So we are on the road to v4.0.  It's hard to believe that GalCiv III was released five years ago.  We've made a lot of changes since then.

Version 4.0 is designed to do a lot of different things.  I won't go over all the changes here but instead will take you on a bit of a guided tour.

Most of the changes are for users of Retribution which is the latest expansion.  If you don't have that, I highly recommend getting it.

Turn 1

On your first turn you're going to likely notice some subtle but important changes.

First, more food.  There are a lot more fertile tiles in general that you can use either for farming or plow away to build other things.

There is also an Administrative Center that you can have 1 per planet with.  It gives you 2 admin points but it's also useful because it enhances adjacent structures.

There has also been a slight tweak to the costs of planetary improvements (on Retribution).  You also end up with a fuller set of choices.  

Not only have asteroid fields been made bigger but Durantium is more common as well.

Technologies have been tweaked so that more administrative points are handed out and a lot more trade routes are handed out.  For instance (Retribution), Xeno Commerce now provides 5 trade routes instead of 2.

Early game changes

Resources like Promethion are somewhat more common as well.

On the other hand, while we've added more asteroids, we've reduced the amount of raw resources mining bases give from 1.0 to 0.50.  As many know, by late game, a disproportionate amount of raw resources ends up coming from the asteroids which was not the intent.  

Instead, because food is so much more common, players will tend to have much larger populations which do provide, over time, more production.

Planets themselves have gotten a bit of a make-over.  More interesting layouts and more interesting cosmetics.

Even Mars.

And this is all in the first 20 turns or so.   We will discuss more as we get closer.

Highlighted feature

A lot of users have asked for the ability to turn OFF the colonies auto-upgrading structures.

Coming in v4.0 in May!

This PC is using Windows 10.  But not just Windows 10 on its own.  It's been upgraded a bit with Object Desktop. That's what Object Desktop does.  A lot of the things in Windows we see today first showed up in Object Desktop.  A few examples include transparencies, shadows, gadgets, ZIP files as folders, GUI skinning, etc.  There is a natural progression to the operating system.

On this screenshot I have Groupy, CursorFX, Fences, Start10 and a new app that hasn't been announced yet. 

The PC of the future series is going to explore where we think the desktop is going. This PC has 64 CPU cores and 128 logical processors.  It has 128 GB of memory and an extremely fast GPU.  So what are we going to do with this hardware? That’s what this series will explore.

Edit: Additional screenshots below.

This week’s update to the Political Machine adds Ronald Reagan.  He’s the first candidate that includes a scoring handicap which means that your score is modified slightly because he’s a bit easier to win with than other candidates.  We’ll show you here.

The update also includes AOC, Al Gore, and Barry Goldwater. 

The Reagan Era

Ronald Reagan was one of the last Presidents we had before the hyper politicization of American life really took hold.  In 1980 and 1984 he won California, something that would not be possible today regardless of whether he had been governor or not. 

Simulating Reagan

In this simulation, we have Reagan going up against Hillary Clinton.  It’s not very close.

This is where the handicap comes in.  It takes a lot of testing and tweaking here.  For example, we have a _Credibility stat which affects how persuasive someone is on a given issue.  Hence, Reagan, who is pro-life is able to take Abortion Rights and get most people who care one way or the other on the issue to vote for him.  He does less well on Lower Taxes and this has to do with how each campaign spends their time campaigning for (or against) certain issues.

In the example here, it would be safe to say that we need to adjust Reagan’s score handicap further. 

So there you go.  Reagan returns!

With our state on lockdown, our offices are empty. 
This gives me a rare opportunity to give a little tour of our offices with almost no one here.

A little bit about Stardock

So I started Stardock from my dorm room back in 1991 and incorporated it in 1993.  The building we’re in now, we bought in 2005.  We own it, so we are able to do whatever we want with it.  It’s about 20,000 square feet and we’ve had the opportunity to try out various working area styles.

The Welcoming Committee

As you enter the main lobby of Stardock...

This is Cheesecake.  An essential employee.  We allow dogs at work.

Stardock has 3 floors.  This is the lower floor in an area called Lab-2 (Lab-1 is upstairs).  The team is working from home.  We let people check out their PCs and take them home.

This is also part of Lab-2.   Lab-2 has the workstation area. It’s not an open floor plan, but rather a hybrid, where everyone gets their own workstation area.  There are also 3 offices connected to it – Senior Producer (oversees schedule) – Senior Publisher (oversees the “biz” side) and Senior Designer (the lead designer on the project).  We mix the artists and engineers together so that they can work seamlessly together.

This is the office I’m occupying down here.  I’m currently on a new project that won’t be ready for a couple years.  This is the first time I’ve been the senior designer on a game project since GalCiv II from the start.

This is part of our Cafe. 

Sitting area for the Cafe.  The nice thing about this area is that there’s a presentation area up front.

This is on the main floor.  This is where the Impulse team used to be back in 2011.  We occasionally use it for podcasts, but it’s been unfilled since 2011.

Also on main floor.  Has been empty since we sold Impulse to GameStop.

Biz Conference room.  I spend a lot of time here, unfortunately.

The fitness room.  Empty. So sad.

My office.  Empty now that I’ve moved to the senior designer office.

Gamer’s Bill of Rights.

Wife and kids.

Back of my office.  There’s a little framed box of the “contract” between Chris Taylor and I on Demigod.  It’s on a napkin.

Upstairs Lab-1 with Agile wall (Scrum wall).   So empty.

Kristy’s workstation isn’t empty at least!

Cleanest this area has been in years. The IT area.

Play-testing lab.

Derek Paxton, upstairs in Lab-1’s Senior Designer office.

The kids of the QA area. Today, just making sure everyone else is able to work from home.

Obligatory picture of gender neutral bathroom. We have gender-specific bathrooms on every floor but we also installed this along with an area for employees who have just had children to take care of things (and we did this back in 2005).

The general goal is to create an environment that is welcoming and comfortable.  We have extremely low turn-over and I think a big part of that is our company environment.

And with that, back to work!

I found a magic planet.

It’s not that it is a class 20 planet – it only started as a class 14 and I’ve upgraded it since.  It is that it had 6 fertile tiles with 5 of them ready to have something amazing placed in the middle.  In this case, Kimberly’s Refuge.  Combined with the planet being a fertile world the result is that this one planet produces 34 food. 

Of course, having the time to build this up required relative peace to be the norm which is the subject of this dev journal.

Leave me alone

One of the most common questions we get is how do you keep everyone from going to war with you? Can you play the game without having to build up a huge military.  The answer is, yes and…maybe. 

I’m playing as a benevolent civilization.  This means my polar opposite civilizations (malevolent) will be inclined to go to war with me.  If I were playing as pragmatic, they would also not like me but they are somewhat less likely to pull the trigger on going to war with a pragmatic civilization versus one that is their opposite.

So what’s the key to getting them to leave me alone?

Relationship factors

Here is the Drengin.  The biggest two things helping me with them are the fact we’re trading with them and they are relatively far away.

Tip #1: Trade with them  

When I play as a peaceful civ, I am careful to trade as much as I can.  You do take a hit due to trading with their enemies but it’s still a big benefit.

Trade helps in so many other areas too.  For example, the more you trade, the less easy of a target you are since they really want your money.

Tip #2: Treaties

Make sure you are setting up treaties with them.

Tip #3: Financial Aid / Tribute

You can give tribute to civilizations (give them money) which will make them happy. 

Tip #4: Don’t be an easy target

If a bear is chasing after you and your friends, you only need to be faster than the slowest friend.   You don’t need a big military to keep from being attacked.  But if you are absolutely defenseless then you are inviting conquest.

Tip #5: Use Diplomats

If you have trained any diplomats, you can use them on the powerful civilizations that you want to leave you alone.  You don’t need them to love you, you just need them to hate someone else more.

Tip #6: Build up your diplomatic skills

There are certain planetary improvements and technologies that give your civilization more diplomatic points.  Your increased skills will cause other civilizations to like you more.

Tip #7: Spy with Freighters

A lot of players will try to keep an eye on what other civilizations are doing by building starbases and sensor ships.  But these can sometimes cause other civilizations to consider them trespassers.  But freighters don’t have that issue.

Instead, design freighters that have great sensor ranges.  Make sure you get an open borders treaty with them.

Hopefully these tips will help you maintain a galactic peace…or at least long enough to either ascend or get a diplomatic victory!

Stardock Magazine

March 2020

by Brad Wardell

## Contents ##

• How Stardock is working from home
• CursorFX added to Object Desktop
• Star Control Roadmap
• Guided tour of Stardock

## How Stardock is working from home ##

This is a crazy situation we find ourselves in. 

I hope this newsletter finds you healthy and safe. 

So last week the governor of Michigan, which is the state in the US that we have our main office in, ordered all businesses closed with a handful of exceptions. 

We happen to be fortunate enough that we’ve had external artists and developers for years.  So we have a pretty good idea of how to get things done from remote.  But we’ve never had to do it at this scale. Below, I’m going to outline what we’re doing.  I hope you find this information helpful.

Jira

Crucial in making this all work is a web tool called Jira. It’s all cloud based and super easy to set up.  Once you create your “project,” you can invite others over via their email address. You can create as many projects as you want with it.

First, I start with a road map.  What are the things I want to get done?

Then, I break that down into tasks (issues). 

Now, I won’t get into Sprints and such. How you want to set up your deadlines requires a bit more discussion than this article is intended to get into.  What I will say is that you want to be able to hand out issues to people. 

What we do is create a backlog of tasks.  Each task has a story point associated with it. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, or 13 points, depending on the complexity.  The story points aren’t intended to be specific time required, but we tend to aim for everyone to finish between 8 to 10 story points per week.  The key is to be consistent with your assigning of story points.

From there, it’s a matter of spending a little time to make sure everyone has enough tasks (issues) assigned to them and making sure that they are finishing enough tasks in a week (or whatever your time frame is). This way, you don’t end up with people stressing out at home not knowing what they should be doing and everyone knows what the expectations are.

There is a lot of communication stuff in there as well, where pictures, video, and such can be inserted.

So here you see me and Skittles (our marketing manager) talking about a virtual tour of the company offices (that is included later in this newsletter).  This task is 1 story point.  This week (as I type this), I have finished 12 story points total.  I’ll probably get to 14.  The key is to let people know how many story points you expect them to finish a week (8 to 10) and to try to be as specific as possible.

MS Teams

The other major tool we’re using is Microsoft Teams.  A lot of people use Slack.  We’re a Microsoft shop already, so Teams was a bit easier for us to set up. 

Now, on my setup, I live with Stardock’s Groupy app.  If you don’t have Groupy, do yourself a favor and go get it.  It lets you treat all windows the same as you do web pages (group them together as tabs).

What is handy about Teams versus say, Skype, is that a given team has channels and those channels can have different pages navigated to with tabs.  You can add new pages and give them their own purpose.

It even hooks in with Jira.

It makes secure file management a breeze, as you can share documents with just your team without any additional setup.

Best of all, the video calling is absolutely rock solid.

Between Jira and Teams, we have a pretty good remote setup going. There are lots of other things we have set up, including VPN, Perforce, GitHub, etc.  But those are a bit more specific for software companies.

I hope this helps!

## CursorFX added to Object Desktop ##

I’m happy to announce that CursorFX is not only getting a major new version (v4.0), but that it is now also part of Object Desktop.

The rewrite of CursorFX required some doing given how much Windows has changed since it was first developed.

We have managed to keep the existing cursors compatible in this age of high-DPI displays by using all kinds of evil to handle scaling (including for multiple monitors with different DPIs). But we are working on and releasing new cursors that are natively high-DPI friendly.  We include a few with the beta.

If you don’t have Object Desktop, get it now!  It includes Groupy, Fences, Start10 and more.  Plus, you get everything we release on it for the following year for free.

->Visit www.objectdesktop.com

## Star Control Roadmap ##

Back in 2018, we released the reboot of the Star Control franchise called Star Control: Origins.  We also re-released the classic DOS games onto Steam.

We then developed an expansion pack for it that we broke up into 4-parts called Earth Rising.  This turned out to be a dumb idea, because while the expansion is pretty meaty, it’s not meaty enough to be broken into 4 parts.  So, we won’t be doing that ever again.  But the good news is that Earth Rising is out now and like I said, it is quite meaty.

Now that Earth Rising is finished, we’re working on porting it to consoles.  We have the XBOX One version pretty far along (they got us the dev kit first).  Our hope is to release that later this year.

After the console version is completed, we plan to move onto the sequel title.  For the sequel, we’re collaborating with the original developers of the DOS game on design and creatives.  We’ve already talked at length about ideas on how to make sure Star Control evolves with the changing way people play games.  We have no ETA for the sequel yet other than to say it’s still years away.

In the meantime, if you don’t already have Star Control: Origins, you can get it via Steam, GOG, or direct.

->Visit www.starcontrol.com

## A Guided Tour of Stardock ##

With everyone working from home, we had a rare opportunity to take some pictures of our offices to share with you what our lives at work are like.

>>A Guided Tour of Stardock

As I write this, we’re starting to find a lot of friction due to the way some communications apps work when it comes to multiple servers.  I’m looking at you, Microsoft Teams.

While connecting multiple Teams servers (not teams) isn’t hard, it is a bit tedious. 

I end up having to click on the drop down and then select the server I want.

Now, ideally, I would like Teams to let me have a truly integrated experience (where I can move teams from various servers onto a single master page) but in the meantime, there is a solution for the user who wants to have multiple Team hosts available in a single click (or keyboard hotkey): Groupy.

Stardock Groupy lets users combine multiple windows together as if they are web pages.

Once installed I move my communication windows together:

Now I can either click between tabs to get right to the other server or use Windows key-~ to tab between them.

If you’re someone who’s using multiple communication apps or servers, I highly, highly recommend you download Groupy.

The next update to The Political Machine will be including mod support to Steam Workshop. 

Specifically, we are going to let people make their own ideologies and share them with others.  We include quite a few in the game.    We will be uploading a few ideology mods to get things started and to help others learn how to make them.

What is an ideology?

An ideology is a set of issues your candidate wants to run on.   Unlike normal campaign issues, ideology issues, when run on, increase the importance of those issues nationally.  This results in making different candidates play quite differently.

Players can either have their ideology work with existing issues or create their own from scratch (which is a new feature in v1.1).

New Features

We are also adding an election night speed so players can savor (or zip through) the results:

We also are implementing a scoring system.  In this test, we made a case where the ideology had a slight penalty because it was easier to play with (in the release, fascism will not be considered easier, we just wanted to test it).

This feature is important because it unlocks the door to having “easier to win” candidates added to the game without it debalancing everything.

This new version should be available next week.

Read the other journals here.

This is my work from home office. 

My desk.  This is for doing calls and such.  I don’t really spend much time here.

Workbench.  This is where I spend most of my time when working from home.

Desk from a different angle. 

Design and QA area.  This is for testing and sketching up.  My sons also use these desks frequently (one is an engineer and the other a 3D artist).