These days I'm mostly playing our stuff.  There's just not a lot of time for other games.  So lots of Ara: History Untold, GalCiv IV, Sins of a Solar Empire II and even some Ashes of the Singularity.

But what are you guys playing? Anything you would recommend I should check out?

You might’ve noticed we had a serious outage that took down our website, forums—everything.

Some people have speculated on what could be so catastrophic as to take us down for WEEKS? 

For legal reasons, I can't get into the details other than to say it wasn't ransomware but it was a total data loss. This catastrophe wiped out everything at our data center, including the on-site backups, so we lost over three decades of data in one hit.

Fortunately, we run nightly offsite backups, but they’re enormous—about 34 terabytes. That’s 34,000 gigabytes, all of which has to be downloaded, scanned, extracted, and then reuploaded to new servers. Just the download alone took over a week. Then came the challenge of figuring out which parts needed immediate restoring, in which order, and whether we should rebuild them piece by piece, create entirely new services, or move to a cloud-based infrastructure to avoid having a single colocation ever again.

We’re talking about a giant library of websites, databases, skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, videos, and more. Some of it’s ancient, from when we started well before Google or Facebook existed. Imagine sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes to find a single legacy web service, built decades ago, that needs to run on a specific OS. It’s a painstaking process.

This outage has been extremely difficult. Everything from old box art for our products to OS/2 programs I wrote in my college days—gone, at least until offsite backups did their job. We had fallback backups on hard drives, DVDs, tapes, and so on, but for a while, it wasn’t entirely clear how much of that would be usable.

A fun fact some may not know: we have one of the oldest continuously used forums around, migrated from Usenet eons ago. That entire environment was wiped, so we’re rebuilding it from offsite storage. Not everything is back yet, and it looks like a few forum user accounts will be lost. That’s not related to customer data, but still worth noting.

We appreciate everyone’s patience. Getting services running again has been the top priority. It’s been a monumental effort, but we’re seeing real progress each day, and the community’s understanding means a lot.

Thanks for sticking with us,

-Brad (Founder & CEO)

At long last, Galactic Civilizations IV v2.95 is here and it's a big one. I'd like to think it addresses most of the high priority feedback we've gotten on the game since launch, especially in terms of map generation.

But well beyond that, v2.95 is a major improvement in everything from performance, balance, multiplayer stability, late game stability, AI, and more. Seriously, this is a big update.

Assuming there's no issues with it, the next big update will be version 3.0, which is one that many of us here have been waiting to come together. This update has many months of improvements and additions that we've been waiting to push through QA.

Here is a sneak preview of changes coming v3.0, which is expected to release this Spring:

Hyperlanes

Originally, GalCiv IV was going to have really small sectors (i.e. imagine "medium" being the biggest) and you'd just go to other sectors.

However, many of us feel it is tedious to keep track of too many sectors. Over time, we've made the size of a single sector larger, but then we return to the problem of taking multiple turns to get to other stars. We initially fixed this by increasing the speed of ships, but that resulted in its own issues.

v3.0 is going to include Hyperlanes that will connect stars to other stars. They will not teleport like Stellar Gateways, but will function like Hypergates from GalCiv III - when you're on a Hyperlane, your ship moves much faster.

By offering the phase lane style of Sins of a Solar Empire / MOO2 while still maintaining the free movement of Galactic Civilizations,  this will, we hope, give players the best of both worlds when traversing the galaxy.

Visual Uplift

While most of our players don't care too much about graphics, many still do. We've put considerable effort into enhancing the engine, which should improve the appearance of ships and other on-screen elements.

Ship Design and Battles

Much like other similar games, new installments of Galactic Civilizations have their own Lead Designer, who provides their own ideas on what the game should do.

For instance, I designed Galactic Civilizations II, but decided to take a step back for the development of Galactic Civilizations III. We brought in Jon Shafer, known for his work on Civilization V, to design GalCiv III. I returned for the design of the Crusade expansion pack, which changed some of the mechanics.

For Galactic Civilizations IV, Derek Paxton was assigned as the Lead Designer, with me completing the Supernova expansion. Supernova was merged with GalCiv IV for the Steam release, bringing notice to my different design preferences with some conflicting gameplay styles.

For version 3.0, I will most likely be asking the team to make the ship battles a bit. . . uglier, but provide more information. For me, the purpose of ship battles is to help players see how different weapon and defense systems work together, as well as how to counter other designs.

My main beef remains that we lack a good way to force players into commiting to a tech path / design so that countering and counter-countering can be effective at the macro scale. In GalCiv II, I solved that by having a rock-paper-scissors type mechanic on weapons and defenses, making it difficult to switch due to the costs of techs and defenses on their own branch. Feel free to discuss your ideas on this in the comments section.

UI UI UI

You have hopefully noticed that as each update gets done, we improve the UI in some way. The idea is to make information more accessible, text more readable, and executing your strategy more straight forward.

If there's something that really bugs you in the current UI or in v2.95, let us know in the comments.

Final Thoughts

This isn't anywhere near a complete list of improvements and changes for v3.0, but should give you an idea of what we hope to accomplish.

BTW, I hope you guys like "Tales of the Arnor". I think you'll find it pretty fun and interesting, especially those of you who like there to be more background lore in the game. It's through your support that we are able to continue with new content and updates!

My office has a lot of printouts in binders regarding the history of the universe (The Mithrilar Cycle) that both Galactic Civilizations and Elemental come from.   I once had the opportunity to write a book, Destiny's Embers and that was quite an adventure.  My original story was 300 pages but my publisher, Del Rey, wanted it fleshed out and had an editor greatly expand the exposition of it.  One of these days, I hope to publish the original manuscript which, I should add, has no references to how charactered dressed or other, in my view, frivolous descriptions.

We have a lot of new content being developed here at Stardock that will be tapping into this lore.  To that end, I thought I'd share some of the background today.

Era 1: Of the Mithrilar
Let's start in the past.  A past—so distant that “time” scarcely had meaning—the Mithrilar watched over the cosmos from a vantage beyond mortal reckoning. Their charge was the Talananth, an artifact of immeasurable potency. Like a loom weaving threads of destiny, the Talananth gave shape to our three-dimensional universe, lending order to the infinite possibilities of existence.

Among these ancient stewards walked Draginol, a Mithrilar who stood apart from his kin by choice and by temperament. Where others moved serenely through the timeless void, Draginol felt the rhythmic pulse of past, present, and future. Impatient with the slow unfolding of the cosmos, he employed the Talananth to craft a sentient people known collectively as the Arnor. In doing so, he hoped they might hasten the grand design he alone seemed to sense.

Draginol’s vision took two forms. First came the Dred’nir—the “First Ones,” in the Arnorian tongue—endowed with a heightened sense of time and a share of Draginol’s own far-reaching perspective. Second came the Elas’nir—the “Second Ones”—slower to grasp the urgency of fleeting moments. While the Dred’nir varied widely in power—some possessed abilities bordering on godlike, others only marginally beyond that of future humans—the Elas’nir were largely placid, drifting through the ages as though tethered to an eternal present.

Draginol’s Impatience
While many of the Mithrilar seemed content to observe the universe’s natural unfolding, Draginol sensed a storm of trouble on the horizon. He believed the Arnor needed to feel the swift crack of mortality—like the ticking of a clock—to galvanize them into action. Yet most Elas’nir remained detached, drifting across the centuries in tranquil ignorance. Only a rare few, like Tandis and Amandara, developed the keen sense of passing time that Draginol valued. They stood out among their kin, capable of grasping the significance of change.

In time, Draginol’s designs took on a darker edge. He conspired with the more powerful (and often more ambitious) Dred’nir to harness the very essence of the Elas’nir. From their essence he meant to fashion an object—the Orb of Draginol—that would grant him unrivaled dominion over the Talananth. Each harvested Elas’nir increased the Orb’s cosmic potency, bringing Draginol closer to directly shaping reality as he saw fit.

But it was not a quietly kept secret. The culling of their ranks roused the Elas’nir from their habitual placidity, and in their resistance, the seeds of conflict took root.

Of the Arnor
Though wrought in the same primordial forge, the Arnor were anything but homogeneous. The Dred’nir—Talax, in particular—became legends, known for raw might or cunning. Meanwhile, the Elas’nir shaped the culture, philosophy, and broader civilization of the Arnor. Their societies thrived on knowledge gleaned from eons of observation. It was in these societies that figures like Tandis rose to prominence, forging alliances and offering hope to countless new races springing up across the nascent galaxy.

As rumor of Draginol’s designs spread, the Arnor found themselves divided between loyalty to their creator and rebellion against his twisted project. Once revered like a distant but benevolent deity, Draginol now seemed a tyrant holding the fate of an entire universe in his hands.

This was the beginning of the Dred'nir and Elas'nir wars and where the Dred'nir became referred to as the Dread Lords.

The Shattering of the Talananth
Believing the Orb of Draginol had absorbed sufficient cosmic essence, Draginol moved to seize the Talananth for himself, presumably to reorder creation to his vision. Yet the raw forces unleashed could not be contained. The Talananth shattered, unleashing a cataclysm that annihilated all but two of the Mithrilar—Draginol and Mascrinthus. Both vanished from known reality, for a long while, taking with them any guiding hand the Arnor might have had.

In the aftermath, the bulk of the Dred’nir and Elas’nir lay broken. The once-proud Arnor teetered on the brink. Those who survived rose from the ashes to fight anew, and the wars between Arnor and the Dread Lords—were waged in earnest.

Arnor / Dread Lord Wars
From this cosmic upheaval emerged an epoch of conflict. The Dread Lords, shaped by the most relentless Dred’nir, carried out Draginol’s dark legacy—though now seemingly without his direct guidance. Their power and wrath knew no bound, a threat to any world that drew their gaze.

Across the stars, the mortal races rose—Iconia, Altaria, and countless others—and became battlefields or pawns in the Dread Lords’ cosmic game. This is the period in which Tandis the Arnorian took up the cause of these younger species. He fought with a measured patience, marshaling the strength of mortals whose wills could not be so easily subsumed. This era of war and uneasy alliances persisted, shaping the fundamental tapestry of galactic history.

It was also during this time that both Mascrinthus and Draginol had their final showdown. A moment witnessed by Tandis on the world of Altaria.  In that final battle, Draginol was defeated by a young mortal who had found the Orb, now known as the Bane.  Tandis would take the Bane and place it beyond the reach, or so he thought, of mortal beings believing it safe to do so with Draginol now vanquished beyond ever being a threat again.

At length, the Dread Lords were entrapped in a pocket universe, quarantined from reality. Their reign of terror appeared ended. Or so it was told in half-remembered stories among the surviving Arnor and the nascent star-faring species that would come later.

Deep Time
In the distant future, a human named DL Bradley stumbled across echoes of this primeval conflict. While his full story is yet to be woven in the records available to most, rumors speak of a tragic destiny—how a single mortal life became intertwined with an eternal cosmic loop. The torment of “unlimited time” is said to be both a boon and a curse, an endless burden for any soul truly aware of time’s relentless drumbeat.

Time, after all, is the great predator. It stalks gods and mortals alike, offering no respite to those who can sense its every pulse. Perhaps that is why Draginol feared complacency, or why Tandis and Amandara strove to uphold hope across the stars. Even the mightiest Mithrilar could be undone by the jaws of eternity.

For now, the legacy of the Arnor and Dread Lords stands as a testament to what comes of cosmic ambition and mortal resilience. The tapestry they wove—and tore asunder—enfolds our galaxy still, from the oldest lore of Iconia to the newest ventures of Earth. Indeed, much of that story remains untold, drifting like stardust in the corridors of eternity, awaiting those bold (or foolish) enough to seek it.

...

And that is, my friends, a general outline of the story.  Of course, this is condensed beyond all reason. But hopefully it helps provide some semblance of sense to the overall story that Galactic Civilizations and Elemental draw from.

With the benefit of hindsight, Tales of the Arnor should have been handled as a full expansion pack. It just has such a massive scope of changes in it.   

For me, personally, it's the first GalCiv IV DLC I've got to work on since Tales of Centauron which I thoroughly enjoyed.  But this one...this one is just so much bigger.

This will probably not be the last post I make on Tales of the Arnor so I will probably miss some things here.

Of the Nyx

So as some of you know, I've been writing the lore on Galactic Civilizations since the late 1980s.  4X strategy games don't make very good vessels for getting that lore out obviously.  

Some of you probably noticed that the Yor changed the way they looked a lot between GalCiv II and GalCiv III.  I mentioned in another post how the first Yor were created by the Iconians and then those Yor creatred more Yor which are the ones depicted in GalCiv III and GalCiv IV.  The Nyx that are the subject of Tales of the Arnor look like the Yor from GalCiv II.

The Campaign

So the Nyx will be introduced in the new Mission called Tales of the Arnor.  But you will also be able to play them in a normal sandbox game as well.

The Nyx get their own completely unique tech tree:

This turned out to be a bit of a crazy decision because a unique tech tree means they have their own unique ship components too:

It also means they have to have their own leader types:

...and their own leader powers.

The Nyx don't have ministers.  They have Primes and they have a very different philosophy how their government should be handled and what traits matter.

It also means they get their own unique improvements including a new one called Aid Ship Production:

And that's just the start.

What you will learn is that the Iconians aren't necessarily blameless.

So I'm working on the upcoming DLC called Tales of the Arnor and it's going to go pretty hard into the background on the Yor.

To do that, I really need to explain a bit about the background of this game which, since it's a 30 year old series there's a lot of bits involved. No pun intended.

In the beginning...

So at the start there were the Mithrilar.  These were beings that we would consider to exist outside our universe.  One of them, called Draginol (which is where I stole of my user handles from) was different from the others in that he could sense time despite existing outside time as we think of it.  He was concerned over the linear development of the universe and used the cosmic Talananth, the primary tool that the Mithrilar had, to create in universe beings that came to call themselves the Arnor.

The Arnor themselves were split into two groups.  The Ele'nir and the Dre'nir.  The short version is that Draginol focused the most effort on the Dre'nir to be most like him in that they could sense time and thus have a sense of urgency.  The Ele'nir were less, by his standards, sophisticated and didn't experience the passage of time in a meaningful way.

Now, lots of things happen in between leading to the end of the Mithrilar presence within the universe.  However, the Ele'nir and Dre'nir persisted and watched life develop and evolve.  By this time, the Arnor's Ele'nir had accepted the branding the Ele'nir had given them "Dread Lords".  From the Dread Lords point of view, the rest of the Arnor were basically mindless cattle.  The Arnor thought the Dread Lords were vicious and dangerous.

The Dread Lords had uplifted a species called the Iconians and in time, the Iconians developed their own artificial servants called the Yor. (They obviously didn't have Terminator of BSG shows in their stories).    The Yor weren't sentient though.  They had strong AI but they had no self-motivation.  They just did as told.  

Eventually, the Dread Lords and Arnor had their massive civil war which ended with both of them disappearing.  But in this mix, the Dread Lords gave the Yor self-motivation which made them truly alive. And the rest is history.

However, within the Yor there's a lot of history there. The Yor had many iterations and we have shown these in the GalCiv games over the years with the most famous being the Nyx series:

and there was also the D-deries (Dark Yor):


In Tales of the Arnor, we will be revisiting the Nyx series of Yor who we haven't seen since GalCiv II.  They will be a playable civ with their own tech tree (as in, a completely new tech tree).

It's really amazing how easy Ara: History Untold is for modding.

The first thing to know is that all the source data files can be found (if you're on Steam for instance) in a directory like:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ara History Untold\assets\SourceMods

So say you don't like one of the balance of say...Recipes. Let's go find that.

Recipes0.zdata is where all the recipes are.

Now I happen to be a bit unhappy that the Feast recipe is defaulting to using money instead of food as its accelerator because this is causing some new players to feel like they don't have enough money.  So I'm going to fix that.

Before:

to:

So I have changed it so that food is teh default option in the first slott and grains in the third and nothing for the second.

Now I'm going to pop this into a new file:

Then save it to the Mods directory:

Then I just have to make sure the game will know about it which involves adding a file called GameCoreData.zdata:

And that's it.

To use it in game you just click on Mods.

and Enable it.

If you did something wrong, the game will tell you and show you the logs where it will explain what you missed or what typo you did.

Now when I start my new game:

It takes a bit longer but as soon as I get grain it will automatically use it.

If I want to share it with others, I just have to go over to http://www.modio.com

And voila.

I went ahead and sprung for the $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro as I do a lot of data analysis on very large and complicated data sets.  

The first thing I through at it was last month's full Perforce logs with diffs and and all so that I could get a nice friendly report of the various developers, how many CLs they did and an evaluation on the type of work they did and how much work they did.

Here are my results:

• ChatGPT 4o.  Basically useless.  It didn't even get the number of CLs right and refused to even try to give a scope of work.
• o1. Much better, it got the number of CLs right but it couldn't really figure out how much work each did.  But it still gave me a decent overview. 
• o1Pro.  Very impressive.  The big difference here is that it went and did a relative analysis of each so that the work rating of each was relative to each other.  

So is o1Pro worth it? Not unless you're doing a lot of data analysis and even then... I'm not sure.  

For me specifically it is probably worth it.  There are plenty of tools out there that will do analysis on this kind of thing but the thing is, I don't have to know or care about them.  This is a generalized tool.

So today let's look at how far had drives have come.  

Let's start with some traditional spinny hard drives with sequential reads:

2006: This is a ThinkPad T60.  100 MB/s.

This is my Dell Dimension from 2005.  125 MB/s.

Let's fast forward to early SSDs: 2012!

Here is 3 Intel X25-Ms in Raid 0 configuration to get max speed. 724MB/s which was at the upper edge of speed for the time.

More typical was my OCZ SSD from 2012

OCZ: 343 MB/sec

Now we go to Toad-2020 which a Viper m.2:

and this is the Samsung 990 Pro.

So a pretty big jump with PCI Express 3.0 being the bottleneck I suspect.

Let's now jump to Frog-2024.

Here we have a Crucial PCI Express 5.0 M.2 drive: 14,307

The random score is a little odd and I suspect it would change if I ran it again but I'm not going to.

I know I've done benchmarks on my various machines in the past but I had no idea how far the rabbit hole goes...

Let's start with back in 2003:

Benchmarking Dell XPS and Lenovo Thinkpads (littletinyfrogs.com)

And now: Frog-2024: 66,708!

Comparing 2003 spinny hard drives to SSDs isn't even a fair start.