be done. 

That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy making “regular” software. We do. Multiplicity, Fences, ModernMix, Start8, WindowBlinds, etc. are crazy fun to work on.

But games, I just love to work on games. I spent this weekend coding AI on Elemental (Legendary Heroes expansion to FE).  There’s business justification to do that.  I’m free labor to the games unit so I tend to work on all kinds of things since I’m not “billed”.

I bring this up as a lead-in to a general preemptive apology to our gaming customers who I’m routinely rude to on our forums. I don’t what to posit this as an “excuse” but rather an explanation as to why I have (and only for the past 20 years or so..) taken a different mindset when dealing with gamers. 

I don’t think of you guys as customers. I think of you as friends. I’m a gamer. I don’t make games as a “job”. I make it because I love games and – and this is the key part – I like hanging out with you guys. That’s what motivates me.  That’s why I’m on so many game forums (even though journalists occasionally plead that I stop doing that since I inevitably say something horrible online).

I make games in order to hang out with other people online talking about games – not the other way around.  I only made Galactic Civilizations in order to please my friends on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic. That’s why I work on the AI or other parts of the games. I just plain enjoy interacting with other gamers.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to over my notes regarding DISC and tax planning. If anyone wants to shoot me, they know where to find me to put me out of my misery.

I’m glad people are liking the new tactical battle maps.  I normally stick to AI coding but I always found myself auto-resolving battles in FE and felt that if we could just make initiative matter more and get the battle doing quickly that it would be a lot more enjoyable.  The maps in LH were the first tactical maps I did and I’m slowly getting the hang of making them better.

Here are some I worked on this weekend:

Fallen City

Kingdom City

another kingdom city

There’s a bunch of others. I really like the effect they’re having on ranged units.  Don’t come to a knife fight with a bow. Having multiple types of units should matter.

Now, my kingdom for a good fire particle effect. Burning cities would look cool.

Outposts can be upgraded.  The question is, are people actually using this and if so, does it make a difference to the outcome of the game?