While the Drengin Empire may hate you, your pets and your hair cut, we at Stardock love you and thank you for your continuing support with Galactic Civilizations.  We look forward to continuing this saga someday in the future!

It’s tough to make a modern game look good at “low” resolution.  But we try our best.

Here are a few screenshots of a work in progress build running at 1024x768.

I’ve also posted a video on Tumblr. Visit http://draginol.tumblr.com.  That’s where I’ll be posting “rougher” stuff that marketing wouldn’t generally want to be widely disseminated but lets those really interested in the game see what we’re up to.

The whole Stardock gang took Friday off to go watch this.

I'm a bit of a comic's nut. I'm the guy who spend $50+ a month on comic books so I very much enjoyed the Knightfall and other references and nods to different story arcs.

I enjoyed the movie immensely and will likely be going back again. There was some troubling pacing and the usual frustration of "Oh come on, people with automatic weapons would solve this in a heart beat."

Stardock is having a pretty good Summer and the good luck continues!  Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a huge hit! The Political Machine 2012 is due out at the end of July. And our new fantasy strategy game, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, is about to go into beta 4.

First, a brief catch up:

Elemental is a world filled with magic, monsters, and an epic history.

Fallen Enchantress is a strategy game that takes place in that world.  It is approximately a century since a great cataclysm took place and now the world has been overrrun with monsters, bandits, and ancient terrors.  It is up to you to build a kingdom from the ground up to bring civilization back to the world.

Fallen Enchantress Beta 4 is around improving the UI and making your cities more interesting and special. We’ve also continued to enhance the elements found previously such as the graphics, animation, balance, AI, stability, performance, etc.

Here are some screenshots that you might have seen online:

When a settlement reaches a certain population, the player can choose its specialization which determines what city improvements are available.

Cities in Fallen Enchantress use up multiple tiles based on what you build.  In Beta 4, players no longer have to manually place where they put improvements. Instead, players choose an improvement and it is placed for them. Additional improvements will tend to replace an existing one. This solves a problem we found in previous betas where cities became sprawling across the world and made navigation tedious late game (and it saves a lot of memory too).

We revamped the main user interface to be more intuitive and yet provide more information at the same time.  Now, what you see here is a later-gameish look so there’s a lot more “stuff” here. But as you can see, it’s overall a lot cleaner.  You can look at it and get an idea of what is going on.

The cloth map has been revamped (planning on redoing the rivers too).  Unlike most (as in, pretty much every strategy game out there), you can rotate and zoom in on the map any way you want. You can zoom in and see an individual peasant working on a farm or zoom out and see a strategic view of the world presented like a fantasy cloth map.

Beta 4 introduces a 3 core resource.  Previously, there were two: Grain and Materials. Grain could be converted into food or other things that might build up your economy. Materials could be converted into production or other things that increase how fast you can build things.  Beta 4 brings back the concept of Essence.  When the Cataclysm nearly wiped out the world, the powerful magic users known as the Titans, were consumed and their essence spread about the world. Essence can be used by Sorcerers (which you are one in the game) to cast powerful spells, enhance cities, and build incredibly powerful improvements that can turn the tide in a war.

We don’t anticipate Beta 4 coming out until August 16th. Sorry for the wait on this but there’s a lot of polish, testing, balancing, and UI to get in there.  And there will be a Beta 5 after Beta 4 at which point we’ll start thinking about a release date.  We’re in no hurry.  The objective here is to create the best fantasy strategy game we can possibly make.

I'm told that my interview with Wired magazine regarding the death of Steve Jobs is scheduled to show up in the August issue of Wired.  Keep an eye out! 

In a recent speech Obama made the statement that implied business owners didn't build their businesses -- "someone else made that happen"

I'm going to put the full text and context of what was said because I've seen left-wing writers trying to diminish what Obama said by claiming it was taken out of context.

So here's the full context:

I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

One thing that will have to be video-shown (i.e. a screenshot obviously can't show animation) is the new animation system in Beta 4.

In Beta 3, animation has worked like in all Stardock games in the past - unit is moving West. If they turn around, they instantly turn around.  When they stop moving, they instantly enter the stop animation.

Animations were recorded at 24FPS also.

But in Beta 4, the animation speed has been increased to 30FPS (hardware is better now) and the new animation system supported blended transitions. That means when a unit turns around, it shows frames of them turning around.  When a unit comes to a stop, it blends the animation between walking (or swinging an axe) to stopping rather than just popping into its idle animation.

The effect is very subtle but makes the overall game feel much more organic. IMO, it also makes it feel like an RTS with a turn button because the units feel like they're moving like they'd be moving in an RTS (which in this particular case is a good thing).

I’ve got my greedy hands on an internal Stardock build of The Political Machine 2012.  I’m a bit of a political junkie and so I’m very interested in watching how the 2012 edition of the popular title comes out.

I can say that it’s much more streamlined than previous editions. There’s no European map. There’s no Drengin Empire scenario type stuff. It focuses on the 2012 American President election and I think, as a game, it benefits from that (when you spread our your focus, you tend to not be as good at anything in particular).

You can pre-order The Political Machine 2012 and get it at a discount.  The AI (if I don’t mind saying) is pretty decent and it’s really fun to play vs. a human.

The Milky Way Galaxy of the 23rd century is a brutal place.

The malevolent Drengin Empire and their allies, the Yor reign supreme.  Earth and its allies have been defeated and in most cases, occupied by Drengin shock troops.  Earth itself remains free, protected behind an energy shield put in place by DL Bradley, commander of the Terran fleet just before they vanished.  Though protected, it is surrounded by an armada of Drengin ships.

The ancient Precursors are gone forever. There will be no help from the benevolent Arnor.

And this, my friends, is where things were left off at the end of the best-selling, critically acclaimed PC Strategy game, Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition.  But it isn’t the end. That’s all I can say on that for awhile.

No promises…but I am lobbying for an in-game quest editor to make it relatively easy to create quests and events.